Lincoln Unbound (13 page)

Although he also took up cases on the other side, in keeping with his lawyer's ethic of taking whatever business he could get, in his most notable cases Lincoln eased the way for the transportation revolution he had done so much to promote in office. He represented the Alton & Sangamon Railroad in an important 1851 case. A few years earlier he was a signatory on a report promoting the railroad “as a link in a great chain of rail road communication which shall unite Boston and New York with the Mississippi.” Now, one James Barret, who had subscribed to thirty shares of stock of the railroad to be paid in installments, wanted to renege. When the route of the railroad was shortened to bypass his property, it made the project less lucrative and appealing to him. But if Barret could back out, it would encourage others to stop payment, too, and deplete the railroad's capital. It would make it more difficult for railroads in the future to change and improve their routes. The case went up to the Illinois Supreme Court, where Lincoln prevailed in a decision that relied on his reasoning and became widely cited.

In another case in 1853 involving a threat to the interests of the railroads, McLean County tried to levy taxes on the Illinois Central's 118 acres in the county. It sought to do this despite the exemption the state had granted to the railroad from exactly such local taxes. The railroad had to contemplate, in addition to its state tax, getting taxed by every county it touched. As Lincoln put it in a (not entirely grammatical) note spelling out the potential magnitude of the additional tax liability, “
The Company own
near two million acres; & their road runs through twentysix counties.” The case also went to the state supreme court and Lincoln won, in another victory for the march of the roads. (He had to sue the Illinois Central to get his five-­thousand-­dollar fee—­an astronomical payment for that time that led Stephen Douglas later to attack him for “taking the side of the company against the ­people.”)

Still another consequential case involved a spur off the Illinois Central, run by the Rock Island Railroad, that headed west to the Mississippi. It built the first railroad bridge over the river, from Rock Island, Illinois, to Davenport, Iowa, a significant opening of the farmland west of the Mississippi to market forces from the East. When two weeks after its opening the steamboat
Effie Afton
crashed against the bridge and destroyed it, the steamboat's owners sued to remove the bridge. In a lawsuit pregnant with economic and sectional implications, Lincoln represented the railroad.

The steamboat operators hated the bridge as an obstacle to navigation and as a herald of a new world. When it was destroyed in the wake of the crash, steamboat captains blew their whistles in joy, “a greater celebration than follows an excited election,” as Lincoln would put it before the jury. If there couldn't be bridges across the Mississippi, the railroad network would have a premature Western terminus and stunt the growing railroad network. Would the Mississippi remain the main artery of commercial traffic, with its inevitable connection with Southern interests, or would the railroad create an opening to the East? Or put another way, would St. Louis and the river, or Chicago and the railroad, win out as transit hubs?

Lincoln dove into the details of the crash, the current, the wind, the speed and condition of the boat, the depth and width of the channel, the angles involved, and so on. But before the jury he also addressed the larger question. He said that he “had no prejudice against steamboats or steamboatmen, nor any against St. Louis, for he supposed they went about as other ­people would do in their situation. St. Louis as a commercial place, may desire that this bridge should not stand, as it is adverse to her commerce, diverting a portion of it from the river.” That couldn't be the overarching consideration, though. “There is a travel from East to West,” he continued, “whose demands are not less important than that of the river. It is growing larger and larger, building up new countries with a rapidity never before seen in the history of the world.” Eventually, in a drawn-­out case, Lincoln and the bridge prevailed.

Lincoln the lawyer for railroad interests doesn't jibe with his image as the tribune of the common man—­at least it doesn't on the surface. Historian Mark Neely notes Lincoln's association “with stock-­jobbers and note-­shavers, boosters and developers.” The early twentieth century poet and Lincoln biographer Edgar Lee Masters complained of his identification with “lawyers and bankers and traders and merchants.” As early as 1840, Lincoln had to defend himself from charges of elitism with invocations of his humble origins that once would have gone without saying.

