Between 1863 and 1865 the American economy in the North grew from a preindustrial society to a rapidly growing industrial society that by the end of the century would rival Great Britain as the leading industrial economy in the World. The speed of the growing industrial revolution in the Northern states proved breathtaking, and the region had Lincoln’s wartime economic policies to thank for it. An incipient prewar movement toward industrialization was strongly accelerated by federal government expenditures for the war. In his Thanksgiving Day Proclamation of 1863, Lincoln marked this spectacular growth, reporting that population and wealth had grown substantially despite battlefield losses of men and treasure. He said that the prospects for future growth were increasingly positive.
In his Message to Congress in December 1863, Lincoln reported: “It is easy to see that under the sharp discipline of civil war the nation is beginning a new life.” He urged Congress to recognize that foreign immigration was growing despite the war and proposed legislation to encourage even more immigration to build the economy. A year later he reported that the economy had experienced great growth of railroad tracks and railroad cars to provision Union armies as well as the Northern civilian population. He also reported on a substantial increase in telegraph lines to provide instant communication between the battlefield and the home front. Most important, Lincoln said, “We do not approach exhaustion in the most important branch of national resources—that of living men. . . . [W]e have more men now than we had when the war began.” Lincoln went on to say, “Material resources are now more complete and abundant than ever. The national resources, then, are unexhausted, and, as we believe, inexhaustible.”
Lincoln was right to celebrate the striking increase in immigration and the role immigrants played in the growth of the American economy in the North—and in winning the war for the Union. The total number of new immigrants, which was fewer than 100,000 per year in 1861 and 1862, increased to 176,000 in 1863, 193,000 in 1864, and 248,000 in 1865. Most of the immigrants came from Great Britain, Ireland, and Germany; most were young men between the ages of fifteen and forty; and most were readily available to work as laborers in the expanding manufacturing sector of the economy. Notably, one out of ten immigrants in 1864 enlisted in the army or navy as soon as they arrived. The American Railroad Journal reported that despite the efforts of foreign countries to discourage emigration, the movement to the United States of able-bodied male workers continued to grow because wages in the US Northern states were three to four times greater than in Europe. The promise of upward mobility, so critical in Lincoln’s thinking, here provided the same opportunity to rise for a new generation of able-bodied immigrants.
It was not only foreign-born immigrants that benefited from the economic boom. When Lincoln took office in 1861, half the people in the United States lived on farms, and three quarters of the population lived and worked in rural areas. During the war, economic growth increased rapidly in urban areas—most notably in Chicago and other northwestern cities that were benefiting from their new railroad connections to the rest of the nation. The supply of farm labor was reduced when men left the nation’s farms to enlist in the Northern army, but that did not slow agricultural production. Instead, it fostered innovation to meet the increased need for agricultural machinery on farms. Inventors had long since devoted countless hours to creating agricultural labor-saving machinery. Now they were being produced and used on increasingly productive farms. And the government’s Homestead Act made land available to farmers and immigrants to expand agriculture. By the end of 1864, Lincoln could boast that 1.5 million acres of public land had been sold under the Homestead Act.
Lincoln was not a passive bystander in supporting and monitoring the economic growth of the nation. Establishing the new federal Department of Agriculture was one more of the president’s aggressive efforts to spur the domestic economy, even in wartime. In his first Annual Message in 1861, while acknowledging that the nation’s farmers were by disposition “independent,” Lincoln had bemoaned the absence of an agency to represent agricultural interests at the federal level. Here was yet another example of astonishing personal and political growth for the once isolated young farm laborer who perhaps remained haunted by his father’s chronic difficulties with both faulty land titles and imperfectly planted crops in the era before federal assistance and advice were even a dream. “Agriculture,” as he lamented in December 1861, “confessedly the largest interest of the nation, has, not a department, nor a bureau, but a clerkship only, assigned to it in the Government.” Though he considered it “fortunate that this great interest is so independent in its nature as to not have demanded and extorted more from the government,” he believed there would be “general advantage” to elevating federal attention to the agrarian sector from which he himself had risen.
Five months later, legislation was on Lincoln’s desk for his signature to establish a new government department focused on agriculture. It was not yet cabinet level—that would not come for another generation—but the president took immense pride in its rapid progress. The department created an extensive mailing list of farmers nationwide—“our most valuable citizens”—and made available to them expert advice on the latest cultivation techniques. The department began an agricultural library and would soon be ready to distribute “seeds, cereals, plants, and cuttings,” a kind of direct federal aid to the farm community. By late 1864 Lincoln would proudly describe the young agency as “peculiarly the people’s Department, in which they feel more directly concerned than in any other.”
