Military life was one outlet for ambitious young men, but Lincoln had no hope of ever securing a recommendation to West Point, even if he contemplated such an opportunity. He did enjoy his experience as a military volunteer in Illinois’s brief war against the Indian chief Black Hawk in 1832. Lincoln joined up principally because all the young men in his village did so, but surely not far from his mind was the knowledge that his own grandfather, also named Abraham, had been killed by an Indian attack in Virginia years before. Had not his future father, then still a child, killed the Indian who shot the first Abraham Lincoln, Thomas would almost certainly have been the next victim—and the future president would never have been born.
Lincoln later said that his “surprise” election as captain by his fellow militiamen constituted his biggest honor to date. As late as 1860, he insisted that he had not “since had any success in life which gave him so much satisfaction.” Many young men gain unforgettable life experiences in the maelstrom of war, but one reason Lincoln so enjoyed his military service—he even reenlisted as a private when his original term of service (and status as captain) lapsed—is that it required no real test against the enemy. Lincoln’s war was entirely free of violence.
After his service ended in July 1832, Lincoln returned to New Salem and wisely chose to become a lawyer. The law offered a life of rationality. Finally, he could define and pursue his destiny based on talent and energy, not by the accidents of birth and blood or the physical endowments of brute strength and a fast temper. He had chosen a profession where success depended instead on rational thinking, orderly presentation of intelligent argument, and quick wit. The law provided not only a reliable source of income and an open path for career development, but also an opportunity for public service and a political platform. Perhaps most appealing of all, he could use the law to help establish order in his own life in a still chaotic frontier society. As Lincoln had come to understand, order and structure were needed to facilitate personal opportunity and upward mobility. At one and the same time, Lincoln made a personal career decision and an ideological commitment to the “rule of law” as one of the most important pillars of a democratic society.
From the first, Lincoln sought a degree of order and equity through his new law practice: he seldom refused paying clients, even if he found their economic claims dubious and political views obnoxious. Lawyer Lincoln routinely handled corporate cases, divorces, bankruptcies, land-title disputes, and debt collection as well the defense of people accused of violent crimes.
Some of the clues to Lincoln’s thinking about politics and government became apparent in the way in which attorney Lincoln argued some of the legal cases he took on before his return to politics in 1854. Many were routine, but the occasional case reflected Lincoln’s belief that all clients (including, once, a slave owner seeking to recover his “runaways”) deserved the best available legal representation. Other cases gave Lincoln the opportunity to propound his belief that government-sponsored infrastructure improvements were crucial to the economic development of the nation and would prove beneficial to its citizens, however poor or wealthy.
Lincoln probably took great pleasure in winning perhaps the most famous and influential decision of his legal career in the 1857 “Effie Afton Case” (officially Hurd vs. Rock Island Bridge Co.). The owners of the steamboat Effie Afton had sued the railroad company that had erected a bridge across the Mississippi River between Illinois and Iowa. Because the ship had crashed into the bridge, the company claimed the span was an unnatural impediment and that the railroad was responsible for its losses. This case gave Lincoln the opportunity to argue that the proliferation of railroads—the great economic development of the decade—was positive and irreversible. In the future, ships would have to make way for trains and bridges, not vice versa. The case presented a challenge to Lincoln’s nimble legal mind: he cleverly demanded proof that the captain had shown reasonable judgment in navigating and piloting his vessel. Absent such proof, the trial ended with a hung jury that absolved Lincoln’s bridge-owning client from liability. The presiding judge dismissed the case. The decision created important case law for Illinois, establishing a precedent that accepted the inevitability of vast improvements to the nation’s infrastructure.
Lincoln’s work as a lawyer convinced him that governments could play a positive role in supporting economic opportunity for all citizens. And his entry into politics allowed him to take an active part in these efforts. He first won election to the state legislature in 1834 and promptly became a leading advocate for state investments in the roads and canals that not only provided jobs and other economic benefits but also, in the long term, created pathways for people like himself to move out of the remote frontier into the limitless world of urbanized society.
As if practicing what he preached, Lincoln in April 1837 packed up his meager belongings and moved to Springfield, Illinois, a flourishing city filled with opportunity unlike any in which he had ever lived. In 1839 the city would, with legislator Lincoln’s support, become the new capital of Illinois. By some macabre twist of fate, Lincoln was twenty-eight years old on the day he moved and had precisely twenty-eight years, to the day, left in his life. Now Lincoln rebranded himself as a rising star in Springfield in both politics and the law.
