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Mr. Lincoln’s Economics Primer (long, and superb)
National Review ^ | 12 February 2010 | Allen C. Guelzo

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.


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Constitution/Conservatism; Culture/Society; Government
KEYWORDS: abrahamlincoln; civilwar; despot; dishonestabe; economy; gaypresident; lincoln; slavery; tyrant; warcriminal
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To: x; beanshirts; rustbucket
To our friendly poster, x:

This article that you support is so much a pants load that I can hardly keep a straight face.

Beginning with the first premise from this quote from the very beginning:

“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,’

Say it again.........”political economy”......Lincoln ‘liked political economy, the study of it.”

How is political economy defined at the very time that Lincoln was supposed to ‘like’ it?

Here from one of the foremost proponents of ‘political economy’, written in 1837: “Whether discussing usury laws, money and banking, internal improvements, or trade restrictions, the detrimental effect of government intervention is a theme that appears throughout the elements of political economy."

Proponents of this political/social/governmental position advocated total free trade. Essentially they supported liberty, property, peace, free markets, limited government, and sound money.

Another writer described proponents of ‘political economy as knowing that legislators adopt positions that are at variance with successful governmental operations.’

“... legislators, who generally assume the labor of directing the manner in which labor or capital shall be employed, in no manner peculiarly qualified for this task; they are, in many respects, peculiarly disqualified for it. The individual is liable to no peculiar biases, in making up his mind in respect to the profitableness of an investment. If he err, it is because the indications deceive him. The legislator, besides being liable to err by mistaking the indications, is liable to be misled by party zeal, by political intrigue, and by sectional prejudice.” (Francis Wayland)

And this quote: “the individual has no right to commit to society, nor society to government, the power to declare war.”

One only has to read Lincoln's 1860 platform or understand his Henry Clay affiliation, or his bias against the South, or his support of a central bank, or his willingness to bring war on the South to comprehend that he did not believe in “political economy”.

For a much more detailed analysis, see post 138

In fact some people of the period ridiculed him for any association with the movement. See this for example:

“Shelby Cullom, who practiced law beside Lincoln in Springfield, Ill., thought that ‘theoretically . . . on political economy he was great.’”

Let's look at the exact source quote (found here: http://abrahamlincolnsclassroom.org/Library/newsletter.asp?ID=137&CRLI=193 ) to see if it means what Guelzo says it means:

“My father,” said Senator Cullom, “took me to Mr. Lincoln at Springfield to have me study law with him. ....I have been with him when he returned from riding the circuit. Mr. Lincoln kept no account books to speak of. ....after trying a case he would take the fee that he received from his client, wrap it up in a piece of paper, write on the back of the paper the name of the case and the amount...ten, fifteen, or twenty five dollars what ever it might be and put the paper in his pocket.

"When Mr. Lincoln came home he would take these papers out of his pockets, one at a time and divide the amounts with his partner, Herndon. Theoretically Mr. Lincoln was strong on financial questions. On political economy he was great. Practically, he knew little about money and took no care of it. As a lawyer in practice, he was very strong before both court and jury. He had a great deal of personal magnetism and his honest, plain way captured the jurors. Mr. Lincoln would lean over the jury, gesturing with his long arms and holding the jurors fascinated with his homely eloquence."

Now as you can plainly see, Guelzo’s quote has absolutely nothing to do with the concept of political economy and is completely out of context.

Then Guelzo has the audacity to claim that he is certain of Mr. Lincoln's reading list.

He says: “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).”

Except for one book, that paragraph is a total contrivance.

From this source http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jala/28.2/bray.html#FOOT207

This bibliography attempts to list, in alphabetical order by author, all the books or parts of books that any serious scholar, biographer, or bibliographer has asserted that Abraham Lincoln read. In the interest of completeness, even dubious claims were listed.

The titles taken from Wayne Temple's “Herndon on Lincoln: An Unknown Interview with a List of Books in the Lincoln & Herndon Law Office” consist exclusively of pre-1866 publications that Lincoln could plausibly have read. While they were probably read or used by William Henry Herndon and noticed on the shelves by Lincoln, there is in most cases no corroborating evidence that Lincoln actually read these titles.

