During the Age of Lincoln, the United States finally shed the tar baby of slavery only to entangle itself in as sticky a tar baby of monopoly and oligopoly capitalism. Mark Twain called this system of massive corporations and corruption the Gilded Age. In a speech before Republican Party leaders in Hartford, Connecticut, Twain bleakly noted, “Our present civil system, born of General Jackson and the Democratic Party, is so idiotic, so contemptible, so grotesque that it would make the very savages of Dahomey jeer and the very gods of solemnity laugh.”46 It would be another generation before progressives led by Theodore Roosevelt developed and asserted a new version of Hamiltonianism designed to break up the cartels, conserve the nation’s natural resources, and impose health, safety, and sanitation standards.
One dimension of power where Abraham Lincoln played a secondary role was in advancing American imperialism. There President Polk surpassed all others with his acquisition of Oregon, California, and New Mexico and with international recognition of the earlier annexation of Texas. Outstanding secretaries of state like Daniel Webster, William Seward, and Hamilton Fish made their own contributions by upholding the Monroe Doctrine in the Western Hemisphere and the Tyler Doctrine in regard to Hawaii.
There is a symbiotic relationship between wealth and power, with each asserted to bolster the other. During the Age of Lincoln, the United States increasingly wielded military power to protect or enhance its swelling economic interests in the Caribbean Basin and Central America and across the Pacific Basin. Washington’s most spectacular and far-reaching act was to force Japan to abandon isolationism and join the global system. In doing so the United States came of age as a global power. Yet a dilemma haunted this transformation. As with domestic policy, interest groups became increasingly powerful in shaping American foreign policy. Symbolically the flag followed profits and the pulpit, best represented by the Chamber of Commerce and the Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions.
The Lincoln revolution failed to dent one enduring, dark dimension of American culture. Most Americans tend to prefer mythology to history.47 It is certainly a lot less demanding. Mythology is all about good versus evil whereby larger-than-life heroes take center stage to battle against and eventually vanquish larger-than-life villains. History reveals that even the most prominent individuals, groups, and nations are beset by overwhelming political, economic, social, psychological, and cultural forces that they can barely understand let alone control. Few people appreciated this more than Abraham Lincoln, who confessed that he had not led but had been led by history. Rather than let this awareness intimidate him as it does most folks, Lincoln was inspired to understand the history in which he was entangled, hoping that he might find some wiggle room in which to progress.
P. T. Barnum, who originated the practices of modern marketing, succinctly explained why most Americans tend to prefer mythology to history: “There is a sucker born every minute.” Although the reasons are obviously more complex than this, Barnum was on to something. There is a very human inclination to blindly believe rather than critically think, to follow a strong leader who is wrong than a weak leader who is right. Lincoln’s good friend Senator Orville Browning of Illinois captured that common human flaw: “Why will men believe a lie, an absurd lie, that could not [be] imposed upon a child, and cling to it and repeat it in defiance of all evidence to the contrary?”48
Doing so, of course, can lead to disaster. Mythology is a double-edged sword. It is at once a source of unity and of delusion for those who believe it. Demagogues can wield mythology to whip a population into a frenzy against contrived “enemies,” foreign and domestic. Related to the power of myth is the power of projection onto hated others the unresolved inner pathologies of one’s self or group.
The South personified these pathologies during the Age of Lincoln. Southerners spun a mythology in which slavocracy was the most exalted human invention while they projected onto abolitionists such characteristics as being cruel, avaricious, dangerous, and treasonous. After Abraham Lincoln won the presidency in November 1860, slavocrats in eventually eleven southern states acted on the delusion that the Republican Party sought to destroy their key institution and thus they had no choice but to rebel from and war against the United States. In doing so, southerners accelerated slavery’s demise by generations.
There is strange twist in the psyches of many, perhaps most, people—the more illogical their excuses for believing or doing something, the more fervently they insist that they are right. In war, as a nation’s losses in people, property, and treasure mount, the tendency increases for leaders and followers to insist that even more sacrifices be made so that the previous sacrifices were not in vain.
