Posted on 02/12/2011 6:06:39 AM PST by Notary Sojac
Abraham Lincoln’s greatest love was politics, but his intellectual passion was for what the 19th century called “political economy” — the way economics and politics intersected in society and government. According to his law partner William Herndon, Lincoln “liked political economy, the study of it,” and Shelby Cullom, who practiced law beside Lincoln in Springfield, Ill. (and later crafted the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887), thought that “theoretically . . . on political economy he was great.” Although Lincoln’s angular, shambling appearance gave him the look of anything but a student of economics — one contemporary said he resembled “a rough intelligent farmer” — people quickly found out that “any man who took Lincoln for a simple minded man would very soon wake up with his back in a ditch.”
Before he was elected the 16th president of the United States, Lincoln “ate up, digested, and assimilated” the premier texts in 19th-century political economy — John Stuart Mill’s The Principles of Political Economy (1848), Mathew Carey’s Essays on Political Economy (1822), his son Henry Carey’s three-volume Principles of Social Science (1858), John Ramsay McCulloch’s The Principles of Political Economy (1825), and Francis Wayland’s Elements of Political Economy (1837). These were also the principal statements of classical “liberal” economics — Mill was a protégé of David Ricardo, Henry Carey was the enemy of “all interference with the liberty of man to employ his industry in such manner as his instinct of self-interest may dictate,” and McCulloch edited an edition of Adam Smith.
Lincoln read and absorbed it all, and it had a profound effect. His embrace of classical-liberal economics was the force that moved all his achievements, from victory in the Civil War to the galaxy of economic policies that emerged from his presidency. And Lincoln’s principles are the ones most loathed by the progressive Left today. Barack Obama struggled mightily during his presidential campaign to connect his image with that of Lincoln, but Lincoln’s ideas march against him as surely as the stars march in their courses.
Take the American Revolution to its roots, and you will find it to be a revolution against regulation. Britain’s imperial planners were originally interested in the New World for the quick riches it might yield. When their colonizing forays produced no such fortunes, they banned the development of all but a handful of manufactures in the colonies, taxed the colonies’ carrying trade, and labored to convert them into an agricultural resource. The colonists rebelled, and we know with what result.
The Revolution left America independent — and without much of a manufacturing sector. This suited Thomas Jefferson, who waxed eloquent about the superior virtues of agrarian life and the corruptions of commerce, but not Alexander Hamilton, who worried that an American republic without the economic strength of manufacturing would be easy pickings whenever some over-mighty European empire grew hungry for adventures in the New World. Jefferson won the initial political argument over the shape of the American economy, but Hamilton’s views won the economic argument when the War of 1812 demonstrated just how vulnerable an agrarian republic was to British industrial might.
The next round of this dispute was played out by Andrew Jackson, who shared all of Jefferson’s suspicions about commerce and extended them to its twin enablers, banks and corporations, and Henry Clay, who urged the federal government to encourage industrial development through a public-private national bank, direct assistance for building a transportation network (“internal improvements,” as it was called), and protective tariffs to help industrial start-ups compete with established foreign competitors.
The wild card that roiled these economic disputes was slavery. It coexisted uneasily with commerce, which had little use for slave labor. Slavery prized stability, in which an established hierarchy of great white planters would always rule black slaves, and white yeomen farmers could always be bought off with subsidies (in the form of debtor-relief laws, state laws banning bank and corporate charters, and newer, cheaper land in the West). Andrew Jackson might have railed against “those amongst us who wish to enlarge the powers of the General Government,” but when it came to slavery, his fellow Democrats did not hesitate to enlarge those powers in order to evict the Cherokee Indians from their tribal lands in Georgia and replace them with plantations, annex Texas as a new slave state, and trigger an expansionist war with Mexico to swell the borders of American slavery. The power to promote economic growth, however, was denounced by Jackson as “usurpation” and “mere selfishness.” After all, a federal government that had the power to develop one kind of economic activity, in the form of markets and commerce, might foster experiments in meddling with another — slavery.
From his first political stirrings in the early 1830s, Abraham Lincoln never had a doubt where his allegiances lay. Henry Clay, Lincoln said, was “my beau ideal of a statesman,” and when Lincoln attached himself to Clay’s newly organized Whig party in the 1830s, he became, a fellow lawyer recalled, “as stiff as a man can be in his Whig doctrines.” In his first political campaign, in 1832, Lincoln announced that “time and experience have verified to a demonstration the public utility of internal improvements.” In the state legislature, Lincoln emerged as the Illinois Whigs’ foremost advocate of a state bank, improved roads and bridges, and the funding of the Illinois & Michigan Canal. He dabbled in commerce himself — unsuccessfully, as it turned out — but left it to become a lawyer, a profession that was being transformed from its pre-Revolutionary role as the arbiter of community morality into a new one as the enforcer of commercial contracts. His case files, significantly, were almost entirely civil and commercial. Only 6 percent of the cases Lincoln handled were criminal; the largest components of his practice were breach-of-contract suits and debt collections.
Lincoln’s Whigs were saddled with a reputation, which persists among some modern historians, for being crotchety, negative, and (above all) rich, while the Jacksonian Democrats are cast as the coonskin-wearing sons of the common man. This pushes out of view the embarrassingly large fortunes that sat on the tables of Jacksonian leadership, especially in the slaveholding South. In 1860, two out of every three estates worth more than $100,000 were in the South, and the wealthiest county in the United States was Adams County, in the heart of Democratic Mississippi. And while Andrew Jackson may have been billed as the paladin of Homo democraticus, he had become quite wealthy through land speculation, owned 150 slaves and a 1,000-acre plantation in Tennessee, and enjoyed a continuing major-general’s salary that amounted to more than $5,000 per annum (well over $100,000 in today’s reckoning).
Nevertheless, Lincoln’s move to the head of the Illinois Whig party earned him criticism as a sell-out to the “aristocracy.” It was an accusation he found incredible. A friend recalled decades later that when a rival Democratic politician began raging about the aristocratic pretensions of the Whigs, Lincoln reached over and pulled open the man’s vest, and out tumbled the frills of a very un-Democratic “ruffle shirt,” along with “gold watches with large seals hung heavily & massively down.” Lincoln pointed out that when his opponent “was riding in a fine carriage, wore his kid gloves and had a gold headed cane, he was a poor boy hired on a flat boat at eight dollars a month, and had only one pair of breeches and they were of buckskin.” “If you call this aristocracy,” Lincoln concluded, “I plead guilty to the charge.”