John Stuart Mill’s The Principles of Political Economy (1848),   Rated as a book that Lincoln “somewhat likely” read.  One of the books William H. Herndon says Lincoln “more or less peeped into” (Hidden Lincoln, 117).

Mathew Carey’s Essays on Political Economy (1822), Not listed as either having read or been in the Lincoln offices. W. H. Herndon told Weik that “Carey's political economy” was one of the books on this subject that Lincoln “more or less peeped into.” , however, comes from the fact that there was another Carey (Matthew) who wrote a treatise on political economy in the first half of the nineteenth century, and we cannot know which, if either, Herndon is referring to (Hidden Lincoln, 117).

His son Henry Carey’s three-volume Principles of Social Science (1858), mentioned by an informant or acquaintance, though in an uncertain context as regards title/author, time or place. It is somewhat unlikely that Lincoln read this book.

John Ramsay McCulloch’s The Principles of Political Economy (1825), ...Probably an incorrect title on the part of this author.  In the listing McCullough, John Ramsey, Essays on Exchange, Interest, Money and Other Subjects [1850], again no documentation that Lincoln read these items.

The one book that there is certainty was Francis Wayland’s Elements of Political Economy (1837).   High probability he read it.

Now, that from multiple sources. Does that give you any increased confidence in your support of Guelzo?

Practically every internet site that you reach through a search engine in checking on Lincoln's “classical” readings will pull up Guelzo’s articles, blogs, and essays. He is attempting to establish credibility with volume rather than any sense of propriety of content.

Thanks to beanshirts for his superb analysis and documentation.

141 posted on 02/24/2011 1:50:09 PM PST by PeaRidge
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To: beanshirts

Thank you for that very interesting post.


142 posted on 02/24/2011 2:05:24 PM PST by PeaRidge
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To: PeaRidge; beanshirts

Thanks for the ping. I had forgotten about this thread. I’ve been busy with other matters (and still am).

Good posts from the both of you.


143 posted on 02/24/2011 8:35:19 PM PST by rustbucket
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To: PeaRidge
You apparently think that political economy in Lincoln's day was exclusively identified with an extreme laissez-faire ideology. Laissez-faire extremists certainly though so. So did some of their extreme opponents (particularly in Britain -- Carlyle, Ruskin, maybe even Dickens) who came to believe that they had to reject economics entirely in order to get rid of its abuses.

In the US, though, there was also a protectionist school of economics represented by Mathew and Henry Carey. Mathew Carey's books were even entitled Essays on political economy; or, The most certain means of promoting the wealth, power, resources, and happiness of states, applied particularly to the United States and Cursory Views of the Liberal and Restrictive Systems of Political Economy. There was nothing strange about Guelzo describing Lincoln's interest and enthusiasm regarding political economy. Political economists came down on different sides of controversial issues, just like economists today.

Guelzo was right in citing Herndon as saying that Lincoln “ate up, digested, and assimilated” Francis Wayland's book, but wrong in applying the same description to books that Herndon said Lincoln only "peeped into." Apparently he was too anxious to prove his case to present only the proven facts and let them speak for themselves.

It's not strange to think that we might be able to surmise with some reliability what statesmen who lived a century or two ago read and thought. We can speak with a good deal of confidence about what John Adams read and thought: we have his letters, his papers, and the books of his library with his annotations in the margins. Something similar is true of Thomas Jefferson, although most of the books he donated to the Library of Congress were burned in a fire.

It looks like we can't speak with the same degree of certainty about what a traveling lawyer in what had recently been frontier country who tried to educate himself in the saddle and in boarding houses read and thought. Certainly without the actual books and more precise testimony it would be hard to say how deeply Lincoln may have studied the books on economics which passed through his hands (though we do have ample testimony on his general reading habits -- Shakespeare, the Bible, Burns, Byron, legal books). Guelzo was wrong in claiming more knowledge about this than the evidence warranted.

