Lincoln Unbound (20 page)

Republicans passed a sweeping protective tariff. In a letter before the Republican convention in May 1860, Lincoln had assured Edward Wallace, who wanted to publicize Lincoln's position on the tariff, that “In the days of Henry Clay, I was a Henry-­Clay-­tariff-­man; and my views have undergone no material change on that subject.” The Republicans championed higher tariffs in 1860 with an eye to the electorally significant industrial states of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, although it was ticklish because the party didn't want to offend its new Democratic enlistees who might not be enamored of its economics.

One of Lincoln's awkward moments on his way to Washington after winning the election came in Pittsburgh, where he addressed the issue in front of a rain-­soaked crowd of five thousand, in vague and halting terms: “The tariff bill now before Congress may or may not pass at the present session. I confess I do not understand the precise provisions of this bill, and I do not know whether it can be passed by the present Congress or not.” He went on in this vein for a while before concluding that he hoped “that all sections may share in common the benefits of a just and equitable tariff.” A week later, at Harrisburg, he (charitably) called his earlier remarks “rather carefully worded.”

The bill Lincoln danced around was the Morrill Tariff, which was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Buchanan shortly before he took office. Sponsored by Representative Justin Morrill of Vermont, it spread its duties widely across all sectors of the economy to avoid unfairly burdening any one group of consumers. Republicans justified the tariff as an exercise in nationalism that would help laborers by creating a strong domestic economy. “Men of Missouri, men of Michigan,” intoned Pennsylvania Congressman James Campbell, “men from all the iron-­bearing States, men of the whole land, will you not unite with us in developing the vast resources of the country?” Like St. Augustine praying for chastity, supporters of the tariff said they wanted to be free-­traders—­but not yet. Campbell maintained that free trade is “the object to which society is tending,” yet isn't appropriate “in a new and poor country”: “foreign competition would stifle in their bud all those things which it requires in order to prosper—­capital, skillful workmen, experienced overseers, easy communication, and a good market; in fact, all the conditions which time alone can give. A transition, consequently, is indispensable; and to preach free trade to a country which does not enjoy all these advantages, is nearly as equitable as to propose that a child contend with a grown man.”

The government also needed the revenue. Congress created an income tax during the war, although reluctantly since Republicans were wary of interfering with private wealth creation. The tax paled as a source of funds. During the war, tariffs brought in about $300 million, income taxes about $50 million.

Lincoln repeatedly signed increases in tariffs. Rates on dutiable imports were almost 50 percent by the end of the war. American industry, increasingly technologically proficient, needed protection less than ever before, but the duties did their work. They were a boon to the iron and steel industries, and by the end of the war, basically locked out some foreign goods.

Republicans passed a land-­grant college bill. Morrill had been agitating for one for years. He wanted to promote wide access to a college education emphasizing practical instruction. Opposition emanated from the West, which worried about giving Western acreage to states back East, and the South, which attacked the bill as an unconstitutional outrage, “one of the most monstrous, iniquitous and dangerous measures which have been submitted to Congress,” in the words of Senator Clement Claiborne Clay Jr., of Alabama. Morrill persisted. Maneuvering around the hostile chairman of the House public lands committee, another ­Alabaman named Williamson R. W. Cobb who had the “humor of a buffoon and the manner of a tin-­peddler” in Morrill's estimation, he got the bill to President Buchanan's desk in 1859. Buchanan vetoed it.

Three years later, Lincoln signed the act into law. States received thirty thousand acres of federal land per congressman and senator to sell and use the proceeds to fund colleges focusing on agriculture and mechanics. Horace Greeley hailed it as promising a “wide and lasting good.” It would advance knowledge “of the sciences which underlie and control the chief processes of Productive Labor.”

