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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.