I also wouldn't call Lincoln a "classical liberal." That label's been appropriated by laissez-faire libertarians. Lincoln's support for tariffs and a somewhat larger role for government in road and canal building and banking most likely disqualifies him as a classical liberal.

Still, in comparison to today's powerful government, Lincoln's philosophy does look more like minimal government than it did to some of his contemporaries or to modern libertarians with axes to grind.

And look around. There are plenty of protectionists on Free Republic who claim to be and are convinced free marketeers. For a century after Lincoln conservatism and protection went together well and formed the core beliefs of the Republican Party. There are also plenty of others here who are skeptical about the dogmas of free trade or protection and judge on a case-by-case basis.

Moreover, Guelzo may have had the 19th century "Market Revolution" in mind, a movement away from local, subsistence production to production for distant markets. Lincoln was very much a supporter of the Market Revolution which was opposed by some agrarian traditionalists. His support for railroad building, banking, and industrialization contributed to our modern industrial America.

Underlying his support for economic development was his commitment to private property, individual enterprise, the rule of law, and economic competition. He was by no means a socialist.

And the kind of Market Revolution he supported was also important. He favored an economy based on domestic production, rather than extraction of raw materials for foreign industry, and on free labor, rather than slavery. Not everyone who opposed tariffs in his day could have said that.

If you think of yourself as some sort of libertarian enforcer you might view Lincoln as one of the damned for his support of tariffs, national banking, railroad subsidies and other forms of government intervention which now appear to be quite rudimentary and comparatively innocuous. But if you look at a wider spectrum of issues, you might take into how he contributed to the building of the free market industrial economy that benefited us so much in the last century.

144 posted on 02/25/2011 2:54:58 PM PST by x
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To: rockrr

Love is in the air..... Long lost friend there?


145 posted on 02/27/2011 12:45:30 PM PST by mojitojoe (In itÂ’s 1400 years of existence, Islam has 2 main accomplishments, psychotic violence and goat curr)
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To: mojitojoe


too too funny


146 posted on 02/27/2011 6:42:12 PM PST by mstar (Immediate State Action)
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To: rockrr
Leaders in the south had aspirations of perpetuating and expanding slavery and would do ANYTHING to stop those who opposed them.

ANYTHING? Including leaving the Union and leaving the Midwestern and Western territories in possession of the North, which is what the South did? Leaving those territories in possession of the North really stopped those who opposed the extension of slavery there, right?

Let's reverse the positions of the North and South. Ah, come on; you can do it. What would the North have done in that case? Here is a comment about such a reversal of roles from the March 5, 1861, Brooklyn Eagle (the largest evening newspaper in the country back then):

Let us suppose that the South had proposed this doctrine, had declared war against free soil as Mr. Lincoln and his party did against slave soil, and laid down a platform to exclude free labor from the territories, and place it in the way of ultimate extinction in the States, and that they possessed a numerical majority of the population and elected a Rhett or Yancey on that platform, as President of these States, would the North have any cause for apprehension? ... Reverse the position of parties, and the North would spurn the yoke of a free soil extinguishing president forced upon it by slaveholding votes against the united vote of every free State with as stern determination as was evinced by the most headlong of the Gulf States.

147 posted on 02/27/2011 8:39:54 PM PST by rustbucket
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To: rustbucket
ANYTHING? Including leaving the Union and leaving the Midwestern and Western territories in possession of the North, which is what the South did? Leaving those territories in possession of the North really stopped those who opposed the extension of slavery there, right?

Except that's not what the south did. There isn't an area of the mid-west or western territories that the south didn't attempt to seize control. It was only the sheer vastness of size that stalled their efforts. They effectively seized New Mexico, for a time held Arizona, and almost seized California. There were even clashes in (what would be) Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana to declare townships and even entire territories for the confederacy.

It wasn't for want of trying.

148 posted on 02/28/2011 9:56:16 AM PST by rockrr ("I said that I was scared of you!" - pokie the pretend cowboy)
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To: rockrr
Except that's not what the south did. There isn't an area of the mid-west or western territories that the south didn't attempt to seize control. It was only the sheer vastness of size that stalled their efforts. They effectively seized New Mexico, for a time held Arizona, and almost seized California. There were even clashes in (what would be) Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana to declare townships and even entire territories for the confederacy.