In its first monthly report in July 1863, the Department of Agriculture said, “No nation has ever developed such agricultural resources as the United States. . . . The amount of capital it has invested in lands and farming implements is nearly seven billions of dollars.” The Department of Agriculture reported that the increase in wartime demand for agricultural products was the primary factor in the doubling of the output of American farms from $707 million in 1862 to $1.4 billion in 1864.
Lincoln served with great skill as a principal architect of the expanded American economy during the Civil War. The Northern economy grew rapidly in each year of the war, stimulated by increasing government expenditures and supported by government receipts from taxes and borrowing. Lincoln’s military and economic programs played a substantial role in stimulating the civilian economy. As government expenditures increased year by year, the economy first grew substantially and then exponentially. The result was the great boom of 1863–1865, and ordinary Americans reaped the benefits. It is no surprise that the substantial increase in federal government expenditures resulted in raising the national income in the Northern states to more than $4 billion by 1865.
The federal government’s stimulus programs under Lincoln provided the basis for the great thrust forward of the new Industrial Revolution in the Northern states both during and after the end of the Civil War. Lincoln’s domestic policies provided the first clear example of the positive role that could be played by the federal government to encourage the economic growth of the nation.
Of course, these successes came at a staggering human cost. Historians now believe that 750,000 Union and Confederate soldiers lost their lives in the Civil War—greater than all American wars combined through the Vietnam era. What sustained Lincoln throughout the conflict, notwithstanding the horrifying military casualties, was the belief that the Union cause was just. In his Inaugural Address on March 4, 1861, Lincoln had insisted, “Intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance on Him, who has never yet forsaken this favored land, are still competent to adjust, in the best way, all our present difficulties.”
Once the seven states of the lower South seceded and created the Confederate States of America, Lincoln had understood that there was little likelihood of preserving the Union and sustaining the democratic society envisioned by the Declaration of Independence without war. He was clear-eyed and practical about what needed to be done. Rather than ceding control of the
South to the Confederacy, he insisted on maintaining a federal presence where he could, announcing that federal control over military and civilian facilities in the seceded states would not be relinquished. He fought the Civil War to retain or reclaim them. And he labored to build a future domestic economy based on free land and government-supported education, railroad expansion, and agricultural improvement. Lincoln never doubted that the Union would be preserved. As he declared in August 1863: “Let us diligently apply the means, never doubting that a just God, in his own good time, will give us the rightful result.”
Five. WHOLLY EVIL OR WHOLLY GOOD
NOT QUITE AN ABOLITIONIST
ABRAHAM LINCOLN ENTHUSIASTICALLY committed himself to the ideal of free labor, criticized the abhorrent aspects of mob rule, and championed the boundless opportunities embedded in his generous interpretation of the American Dream. But he did not embrace outright abolitionism as a means of enlarging the pool of dreamers to include African Americans—at least not until the final years of his presidency. Whether his attitude stemmed from a natural resistance to radicalism, a politically calculated desire to remain in the mainstream, or an initial resistance to racial equality has remained a matter of historical debate ever since. Perhaps the answer lies with some or all of the above.
One thing, however, is certain. Lincoln hated slavery, not only because it subjected one race to unspeakable cruelty, but also because it placed slaves in a fixed condition for life, unable to advance, denied any right to upward mobility. Slavery made a mockery of the American Dream and the right it promised to all Americans: the ability to work oneself into the middle class. “I am naturally anti-slavery,” he told Kentucky governor Thomas Bramlette and a Frankfort journalist when the two men visited the White House in 1864. “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and so feel.”
Lincoln’s early opposition to slavery was based on his settled conviction that every person—black or white—was entitled to receive full payment for his labor. As a young man, Lincoln was offended by the notion that any man should labor without pay. As a freshman US congressman in 1849, Lincoln recoiled when a black waiter—just a few dollars shy of buying his own freedom after years of paying his master off—was violently seized by the police right in Lincoln’s own boardinghouse, after the owner of the slave cruelly decided to sell him south. Lincoln and his fellow lawmakers were forced to face the violence of slavery even in the capital of the United States. But Lincoln did not sit idly by; instead, he joined in an effort to overturn the seizure legislatively and, when that failed, helped to raise the funds to buy the waiter’s freedom. A longtime apostle of free white labor, Lincoln thus extended his advocacy to a (nearly) free black laborer. He was genuinely incensed that a man who had so faithfully paid the increments to secure his own freedom could be sold as a piece of property before the final installment could be raised, allowing his master to keep the waiter’s contributions and reap a further windfall by selling him to another owner. This surely aroused Lincoln’s sense of fairness. As he later expressed it, “Fair play is a jewell.”