Finally, Republicans passed the Homestead Act. There had long been proposals to give parcels of federal land to farmers to work. But they were controversial and created cross-­currents within both the Whig and Democratic parties. Lincoln wasn't all that interested in homestead legislation since he had never particularly wanted to promote agriculture. As a good Whig back in Illinois, he had favored selling the public lands and spending the proceeds on improvements. Originally, some Southerners favored a homestead law. Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, Lincoln's vice president and successor, was a longtime and persistent supporter. After the Kansas-­Nebraska Act, though, the push for a homestead law became caught up in the fight over the character of Westward expansion.

Southerners denounced the proposal as a threat to their political power, yet another tool in the hands of those hoping to exclude slavery from the West and flood it with free farmers. One Virginia congressman attacked it as leading to “the propagation of northern sentiment and the multiplication of northern representatives here and in the Senate.” Virginia senator James Mason inveighed against the proposal in 1860, alleging Northern intent to win for itself “command and control of the destinies of the continent.” He called it “a political engine and a potent one” against the South, “part of this ‘measure of empire' ” to connect, as belonging indissolubly to it, the whole slavery question with the homestead policy.

In the 1850s, Southern senators repeatedly killed homestead bills and President Buchanan vetoed one bill that made it to his desk.

Republicans took up the cause. It was another way to demonstrate that they favored the interests of free working ­people and of immigrants against the Slave Power. The party's 1860 platform endorsed the legislation. Lincoln himself didn't publicly address the homestead issue until after the election. “I have to say that in so far as the Government lands can be disposed of,” he said in an 1861 speech to German working men in Cincinnati, on his way to Washington, “I am in favor of cutting up the wild lands into parcels, so that every poor man may have a home.”

In making their case, Republicans attacked land speculators who bought large tracts of land from the federal government and then sold them at profit to the little guy. They believed the Homestead Act would break up land monopolies and boost the agricultural potential of the country and therefore the entire economy. It would devote public lands to “the purpose for which their Creator designed them—­the assignment of a limited quantity to each head of a family, for the purpose of cultivation and subsistence,” in the words of Wisconsin Republican representative John Fox Potter. The act passed in 1862 and gave 160 acres to farmers to improve and to own after five years. Horace ­Greeley exulted: “Young men! Poor men! Widows! resolve to have a home of your own!”

This was an extraordinary bout of congressional activism, at the same time as the exigencies of war inevitably enhanced the powers of the Northern state. Still, as Richard Franklin Bensel points out, the industrial and agricultural sectors ran free of government controls. The labor force, although tapped for manpower for the war, was relatively unmolested. The government became entangled with the financial system, but that system was also becoming more modern, sophisticated, and free of European influence. Given its vitality and wealth, the North could wage the war without subjecting itself to heavy-­handed command-­and-­control policies. Compared to the overmatched Confederacy, it was a laissez-­faire haven.

The Southern political economy came to depend on bureau­cratic control and government expropriation. An extensive ­conscription law effectively subjected the entire labor force to centralized direction. The government had the discretionary power to exempt certain occupations and to detail men to civil duties deemed necessary; private concerns, therefore, depended on the government for workers. Despite the constitution, the government subsidized the construction of railroads and by the end of the war assumed control of them and, by extension, the supply of raw materials. A government bureau undertook the operation of mines. Under the pressure of events, the Confederate government occupied the commanding heights of Southern industry.

It “impressed” property from manufacturers, farmers, and railroads to supply the military. In other words, it forced its owners into exchanging the goods for a price. The system led to wide-­ranging price controls. One Confederate congressman complained of the government agents who were “as thick as locusts in Egypt.” Under pressure from the Union blockade, the government eventually prohibited the importation of luxuries and took control of a vast array of exports. It imposed a more progressive income tax than the North did, and stifled commerce with various onerous taxes. It distributed the revenues of a tax on slave overseers to states for relief payments; nearly 40 percent of families in Alabama were on relief in 1864, according to Bensel.

In short, the Confederates pioneered a program of a kind of war socialism back when Woodrow Wilson—­the progressive president who would run the country's economy on a similar basis during World War I—­was still in knee-­pants. The Southern stance wasn't opposition to government per se, but opposition to those social and economic forces in the North that threatened the slave system. “One of the great ironies of American political development,” Bensel writes, “is that a central state as well organized and powerful as the Confederacy did not emerge until the New Deal and subsequent mobilization for World War II.”

