he rational skills Lincoln was honing on the rambunctious Illinois law circuit proved extremely useful when he applied them to the surrounding economic and social turbulence that confronted him as he entered national politics in the 1840s.
The American market economy veered between boom and bust. The Panic of 1837 initiated a recession that was one of the worst in US history. Economic instability gave Whigs like Lincoln an opportunity to attack the Democrats’ policies of free trade, hard currency, and the depositing of federal funds in state banks. Lincoln branded the Democratic program as dangerously decentered and corrupt. He and his fellow Whigs called for a restored central bank, a national currency, a protective tariff, and government funding of internal improvements.
This program attracted many new voters in the 1840s. The party won the White House with William Henry Harrison in 1840 and Zachary Taylor in 1848, and came close in 1844, when Henry Clay lost to the Democrat James K. Polk. In these hard-fought elections, which saw tremendous voter turnouts, both parties faced the challenge of appealing to an unruly electorate that included large numbers of young men casting what was called their virgin vote.1
The battle for the youth vote was waged in circus-like political campaigns and raucous election days filled with drinking, brawling, screaming, and bonfires. Whigs created folk symbols—from the log cabins and raccoons of the William Henry Harrison campaign to the “monster” torchlight demonstrations of the Zachary Taylor one—that had huge appeal for the masses. However, even as Lincoln witnessed the political power of popular symbols, he felt a strong need to bring under control the often anarchic energies of what he called the “shrewd wild boys” who made up a large segment of voters.2
He knew that these voters were, in the main, opposed to extreme stances on the most divisive issue of the day: slavery. Although he was appalled by the threatened westward spread of slavery, as a US congressman from December 1847 to March 1849 he carefully avoided radical statements on slavery, choosing instead to remain publicly restrained. In Congress he learned how, as a left-leaning moderate from central Illinois, he was well positioned to address the nation’s deepening divisions.
SEEKING SHELTER FROM ECONOMIC STORMS
The ravages that the Panic of 1837 inflicted on the nation had a special impact on Lincoln. As a Whig legislator in Illinois, he ardently promoted government spending on internal improvements. Just before the recession struck, he had helped pass a bill, the Internal Improvements Act of 1837, that called for more than $10 million to be invested in railroads and canals. The subsequent recession drove Illinois to near bankruptcy. The Whig program seemed to be in disarray. While Lincoln’s psychological breakdown in early 1841 resulted mainly from romantic difficulties, the bottoming out of the Illinois economy appears to have contributed to his suicidal depression.
Lincoln also witnessed the destructive effects of the financial crisis as a lawyer. A full 55 percent of his law cases—more than 2,800 in all—were related to debt litigation. In the brief period when the federal bankruptcy law was in effect (1842–43), he and Stephen T. Logan handled 72 bankruptcy cases.3
Witnessing the economic downturn drove Lincoln to fresh political action. One of his most prominent early political speeches was his May 1839 assault on President Martin Van Buren’s proposal for a subtreasury system (which, despite opposition like Lincoln’s, went into effect the next year). In the aftermath of Andrew Jackson’s dismantling of the Bank of the United States, Van Buren called for the establishment of “pet banks” in states that would become repositories of federal funds in the form of hard currency. The system, in the view of Lincoln, fostered inefficiency and corruption. Taking paper money out of circulation and demanding specie (hard money), he declared, would cause “distress, ruin, bankruptcy and beggary.”4 Putting federal money under the watch of minor government officials invited criminality. He gave facts and statistics to back his claim that the typical subtreasury director would be constantly tempted to pilfer funds and abscond with them as fast as the Irishman in a popular song whose cork legs ran away with him. Lincoln’s speech culminated in his sensational image of “the lava of political corruption,” alive with devils, that flowed from the Van Buren White House in the form of the subtreasury plan.
Lincoln continued his attacks on the Democrats’ economic policies throughout the 1840s. Those policies, however, actually gave a boost to him and his fellow Whigs. Michael Holt affirms that the Panic of 1837 “was the pivotal episode in the growth of the Whig Party.”5 The Whigs charged that the successive Democratic presidents—Andrew Jackson for two terms, followed by Martin Van Buren—had caused the American economy to unravel. Whigs offered alternatives to Jacksonian economic principles: free trade would be replaced by a protective tariff, the insistence on specie by an openness to paper money in the form of a national currency, and the subtreasury system by a restored national bank.
Lincoln’s economic philosophy was close to that of America’s leading economist, Henry C. Carey. It appears that Lincoln was familiar with Carey’s landmark book Principles of Political Economy (1837).6 Carey was an unofficial economic adviser to Lincoln during the Civil War, sending him letters of advice. One of Carey’s fundamental ideas was the necessity of a protective tariff to stimulate the growth of American industries. Carey noted that American industrial production faltered at times when tariff protection was weak and revived when it was strong. Free trade, Carey insisted, created waste, because paying the costs of transporting goods from abroad resulted in higher prices on those goods when they were sold in the United States. The tariff, by increasing the price of foreign goods, provided an incentive to American mining and manufacturing.