Lincoln had indeed been “a poor boy.” Lincoln’s father, Thomas, was a typical agrarian yeoman, one of the sort that Jefferson described as “God’s chosen people, if ever he had a chosen people.” A contemporary recalled him as a man “satisfied to live in the good old fashioned way” so long as his “shack kept out the rain” and “there was plenty of wood to burn.” But Thomas’s son found nothing terribly enchanting about the back-breaking work of the farm or the drunken hooliganism that was its chief entertainment. A friend recalled Lincoln’s saying that “his father taught him to work” on the farm “but never learned him to love it.” Lincoln was always reluctant to talk about his poor-boy origins except when they gave him an opportunity to measure how far he had risen above them. On other occasions, he would sum up his early life in twelve words: “I have seen a good deal of the backside of this world.” What attracted him to Henry Clay and the Whigs was not elitism but mobility — a path, through commerce and finance, out of that backside.
It was also what led him into his lifelong opposition to slavery. “I am naturally anti-slavery,” he said in 1864. “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel.” What he loathed in slavery was not just the physical violence — “the poor creatures hunted down, and caught, and carried back to their stripes” — but the economic deadness that confined them to “unrewarded toils.” He even considered his father’s control over his own labor on the farm to be a species of slavery, so much so that he once announced, “I used to be a slave, and now I am so free that they let me practice law.”
The antidote to slavery, Lincoln insisted, was also economic: free labor. In the 19th century, free labor was the shorthand term for a particular way of viewing capitalism: as a labor system, in which employers and employees struck bargains for production and wages without restriction, and where the boundaries between these two roles were fluid enough that today’s employee could, by dint of energy, talent, and foresight, become the employer of tomorrow.
Slavery was the polar opposite of free labor. With very rare exceptions, it denied the slave any future but that of being a slave, and it replaced the open-ended arrangements of employees and employers with a rigidly dictatorial system. The harmful effects extended beyond the slaves themselves, Lincoln wrote, because in the process, all labor became stigmatized as “slave work”; the social ideal became “the gentleman of leisure who was above and scorned work,” rather than “men who are industrious, and sober, and honest in the pursuit of their own interests.” Men who are industrious — that, of course, described Lincoln. Slavery, then, was not merely an abstraction; it was the enemy of every ambition Lincoln had ever felt.
Free labor, however, was ambition’s friend. Like Adam Smith, who traced the “the real price of everything” to “the toil and trouble of acquiring it,” Lincoln believed that labor laid the foundation for everyone to build up capital of their own. “Capital is only the fruit of labor; and could not have existed if labor had not first existed.” The folly of slavery lay in its assumption that the vast majority of laborers were indolent and without ambition, “that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it, induces him to labor.” Since by that rule “nobody works unless capital excites them to work,” the most efficient way to motivate laborers to work is to “buy the men and drive them to it, and that is slavery.”
In a system of free labor, by contrast, the prospect of profit incites the laborer to work and save, then turn into an entrepreneur himself and hire others to labor. Hiring workers, in turn, not only fires the entrepreneur’s ambition, but opens up the path of ambition for his employees, “men who have not their own land to work upon, or shops to work in, and who are benefited by working for others.”
Lincoln was aware that pro-slavery propagandists had begun claiming in the 1850s that laborers in northern factories were, in reality, no more free to make wage bargains than slaves on southern plantations. In fact, they claimed, “free labor” was worse off, because employers had no obligation to provide health care for mere wage-earners or to support them in childhood and old age, the way slaveowners did for their slaves.
Lincoln found this comparison absurd, largely because his own life experience refuted it: “Twenty-five years ago, I was a hired laborer.” A typical young man in this situation, he explained, “has for his capital nothing, save two strong hands that God has given him, a heart willing to labor, and a freedom to choose the mode of his work.” If the beginner really is willing, however, “he works industriously, he behaves soberly, and the result of a year or two’s labor is a surplus of capital . . . and in course of time he too has enough capital to hire some new beginner.” This, to Lincoln, was the key flaw in the slavery defenders’ case: Slavery offered no reward at all for sobriety or industry, while free labor was the “just and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way for all — gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all.”
He did not deny that there were hired men who never became anything more, but that was not because of any defect in free-labor capitalism. “If any continue through life in the condition of the hired laborer, it is not the fault of the system, but because of either a dependent nature which prefers it, or improvidence, folly, or singular misfortune.” Ambition was not a crime to be punished. “We do not propose any war upon capital,” he insisted. Far from it: He wanted “to allow the humblest man an equal chance to get rich with everybody else” and “leave each man free to acquire property as fast as he can.” The genius of free labor, he explained to an audience of workingmen in New Haven, Conn., was that “when one starts poor, as most do in the race of life . . . he knows he can better his condition.” Lincoln wanted every “man to have the chance — and I believe a black man is entitled to it — in which he can better his condition. . . . That is the true system . . . and so it may go on and on in one ceaseless round so long as man exists on the face of the earth!”
To make this system work, Lincoln envisioned an active role for the federal government, but it was hardly that of a top-down managerial state. “The leading principle — the sheet anchor of American republicanism,” Lincoln said, is that “no man is good enough to govern another man, without that other’s consent.” This was what guaranteed “individuals . . . the sacred right to regulate their own family affairs” and “communities . . . [to] arrange their own internal matters to suit themselves” without wanton interference by government. “The proposition that each man should do precisely as he pleases with all which is exclusively his own” was the “foundation of the sense of justice there is in me.”
So government was not a choice between an all-powerful dictatorship and an anarchistic landscape devoid of highways, traffic signs, levees, and harbor clearance. There were some things that individuals could not accomplish on their own, and it was those things that called governments into being. “The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves — in their separate, and individual capacities,” Lincoln wrote. “In all that the people can individually do as well for themselves, government ought not to interfere.” But “in relation to . . . crimes, misdemeanors, and non performance of contracts,” and the sort of need that “requires combined action, as public roads and highways, public schools, charities, pauperism, orphanage, estates of the deceased,” and protection of “the machinery of government” itself, “there still would be some, though not so much, need of government.”
Lincoln’s rule was neither “big government” nor “no government” but minimal government, with that minimum confined almost entirely to the task of removing obstacles to self-improvement and the development of ambition. “To elevate the condition of men — to lift artificial weights from all shoulders — to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all — to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life” was “the leading object of the government.” And in the ultimate sense, the Civil War, by preserving the Union and eliminating slavery, was waged “in order that each of you may have through this free government . . . an open field and a fair chance for your industry, enterprise and intelligence; that you all may have equal privileges in the race of life, with all its desirable human aspirations.” Such a “nation is worth fighting for, to secure such an inestimable jewel.”