I thought back when I was making my post to which you responded that I should note an exception for the Southern half of the New Mexico Territory who's "convention" voted to go with the Confederacy. They wanted to come in; the South let them and gained military supremacy there for a while. I've posted about the Confederate Arizona Territory many times in the past. I restricted my comments to the Midwest and Western territories because of the Arizona Territory. Sorry if I wasn't clear.

Confederate Arizonans established a fort in Yuma, Arizona, later abandoned. As far as I know, the farthest west that a battle or skirmish took place was a skirmish at Stanwix Station 80 miles east of Yuma Arizona. I'm not aware of any battles in California. As far as I know, Southern sympathizers in California went to Texas to join the Confederate army.

I'm not aware of any "clashes" in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. You live up in that part of the world. Could you provide some additional information/links, please? Always willing to learn history.

I'm sure there were Confederate sympathizers in the Midwest and Western territories and even Northern states, but do desires to join the Confederacy by isolated groups of sympathizers indicate that the South itself was instigating those actions. Or was it simply that those people agreed with the South and/or were against the coercion of states by the central government?

Some Confederate sympathizers flew a Palmetto flag for a day at Old Fort Kearney, an abandoned fort in Nebraska (?), but it was apparently the work of local sympathizers, not an action by the Confederacy. See: Link.

Various Indian tribes in the Indian Territory (Oklahoma) allied themselves with the Confederacy as well and supplied troops to fight the Federals. My recollection is that more Indians fought for the South than for the North. When the choice was between the Confederacy and an overbearing Federal government, who wouldn't go with the South? Just my opinion, as I'm sure you will recognize.

149 posted on 02/28/2011 1:28:34 PM PST by rustbucket
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To: rockrr
I mentioned coercion in my last post. Here is an unusual ruling by the Supreme Court, Kentucky v. Dennison, 65 U.S. 66 (1860), that reflects an earlier view of the rights/powers of states versus those of the Federal government and whether the Federal government had the power to coerce state officers to follow the Constitution.

I found this case when researching something I had posted earlier:

The Case of the State of Kentucky Against the Governor of Ohio, for Refusing to Issue a Warrant for the Arrest of Lago. Washington, Jan. 11. – The case of the State of Kentucky against the Governor of Ohio, who refused to issue his warrant for the arrest of Lago, charged with having enticed a slave from Kentucky into Ohio, was set for to-day, in the Supreme Court, but the Attorney-General of Ohio having forwarded an affidavit of a professional engagement which prevented his attendance, the case was postponed until the 8th of February. Kentucky was ready by counsel.

The Constitution requires that:

A Person charged in any State with Treason, Felony, or other Crime, who shall flee from Justice, and be found in another State, shall on Demand of the executive Authority of the State from which he fled, be delivered up, to be removed to the State having Jurisdiction of the Crime.

In Kentucky v. Dennison, 65 U.S. 66 (1860) [Link], the Supreme Court ruled 8 to 0 that yes, the governor of a state had the duty to extradite a person charged with a crime in another state upon being provided with a proper demand from the governor of another state, but if the governor did not extradite the prisoner, no part of the Federal government had the power to coerce the governor to turn the person over to the state seeking him/her. From the syllabus of the ruling:

5. It was the duty of the Executive authority of Ohio, upon the demand made by the Governor of Kentucky and the production of the indictment, duly certified, to cause Lago to be delivered up to the agent of the Governor of Kentucky who was appointed to demand and receive him.

6. The duty of the Governor of Ohio was merely ministerial, and he had no right to exercise any discretionary power as to the nature or character of the crime charged in the indictment.

7. The word "duty," in the act of 1793, means the moral obligation of the State to perform the compact in the Constitution when Congress had, by that act, regulated the mode in which the duty was to be performed.

8. But Congress cannot coerce a State officer, as such, to perform any duty by act of Congress. The State officer may perform it if he thinks proper, and it may be a moral duty to perform it. But if he refuses, no law of Congress can compel him.