Which brings us to the Confederate cause. During the nearly nine decades following America’s declaration of independence, slavery was the nation’s core toxic issue that infected virtually all others. Economic, moral, and thus political disputes over slavery led to crises in 1820, 1837, 1845, 1850, and 1854 that skilled statesmen eventually finessed with compromises. The crisis over slavery in 1860, however, was so severe that it overwhelmed all voices of reason and resulted in secession, rebellion, and war. While the Civil War had many causes, one, slavery, caused all the others. Had slavery never existed the rebel states would have had no cause to quit, let alone fight, the United States.49
In 1860 America’s economy, and thus its social and moral system, was schizophrenic. A nation’s power is no greater than its unity. With the United States half slave and half free, it was split into two nations rather than one. The concept of America as a nation weakened as southern identity and belief in states’ rights grew.50 Free labor and capital markets prevailed across the North but overlapped with slavery and feudalism across the South. In 1860 one of five people living in the southern states was black, and virtually all blacks, or four million people, were slaves. Meanwhile four of ten southern whites were so poor that they did not own the land that they farmed. The white middle class of shopkeepers, blacksmiths, and wheelwrights was limited in numbers and income. For southerners slavery was the surest route to wealth, power, and prestige. The average slaveholder held $25,000 of assessed wealth, fourteen times more than the average of $1,800 for farmers without slaves.51
Slavery hurt nearly everyone except those who actually owned and exploited the slaves. How can white laborers compete with slaves performing the same labor in the next field or workshop? Nonetheless, while poor white southerners may have complained about being in a “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight,” most of them fought heroically all the same. In doing so, they fought for abstract notions of “honor” and “states’ rights” against their own hard economic interests.
Slavocrats provoked first secession, then an increasingly devastating war with the United States. The slavocrat promise that the South would swiftly triumph in a glorious victory quickly proved chimerical. Yet the rebels fought on for four blood-soaked years, all along clinging to the Orwellian delusion that they were defending states’ rights rather than slavery. This belief was at once a strength and a weakness—it mobilized the population for war and worsened their destruction and eventual defeat. The South’s ideology of slavocracy was not a source of power but of self-inflicted, devastating wounds. And this presents a vital insight into the art of power—the ultimate source of power is a devotion to understanding and advancing one’s interests in the world as it is rather than how one might like it to be.
The Declaration of Independence is said to express “the American mind.” This, of course, is only partly true. The text pronounced a set of ideals that progressive Americans have struggled to realize ever since. It represents how Americans would like to see themselves much more than how they really are. The Declaration of Independence’s ideals guided Abraham Lincoln throughout his life. No one from 1848 to 1876 did more to advance the nation’s ability to live up to the ideals upon which it is founded.
Upon meditating on the dead body of the man he had served for four years and came t
o deeply admire, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton remarked, “Now he belongs to the ages.”52 And so does the America that Abraham Lincoln so decisively shaped.
ABBREVIATIONS
Grant Memoirs
Ulysses S. Grant. The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. Princeton NJ: Collectors Reprints, 1998.
Lincoln Works
Roy P. Basler et al., eds. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. 9 vols. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1853–55.
Lincoln Writings
Allan Nevins, ed. The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln. New York: Modern Library, 2000.
Official Records
War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. 70 vols. Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1880–1901.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1. William Nester, The Revolutionary Years, 1775–1789: The Art of American Power during the Early Republic (Washington DC: Potomac Books, 2011); William Nester, The Hamiltonian Vision, 1789–1800: The Art of American Power during the Early Republic (Washington DC: Potomac Books, 2012); William Nester, The Jeffersonian Vision, 1801–1815: The Art of American Power during the Early Republic (Washington DC: Potomac Books, 2012); William Nester, The Age of Jackson and the Art of American Power, 1815–1848 (Washington DC: Potomac Books, 2013).
2. The thousands of books and articles on Abraham Lincoln could fill a small library. For overviews of the literature, see Richard Booker, Abraham Lincoln in Periodical Literature, 1860–1940 (Chicago: Falwey Brost, 1941); Jay Monaghan, Lincoln Bibliography, 1839–1939, 2 vols. (Springfield: Illinois State Historical Library, 1943); Paul M. Angle, A Shelf of Lincoln Books: A Critical Selective Bibliography of Lincolniana (New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1946); Benjamin P. Thomas, Portrait for Posterity: Lincoln and His Biographers (New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1947); Don Fehrenbacher, The Changing Image of Lincoln in American Historiography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968); Merrill D. Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); John Channing Briggs, Lincoln’s Speeches Reconsidered (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).
For the most extensive studies by those who knew him, see William H. Herndon and Jesse W. Weik, Herndon’s Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life, 3 vols. (Chicago: Belford, Clarke, 1889); John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, 10 vols. (New York: Century, 1890).
For the best one-volume histories, see Benjamin P. Thomas, Abraham Lincoln: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952); Reinhard H. Luthin, The Real Abraham Lincoln (Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice Hall, 1960); Stephen Oates, With Malice toward None: The Life of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Harper and Row, 1977); David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995).
For the best books on his presidency, see Mark F. Neely, The Last Best Hope of Earth: Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of America (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Philip Shaw Paludan, The Presidency of Abraham Lincoln (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994); William Lee Miller, President Lincoln: The Duty of a Statesman (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008).