Lincoln aired similar views in a note on the tariff that he wrote in 1846. He argued that only goods that were impossible or expensive to produce in America, such as coffee, must be imported from abroad. Most products, he argued, could be produced at home. The cost of these American products, in his view, would be far lower than foreign ones, to which the cost of shipping, storage, insurance, and so on must be included. Even more strongly than Carey, he emphasized the labor theory of value—that is, the idea that the value of a product should be tied as closely as possible to the actual labor that went into making it. Lincoln wanted to reduce the role of the middleman in the production and sale of goods. He applied the term useless labour to “all carrying, & incidents of carrying, of articles from the place of their production, to a distant place for consumption, which articles could be produced of as good quality, in sufficient quantity, and with as little labour, at the place of consumption, as at the place carried from.” He identified three types of work: “useful labour, useless labour and idleness.” Because only the first of these has merit, he wrote, the aim should be to “drive useless labour and idleness out of existence.”7 Some have noted that Lincoln’s statements about labor move beyond standard Whig economics. Actually, these statements put him in the company of radical labor reformers of the 1840s, such as George Lippard, who contrasted the “upper ten” and the “lower million”—that is, the so-called “idle” rich who make money off the work of others, and the mass of toiling Americans, who do the actual work.8 Whitman in the 1855 Leaves of Grass made the same distinction: “Many sweating, ploughing, thrashing, and then the chaff for payment receiving, / A few idly owning, and they the wheat continually claiming.”9
Lincoln gave his customary spin on the notion of work. His longtime habit was to trace ideas to origins—pull them up, in his metaphor, by the roots and illuminate them by the fires of the mind.10 His ideas behind labor were no exception. In this case, he seemed to have been influenced by another leading economist, Francis Wayland, whose book Political Economy “Lincoln ate up, digested, and assimilated,” according to Herndon.11 Wayland, to support his point that “Labor has been made necessary to our happiness,” cites Genesis 3:19. Wayland writes, “The universal law of our existence, is, ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat thy bread, until thou return to the ground.’”12 Similarly, Lincoln, in describing labor, writes, “In the early days of the world, the Almighty said to the first of our race ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.’”13
Lincoln went on to give this passage a distinct antislavery meaning. He memorably paraphrased it in the Second Inaugural Address, his antislavery masterpiece.14 He emphasized it to a Baptist delegation to the White House, saying, “To read in the Bible, as the word of God himself, that ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,[’] and to preach there-from that, ‘In the sweat of other mans faces shalt thou eat bread,’ to my mind can scarcely be reconciled with honest sincerity.”15
His fixation on the passage marks a difference between him and Henry Carey. Both men connected antislavery arguments with economics, but in different ways. Carey was a hardheaded pragmatist who ignored the humanistic or moral issues surrounding slavery and focused solely on financial ones. In his view, slavery would disappear when a strong tariff was in place for a sustained time. His idea was that the reason the South had become so dependent on trade with England and other foreign powers was that the slave system tended to exhaust its lands, forcing it to sell as much cotton and tobacco abroad as possible in order to buy foreign cloth and metal products. With the implementation of a tariff, Carey argued, the South would be spurred to tap into its rich iron reserves and produce metal products and textile factories on its own. Manufacturing would grow, and the South’s slave-dependent culture would eventually be replaced by self-sufficient communities where slave labor would be de-emphasized. Early in the Civil War, Carey wrote Lincoln, saying that the war was due to the mismanaged US economy. Carey explained: “Had the policy of Mr Clay, as embodied in the tariff of 1842, been maintained, there could have been no secession, and for the reason that the southern mineral region would long since have obtained control of the planting one.” By restoring a high tariff, Carey continued, “we may retrace our steps and secure the permanent maintenance of the Union”; but “if the British free trade system be readopted—the Union must, before the lapse of many years, be rent into numerous fragments, mere instruments in the hands of foreign powers.”16
Lincoln’s antislavery interpretation of the tariff idea was more humanistic than Carey’s. By maintaining that one should earn the rewards of sweat from one’s own brow, he was invoking an image of labor that he would later apply to slavery. Lincoln came to pity the unrewarded labor and physical and mental suffering endured by the enslaved.
In his writing on economics during the 1840s, however, he did not explicitly link the “sweat from the brow” trope to slavery. Indeed, he shied away from making extended statements on slavery, and when he did, as in his proposal in Congress for the gradual abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, he did so in a moderate way.
Given his lifelong hatred of slavery, why did he recoil from making any long antislavery speech early on? The answer lies partly in his role as a politician trying to appeal to a largely young American electorate. Before he would dare to raise the controversial issue of slavery with American voters, he had to learn how to appeal to these voters, who were often rowdy—and racist—young men.
THE BATTLE FOR YOUNG AMERICA
“We have all heard of Young America. He is the most current youth of the age.”17 So Lincoln declared in 1860 in the second part of his continuing lecture on discoveries and inventions. He devoted most of the lecture to contrasting the young American—smart, cosmopolitan, eager to spread freedom, up to date on modern inventions and fads—with the “old fogy,” stodgy and looking backward. He traced Young America to the youngest of all humans, as recorded in Genesis: Adam. Lincoln pointed out that Adam came up with the first invention, a fig leaf apron to cover his nakedness. From there, Lincoln followed the long trail of subsequent discoveries and inventions: speech, writing, printing, steam power, and others, each of them a leap forward.
Lincoln here aligned Young America with Whig-Republican principles. Just as in the earlier part of his lecture on inventions he had defined humans as improving animals, so his linkage here of Young America with progress through inventiveness reflected his effort to summon American youth—a large part of the voting population—to the Whig-Republican vantage point. He had been trying to do so for years. His chief competitor in the struggle was the Democrat Stephen A. Douglas.
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