America the experiment was looking mighty shaky as it finally moved beyond its original revolutionary generation. For all practical purposes, you could describe America as a single-party state characterized by, as Howe calls it, “nonparty politics,” for its first five decades, until Andrew Jackson, our first “Western” president, rode into power in 1828. Jackson ascended to the presidency on the back of America’s first true political party, the Democrats, ushering in an age of raucous and mean-spirited mobocracy that witnessed: the onset of the “spoils system” of political patronage; government-sanctioned extension of slavery into what was then the American “southwest” of Alabama and Mississippi; and an accompanying policy of rapid and wholesale ethnic “cleansing” of Native American tribes located therein, to include the final liquidation of the first of America’s many “Tibets”—the Seminole nation of Florida. As Howe writes:
Our own age finds the limitations on the democracy of that period glaring: the enslavement of African Americans, the abuse of Native Americans, the exclusion of women and most nonwhites from the suffrage and equality before the law. The Jacksonian movement in politics, although it took the name of the Democratic Party, fought so hard in favor of slavery and white supremacy, and opposed the inclusion of nonwhites and women within the American civil polity so resolutely, that it makes the term “Jacksonian Democracy” all the more inappropriate as a characterization of the years between 1815 and 1848.
It is surprising that the word “nationalism” first appears in America’s political lexicon only during the 1830s, for there was plenty of evidence of its popular existence following the defeat of the British in the War of 1812. But as Howe argues, for nationalism to achieve real meaning, there needed to be firm evidence that the nation was truly coming together in economic terms, and the one development that signaled that possibility more than any other was the building of the Erie Canal—“the first step in the transportation revolution that would turn an aggregate of local economies into a nationwide market economy.” The canal also catapulted its oceanfront terminus, New York City, into the forefront of national and international commerce and finance, almost as if “New York had redrawn the economic map of the United States and put itself at the center.”
But another reason nationalism became a more prominent national characteristic in the 1830s was that America finally had a hero in the White House whose fame was not tied to the Revolution but to an episode in the nation’s subsequent history—Jackson’s defeat of the British at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815. Jackson’s victory had stirred the nation’s heart like nothing before, not simply because it erased the humiliation of the capital city’s sacking and the burning of the new executive mansion, but more so because vanquishing Britain once and for all effectively banished the nation’s fear of reenslavement at the hands of its former colonial master. The son had finally been freed from the grasp of the father and was now his own man, far more sure of himself and feeling his vigor and confidence grow with every passing year. Old Hickory, with his unapologetically authoritarian manner, signaled by his unyielding concentration of presidential power that America was now led by a new father.
“King Andrew” was, in many ways, the classic “great man” of an emerging regional power, and his style of rule reminds us that leaders of countries enjoying such a trajectory often come off as unrepentant thugs to allies and enemies alike. Jackson’s leadership, upon close examination, is more than a bit reminiscent of the sort of heavy-handed and corrupt political practices of Russia’s siloviki, or “security guys,” under Vladimir Putin. I do not consider this a wild comparison, for Putin, like Jackson, made his initial marks in national security, ruled autocratically with a tendency toward political vendetta against his enemies and economic largesse dispensed to his cronies, cracked down viciously on secessionist sentiment whenever and wherever it cropped up, and made no secret of his desire to catapult his nation toward global greatness on the basis of its most precious natural resources (slave-raised cotton for Jackson, state-owned energy for Putin). Like Putin, Jackson deeply—and personally—disliked the era’s dominant great power. Finally, Jackson granted himself a “third term” by appointing his successor, Martin Van Buren, in much the same way Putin selected his own colorless protégé-cum-replacement, Dmitry Medvedev.
Jackson’s age likewise saw plenty of social unrest and spiritual awakening. America endured its first great wave of immigration in this period, with the influx of Irish Catholics being particularly disturbing to the dominant Protestant denominations of the age, so much so that public education was pioneered in an attempt to dilute the impact of this new, Roman Catholic minority, which was viewed as essentially nonwhite. The incoming Irish were simultaneously the Muslims and Mexicans of their day: generating irrational social fear with their exclusionary, religious-based schools and being shunted into the “3D” jobs of the economy—dirty, dangerous, and difficult—which in turn allowed them to send substantial amounts of remittances back to their distressed homeland, dwarfing the official humanitarian aid offered by Britain during the Great Potato Famine of the 1840s.
America’s Second Awakening in religious fervor, fueled in part, and ironically enough, by New England choosing to disestablish state religions, set in motion an expansion of evangelical missionary activity across both America and the world at large, reaching all the way to the original promised lands of the Middle East. It also triggered, by forcing religious denominations to compete for believers on their own, a tremendous influx of faith-based group involvement in the social issues of the day, first and foremost among these being the abolition movement. This rise in social awareness coincided with the first great instances of slave rebellion, highlighted by the Nat Turner-led insurrection of 1831 and the famous case of the slave-ship revolt in 1839, which led prominent abolitionist John Quincy Adams to defend the Amistad’s rebel leader in court. Quincy Adams, by the way, introduced in Congress the first official call for secession from the Union on the basis of the evil of slavery, when in 1842 he presented a petition from the citizens of Haverhill, Massachusetts, asking that their city be allowed to leave the United States and thus end their unwanted association with the abominable practice.