And fight he would: “I expect to maintain this contest until successful, or till I die, or am conquered, or my term expires, or Congress or the country forsakes me,” Lincoln wrote in 1862. But there were many places to do the fighting, and one of them was Congress (from which almost all the southern Democrats had conveniently withdrawn when their states seceded). The landmark pieces of legislation that he signed between 1861 and 1865 — the Homestead Act (1862), the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act (1862), the Pacific Railway Act (1862), and the National Bank Act (1863) — together with the Morrill Tariff of 1861, which was signed into law by James Buchanan just before he turned the presidency over to Lincoln, amounted to nothing less than a repeal of six decades of Democratic dominance of the federal government. They would have made Lincoln’s presidency as controversial as Andrew Jackson’s even if there had been no Civil War. The railway act, which funded construction of the transcontinental railroad, was the ultimate version of Henry Clay’s “internal improvements,” while the tariff hiked import duties to all-time highs to protect American industry. (Lincoln backed the tariffs specifically because of the era’s whopping imbalance between European manufacturing and American manufacturing; whether he would have advocated their extension permanently is another matter.) In 1862 the Indiana Democratic state committee complained that Lincoln had struck “down at one dash all the labor of Gen. Jackson for the last four years of his administration.”
Did this amount to “big government”? Not if we measure bigness by the size of the federal budget. In 1860, federal spending amounted to a minuscule $63.2 million. Factored for a century and a half of inflation, the modern equivalent would be a federal budget of about $1.5 billion. During Lincoln’s presidency, federal spending leapt from $66.6 million in 1861 to $1.29 billion in 1865. But even with the swollen costs of war to absorb, the 1865 federal budget would translate into only about $18 billion in today’s money, using consumer-price inflation as the measure.
The bulk of that spending was war-related, and disappeared as soon as the wartime emergency was over. By 1871, the federal budget had shrunk to $293 million — only 22.7 percent of the size it had been in 1865 — and it would have shrunk even more drastically if not for the cost of servicing the wartime debt (which accounted for 44 percent of the budget) and paying pensions to wounded and injured soldiers (another 11 percent). Lincoln was dead by then, of course, but his successors and the Congress had generally followed his intentions. If Lincoln’s goal was to use the Civil War as the cloak for a permanent transformation of the federal government into an all-powerful megastate, the budget numbers certainly do not show much evidence of it.
The Italian historian Raimondo Luraghi once remarked that, unlike the Lincoln administration, the “Confederate rulers did not want a private capitalist industry” and “did not want to see a powerful industrial bourgeoisie rising in the Confederacy.” So while the Union government contracted out its wartime needs to the private sector, the Confederate government set up government-owned supply facilities “investing millions of dollars, arming and supplying one of the largest armies in the world — and all this as national property or under national control, in a kind of quasi-socialist management.” Predictably, the Confederacy’s nationalized industries did a bad job of supplying and feeding the rebel armies, so among the reasons Luraghi listed for the Confederacy’s downfall was its choice of “the way of ‘state socialism,’ a solution that is as far from capitalism as the earth is from the moon.”
But the fundamental convictions that animated the “Slave Power” — that stability is preferable to mobility, and that top-down management in the name of efficiency and fairness is the default position of human society — were not among the things surrendered at Appomattox. Half a century after Lincoln’s death, another American president would contradict every principle in political economy that Lincoln held dear by announcing that society must stop modeling itself on metaphors like “the race of life” and instead become a “family . . . where men can live as a single community, co-operative as in a perfected, coordinated beehive, not afraid of any storm of nature,” and do so “with an eye single to the standards of justice and fair play.” What a century of Woodrow Wilson’s “family” metaphor has produced, however, is the dreary reality of a government that regards citizens as miscreant children requiring constant correction of their appetites, salaries, attitudes, vocabulary, and even light bulbs.
Hurling Lincoln’s economic principles back against this present-day reality may seem like the height of futility. How many battalions, we may ask, do the economic ideas of a man dead for a century and a half command? But those inclined to dismiss these ideas should beware of Lincoln’s ditch. A generation from now, the question might seem more serious.Abraham Lincoln’s greatest love was politics, but his intellectual passion was for what the 19th century called “political economy” — the way economics and politics intersected in society and government. According to his law partner William Herndon, Lincoln “liked political economy, the study of it,” and Shelby Cullom, who practiced law beside Lincoln in Springfield, Ill. (and later crafted the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887), thought that “theoretically . . . on political economy he was great.” Although Lincoln’s angular, shambling appearance gave him the look of anything but a student of economics — one contemporary said he resembled “a rough intelligent farmer” — people quickly found out that “any man who took Lincoln for a simple minded man would very soon wake up with his back in a ditch.”
Before he was elected the 16th president of the United States, Lincoln “ate up, digested, and assimilated” the premier texts in 19th-century political economy — John Stuart Mill’s The Principles of Political Economy (1848), Mathew Carey’s Essays on Political Economy (1822), his son Henry Carey’s three-volume Principles of Social Science (1858), John Ramsay McCulloch’s The Principles of Political Economy (1825), and Francis Wayland’s Elements of Political Economy (1837). These were also the principal statements of classical “liberal” economics — Mill was a protégé of David Ricardo, Henry Carey was the enemy of “all interference with the liberty of man to employ his industry in such manner as his instinct of self-interest may dictate,” and McCulloch edited an edition of Adam Smith.
Lincoln read and absorbed it all, and it had a profound effect. His embrace of classical-liberal economics was the force that moved all his achievements, from victory in the Civil War to the galaxy of economic policies that emerged from his presidency. And Lincoln’s principles are the ones most loathed by the progressive Left today. Barack Obama struggled mightily during his presidential campaign to connect his image with that of Lincoln, but Lincoln’s ideas march against him as surely as the stars march in their courses.
Take the American Revolution to its roots, and you will find it to be a revolution against regulation. Britain’s imperial planners were originally interested in the New World for the quick riches it might yield. When their colonizing forays produced no such fortunes, they banned the development of all but a handful of manufactures in the colonies, taxed the colonies’ carrying trade, and labored to convert them into an agricultural resource. The colonists rebelled, and we know with what result.
The Revolution left America independent — and without much of a manufacturing sector. This suited Thomas Jefferson, who waxed eloquent about the superior virtues of agrarian life and the corruptions of commerce, but not Alexander Hamilton, who worried that an American republic without the economic strength of manufacturing would be easy pickings whenever some over-mighty European empire grew hungry for adventures in the New World. Jefferson won the initial political argument over the shape of the American economy, but Hamilton’s views won the economic argument when the War of 1812 demonstrated just how vulnerable an agrarian republic was to British industrial might.
The next round of this dispute was played out by Andrew Jackson, who shared all of Jefferson’s suspicions about commerce and extended them to its twin enablers, banks and corporations, and Henry Clay, who urged the federal government to encourage industrial development through a public-private national bank, direct assistance for building a transportation network (“internal improvements,” as it was called), and protective tariffs to help industrial start-ups compete with established foreign competitors.