Ninian Edwards told Herndon of a campaign stop in 1840. One Colonel E. D. Taylor charged Lincoln “with belonging to the aristocracy.” Lincoln replied that “whilst Col. Taylor had his stores over the country, and was riding in a fine carriage, wore his kid cloves and had a gold headed cane, he [Lincoln] was a poor boy hired on a flat boat at eight dollars a month.” That wasn't all. As Edwards continued to relate (rendered in run-­on fashion by Herndon), Lincoln said back then he “had only one pair of breeches and they were of buckskin now . . . if you know the nature of buckskin when wet and dried by the sun, they would shrink and mine kept shrinking until they left for several inches my legs bare between the top of my Socks and the lower part of my breeches—­and whilst I was growing taller they were becoming shorter: and so much tighter, that they left a blue streak around my leg which you can be seen to this day—­If you call this aristocracy I plead guilty to the charge.”

If his agenda was vulnerable to attack as favoring the well-­off, Lincoln conceived of it entirely differently. It wasn't for—­as he wrote dismissively in 1858 of the Whigs whom he couldn't win over in his Senate contest with Stephen Douglas—­the “exclusive silk-­stocking whiggery,” “the nice exclusive sort.” It was for the man on the rise. In the 1830s, the
Sangamo Journal
, with which Lincoln was closely associated, put the argument for improvements and banks in terms of aspiration. Without them, the poor would have no prospects except working as “hewers of wood and drawers of water” for the rich. Without access to capital, the “industrious poor” had no hope of lifting themselves up onto a higher economic plane.

The Whig polemicist Calvin Colton developed the argument at greater length in his
Junius Tracts
making the case for his party in 1844. He defined the country as one of mobility and striving: “Ours is a country, where men start from an humble origin, and from small beginnings rise gradually in the world, as the reward of merit and industry, and where they can attain to the most ­elevated positions, or acquire a large amount of wealth, according to the pursuits they elect for themselves. No exclusive privileges of birth, no entailment of estates, no civil or political disqualifications, stand in their path; but one has as good a chance as another, according to his talents, prudence, and personal exertions. This is a country of
self-­made men
, than which nothing better could be said of any state of society.”

This state of society can't apply, though, if foolish anticapitalist policies suppress economic vitality. “It has been a prevalent and fatal doctrine in this country,” he wrote, “with a certain class of statesmen, that it is always a safe policy and a duty in the government, to fight against moneyed capitalists, in whatever place or shape they lift up their heads, whether in banks, or in manufactories, or in any and all other forms and enterprises requiring associated capital.” This is so foolish because “it is not considered, that the employment and thriving of the ­people depend on the profitable investment of the moneyed capital of the country.” Therefore, “that policy which destroys the profit of money, destroys the profit of labor. Let government strike at the rich, and the blow falls on the heads of the poor.”

Lincoln would make this case with great power, especially as his emphasis on aspiration dovetailed with his case against slavery and as he transitioned from Whig to Republican. “So while we do not propose any war upon capital,” he explained in a stirring riff in a speech in New Haven, Connecticut, in March 1860, “we do wish to allow the humblest man an equal chance to get rich with everybody else. When one starts poor, as most do in the race of life, free society is such that he knows he can better his condition; he knows that there is no fixed condition of labor, for his whole life.”

He continued in a personal mode, “I am not ashamed to confess that twenty five years ago I was a hired laborer, mauling rails, at work on a flat-­boat—­just what might happen to any poor man's son! I want every man to have the chance—­and I believe a black man is entitled to it—­in which he
can
better his condition—­when he may look forward and hope to be a hired laborer this year and the next, work for himself afterward, and finally to hire men to work for him! That is the true system.” He wanted a country where “you can better your condition, and so it may go on and on in one ceaseless round so long as man exists on the face of the earth!”

