Lincoln Unbound (10 page)

Consider the hoopla campaign for William Harrison in 1840. It demonstrated both Lincoln's occasional low-­down practicality and his high seriousness. He favored the nomination of Harrison over his sainted Henry Clay for purely pragmatic reasons—­Harrison seemed more electable. The Whigs proceeded to unleash just the sort of onslaught on President Van Buren that President Adams had suffered at the hands of the Jacksonians. They dubbed the president, caught presiding over a depression, “Martin van Ruin” and portrayed him living in champagne-­soaked luxury at the White House, where he hired French chefs to sate his epicurean tastes. Lincoln eagerly partook of the demagoguery. He denounced Van Buren as “in feeling and principle an Aristocrat.” He excoriated him in hair-­raisingly scurrilous terms for supposedly advancing black suffrage back in New York in 1821. When a Whig friend complained of the unedifying tone of the campaign for Harrison, Lincoln supposedly replied, “It is all right;
we must fight the devil with fire
.”

Yet the campaign wasn't as substance-­less as legend has it, or as the Whig ditty “without a why or a wherefore we'll go for Harrison therefore” suggested. The clashing positions of the parties were clear enough, and Lincoln enunciated them with great force.

Harrison came up just short in Illinois, even as he swept to victory nationally. But Lincoln may have begun to feel a calling to something greater at this time. “I think it grew and bloomed and developed into beauty, etc., in the year
1840 exactly
,” Herndon said of his aspiration for higher office. “Mr. Lincoln told me that his ideas of something burst in him in 1840.”

From immature politico to budding statesman, his touchstone remained Henry Clay. He eulogized his hero after his death in 1852. In Lincoln's telling, “Mr. Clay's predominant sentiment, from first to last, was a deep devotion to the cause of human liberty—­a strong sympathy with the oppressed every where, and an ardent wish for their elevation. With him, this was a primary and all controlling passion.” As for his country, Lincoln continued, Clay “burned with a zeal for its advancement, prosperity and glory, because he saw in such, the advancement, prosperity and glory, of human liberty, human right and human nature. He desired the prosperity of his countrymen partly because they were his countrymen, but chiefly to show to the world that freemen could be prosperous.”

Lincoln burned with the zeal he attributed to Clay. Until the issue of slavery arose to loom over all else, Lincoln devoted his career chiefly to economics. He sought the prosperity of his countrymen through Whig principles and Whig policies, and made the cause of canals, railroads, banks, and industry his own. The ­­railsplitter became, in the argot of a later era, a “capitalist tool.”

 

Chapter 3

“The True System”: The Genius of American Capitalism

Man is not the only animal who labors; but he is the only one who improves his workmanship.

—­
A
BRAHAM
L
INCOLN,
F
IR
ST
L
ECTURE ON
D
ISCOV
ERIES AND
I
NVENTIONS
, 1858

I
n December 1840, the Illinois legislature fought desperately over the fate of the Bank of Illinois. Democrats hated the institution as a tool of the powerful and sought to kill it. With the bank tottering in the midst of an economic crisis, they had their opportunity. The bank couldn't redeem its notes in specie—­in other words, gold and silver—­as required by its charter. But the legislature had given it a reprieve. It wouldn't have to start such payments again until the legislature's next session.

That created an opening for enemies of the bank. The governor had called the legislature back into session two weeks early. The Democrats realized that they could vote to adjourn at the end of the two weeks and formally make that period a distinct session. Then the bank would be forced to resume specie payments immediately, at great risk to the institution.

The Whigs did their own maneuvering. The legislature couldn't adjourn if it didn't have a quorum. The Whigs didn't show up for the proceedings, held in a church in the new capital city of Springfield while the capitol building was still under construction. Lincoln and his Whig colleague Joseph Gillespie monitored the situation from the floor. According to Gillespie, the sergeant-­at-­arms was ordered to round up members. “We soon discovered,” he recalled, “that several Whigs had been caught and brought in and that the plan had been spoiled and we (Lincoln & I) determined to leave the Hall and going to the door found it locked and then raised a window & jumped out but not untill the democrats had succeeded in adjourning.”

The sergeant-­at-­arms supposedly refused orders to chase the retreating members: “My God! gentlemen, do you know what you ask? Think of the length of Abe's legs, and then tell me how I am to catch him.”

After the ludicrous exit, Democrats chanted, “He who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day.” A Democratic newspaper delighted in lampooning Lincoln for his retreat out the first-­floor window: “We have not learned whether these flying members got hurt in the adventure, and we think it probable that at least one of them came off without damage, as it was noticed that his legs reached nearly from the window to the ground! . . . We learn that a resolution will probably be introduced into the House this week to inquire into the expedience of raising the State House one story higher, in order to set in the third story so as to prevent members from jumping out windows! If such a resolution passes, Mr. Lincoln in future will have to climb down the spout.”