9. The Governor of Ohio cannot, through the Judiciary or any other Department of the General Government, be compelled to deliver up Lago, and, upon that ground only, this motion for a mandamus was overruled.

This ruling seems compatible with the earlier ruling in Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1843) that state officers could not be made to enforce Federal law regarding the return of fugitive slaves. That ruling made the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law a Federal responsibility. The Feds could not force a state to enforce Federal law. In some Northern states’ personal liberty laws, state officials were forbidden at the risk of fines and jail time to help enforce Federal law with regard to the return of fugitive slaves. These two rulings (Prigg and Kentucky) say the states are independent sovereigns who can decide what part of the Constitution they are going to obey and that the Federal Government can’t coerce them. This sort of a situation, i.e., states not following the plain words of the Constitution, undermined both the Constitution and the Union.

Kentucky v. Dennison was finally overturned in Puerto Rico v. Branstad, 483 U.S. 219 (1987). In that ruling, Thurgood Marshall delivered the unanimous opinion of the court that Kentucky v. Dennison …

"...is the product of another time. The conception of the relation between the States and the Federal Government there announced is fundamentally incompatible with more than a century of constitutional development."

Who knew? The Constitution was still being developed more than 100 years after it was written, and the relationship between states and the Federal government had changed from what it had been before the War Between The States. The Living Constitution theory lives on.

I’m not sure the newspaper article that led me to find this case was entirely correct. I’ve read elsewhere that the slave who was enticed to escape to freedom by Willis Lago had in fact been taken to Ohio by her master. It was in Ohio that Willis Lago helped the slave escape from her master. That might have been against Kentucky law, but the crime happened in Ohio. Could Kentucky law be enforced in Ohio?

Here is another complication. Willis Lago was considered a free black in Ohio. Had he earlier been an escaped slave himself? If so, perhaps that entered into Ohio Governor Dennison’s decision not to extradite him to Kentucky.

150 posted on 02/28/2011 1:54:00 PM PST by rustbucket
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To: x
You said: “Apparently he (the he is the author, Guelzo) was too anxious to prove his case to present only the proven facts and let them speak for themselves.”

That is very good of you to acknowledge the evidence presented by me and to distance yourself from any attempted validation of his article.

Guelzo ought to be exposed for what he is.

You said: “If you think of yourself as some sort of libertarian enforcer...”.

You do not know that, nor does the content of my posts support that.

151 posted on 03/02/2011 7:48:53 AM PST by PeaRidge
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To: PeaRidge
Guelzo ought to be exposed for what he is.

You should read more of what he wrote and what other historians write to see if this is part of a pattern in his work that isn't found in other historians before coming to a judgement like that.

He was too quick to assume that Lincoln had “ate up, digested, and assimilated” the major texts of 19th century political economy with the same zest that Herndon says he dug into Wayland's book, but if you found Shelby Davis writing

During my life I have been acquainted with very many able lawyers, and I have no hesitation in saying that Lincoln was the greatest trial lawyer I ever saw. He was a man of wonderful power before a court or jury. When he was sure he was right, his strength and resourcefulness were well-nigh irresistible. In the court-room he was at home. He was frank with the court, the juries, and the lawyers, to such an extent that he would state the case of the opposite side as fairly as the opposing counsel could do it; he would then disclose his client's case so strongly, with such honesty and candor, that the judge and jury would be almost convinced at once in advance of the testimony.

You might not automatically assume that his reported comment about Lincoln being "great" on political economy was wholly tongue in cheek. I wouldn't cite it as evidence in the way that Guelzo does, but there is a possible gray area there that you didn't acknowledge.

You said: “If you think of yourself as some sort of libertarian enforcer...”.

You do not know that, nor does the content of my posts support that.

That wasn't intended personally. It is the case that a lot of what we hear about history comes from people who have very strong political agendas who condemn those who don't belong to their own particular sect.

Over time these condemnations and accusations are spread beyond the cult and get separated from their original agenda. They take root with people who don't share the original ideology and can be hard to analyze properly and uproot.

But though I didn't intend it personally look at the sentence of yours immediately above your denial, "Guelzo ought to be exposed for what he is." And you don't think of yourself as some sort of enforcer?