Interestingly—and, as it turned out, fleetingly—Lincoln at this early point in his career in the Illinois General Assembly promoted the idea of extending the right to vote to females. He was, though, still far from endorsing the idea of granting the suffrage to one and all (he made no mention of free people of color). Being born female in the first half of the nineteenth century, especially female and poor, relegated one to yet another kind of American slavery. By the time Lincoln reached national fame, however, and despite having served in Congress during the first well-publicized women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York, the cause had faded from his political consciousness. Just as the more enlightened founding fathers had called for a gradual end to slavery, only to retreat from that position in the wake of opposition from wealthy southern aristocrats such as Jefferson, the male leaders of the next century retreated from their brief flirtation with women’s rights. The founding mothers encountered continuing opposition to their calls for equal rights for women. For another half century, serious-minded progressive women were often mockingly depicted in caricatures as promiscuous antifamily advocates.
As a young politician, Lincoln’s central idea was to combine ingenuity and ambition with proposals for government support for positive infrastructure programs. Innovation remained key. New Salem’s pathetic little Sangamon River appeared to be forever doomed to the status of a mere stream. Lincoln developed and sought a patent for a clever if impractical device to raise vessels up in its shallow waters. Lincoln may have gone on to politics and the law, but he still believed that his invention could improve the aspirations of river villages like New Salem to become thriving ports by investing in what would later be called infrastructure improvements. It is no surprise that Lincoln became the first—and only—president to hold a federal patent, even if Scientific American said of his device, on the eve of Lincoln’s 1861 inauguration, “[W]e hope the author of it will have a better success in presiding as Chief Magistrate over the people of the entire Union than he has had as an inventor.”
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Lincoln entered politics as a Whig, and more particularly as a follower of the revered political lion Henry Clay. Clay, who served as a congressman, senator, secretary of state, and Speaker of the House, was a nationally renowned politician who ran unsuccessfully for president five times. He was the nation’s leading proponent of a strong Union and a strengthened federal government. By the mid-1820s, Clay had devised a comprehensive political program under the nicely marketable label of the “American System.” And Lincoln embraced it enthusiastically—even though, it should be noted, it also included the idea of freeing, and then colonizing, African American slaves.
Clay’s American System fe
atured three major components: a national bank, to provide the nation with a sound currency and stable financial system; high tariffs, to encourage the growth of domestic manufacturing; and federal spending, financed by the tariff to create roads, bridges, canals, and other transportation infrastructure to aid in the development of the domestic economy. When Lincoln ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the Illinois General Assembly in 1832, he said, “My politics are short and sweet, like the old woman’s dance. I am in favor of a national bank. I am in favor of the internal improvement system and a high protective tariff.” Behind what seemed like a quip lurked a deft summary of the three key economic issues that divided the nation, and the political parties, in the decades leading up to the Civil War, before the issue of slavery overwhelmed them all. Lincoln’s “old woman’s dance” was in fact astutely choreographed; it was a reiteration of Clay’s entire program.
Importantly, Lincoln understood that Clay saw his American System as something that would aid the common people by promoting economic development. Clay always claimed a concern for ordinary citizens. And he certainly believed in America as a land of opportunity. As Lincoln surely knew, Clay was responsible for putting the term “self-made man” into political circulation.
When Lincoln embraced Clay’s economic “system,” he did so not out of a sense of nationalism but because, in very practical terms, he thought Clay’s program would aid ordinary working people, people like himself, those striving to become, and remain, middle class. The whole nation had witnessed the vast benefits that accrued to the citizens of New York from the construction of the nearly four-hundred-mile Erie Canal between 1817 and 1825. The engineering marvel opened up the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean and helped transform New York City into the most important seaport in the entire country. As an inhabitant of a still undeveloped frontier state—a land bereft of decent roads and dependably navigable rivers, to say nothing of canals and railroads—Lincoln wanted something of the same for Illinois. Lincoln supported state funding for economic development throughout his career in the legislature. Even though the state government boasted few resources at its disposal, Lincoln’s major undertaking when he entered the Illinois state assembly was to push through an ambitious package of “internal improvements,” partially state-financed roads, bridges, canals, and railroads. Lincoln’s program nearly bankrupted Illinois, but its high fiscal and political cost never changed his view that government should engage proactively to build, expand, and provide opportunities for working people to improve their economic status.
Early on, Lincoln saw a need for positive federal government action: to provide infrastructure that would allow the expansion of internal commerce, to guarantee a sound currency to enable economic transactions, and to protect homegrown manufacturing from the threat of (mostly British) manufactured goods from abroad. The government’s job was to clear the path for its citizens to get ahead. By the standards of his time—when the federal government’s size and budget were minimal—Lincoln was in favor of an activist federal government, on the grounds that a primary purpose of the United States was to support the economic opportunities of its citizens.