The wild card that roiled these economic disputes was slavery. It coexisted uneasily with commerce, which had little use for slave labor. Slavery prized stability, in which an established hierarchy of great white planters would always rule black slaves, and white yeomen farmers could always be bought off with subsidies (in the form of debtor-relief laws, state laws banning bank and corporate charters, and newer, cheaper land in the West). Andrew Jackson might have railed against “those amongst us who wish to enlarge the powers of the General Government,” but when it came to slavery, his fellow Democrats did not hesitate to enlarge those powers in order to evict the Cherokee Indians from their tribal lands in Georgia and replace them with plantations, annex Texas as a new slave state, and trigger an expansionist war with Mexico to swell the borders of American slavery. The power to promote economic growth, however, was denounced by Jackson as “usurpation” and “mere selfishness.” After all, a federal government that had the power to develop one kind of economic activity, in the form of markets and commerce, might foster experiments in meddling with another — slavery.
From his first political stirrings in the early 1830s, Abraham Lincoln never had a doubt where his allegiances lay. Henry Clay, Lincoln said, was “my beau ideal of a statesman,” and when Lincoln attached himself to Clay’s newly organized Whig party in the 1830s, he became, a fellow lawyer recalled, “as stiff as a man can be in his Whig doctrines.” In his first political campaign, in 1832, Lincoln announced that “time and experience have verified to a demonstration the public utility of internal improvements.” In the state legislature, Lincoln emerged as the Illinois Whigs’ foremost advocate of a state bank, improved roads and bridges, and the funding of the Illinois & Michigan Canal. He dabbled in commerce himself — unsuccessfully, as it turned out — but left it to become a lawyer, a profession that was being transformed from its pre-Revolutionary role as the arbiter of community morality into a new one as the enforcer of commercial contracts. His case files, significantly, were almost entirely civil and commercial. Only 6 percent of the cases Lincoln handled were criminal; the largest components of his practice were breach-of-contract suits and debt collections.
Lincoln’s Whigs were saddled with a reputation, which persists among some modern historians, for being crotchety, negative, and (above all) rich, while the Jacksonian Democrats are cast as the coonskin-wearing sons of the common man. This pushes out of view the embarrassingly large fortunes that sat on the tables of Jacksonian leadership, especially in the slaveholding South. In 1860, two out of every three estates worth more than $100,000 were in the South, and the wealthiest county in the United States was Adams County, in the heart of Democratic Mississippi. And while Andrew Jackson may have been billed as the paladin of Homo democraticus, he had become quite wealthy through land speculation, owned 150 slaves and a 1,000-acre plantation in Tennessee, and enjoyed a continuing major-general’s salary that amounted to more than $5,000 per annum (well over $100,000 in today’s reckoning).
Nevertheless, Lincoln’s move to the head of the Illinois Whig party earned him criticism as a sell-out to the “aristocracy.” It was an accusation he found incredible. A friend recalled decades later that when a rival Democratic politician began raging about the aristocratic pretensions of the Whigs, Lincoln reached over and pulled open the man’s vest, and out tumbled the frills of a very un-Democratic “ruffle shirt,” along with “gold watches with large seals hung heavily & massively down.” Lincoln pointed out that when his opponent “was riding in a fine carriage, wore his kid gloves and had a gold headed cane, he was a poor boy hired on a flat boat at eight dollars a month, and had only one pair of breeches and they were of buckskin.” “If you call this aristocracy,” Lincoln concluded, “I plead guilty to the charge.”
Lincoln had indeed been “a poor boy.” Lincoln’s father, Thomas, was a typical agrarian yeoman, one of the sort that Jefferson described as “God’s chosen people, if ever he had a chosen people.” A contemporary recalled him as a man “satisfied to live in the good old fashioned way” so long as his “shack kept out the rain” and “there was plenty of wood to burn.” But Thomas’s son found nothing terribly enchanting about the back-breaking work of the farm or the drunken hooliganism that was its chief entertainment. A friend recalled Lincoln’s saying that “his father taught him to work” on the farm “but never learned him to love it.” Lincoln was always reluctant to talk about his poor-boy origins except when they gave him an opportunity to measure how far he had risen above them. On other occasions, he would sum up his early life in twelve words: “I have seen a good deal of the backside of this world.” What attracted him to Henry Clay and the Whigs was not elitism but mobility — a path, through commerce and finance, out of that backside.
It was also what led him into his lifelong opposition to slavery. “I am naturally anti-slavery,” he said in 1864. “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel.” What he loathed in slavery was not just the physical violence — “the poor creatures hunted down, and caught, and carried back to their stripes” — but the economic deadness that confined them to “unrewarded toils.” He even considered his father’s control over his own labor on the farm to be a species of slavery, so much so that he once announced, “I used to be a slave, and now I am so free that they let me practice law.”
The antidote to slavery, Lincoln insisted, was also economic: free labor. In the 19th century, free labor was the shorthand term for a particular way of viewing capitalism: as a labor system, in which employers and employees struck bargains for production and wages without restriction, and where the boundaries between these two roles were fluid enough that today’s employee could, by dint of energy, talent, and foresight, become the employer of tomorrow.
Slavery was the polar opposite of free labor. With very rare exceptions, it denied the slave any future but that of being a slave, and it replaced the open-ended arrangements of employees and employers with a rigidly dictatorial system. The harmful effects extended beyond the slaves themselves, Lincoln wrote, because in the process, all labor became stigmatized as “slave work”; the social ideal became “the gentleman of leisure who was above and scorned work,” rather than “men who are industrious, and sober, and honest in the pursuit of their own interests.” Men who are industrious — that, of course, described Lincoln. Slavery, then, was not merely an abstraction; it was the enemy of every ambition Lincoln had ever felt.
Free labor, however, was ambition’s friend. Like Adam Smith, who traced the “the real price of everything” to “the toil and trouble of acquiring it,” Lincoln believed that labor laid the foundation for everyone to build up capital of their own. “Capital is only the fruit of labor; and could not have existed if labor had not first existed.” The folly of slavery lay in its assumption that the vast majority of laborers were indolent and without ambition, “that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it, induces him to labor.” Since by that rule “nobody works unless capital excites them to work,” the most efficient way to motivate laborers to work is to “buy the men and drive them to it, and that is slavery.”
In a system of free labor, by contrast, the prospect of profit incites the laborer to work and save, then turn into an entrepreneur himself and hire others to labor. Hiring workers, in turn, not only fires the entrepreneur’s ambition, but opens up the path of ambition for his employees, “men who have not their own land to work upon, or shops to work in, and who are benefited by working for others.”