Afterward, Lincoln didn't like to be reminded of what he called “that jumping scrape.” Gillespie said, “I think Mr Lincoln always regretted that he entered into the arrangement as he deprecated everything that Savored of revolutionary.” The incident nonetheless speaks to his priorities. What kind of politician was Lincoln? The kind that might jump out of a window to save a bank.

Lincoln believed that if we acted on sound economic principles, and stayed true to the philosophical foundations of America, the prospects for the country's growth were boundless. To say he had an expansive vision of the country's ability to forge material progress understates it. In a lecture on discoveries and inventions in the late 1850s, he spoke of how man could “dig out his destiny.” He could find riches as yet unimaginable, so long as he was diligent and inquisitive enough and operated in an environment that protected property and encouraged its acquisition. He noted (rather indelicately) that “yankees” had almost instantly discovered gold in California that “had been trodden upon, and overlooked by indians and Mexican greasers, for centuries.”

He spun the discovery of gold into a larger metaphor. “There are more mines above the Earth's surface than below it,” Lincoln said. “All nature—­the whole world, material, moral, and intellectual—­is a mine.” It is our work “to develope, by discoveries, inventions, and improvements, the hidden treasures of this mine.” If the metaphor is overdone, the depth of feeling is clear. Lincoln thrilled to the world-­changing imagination and enterprise of a Whitney or a McCormick, a Fulton or a Colt, a Goodyear or a Morse.

For all Lincoln's clear-­eyed realism about human nature, he had a deep faith in the generative capacities of man. “Lincoln was possessed by the optimism of Western Civilization,” Gabor Boritt writes in his definitive
Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream
, “reborn in the Renaissance, grown to maturity in the Enlightenment, and triumphant in nineteenth century America, which saw man as the master of his own destiny. Perhaps nowhere was this world view stronger than in American conceptions about economics, particularly among Whigs.”

Lincoln devoted himself to the question of how to make free men prosperous. He took his economic principles into the public square fearlessly and unyieldingly. He leavened them with his own personal experience and his zeal for economic mobility—­matching capitalist rigor with bottom-­up populism. This combination runs throughout Lincoln's career and came to define his new Republican Party.

He and other Whigs—­and then Republicans—relied heavily on the contemporary work of Francis Wayland and Henry Charles Carey. In 1837, Wayland published the widely read
The Elements of Political Economy
and Carey the highly influential
Principles of Political Economy.
Herndon said Lincoln “ate up, digested, and assimilated” Wayland's
Elements
.

The president of Brown University, as well as a moral philosopher, Wayland gave pride of place to private property and to labor. He argued “that every man be allowed to gain all that he can,” and “to use it as he will.” He maintained that property “lays at the foundation of all accumulation of wealth, and of all progress in civilization.” If government fails to protect it, “capital emigrates, production ceases, and a nation . . . sinks down in hopeless despondence.” He embraced the labor theory of value and wrote, in a passage that Lincoln could have cut-­and-­pasted into his speeches, “Labor has been made necessary to our happiness. No valuable object of desire can be produced without it. . . . The Universal law of our existence, is, ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat thy bread, until thou return to the ground.' ”

Wayland saw no conflict between capital and labor: “One who owns the capital, unites in production with another or others, who perform the labor. . . and there are just proportions to be observed between the wages of labor and the wages of capital.” He denounced as “robbery” any coercion in the exchange of ­labor and capital.

He defended the Bank of the United States, as well as paper currency. He made the case for his economics in terms of facilitating the rise of workers. Lincoln absorbed it all. Boritt writes of Lincoln's views: “The importance of property and capitalism; their virtues for the man who wished to ‘make' something of himself; the benefits of industrialization, credit, and paper money; and hostility toward slavery—­these were basic elements of his thinking that received systematic support from his study of Wayland.”

Henry Carey thought in a similar key. He maintained that there is a “harmony of all real interests” in the country (one of his books was titled
The Harmony of Interests: Agricultural, Manufacturing, and Commercial
). The era's most prominent protectionist thinker, he favored industrialization to diversify the economy and drive up wages, and a protective tariff to promote it. He wrapped it all in a profound optimism, resting on the assumption of “a tendency to equality of physical and intellectual condition, and to the general ownership of wealth.”

These arguments accorded with Lincoln's deep-­set personal tendencies. He wasn't any more romantic about farms when he left them behind than he had been when living on one. In the White House in 1864, he told a story about an early memory. It captured the inevitable vicissitudes of agriculture. The Knob Creek farm in Kentucky rested in a valley. Lincoln remembered planting pumpkin seed in a big field on a Saturday afternoon, while other boys planted corn: “The next Sunday morning there came a big rain in the hills, it did not rain a drop in the valley, but the water coming down through the gorges washed ground, corn, pumpkin seeds and all clear off the field.” All that work for naught.