Lincoln’s embrace of antislavery was a matter of personal belief and a commitment to fairness, and it became a singular political focus as soon as he reentered politics in 1854. Lincoln had based his return on opposing Senator Stephen Douglas’s newly enacted Kansas-Nebraska Act, which authorized white citizens of each of the new territories to vote to welcome slavery if a majority wished it. Lincoln insisted from 1854 onward that the extension of slavery should be outlawed in all US territories, knowing full well that it would place the institution “in the course of ultimate extinction.” Speaking in Chicago shortly after he became a candidate for the US Senate in 1858, Lincoln declared to a burst of applause: “I have always hated slavery, I think as much as any Abolitionist,” and used the phrase ultimate extinction no fewer than seven times.
At his final debate with Stephen Douglas in 1858, Lincoln presented a clear and eloquent statement on human rights, explaining why, though he was still opposed to immediate abolition, he remained committed to free labor for blacks as well as whites:
That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, “You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.” No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.
That was indeed the issue. There is a clear difference, Lincoln explained, between those who believe in the “common right of humanity” and the “divine right of kings,” a disparity that had been in place “from the beginning of time.” Lincoln put himself firmly on the side of humanity and asserted that slavery must be placed “in the course of ultimate extinction,” while the Democrats continued “to avow a policy looking to its perpetuation.” Lincoln was clearly against slavery as both immoral and as an impediment to extending economic opportunity. Even so, Lincoln said there should be “no war, no violence” in order to achieve freedom—no convulsive act of outright abolition. His solution at that time was to end slavery through attrition by preventing any and all extension of slavery into the new American territories west of the Mississippi River.
While Lincoln always believed that slavery was immoral, immediate abolition was not in his lexicon until 1863, after the country had been consumed by the war and violence he had once hoped to avoid. Before that, however, Lincoln conceded that since slavery was protected in the Constitution, abolition implicitly required upheaval, maybe even revolution. And to young Abraham Lincoln, finding his way in the political landscape, the adherents of immediate abolition seemed to encourage violence as a means to an end: violence in pursuit of a virtuous outcome, perhaps, but nonetheless anathema to a politician who believed sincerely in the Constitution and the law. The abolitionist movement that seemed to encourage lawlessness and incite agitation, however horrifically violent the system of brutality it sought to overturn, was not for Lincoln.
Lincoln’s rejection of the abolitionist movement did not mean that he was not vocal about bringing an end to slavery. In his earliest days in political life, the future president was clear and direct in saying that “the institution of slavery” was “founded on both injustice and bad policy.” Even this minimalist statement placed Lincoln in the liberal wing of the Illinois Whig Party. But distancing himself from the vocal abolitionist movement ensured that he would remain a viable political force. From that time forward, Lincoln pursued a political career devoted to arresting the spread of slavery into the western territories. This was for Lincoln not a compromise but a solution based on a balanced combination of his opposition to slavery as immoral and his effort to find a peaceful solution that would put slavery “in the course of ultimate extinction.” If slavery were banned from the western territories, they would eventually become free states, electing antislave representatives to Congress, and creating a supermajority in favor of putting an end to slavery in the United States.
Lincoln changed little in a quarter of a century of thinking about the impact of Southern slavery on economic and political opportunity for the Northern white population. He was also consistent in his concern about the potential for unlawful behavior by extremist proponents and opponents of slavery. One of his early demonstrations of hand-wringing over these thorny issues came in his speech before the Springfield Young Men’s Lyceum in 1838, when he was a few days short of his twenty-ninth birthday.
Lincoln’s speech reveals the limits to his ongoing
struggle with what he clearly regarded at the time as twin evils, each likely to foment violence: support of slavery and support of immediate abolition. He expressed equal disdain for the “increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgement of Courts; and the worse than savage mobs, for the executive ministers of justice.” Lincoln went on to remind his listeners: “Accounts of outrages committed by mobs, form the every-day news of the times. They have pervaded the country, from New England to Louisiana. . . . [N]either are they confined to the slaveholding, or the nonslaveholding States. Alike, they spring up among the pleasure hunting masters of Southern slaves, and the order loving citizens of the land of steady habits. Whatever, then, their cause may be, it is common to the whole country.”
Lincoln chose not “to recount the horrors of all of them.” It would be “useless” to do so. But he went on to mention a few anyway. He was particularly horrified, he said, that “negroes, suspected of conspiring to raise an insurrection,” had recently been “caught up and hanged” in Mississippi, together with “white men, supposed to be leagued with the negroes . . . till, dead men were seen literally dangling from the boughs of trees upon every road side.” But even atrocities like this had not yet converted Lincoln to abolitionism. He was not yet willing to support the idea of “positive violence” for a good cause against “negative violence” for a bad cause.
A Just and Generous Nation Page 10