3. Sun Tzu, The Art of War (New York: Basic Books, 1994).
4. Abraham Lincoln to Albert Hodges, April 4, 1864, Lincoln Works, 7:281–82.
5. Abraham Lincoln to Reverdy Johnson, July 26, 1862, Lincoln Works, 5:342–43.
6. Herndon and Weik, Herndon’s Lincoln, 2:334.
7. Notes for Speeches, August 21, 1858, Lincoln Works, 2:552.
8. Abraham Lincoln to H. L. Pierce, April 6, 1859, Lincoln Writings, 540.
9. Abraham Lincoln to Isaac Schermerhorn, September 12, 1864, Lincoln Works, 8:1.
10. “Mediation on the Divine Will,” September 30, 1862, Lincoln Writings, 728.
11. Tyler Dennett, ed., Lincoln and the Civil War in the Letters and Diaries of John Hay (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1939), 19; “A House Divided,” June 16, 1858, Lincoln Works, 2:461–62.
12. Gabor S. Boritt, Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream (Memphis: Memphis State University Press, 1978), 159, 190.
13. For other books that wholly or partly explore that era, see William R. Brock, Conflict and Transformation: The United States, 1844–1877 (New York: Penguin, 1973); Richard H. Sewell, A House Divided: Sectionalism and the Civil War, 1848–1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988); William L. Barney, Battleground for the Union: The Era of the Civil War and Reconstruction, 1848–1877 (Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice Hall, 1990).
14. Nester, Age of Jackson.
15. Mark W. Summers, The Plundering Generation: Corruption and the Crisis of the Union, 1849–1861 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
16. Address at Cooper Institute, February 27, 1858, Lincoln Writings, 591.
1. EIGHTEEN FORTY-EIGHT
1. Chaplain W. Morrison, Democratic Politics and Sectionalism: The Wilmot Proviso Controversy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967).
2. Gabor S. Boritt, “Lincoln’s Opposition to the Mexican War,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 67 (February 1974): 79–100; Mark E. Neeley, “War and Partisanship: What Lincoln Learned from James K. Polk” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 74, no. 3 (Autumn 1981): 199–216; Mark E. Neeley, “Lincoln and the Mexican War: An Argument by Analogy,” Civil War History 24 (March 1979): 5–23.
3. House of Representatives Speech, January 12, 1848, Lincoln Works, 1:431–42.
4. Resolution in the United States House of Representatives, December 22, 1847, Lincoln Writings, 297–99.
5. Robert W. Merry, A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War, and the Conquest of the American Continent (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009), 341–42.
6. Herndon’s letter is not preserved but its content can be surmised by Lincoln’s reply; Abraham Lincoln to William Herndon, February 15, 1848, Lincoln Writings, 299–300.
7. House of Representatives Speech, January 12, 1848, Lincoln Writings, 306.
8. Grant Memoirs, 24–25, 18.
9. Grant Memoirs, 25.
10. Albert K. Weinberg, Manifest Destiny: A Study of Nationalist Expansion in American History (Chicago: Quadrangle Press, 1963); Frederick Merk, Manifest Destiny and the Mission in American History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963); Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); Thomas Hietala, Manifest Destiny: Anxious Aggrandizement in Late Jacksonian America (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1985); Amy Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
11. Samuel Flagg Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Union (Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1980), 536.
12. Richard Griswold del Castillo, The Treaty of Guadeloupe Hidalgo (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990).
13. Michael A. Morrison, Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).
14. Rodman Paul and Elliott West, Mining Frontiers of the Far West (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001), 13; Brian Roberts, American Alchemy: The California Gold Rush and Middle-Class Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Susan Johnson, Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001); Kenneth Owen, Riches for All: The California Gold Rush and the World (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002).
15. John D. Unruh, The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840–1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978); Michael Tate, Indians and Emigrants: Encounters on the Overland Trails (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006).
16. Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation (New York: Penguin, 1985), 164.
17. Historical Statistics of the United States, 1789–1845 (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1949), 32; David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1
861 (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 11, 12.
18. Joseph Ferrie, Yankees Now: Immigrants in the Antebellum United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
19. Ellen C. Dubois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869 (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1978); Blanche Hersh, The Slavery of Sex: Feminist-Abolitionists in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978); Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne, eds., The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); Sylvia Hoffert, When Hens Crow: The Woman’s Rights Movement in Antebellum America (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1995); Margaret McFadden, Golden Cables of Sympathy: Transatlantic Sources of Nineteenth-Century Feminism (Lexington: University of Press Kentucky, 1999); Barbara Cutter, Domestic Devils, Battlefield Angels: The Radicalization of American Womanhood, 1830–1865 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003); Judith Wellman, The Road to Seneca Falls (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004).
20. Sally Gregory Miller, Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 93–94.
21. For the election, see Joseph G. Rayback, Free Soil: The Election of 1848 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1978). For the Democratic Party, see Yonatan Eyal, The Young America Movement and the Transformation of the Democratic Party, 1828–1861 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). For the Whig Party, see Thomas Brown, Politics and Statesmanship: Essays on the American Whig Party (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
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