Lincoln was aware that pro-slavery propagandists had begun claiming in the 1850s that laborers in northern factories were, in reality, no more free to make wage bargains than slaves on southern plantations. In fact, they claimed, “free labor” was worse off, because employers had no obligation to provide health care for mere wage-earners or to support them in childhood and old age, the way slaveowners did for their slaves.
Lincoln found this comparison absurd, largely because his own life experience refuted it: “Twenty-five years ago, I was a hired laborer.” A typical young man in this situation, he explained, “has for his capital nothing, save two strong hands that God has given him, a heart willing to labor, and a freedom to choose the mode of his work.” If the beginner really is willing, however, “he works industriously, he behaves soberly, and the result of a year or two’s labor is a surplus of capital . . . and in course of time he too has enough capital to hire some new beginner.” This, to Lincoln, was the key flaw in the slavery defenders’ case: Slavery offered no reward at all for sobriety or industry, while free labor was the “just and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way for all — gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all.”
He did not deny that there were hired men who never became anything more, but that was not because of any defect in free-labor capitalism. “If any continue through life in the condition of the hired laborer, it is not the fault of the system, but because of either a dependent nature which prefers it, or improvidence, folly, or singular misfortune.” Ambition was not a crime to be punished. “We do not propose any war upon capital,” he insisted. Far from it: He wanted “to allow the humblest man an equal chance to get rich with everybody else” and “leave each man free to acquire property as fast as he can.” The genius of free labor, he explained to an audience of workingmen in New Haven, Conn., was that “when one starts poor, as most do in the race of life . . . he knows he can better his condition.” Lincoln wanted every “man to have the chance — and I believe a black man is entitled to it — in which he can better his condition. . . . That is the true system . . . and so it may go on and on in one ceaseless round so long as man exists on the face of the earth!”
To make this system work, Lincoln envisioned an active role for the federal government, but it was hardly that of a top-down managerial state. “The leading principle — the sheet anchor of American republicanism,” Lincoln said, is that “no man is good enough to govern another man, without that other’s consent.” This was what guaranteed “individuals . . . the sacred right to regulate their own family affairs” and “communities . . . [to] arrange their own internal matters to suit themselves” without wanton interference by government. “The proposition that each man should do precisely as he pleases with all which is exclusively his own” was the “foundation of the sense of justice there is in me.”
So government was not a choice between an all-powerful dictatorship and an anarchistic landscape devoid of highways, traffic signs, levees, and harbor clearance. There were some things that individuals could not accomplish on their own, and it was those things that called governments into being. “The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves — in their separate, and individual capacities,” Lincoln wrote. “In all that the people can individually do as well for themselves, government ought not to interfere.” But “in relation to . . . crimes, misdemeanors, and non performance of contracts,” and the sort of need that “requires combined action, as public roads and highways, public schools, charities, pauperism, orphanage, estates of the deceased,” and protection of “the machinery of government” itself, “there still would be some, though not so much, need of government.”
Lincoln’s rule was neither “big government” nor “no government” but minimal government, with that minimum confined almost entirely to the task of removing obstacles to self-improvement and the development of ambition. “To elevate the condition of men — to lift artificial weights from all shoulders — to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all — to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life” was “the leading object of the government.” And in the ultimate sense, the Civil War, by preserving the Union and eliminating slavery, was waged “in order that each of you may have through this free government . . . an open field and a fair chance for your industry, enterprise and intelligence; that you all may have equal privileges in the race of life, with all its desirable human aspirations.” Such a “nation is worth fighting for, to secure such an inestimable jewel.”
And fight he would: “I expect to maintain this contest until successful, or till I die, or am conquered, or my term expires, or Congress or the country forsakes me,” Lincoln wrote in 1862. But there were many places to do the fighting, and one of them was Congress (from which almost all the southern Democrats had conveniently withdrawn when their states seceded). The landmark pieces of legislation that he signed between 1861 and 1865 — the Homestead Act (1862), the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act (1862), the Pacific Railway Act (1862), and the National Bank Act (1863) — together with the Morrill Tariff of 1861, which was signed into law by James Buchanan just before he turned the presidency over to Lincoln, amounted to nothing less than a repeal of six decades of Democratic dominance of the federal government. They would have made Lincoln’s presidency as controversial as Andrew Jackson’s even if there had been no Civil War. The railway act, which funded construction of the transcontinental railroad, was the ultimate version of Henry Clay’s “internal improvements,” while the tariff hiked import duties to all-time highs to protect American industry. (Lincoln backed the tariffs specifically because of the era’s whopping imbalance between European manufacturing and American manufacturing; whether he would have advocated their extension permanently is another matter.) In 1862 the Indiana Democratic state committee complained that Lincoln had struck “down at one dash all the labor of Gen. Jackson for the last four years of his administration.”
Did this amount to “big government”? Not if we measure bigness by the size of the federal budget. In 1860, federal spending amounted to a minuscule $63.2 million. Factored for a century and a half of inflation, the modern equivalent would be a federal budget of about $1.5 billion. During Lincoln’s presidency, federal spending leapt from $66.6 million in 1861 to $1.29 billion in 1865. But even with the swollen costs of war to absorb, the 1865 federal budget would translate into only about $18 billion in today’s money, using consumer-price inflation as the measure.
The bulk of that spending was war-related, and disappeared as soon as the wartime emergency was over. By 1871, the federal budget had shrunk to $293 million — only 22.7 percent of the size it had been in 1865 — and it would have shrunk even more drastically if not for the cost of servicing the wartime debt (which accounted for 44 percent of the budget) and paying pensions to wounded and injured soldiers (another 11 percent). Lincoln was dead by then, of course, but his successors and the Congress had generally followed his intentions. If Lincoln’s goal was to use the Civil War as the cloak for a permanent transformation of the federal government into an all-powerful megastate, the budget numbers certainly do not show much evidence of it.
The Italian historian Raimondo Luraghi once remarked that, unlike the Lincoln administration, the “Confederate rulers did not want a private capitalist industry” and “did not want to see a powerful industrial bourgeoisie rising in the Confederacy.” So while the Union government contracted out its wartime needs to the private sector, the Confederate government set up government-owned supply facilities “investing millions of dollars, arming and supplying one of the largest armies in the world — and all this as national property or under national control, in a kind of quasi-socialist management.” Predictably, the Confederacy’s nationalized industries did a bad job of supplying and feeding the rebel armies, so among the reasons Luraghi listed for the Confederacy’s downfall was its choice of “the way of ‘state socialism,’ a solution that is as far from capitalism as the earth is from the moon.”