Even at this still early stage of his political career, Lincoln found a way to address the question of building and maintaining the nation’s infrastructure practically as well as philosophically. He acknowledged that there was a need to recognize that certain internal improvements funded by the federal government would be more beneficial to some states, while others would benefit other states. Somehow, the competition, even then, often pitted southern interests against northern—especially when politicians began proposing plans for a transcontinental railroad. Yet Lincoln shunned the human tendency to characterize one’s own self-interest as “good” and others’ self-interest as “evil.” As Lincoln saw matters, “The true rule, in determining to embrace, or reject any thing, is not whether it have any evil in it; but whether it have more of evil, than of good. There are few things wholly evil, or wholly good. Almost every thing, especially of governmental policy, is an inseparable compound of the two; so that our best judgment of the preponderance between them is continually demanded.”
In his first and only term in the US Congress, Lincoln forcefully presented the view that the federal government should play its proper role in financing infrastructure. The freshman congressman argued on the floor of the US House of Representatives on June 20, 1848, “[T]he question of internal improvements . . . can no longer be avoided . . . and the friends of the policy must now battle.” Lincoln declared there was an important role for both the federal government and the state government. Facing the threat of a public-works veto from conservative president Democrat James Knox Polk, he proposed a compromise: “Let the nation take hold of the larger works, and the states the smaller ones.”
Congressman-elect Abraham Lincoln, ca. 1846. This is his first photograph, taken by Nicholas H. Shepherd in Springfield, Illinois, after Lincoln won his House seat on the pro–internal improvements Whig ticket.
NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS PHOTOGRAPH
If the drive for economic advancement and material progress represented one great thrust of America’s early national life, then the other great thrust aimed toward increasing political democracy. In the years leading up to Lincoln’s entry into politics, most states had expanded their suffrage to include not just property owners but all free white males. The expansion of voting rights in the decades since the founding had given a new more raucous and populist cast to national politics. No one better epitomized this new populism than President Andrew Jackson. On the occasion of his inauguration in 1829, he famously opened the doors of the White House to one and all. Farmers stood on the fine chairs in their muddy boots and cut souvenir slices from the carpets and drapery. Damage to the presidential residence by the end of the affair amounted to thousands of dollars. But the point had been made. “The people” were now in charge.
Many historians have seen in Jackson a kind of founding father of the modern Democratic Party. But on economic policy, the positions of Jackson’s party bore a closer resemblance to those of today’s Republicans than to those of today’s Democrats. The Jacksonian Democratic Party was, in our present-day terms, “anti–big government,” viewing with deep suspicion economic development, urbanization, and virtually all the other developments that the Whigs hailed as “progress.” Jackson’s economic policy approach was of a piece with his skepticism about what we would call today the “public sector.”
Jackson’s attack on the activist American System—proposed by Clay and supported by Lincoln—was manifested in his campaign against the Second Bank of the United States, which forced its liquidation by 1838. Jackson’s suspicion of the bank carried with it an element of sectionalism. He thought the bank disproportionately benefited northern financial interests. The bank had suffered its share of problems, but on the whole it lent a vital stability to the nation’s financial system. Jackson’s destruction of the bank would condemn the nation to currency instability and a terrible cycle of booms and busts for decades to come. Jackson also demonstrated his opposition to internal improvements by vetoing bills to provide federal aid for the construction of roads. Jackson may have been elected as a military hero, but the president was a plantation owner from North Carolina, and as such he came almost naturally to oppose the key elements of Clay’s American System.
The most explosive issue facing American politicians North and South in the Jacksonian era proved to be the tariff. Tariffs were the financial centerpiece of Clay’s American System. As Speaker of the House of Representatives, he had engineered passage of a major tariff bill in 1824—the first true protective tariff in American history. From the start, much of the South opposed tariffs because they were designed to protect manufacturing, largely a northern enterprise. At the same time, in the southern view, tariffs threatened the southern economy, which was critically dependent on export trade with Great Britain. Britain was by far the United States’ largest t
rading partner, and the most important American export was southern cotton to British factories.
It should come as no surprise that the southern politicians found political arguments to support their sectional economic interests, opposing not only high tariffs but also federal government expenditures for internal improvements. Southern politicians questioned the constitutionality of such ambitious federal action. In the south, the idea of public investment in infrastructure remained largely an alien notion. Southerners argued that these activist government programs unduly benefited Northern financial and industrial interests. At the time, southern legislatures were firmly controlled by slave owners, who had little economic interest in public improvements, saw no need to provide an active economy for a free labor force, and had a substantial ability to surround themselves with luxury within the private preserves of their plantations. The southern political mind increasingly viewed both tariffs and internal improvements as northern ideas that would not benefit its section in the least. Pursuing social mobility through internal improvements provided no positive benefit, in the view of slave owners who dominated southern economic and political society.
A Just and Generous Nation Page 3