152 posted on 03/02/2011 2:54:07 PM PST by x
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To: x
You said: “You should read more of what he wrote and what other historians write to see if this is part of a pattern in his work that isn't found in other historians before coming to a judgment like that.”

I did and have. In order that you understand the magnitude of Guelzo’s use of blogs and non-footnoted publications to create a false reservoir of "factual" sources of support for his contentions, just simply do a search using the term “political economy”. I found 52 postings, 51 belonging to Guelzo...all listing his article, and it was posted on all sorts of locations...he really went to some trouble to get it where it went..

He essentially flooded the search engine platter. No one else except one provided any information on Lincoln's behavior. The one that was cited was the one I provided several posts ago that was either a misinformed comment or more likely one that was ridiculing Lincoln.

Next, regarding your long post on Lincoln...that is irrelevant to the article.

You said: “You might not automatically assume that his reported comment about Lincoln being “great” on political economy was wholly tongue in cheek.”

Taken in the context of the quote, how would you explain it?

“I wouldn't cite it as evidence in the way that Guelzo does,...”

Of course you wouldn't. It would be totally absurd.

You said: “..but there is a possible gray area there that you didn't acknowledge.”

And what would that be?

You said: “But though I didn't intend it personally look at the sentence of yours immediately above your denial, ‘Guelzo ought to be exposed for what he is.’ And you don't think of yourself as some sort of enforcer?”

That is such tripe that does not deserve any response other than to say that I expect you are looking forward to the next “Dirty Harry” movie starring Carl Bernstein.

153 posted on 03/04/2011 8:38:32 AM PST by PeaRidge
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To: PeaRidge
In order that you understand the magnitude of Guelzo’s use of blogs and non-footnoted publications to create a false reservoir of "factual" sources of support for his contentions, just simply do a search using the term “political economy”. I found 52 postings, 51 belonging to Guelzo...all listing his article, and it was posted on all sorts of locations...he really went to some trouble to get it where it went..

He essentially flooded the search engine platter. No one else except one provided any information on Lincoln's behavior.

The laughs never end with you, Doris.

There may have been a blip yesterday or in the days before when blogs and aggregator sites picked up Guelzo's article, but such things don't last. I did a search for "Lincoln political economy" today and found all kinds of things unrelated to his article, including the worst trash from DiLorenzo & Co. Of course, since it's more recent, "Mr. Lincoln's Economics Primer" came up first, but it didn't block out other content.

You should know that "political economy" isn't the commonest of phrases nowadays (you should know, since you made some pretty questionable claims about political economy in your earlier post). By featuring the phrase so prominently and frequently in his article, Guelzo made it likely that any search for that phrase in connection with his article would lead to the article. But if you searched for "Lincoln economics" yesterday or the day before you would have found quite a mix of articles from different points of view (as I did searching for "Lincoln political economy" today).

But the laughs don't end there. You guys are quick to fault others for confining their research to what's available on line. By confessing that your research involved googling, you've essentially put a "kick me" sign on your own back. I won't take advantage of your mistake though. But seriously, try to get a look at Gabor Boritt's book. Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream and don't rely on google seaches alone. Much of it is even available at Google Books.

And there's more! You've may finally have found out how the rest of us feel. There have been times when googling "Lincoln tariffs" or "civil war tariffs" only yielded pages and pages of Rockwellite or sub-Rockwellite editorializing and scarcely a pro-Lincoln or balanced or objective article for pages and pages. But nobody cried in public about it or said it was unfair. Now I've done those searches and come up with a better menu of articles, but "flooding the search engine platter" is something Rockwellites and neo-confederates have been doing for a long time.

That is such tripe that does not deserve any response other than to say that I expect you are looking forward to the next “Dirty Harry” movie starring Carl Bernstein.

I don't know what you're trying to say there. I suspect Woodward and Bernstein thought of themselves as some kind of enforcers themselves.