But the fundamental convictions that animated the “Slave Power” — that stability is preferable to mobility, and that top-down management in the name of efficiency and fairness is the default position of human society — were not among the things surrendered at Appomattox. Half a century after Lincoln’s death, another American president would contradict every principle in political economy that Lincoln held dear by announcing that society must stop modeling itself on metaphors like “the race of life” and instead become a “family . . . where men can live as a single community, co-operative as in a perfected, coordinated beehive, not afraid of any storm of nature,” and do so “with an eye single to the standards of justice and fair play.” What a century of Woodrow Wilson’s “family” metaphor has produced, however, is the dreary reality of a government that regards citizens as miscreant children requiring constant correction of their appetites, salaries, attitudes, vocabulary, and even light bulbs.
Hurling Lincoln’s economic principles back against this present-day reality may seem like the height of futility. How many battalions, we may ask, do the economic ideas of a man dead for a century and a half command? But those inclined to dismiss these ideas should beware of Lincoln’s ditch. A generation from now, the question might seem more serious.
I know precisely what you mean.
The opposition challenged us to raise the discourse, a la rustbucket.
I thought, alright, I’m willing to give it a try. Now, lets see if they were sincere.
I thought, alright, I’m willing to give it a try. Now, lets see if they were sincere.
Maybe you haven't noticed, but some of us have been engaging Rustbucket in a mutually respectful way for some time now. If you want to join in, you're more than welcome.
You'll have to pardon some of us if your new-found and loudly proclaimed commitment to civility hasn't yet convinced us of your sincerity. Especially since you've done little else BUT proclaim it.
Although your post seems to delve only into trivialities, I will honor your effort by pointing out that you had a math error.
In the name of accuracy, you might do a better count of effort by looking at words.
Mr. ‘x’ exerted an effort of 70 lines while I used 38.
And since his energy level was more enthusiastic....well, case made.
Perhaps in some way my quote of Lincoln seems dishonest to you, but in fact is an error on your part. I quoted from his sixth debate with Steven A. Douglas at Quincy, Ill., Oct. 13, 1858.
Your quote was from his first debate with Douglas at Ottawa, Illinois, August 21, 1858.
If you reread both, then come back and describe the distortion, if it still exists in your mind.
From the 6th Debate at Quincey
-----------------------------------------------------------
As this was done in the Judge’s opening speech at Galesburgh, I had an opportunity, as I had the middle speech then, of saying something in answer to it. He brought forward a quotation or two from a speech of mine, delivered at Chicago, and then to contrast with it, he brought forward an extract from a speech of mine at Charleston, in which he insisted that I was greatly inconsistent, and insisted that his conclusion followed that I was playing a double part, and speaking in one region one way, and in another region another way. I have not time now to dwell on this as long as I would like, and wish only now to requote that portion of my speech at Charleston, which the Judge quoted, and then make some comments upon it. This he quotes from me as being delivered at Charleston, and I believe correctly: "1 will say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races—that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which will ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together, there must be the position of superior and inferior. I am as much as any other man in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race." ["Good," "Good," and loud cheers.] This, I believe, is the entire quotation from the Charleston speech, as Judge Douglas made it. His comments are as follows:Lincoln in fact repeated the exact same words that we are discussing in the 6th Debate as he used in the 1st Debate.
"Yes, here you find men who hurra for Lincoln, and say he is right when he discards all distinction between races, or when he declares that he discards the doctrine that there is such a thing as a superior and inferior race; and Abolitionists are required and expected to vote for Mr. Lincoln because he goes for the equality of races, holding that in the Declaration of Independence the white man and negro were declared equal, and endowed by divine law with equality. And down south with the old line Whigs, with the Kentuckians, the Virginians, and the Tennesseeans, he tells you that there is a physical difference between the races, making the one superior, the other inferior, and he is in favor of maintaining the superiority of the white race over the negro."
Those are the Judge’s comments. Now I wish to show you, that a month, or, only lacking three days of a month, before I made the speech at Charleston, which the Judge quotes from, he had himself heard me say substantially the same thing. It was in our first meeting, at Ottawa—and I will say a word about where it was, and the atmosphere it was in, after awhile—but at our first meeting, at Ottawa, I read an extract from an old speech of mine, made nearly four years ago, not merely to show my sentiments, but to show that my sentiments were long entertained and openly expressed; in which extract I expressly declared that my own feelings would not admit a social and political equality between the white and black races, and that even if my own feelings would admit of it, I still knew that the public sentiment of the country would not, and that such a thing was an utter impossibility, or substantially that.
That extract from my old speech, the reporters, by some sort of accident, passed over, and it was not reported. I lay no blame upon any body. I suppose they thought that I would hand it over to them, and dropped reporting while I was reading it, but afterward went away without getting it from me. At the end of that quotation from my old speech, which I read at Ottawa, I made the comments which were reported at that time, and which I will now read, and ask you to notice how very nearly they are the same as Judge Douglas says were delivered by me, down in Egypt. After reading I added these words: "Now, gentlemen, I don’t want to read at any great length, but this is the true complexion of all I have ever said in regard to the institution of slavery or the black race, and this is the whole of it; any thing that argues me into his idea of perfect social and political equality with the negro, is but a specious and fantastical arrangement of words by which a man can prove a horse—chestnut to be a chestnut horse. I will say here, while upon this subject, that I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution in the States where it exists. I believe I have no right to do so. I have no inclination to do so. I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races. There is a physical difference between the two, which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together on the footing of perfect equality, and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position." [Cheers, "That’s the doctrine."] "I have never said any thing to the contrary, but I hold that notwithstanding all this, there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence—the right of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. I agree with Judge Douglas that he is not my equal in many respects, certainly not in color—perhaps not in intellectual and moral endowments; but in the right to eat the bread without the leave of any body else which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every other man." [Loud cheers.]----------------------------------------------------------
LOL, you polished that pot but it still looks just like a kettle. I nominate that as the most inane post of the thread.
Congrats!
Reread both, then come back and describe the distortion, if it still exists in your mind.
The data always leads the way for confused minds.
“You only have to get a copy of Gabor Boritt’s Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream to understand where Guelzo is coming from and probably to see the citations for his quotations.”
You allege familiarity yet you use the word ‘probably’ for citation validation.
And that is the point exactly....quoting the quotes of others do not demonstrate that Lincoln manifested anything that Guelzo would have the public believe.
Why don't you post his sources, his secondary sources, and their sources. Then point out specific patterns of Lincoln behavior that manifest the Guelzo contentions. This will completely clear any conflict. If you are willing to spend the time composing multiple rebuttals, you can do a search and post for everyone to see.
Let us see the evidence that Mr Lincoln's actual behavior was affected by the Guelzo factor.
And in your confusion you continue to dig.