America was most assuredly splitting into two opposing camps, even two opposing nations with competing foreign policies. As Robert Kagan argues, the South was becoming “increasingly despotic, and not only toward slaves and free blacks.” As a result, “antislavery agitators, when they were not hanged, were tortured, tarred and feathered, and driven from southern towns,” which, in turn, only increased the North’s mirror-imaged paranoia that the South “aimed to destroy the North’s free-labor civilization.” What had been the United States’ unitary focus on westward expansion in decades past now became, thanks to its codification in the Missouri Compromise of 1820, an avowed competition between North and South to see which could pile up the most states—free or slave. As the South increasingly dreamed of erecting a social firewall—in effect creating civilizational apartheid—between itself and the North, the lure of “tropical empire” beckoned in the Caribbean, a proxy war inevitably erupted in the border territories of Kansas-Nebraska, and America was agitated toward war with Mexico, culminating in 1845 with the capture and incorporation of the biggest slave state yet—Texas.
In effect, the outlines of a Cold War were emerging between a North hell-bent on containing—perchance even rolling back—the scourge of cotton-driven slavery and a South vocally and violently committed to rapid westward and southward expansionism. But in a similar sense, America was enduring internally the sort of war of identity that marks our current struggle with Islamic radicalism in the Middle East. The American South was the Saudi Arabia of its day: taking in “guest workers” and pumping out the cotton with an attitude of “Don’t bother us about what goes on down on the plantation, because as long as the cotton stays cheap and plentiful, then, buddy, that’s none of your damn business! For this is our way of life.” The South’s corolla
ry of exported troublemakers were the sort of adventurers and slavery jihadists who were more than happy to stir up trouble and even terrorist violence in the name of spreading their self-evident truth that some men are equal but that others—skin-tone infidels, if you will—are subhumans to be regarded only as property, and with God’s blessing. By the time the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 essentially condoned a government-sponsored rendition program of returning escaping slaves to their masters, the South had become, as Kagan puts it, a “rogue state” increasingly isolated within an emerging global antislavery crusade.
From Jackson’s election in 1828 until Lincoln’s shocking rise to the presidency in 1860, the South had effectively achieved political “safe harbor.” But with Honest Abe’s stunning victory, the Whigs’ grand strategy of consummating America’s potential as a global power was reborn in the newly formed Republican Party, the main stalwarts of which all made it into Lincoln’s original cabinet, including the party’s original standard-bearer, William Seward, as Lincoln’s secretary of state. Lincoln and Seward, Kagan notes, “had remained consistent supporters of the American System throughout the Jacksonian era, favoring federal support for internal improvements and a strong federal bank.” Lincoln himself, who idolized fellow Kentuckian Henry Clay as a “beau ideal of a statesman,” openly bragged, during his early stint as an Illinois state legislator, that he aimed to become “the DeWitt Clinton of Illinois,” proposing an “Illinois System” of canals and roads that he hoped would transform that prairie state as Clinton’s visionary leadership had built New York into the Empire State with the construction of the Erie Canal. Lincoln’s grand plans came to nothing, thanks to the national economic crisis of 1837, but when later granted the extraordinary powers of a wartime president, he would take up those plans on a continental scale.
Lincoln believed deeply in the essential equation of American democracy, seeing its truest test in its ability to “elevate the condition of men.” In this manner, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin links Lincoln, Seward, Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase, and Attorney General Edward Bates, “a team of rivals” for the Republican presidential nomination in 1860, to a new generation of Americans eager to leave behind the eighteenth century and its ills—specifically slavery. Seeing their nation, as a young Lincoln once put it, “in the peaceful possession of the fairest portion of the earth,” and believing, as Goodwin notes, that “the only barriers to success” found therein “were discipline and the extent of one’s talents,” this generation of Americans born to the Union were driven by a supercharged zeal to propel it beyond its status as a unique political experiment into the full realization of its potential as the Western Hemisphere’s undisputed giant.
Of course, Lincoln’s very election, leading to the secession of a slew of Southern states that immediately reformed themselves into a confederacy committed to remaining forever independent, constituted the single greatest crisis the still young nation had ever known. The first order of business was salvaging the Union through war. Faced with fielding a “B team” effort because so many of the country’s best flag officers had stuck with their native South, including General Robert E. Lee, to whom Lincoln had initially offered command of the federal forces, the new president was forced to run through numerous lesser talents before finally locating the primary architects of his victory, Ulysses S. Grant and William Sherman, two previously undistinguished prewar officers who rose to the rank of general, and proved capable of the impossible task of not merely defending the North but of subjugating the South.