It worked as well as could be expected—­which is to say, not well at all. The financially feeble Confederacy couldn't pay for the war with bonds or, despite its best efforts, tax revenues. It resorted to churning the printing presses, and reaped a ruinous inflation that outpaced that of the North. The Confederacy couldn't efficiently move supplies on its inadequate, deteriorating railway network and had trouble keeping the army's horses fed. The civilian population suffered an abundance of shortages. “At the stroke of secession,” historian Walter McDougall observes, “the South had a booming economy and no army. By 1864 it had an army and no economy, unless one counts smuggling, tax evasion, speculation, hoarding, trading with the enemy, scrounging and subsistence farming.”

Soon enough, it barely even had an army, down to 155,000 troops ready to fight by the beginning of 1865. The war killed about a quarter of military-­age white males in the South. The United States would have had to suffer more than 6 million dead in World War II for a comparable loss on a per capita basis. It liberated some $3 billion worth of slaves. It destroyed more than half the South's farm machinery. It wiped out about two-­fifths of its livestock. The real estate market cratered. The value of Confederate bonds and paper currency—­tenuous even during the war—­disintegrated into nothingness with predictably cataclysmic consequences for the financial system.

The North's advantages, on the other hand, had only grown during the conflict. Its production continued to expand, although at a slower pace than before or after the war. The North exploited an already extant economic machine. Its factories churned out roughly 1.5 million rifles. Its railroad network grew, and supplied and moved Union armies in prodigious feats of logistics. Starting from nearly nothing, it built a navy of nearly seven hundred ships. Farms not only kept civilians and the army fed, they replaced missing Southern produce and
still
exported massive amounts of goods abroad. Settlement of the West continued, with 5 million acres passing from government into private hands. At the height of its mobilization, with a million men under arms, the United States had become the world's foremost military power.

The country had avoided getting riven into two, or more if the nation's cohesion had been shattered. In a January 1861 speech, William Seward colorfully invoked what would have been the upshot of a broken United States. He spoke of seeing an American man-­of-­war entering a foreign port and how “all the ­people blessed it as a harbinger of hope for their own ultimate freedom.” Then he imagined the same ship entering the same port under different auspices: “The flag of thirty-­three stars and thirteen stripes has been hauled down, and in its place a signal is run up, which flaunts the device of a lone star or a palmetto tree. Men ask, ‘Who is the stranger that thus steals into our waters?' The answer contemptuously given is, ‘she comes from one of the obscure republics of North America. Let her pass on.' ”

The war slammed the door on an alternative future of a Slave South as international defender of slavery and conqueror of territory in the Caribbean and Latin America, in a Manifest Destiny for the planter set. Any number of counterfactuals are possible assuming that the South had been allowed to peaceably secede or had won its independence by force of arms. None of them are favorable to liberty or the future of an America as we would come to know it.

Instead, the war shattered the South's political power for the next seven decades. After 1860, Midwesterners dominated the presidency in ensuing elections the way Southerners once had. The South couldn't even manage a Senate president or Speaker of the House for a few decades after the war. The country tilted on a different axis.

Kansas senator Samuel Pomeroy expressed the new dis­pensation when, in a debate over the possibility of colonizing ex-­slaves during the war, he said he would prefer to colonize
slaveholders
on grounds that they “are dangerous, and they are not producers.” Radical Congressman Thaddeus Stevens said much the same in plugging for thoroughgoing reconstruction of the South in 1865: “If the South is ever to be made a safe republic let her land be cultivated by the toil of its owners, or the free labor of intelligent citizens. This must be done even though it drive the nobility into exile. If they go, all the better. It is easier and more beneficial to exile seventy thousand proud, bloated and defiant rebels than to expatriate four million laborers, native to the soil and loyal to the government.”