I read both. Lincoln repeated the exacts same words at both debates. He did it in the 6th to answer Doglas' charge that he said one thing in front of an audience in Southern IL. and another in Northern IL.
His position was consistent throughout. No, he didn't think blacks were socially or intellectually equal to whites, but he still thought slavery wrong and that blacks were entitled to 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (i.e. property)' just as much as whites.
You are the one who posted his quote out of context -- just as Lost Causers and Leftist revisionists have been doing for decades. They both distort his words and historical record to serve their own ends. Neither has any interest in the truth.
You again? You are wasting my time and everyone's space. I referred you to Boritt's book and you're welcome to read or ignore it as you see fit.
There's nothing controversial about Guelzo's article: Lincoln did promote a free labor economy by encouraging industry, and railroad construction, and settlement of the West. Guelzo even gives you the legislation by name. And his actions were a culmination of a long concern with economic development.
Look at Lincoln's early speeches on discoveries and inventions. Read a basic biography to learn about his interest in establishing banks, roads, and canals in his early career. None of that is disputed.
Look at the 1860 speech in New Haven that Guelzo explicitly refers to, at Lincoln's "Annual Address Before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, at Milwaukee, Wisconsin, September 30, 1859" on free and slave labor, at his "Speech on the Kansas-Nebraska Act, March 21, 1854," at his 1854 "Fragment on Government." If I could locate these documents in a few minutes, what's stopping you?
Some people attack Lincoln for not being a perfect free marketeer, but Guelzo makes clear that he wasn't a 20th century liberal or socialist, and many of those free traders who win the praise of today's libertarian fanatics had a blind spot about slavery and weren't opposed to the US remaining merely a source of raw materials for foreign industry.
Really there's nothing controversial in what Guelzo says. Whatever he leaves out you can find for yourself. It's not my job to remedy the gaps in your education and I'm not running a tutorial for you. Still less am I interested in arguing with you, given how irrelevant what you brought to the table in your original post was to Guelzo's article.
Maybe you'll find somebody else interested in rewriting the article for you and tutoring you on basic points of Lincoln's biography, but that's not something you have a right to demand of those who respond to you.
Rasing the discourse and being concerned about the appearance of FR to liblurkers goes beyond selective civility.
You'll have to pardon some of us if your new-found and loudly proclaimed commitment to civility hasn't yet convinced us of your sincerity. Especially since you've done little else BUT proclaim it.
It's obvious that you're spoiling for a fight which tells me that you're not really interested in raising the discourse and you're not really concerned about the appearance of FR. Oh well. You'll just have to shadow box because I'm not interested.
Go in a good way.
And yet you keep responding. Admit it, this forced simulacrum of civility is just eating you alive, isn't it?
Maybe if you were to say something other than loudly announce your new-found allegiance to courtesy, we might find something to engage on. Perhaps you have some opinion on Lincoln's economic philosophy that you'd like to state in a constructive, respectful way.
Wow. I just suffered through that entire original article on NRO, and all I can say is that I’ve rarely read, in terms of the main premise asserted by the author, such bunk.
“His embrace of classical-liberal economics was the force that moved all his achievements, from victory in the Civil War to the galaxy of economic policies that emerged from his presidency.”
This statement is by far the most ludicrous statement I’ve ever read in regard to President Lincoln, as it is almost exactly the opposite of the truth, and then he follows this statement up with other absolutely incredible assertions that fly in the face of historical fact and simple logic.
Furthermore, after totally misrepresenting (and therefore redefining the historical meaning of classical-liberal economics to mean its opposite), Guelzo then spends most of his time writing about slavery. Being most generous to Mr. Guelzo, it was President Lincoln’s opposition to the expansion of slavery into the Western territories, and ONLY in his opposition to this, that President Lincoln’s policies resemble anything remotely related to classical-liberal economics. In all other aspects, his policies were the exact opposite of classical-liberal economics.
But let us take a look at Mr. Guelzo’s assertions... point by point.
By far, the most truthful line in the piece is this one.
“Take the American Revolution to its roots, and you will find it to be a revolution against regulation. Britain’s imperial planners were originally interested in the New World for the quick riches it might yield. When their colonizing forays produced no such fortunes, they banned the development of all but a handful of manufactures in the colonies, taxed the colonies’ carrying trade, and labored to convert them into an agricultural resource. The colonists rebelled, and we know with what result.”
What Mr. Guelzo is referring to here, is mercantilism, defined in general by government planning and regulation of the economy in order to engineer desired results. In the 17th-19th centuries, these policies would have been defined as the opposite of classical-liberal economics, which stressed the absence of government planning, regulations, or interventions into the economy... which many refer to as laissez-faire capitalism. Whereas the mercantilist seeks to use government intervention to engineer desired results, the classical-liberal rejects the use of government power to engineer desired results.
And, in the context of America’s colonial history, here is how British mercantilist policies largely manifested themselves, as Mr. Guelzo accurately points out; onerous government regulations and central planning, high taxes - especially in the form of protective tariffs designed to protect certain businesses and industries from competition, and the squashing of free trade. Of course, there were other major components of mercantilism that Mr. Guelzo conveniently didn’t mention, such as corporate welfare and subsidies for industries and businesses in partnership with the government, and government owned or managed central banks with control of the money supply and other monetary policies.
To recap, here’s what mercantilism stood for:
- government regulations and planning of the economy to engineer desired results
- high taxes so that government can raise money to regulate and plan the economy
- protective tariffs (taxes on imports) to insulate domestic industry from foreign competition
- opposition to free trade
- subsidies (corporate welfare) for corporations and businesses favored by the government, which of course will make everyone else who isn’t one of those corporations or businesses given these special government favors less competitive
- government owned or managed central banks controlling the money supply and setting monetary policy
And here’s what classical-liberal economics stood for:
- no government regulations or planning of the economy... instead of the government engineering results, the economy should be free to develop organically on its own path as the aggregate byproduct of each person’s un-coerced economic decisions
- very low and uniformly levied taxes (or better yet no taxes at all) as government doesn’t need to raise much revenue as its not supposed to be regulating or planning the economy in the first place
- very low tariffs (if any at all), as each person should be free to engage in the buying and selling of whatever he wished... un-coerced by government power, and since the government isn’t supposed to be planning the economy in the first place, there is not need to “protect” favored businesses or corporations from competition
- support for free trade
- no wealth redistribution schemes at all, especially in the form of subsidies (corporate welfare) for corporations and businesses favored by the government, as the government is not supposed to be picking the winners and the losers in the free marketplace
- opposition to government owned or managed central banks controlling the money supply and setting monetary policy, as this manipulation is not part of the proper role of government either
As far the classical-liberal position was concerned, it endorsed Thomas Jefferson’s view that the proper role of government was to defend life, liberty, and property from those who would usurp them... and that was it. Anything beyond this which government tried to do, such as engineering desired economic outcomes or steering the direction of the economic development via government policy, was by definition tyranny.