Beyond that, the primary strategic challenge of the war lay in the ability of Lincoln and Seward to forestall any entry by European powers in support of the Confederacy, whose economy Union naval forces slowly strangled with a very effective blockade. To this task, Seward brought a naïve bravado, immediately suggesting to the new president that the best way to reunify the country would be to preemptively declare war on Spain and France while threatening the same to Britain and Russia if they did not immediately back down from their meddlesome threats. Lincoln wisely tempered Seward’s zeal to expand the conflict across the ocean, and, as Goodwin notes, “history would later give Secretary of State Seward high marks for his role in preventing Britain and France from intervening in the war.”
Stipulating those two successes, as desperately tenuous as the odds may have seemed through the war’s first several years, let me now argue specifically where Lincoln’s genius as a grand strategist was revealed.
First was Lincoln’s bold decision to transform an initially limited war of reunification into a total war of transformation by making public his planned Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862, when victory was far from certain. Indeed, Seward displayed his own substantial wisdom in talking Lincoln out of his original desire to announce the proclamation in the sullen July days following General George McClellan’s disastrous Peninsula Campaign, instead holding off until the Union’s victory at Antietam two months later. What Lincoln risked by this declaration was the fate of the entire Union, because Southerners most certainly knew then that defeat would mean total social and economic revolution in their homelands, and therefore they would be emboldened to fight on with the desperation of one who has everything to lose. Seward himself feared that an ensuing race war inside the South would so damage its long-term ability to produce cotton that Britain and France might feel forced to intervene. But Lincoln, Goodwin writes, “intuitively understood that once the Union truly committed itself to emancipation, the masses in Europe, who regarded slavery as an evil demanding eradication, would not be easily maneuvered into supporting the South.”
As many would later argue, Lincoln’s real genius here lay in understanding the commitment to total victory that the proclamation would elicit from a Northern population now deeply engaged in a war that many felt Washington was waging too feebly. In effect, the gloves would come off now, the generals able to master the “terrible math” would be elevated to positions of commanding leadership, and the war would henceforth be waged with a clearer understanding of its strategy of attrition against an enemy that had just seen—based on nothing more than a piece of paper—more than one-third of its population transformed into the North’s “fifth column.”
But to me, Lincoln’s genius for grand strategy was equally demonstrated in the way he front-loaded the Union’s overall postwar recovery, not in a South he planned to reconstruct, but in a West slated for rapid and comprehensive integration. Whereas Lincoln planned the gentlest possible reintegration of the South, arguing in advance that any Confederate state that could muster 10 percent of its population toward taking a new oath of loyalty to the Union be admitted basically “as is,” when it came to the West he engineered nothing less than its systematic economic transformation and de facto political integration in a quarter-century’s time. Within twenty-five years of the Civil War’s end, there would be no unassigned federal lands west of the Mississippi, and what little remained of the Native American tribes of the Great Plains, the Southwest, and the coastal Pacific would all be confined to geographically isolated and undesirable land. In sovereign terms, America already possessed virtually all the lands that would eventually make up the contiguous United States, but in actuality, the vast majority of the territory was unclaimed and undeveloped. All of that would change in a mere two and a half decades, in great part because of a series of laws engineered by Lincoln that deeply incentivized private individuals and businesses to flood the Western territories in search of more than just California’s gold.
Amazingly, from today’s perspective, all five of these historic bills were passed in a single congress—the 37th, which ran from March 1861 through March 1863, encompassing Lincoln’s first two years in office. How was this possible? With only twenty-five member states, the smaller Congress featured strong Republican majorities in both houses, meaning the wartime president and commander in chief could basically pass any bill he wanted, which Lincoln of course did.
Perhaps the most
important bill was the Homestead Act, which, as Carl Sandburg described, gave a free farm to “any man who wanted to put a plough to unbroken soil.” He did not even have to be a citizen but could be a brand-new immigrant who had but to express a desire to become a citizen eventually, and who could manage the $10 fee. The only restrictions were put on those who had ever borne arms against the United States, meaning Confederate soldiers. After the war, Union soldiers could count their time in service against the residency requirements. On the far side of those meager requirements stood title to 160 acres. As a wartime measure, this was beyond brilliant, for not only did it immediately attract tens of thousands of British, Irish, German, and Scandinavian immigrants to the American West (“What a good new country where they give away farms!”), but it also boosted the nation’s food supply while a significant portion of its normal agricultural workforce was otherwise employed. Between 1862 and 1890, the U.S. added 32 million people to its population. One out of every sixteen of those people settled on farms through the Homestead Act. According to the U.S. Archives, “By 1934, over 1.6 million homestead applications were processed and more than 270 million acres—10 percent of all U.S. lands—passed into the hands of individuals.”
The rest of Lincoln’s legislative agenda included: the Pacific Railroad Act, which quickly led to the first transcontinental railroad line; the Morrill Act, which provided public lands for land-grant colleges; the Legal Tender Bill, which created the first, single paper currency the United States had ever enjoyed, known as “greenbacks” (at the time, over 8,000 different types of banknotes circulated in the economy), and allowed the federal government to raise, in conjunction with a second National Bank Act, $450 million of wartime finance through the issuance of Treasury bonds; and finally, an omnibus tax act that both established the forerunner of today’s Internal Revenue Service and, for the first time in American history, taxed the incomes of individual Americans (a practice to be permanently instituted in 1913).
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