If Allen Guelzo is becoming another Tommy DiLorenzo, throwing together hackwork and promoting it relentlessly, he may be reproved, but given the fine work he's done in the past, pointing out what he's been capable of in his earlier work will do a lot more than playing the Grand Inquisitor, a prosecuting attorney, or a two-bit mob enforcer.

154 posted on 03/05/2011 11:00:51 AM PST by x
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To: x
The content of your responses is increasingly disintegrating. You are using non-sequiturs, personal insults, misrepresentations and outright canards to try to keep your head above the logic and documentation.

It has been proved that Guelzo’s only premise was a fabrication: ....John Stuart Mill’s "The Principles of Political Economy" was one of the books William H. Herndon says Lincoln “more or less peeped into” (Hidden Lincoln, 117).

You said: “Apparently he (the he is the author, Guelzo) was too anxious to prove his case to present only the proved facts (he had none to present so he resorted to fabrications) and let them speak for themselves.”

That is correct, and you do acknowledge the author's fallacious content.

Finally you rationalize this mega pants load by trying to point out Guelzo’s other works.

“If Allen Guelzo is..throwing together hackwork and promoting it relentlessly, he may be reproved, but given the fine work he's done in the past, pointing out what he's been capable of in his earlier work will do a lot more,,,,”

NO, it won't. The article has been exposed for exactly what it is............TRIPE contrived through CANARDS!.

155 posted on 03/13/2011 6:31:15 AM PDT by PeaRidge
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To: PeaRidge
The content of your responses is increasingly disintegrating. You are using non-sequiturs, personal insults, misrepresentations and outright canards to try to keep your head above the logic and documentation.

And when has your writing ever risen above that, Doris?

It has been proved that Guelzo’s only premise was a fabrication: ....John Stuart Mill’s "The Principles of Political Economy" was one of the books William H. Herndon says Lincoln “more or less peeped into” (Hidden Lincoln, 117).

Just as well, given Mill's evolution in a socialist direction. Noah Brooks a friend of Lincoln's did mention in his "Recollections of Abraham Lincoln" that Lincoln "particularly liked" Mill's On Liberty. That doesn't justify Guelzo's conclusion, but it does give some context for it.

The article has been exposed for exactly what it is............TRIPE contrived through CANARDS!.

I think I tried that in a French restaurant once. Yummy!

Go crawl back under your rock.

156 posted on 03/13/2011 12:02:56 PM PDT by x
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To: x
Your last post reveals your character, x.

Having not a single fact to add, you resort to insult, non-sequitur, sarcasm, and ending with another supercilious insult.

Let it be remembered that you stole away under the smokescreen of contrived superiority, but alas nothing more than failures to present any logical rebuttal.

Something is rotten in your denmark.

157 posted on 03/19/2011 10:34:34 AM PDT by PeaRidge
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To: PeaRidge
And what does your last post add? Or the one before that? Just more stupid crowing on your dunghill. And who are you to make judgements about anyone else's character, Doris?

Anyone who looks through the whole thread will find facts enough in my posts, but there's no use in responding to parting shots like yours that don't make any new points but simply make insults.

D*psh*t, I actually agreed with you, but you weren't satisfied. I don't see any more point in trading insults back and forth, so I guess this is done.

158 posted on 03/19/2011 10:47:40 AM PDT by x
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To: x

Find one post that supports this:

“Lincoln read and absorbed it all...”


159 posted on 03/19/2011 11:03:28 AM PDT by PeaRidge
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To: PeaRidge
Are you retarded? Or just stupid? We have testimony from Herndon that Lincoln either read or "more or less peeped into" works mentioned. If Herndon is a reliable witness Lincoln had some familiarity with the titles mentioned.

We can't say with any certainty that he "absorbed" those works, let alone “ate up, digested, and assimilated” those books, so in that Guelzo was wrong. It's also highly questionable whether Lincoln truly "embraced" classical liberal economics. I said as much in post #144 three weeks ago.

You haven't had anything new to say since, Doris, but persist in drawing out the exchange with pointless personal remarks that add nothing to the discussion. I don't know what it is you want, and at this point I certainly don't care, if I ever did.

160 posted on 03/19/2011 11:58:46 AM PDT by x
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