He never pandered to farmers. In an 1859 address to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society in Milwaukee, he prefaced his remarks by saying he wouldn't “employ the time assigned me, in the mere flattery of the farmers, as a class. My opinion of them is that, in proportion to numbers, they are neither better nor worse than other ­people.”

The rest of the address is a splendidly Lincolnian performance. He talked of the importance of more efficient agriculture and mused in detail about how a “Steam Plow” might work. He recommended “book-­learning” and science—­botany, chemistry, and “the mechanical branches of Natural Philosophy,” “especially in reference to implements and machinery.” He related how he loved invention: “I know of nothing so pleasant to the mind, as the discovery of anything which is at once
new
and
valuable
—­nothing which so lightens and sweetens toil, as the hopeful pursuit of such discovery.”

Lincoln had the taste for machinery of a frustrated engineer. As president, he was a booster of an early version of the machine gun and promoted the breech-­loading rifle. He tested new rifles for himself in an area behind the White House, in violation of a rule that guns shouldn't be fired in the District. Once, the tinkerer-­in-­chief whittled a wooden gun sight for the new breech-­loading Spencer rifle.

William Herndon said “he was causative; his mind, apparently with an automatic movement, ran back behind facts, principles, and all things to their origin and first cause—­to that point where forces act at once as effect and cause. He would stop in the street and analyze a machine. He would whittle a thing to a point, and then count the numberless inclined planes and their pitch making the point. Mastering and defining this, he would then cut that point back and get a broad traverse section of his pine-­stick, and peel and define that. Clocks, omnibuses, language, paddle-­wheels, and idioms never escaped his observation and analysis.”

Returning from a campaign swing for Zachary Taylor in 1848, Lincoln saw a steamboat on the Detroit River that had run aground, and he got an idea. He devised and sought a patent for a mechanism for “a new and improved manner of combining adjustable buoyant air chambers with a steam boat or other vessel for the purpose of enabling their draught of water to be readily lessened to enable them to pass over bars, or through shallow water.”

His application with the patent office included enumerated drawings with the various parts of the device marked with letters, and a detailed explanation of how it would work, to wit: “The ropes f.f. are connected to the vertical shafts at i.i. as shown in Figs. 1. & 2.” On it went in that vein. He obtained Patent Number 6,469.

Lincoln's knack for mastering and explaining the workings of machines served him well in his patent cases as a lawyer. One of his fellow lawyers, Grant Goodrich, recounted to Herndon a patent infringement case involving a water wheel, tried in Chicago in 1850. Lincoln represented the defense. “He had tended a saw-­mill for some time,” Goodrich wrote, “& was able in his arguments to explain the action of the water upon the wheel, in a manner so clear & inteligable, that the jury was enabled to comprehend the points and the line of defense.” Lincoln won. As a general matter, Goodrich recalled, “He had a great deal of Mechanical genius, could understand readily the principles & mechanical action of machinery, & had the power, in his clear, simple illustrations & Style to make the jury comprehend them.”

Lincoln considered patents a boon to mankind. In his lecture on discoveries and inventions, he included patent laws among the great innovations of history, along with printing and the discovery of America. Before their introduction, “any man might instantly use what another had invented; so that the inventor had no special advantage from his own invention.” The patent laws “secured to the inventor, for a limited time, the exclusive use of his invention; and thereby added the fuel of
interest
to the
fire
of genius, in the discovery and production of new and useful things.”

Property was another Lincoln enthusiasm that, like patent law, might seem arid to someone less attuned than he was to its foundational value. For him, property was “a positive good in the world,” as he told workingmen from New York in 1864. Daniel Walker Howe writes that Lincoln believed, as the nineteenth-­century theologian Horace Bushnell put it, a “grand moral struggle centers in the holding and use and transmission of property.”

He had seen that process impaired in his youth. An antiquated system of land titles in Kentucky had blighted his father's attempts to hold and improve property. The state originally belonged to Virginia, which passed along laws it had inherited from English land tenure wholly inappropriate in the frontier context. On top of this, Virginia sold off more land than actually existed in Kentucky. Thomas Cooper, an early-­nineteenth-­century political philosopher, said that “a purchaser in Kentucky buys a law-­suit with every plot of unoccupied land he pays for there.”

Thomas Lincoln lost money on two properties thanks to flawed titles, and then got chased off his last farm in the state by a lawsuit. He moved to Indiana, where the federal Land Ordinance of 1785 imposed more order and reliability on surveys and land titles. A British lawyer who visited Lincoln in the White House in 1864 said that the president talked to him about “queer” features of English land law. He then complained that “in the State of Kentucky, where he was raised, they used to be so troubled with the same mysterious relics of feudalism, and titles got into an almighty mess with these pettifoggin' incumbrances turnin' up at every fresh tradin' with the land, and no one knowin' how to get rid of 'em.”