Lincoln—­and his like-­minded Whigs and Republicans—­engineered a momentous shift. He democratized Whiggish economics. He took an economic point of view descended from Alexander Hamilton—­with all the elitist baggage that implies—­and baptized it in the great, rolling Jordan River of American democracy. In Lincoln, the banks and the log cabin met. In Lincoln, the laboring man became the master of his own economic destiny. The storied political scientist Louis Hartz explained that economic power came to be defined “as within the reach, within the legitimate ambition, of all. The old gentilities are gone, and by an ironic paradox, the Hamiltonian Whig economic goal is attained amid enthusiasms wholly un-­Whig in character.”

For all the frustrations and fits and starts of Lincoln's policy initiatives, his broad economic vision was steadily vindicated in Illinois, and in the country—­improved transportation and commercial networks, more ­people and more innovation, a spiraling upward economic rush. The improvements eventually came in the state. The Illinois & Michigan Canal had never been completely abandoned. It opened its locks in 1848, twelve years after construction began, and traffic boomed throughout the 1850s. But canals were no longer the future. The amount of railroad track jumped a hundredfold in the state—­from 26 to 2,799—­in the two decades after 1840. By 1860, Illinois had the second-­largest amount of track of any state in the country.

Illinois reflected national trends. The country went through a canal-­building boom that saw more than three thousand miles constructed by 1840. But then cost overruns and disappointing toll revenues on many routes and the dawning of the age of the railroad sent canals into retreat. The railroads were more reliable and practical than even the best canals. Americans embraced them with a fervor. At more than three thousand miles, the United States already had more railroad track than the entirety of Europe in 1840. New England and New York led the way in the 1840s, when another five thousand miles were added nationally, and then the Midwest rapidly began to catch up in the 1850s, when another twenty-­two thousand miles were added.

Through the new, cheaper means of east-­west transit, the ­Atlantic Ocean reached out and touched the rivers and lakes of the Midwest. Technology conquered distance. To use Lincoln's term from his lectures on discoveries and inventions, the “mines” of the middle of the country—­the land capable of producing a stupendous agricultural bounty—­were unlocked to markets on the East Coast and beyond.

Previously, dragging goods over land by horse had been incredibly cumbersome and expensive. Historian George Rogers Taylor quotes a United State Senate committee report from 1816: “A coal mine may exist in the United States not more than ten miles from valuable ores of iron and other materials, and both of them be useless until a canal is established between them, as the price of land carriage is too great to be borne by either.” According to the report, getting a ton of goods across the ocean from Europe to the United States cost $9. The cost of getting a ton of goods thirty miles within the United States on the ground? Also $9.

The Allegheny Mountains had been a nearly insuperable obstacle to the development of an extended market. As Taylor relates, to get to Eastern markets, bulky Western goods had to circumvent the mountains by moving in a great arc, down the Mississippi, then up along the coast to Philadelphia, Boston, or New York. To get to the West, Eastern goods had to make it across the mountains or come upriver from New Orleans (a trip facilitated by the advent of the steamboat). The rise of the canals made a direct East-­West route possible. Eastern manufactured goods headed directly west, and agricultural products in the opposite direction in great abundance.

The railroads instantly made ground transportation cheaper, and as they improved, it got cheaper still. From around 1815 to the Civil War, the cost of shipping bulky freight on land dropped 95 percent (some of this drop could be attributed to an economy-­wide decline in prices). And it got there faster. Whereas earlier in the century it had taken more than fifty days to get goods from Cincinnati to New York, the railroad could get them there in as few as six days. Commerce on the Mississippi continued to grow, but Eastern manufactured and Western agricultural goods made up a smaller proportion of it. Human ingenuity was trumping sheer geography. The North increasingly cemented the Midwest to itself and its economic system, and effectively detached the region from the South.

The South noticed. In 1852,
DeBow's Review
, a proslavery journal that advocated Southern economic independence, blamed the Northern “enemy” for the decline of New Orleans: “Armed with energy, enterprise, and an indomitable spirit, that enemy, by a system of bold, vigorous, and sustained efforts, has succeeded in reversing the very laws of nature and of nature's God—­rolled back the mighty tide of the Mississippi and its thousand tributary streams, until their mouth, practically and commercially, is more at New York or Boston than at New Orleans.”