Nonetheless, in spite of the author’s omissions, so far not so bad.
Unfortunately, from this point onward Mr. Guelzo’s piece meanders aimlessly into the realm of bizarro opposite-land.
For example, Mr. Guelzo has the audacity to actually infer that Thomas Jefferson’s broad philosophy, rather than Alexander Hamilton’s, flew in the face of classical-liberal economics.
What could be further from the truth!!! About the only policy that Jefferson supported that did not line up with classical-liberal teachings was his disastrous Embargo Act (born out of a desperate attempt to avoid war with Britain and France). Otherwise, Thomas Jefferson was the archetype of the classical-liberal economist, calling for free trade, minimal taxation and government spending, low tariffs, no government intervention or planning of the economy, opposition to any wealth redistribution schemes that would steer other people’s money into the hands of corporations and businesses in bed with the government, and steadfast opposition to centralized banking schemes and monetary policies.
By comparison, what did Alexander Hamilton stand for? He stood for high protective tariffs on imports, numerous and high taxes to raise money for government, lots of government spending, high tariffs to protect government favored businesses and industries from competition, numerous government interventions in order to steer the economy in the direction of results desirable to the government, numerous subsidies and other corporate welfare schemes (called “internal improvements” when referred to government assistance for transportation projects such as roads, canals, and later on railroad companies) designed to redistribute other people’s money into the hands of businesses and corporations in bed with the government, and the establishment of a national bank giving government the power to control the money supply and conduct monetary policy.
To put it bluntly, a historian could not have invented an agenda more at odds (than Hamilton’s) with classical-liberal economics if he had concocted it in a test tube in a laboratory. What Hamilton was proposing for the United States in the 1790s was nothing less than the replacement of mercantilism imposed by the heavy hand of the British government with mercantilism imposed by the heavy hand of the United States government.
Nonetheless, Guelzo then continues with this gem, as he brings Hamilton’s mercantilist successor, Henry Clay, into the discussion.
“The next round of this dispute was played out by Andrew Jackson, who shared all of Jefferson’s suspicions about commerce and extended them to its twin enablers, banks and corporations, and Henry Clay, who urged the federal government to encourage industrial development through a public-private national bank, direct assistance for building a transportation network (“internal improvements,” as it was called), and protective tariffs to help industrial start-ups compete with established foreign competitors.”
Okay, what was Henry Clay’s agenda again, according to the author of this piece (in his own words no less)?
1) a public-private national bank
2) direct assistance for building a transportation network (”internal improvements,” as it was called)
3) protective tariffs
Again, straight out the mercantilist playbook. Clay’s “American System,” as it was called at the time, just like Hamilton’s agenda, could not have been more at odds with the principles of classical-liberal laissez faire economics if he had tried.
And then, as the author points out himself, who was Henry Clays’ successor in terms of economic policies, who picked up where he left off and became one of the primary supporters of this “American System” - which was the exact opposite of classical-liberal economics - from the 1830s onward? You guessed it, Abraham Lincoln.
“From his first political stirrings in the early 1830s, Abraham Lincoln never had a doubt where his allegiances lay. Henry Clay, Lincoln said, was “my beau ideal of a statesman,” and when Lincoln attached himself to Clay’s newly organized Whig party in the 1830s, he became, a fellow lawyer recalled, “as stiff as a man can be in his Whig doctrines.” In his first political campaign, in 1832, Lincoln announced that “time and experience have verified to a demonstration the public utility of internal improvements.” In the state legislature, Lincoln emerged as the Illinois Whigs’ foremost advocate of a state bank, improved roads and bridges, and the funding of the Illinois & Michigan Canal”
On the eve of the 1860 election, there was no debate whatsoever, by the standards of the day, in regard to the proposition that Abraham Lincoln and his Republican Party were anything other than the primary standard bearers of the principles of big, centralized, government planning and interventionism in America.
Yet somehow, Mr. Guelzo still has the nerve to make assertions like this, near the end of his piece.
“Lincoln’s rule was neither “big government” nor “no government” but minimal government, with that minimum confined almost entirely to the task of removing obstacles to self-improvement and the development of ambition.”
What a joke of epic proportions!!!
On one hand, President Lincoln’s policies weren’t designed to “remove obstacles to self-improvement.” The mercantilist policies that defined the seventy year agenda of the Hamilton-Clay-Lincoln continuum were themselves the “obstacles to self-improvement” that prevented America from enjoying the benefits of a truly laissez faire capitalist free market economy in the mold of the classical-liberal tradition.
And the second assertion is even more outrageous. How in the world can the author possibly argue that Abraham Lincoln and Republicans of the 1850s-60s, whose policies were in their own day in support of much, much bigger government, much, much more centralized government, and many, many more intrusive and expensive government interventions in the economy than any of the other relevant political factions or parties of the age, possibly be the party of “minimal government?”
This last assertion is as absurd as if I were to suggest to you today that the Obama Administration and the progressive socialist wing of the modern Democratic Party (in comparison to say the Jim Demint/Rand Paul wing of the modern GOP) is the party of “minimal government.”
Finally, if we look at what President Lincoln did while in office, he took the opportunity of the exodus of the Southerners from Congress to exact during the war pretty much the entirety of the big government, statist, freedom-sucking, state-sovereignty destroying mercantilist agenda that dated back to Alexander Hamilton (the arch nemesis of the true classical-liberal - which today would be called a conservative - Thomas Jefferson), which laid the governmental foundation for our modern, centralized, progressive, and statist present.
According to Mr. Guelzo...
“The landmark pieces of legislation that he signed between 1861 and 1865 — the Homestead Act (1862), the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act (1862), the Pacific Railway Act (1862), and the National Bank Act (1863) — together with the Morrill Tariff of 1861, which was signed into law by James Buchanan just before he turned the presidency over to Lincoln, amounted to nothing less than a repeal of six decades of Democratic dominance of the federal government.”
What President Lincoln’s agenda of massive government spending, record high taxation, abandoning of the principles of free trade, redistribution of vast amounts of other people’s money, and government empowering and ultimately currency devaluing centralized banking schemes really amounted to, was nothing less than the repeal of the principles of the American Revolution, the proper constitutional balance of power between the states and the federal government, and the beliefs of the founding fathers in regard to the proper role of government as defined by the Declaration of Independence.
Outstanding post! ;-)
You might enjoy these videos of Mike Wallace's 1959 interview of Ayn Rand:
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