Lincoln Unbound (16 page)

Lincoln cited a Virginia clergyman who had noted dismissively that the Declaration's statement of universal equality is not found in the Bible but comes “from Saint Voltaire, and was baptized by Thomas Jefferson.” The man of the cloth went on to argue that he had never seen two men who were actually equal, although he admitted—­he must have styled himself a wit—­that “he never saw the Siamese twins.” Lincoln observed archly, “This sounds strangely in republican America,” and insisted that “the like was not heard in the fresher days of the Republic.”

Distant from his own father, Lincoln felt a deep patriotic filial piety to “the fathers.” In the Lyceum address, he declared: “Let every man remember that to violate the law, is to trample on the blood of his father.” It is our duty to transmit “undecayed” our inheritance of constitutional liberty, out of “gratitude to our fathers, justice to ourselves, duty to posterity, and love for our species in general.” At Peoria, he said, “I love the sentiments of those old time men.” In a stirring Chicago speech in 1858, he spoke of the “iron men” of the past, of “those old men,” and “that old Declaration of Independence.”

A sense of loss suffuses his statements in the 1850s. At Peoria, he lamented that “Little by little, but steadily as a man's march to the grave, we have been giving up the OLD for the NEW faith.” He imagined what would have happened had Senator Pettit denigrated the Declaration during the Founding generation: “If it had been said in old Independence Hall, seventy-­eight years ago, the very door-keeper would have throttled the man and thrust him into the street.”

Lincoln sought to recapture what seemed to be slipping away, to catch the falling flag of our patriotic patrimony. “He endeavored to bring back things to the old land marks,” Joseph Gillespie wrote Herndon, “but he never would have attempted to invent and compose new systems. He had boldness enough when he found the building racked and going to decay to restore it to its original design but not to contrive a new & distinct edifice.” ­Lincoln wanted to “re-­adopt,” as he said at Peoria, the Declaration. The road to salvation ran through 1776, he argued in a gorgeous passage: “Our republican robe is soiled, and trailed in the dust. Let us re-­purify it. Let us turn and wash it white, in the spirit, if not the blood, of the Revolution.”

Lincoln believed that this renewal is exactly the purpose for which the Declaration had been intended. He had complicated feelings about Thomas Jefferson even though he categorized him as one of “those noble fathers—­Washington, Jefferson, and Madison.” Henry Clay argued that his was the party that truly continued in the tradition of Jefferson, and so did Lincoln. But Lincoln had no use for Jefferson the aristocrat, the hypocritical slaveholder and celebrant—­like Andrew Jackson—­of yeoman agriculture. It was Jefferson's Declaration that he adored.

Lincoln practically gushed in a 1859 letter to a Republican festival in Boston marking the anniversary of Jefferson's birth: “All honor to Jefferson—­to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single ­people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-­day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-­block to the very harbingers of re-­appearing tyranny and oppression.”

For Lincoln, the Declaration laid the philosophical foundation for the liberal capitalism he wanted to spread and vindicate. It made the case for human dignity and created the predicate for a system that endlessly developed human potential. It undergirded what Republicans extolled as “free-­labor civilization.”

Lincoln saw a biblical warrant for the natural rights the Declaration enunciated. As far back as roughly 1847, he wrote in notes for himself about tariff policy, “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.' ” It follows that all good things come from labor and “such things belong to those whose labour has produced them.” Except that “it has so happened in all ages of the world, that
some
have laboured, and
others
have, without labour, enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits. This is wrong, and should not continue. To [secure] each labourer the whole product of his ­labour, or as nearly as possible, is a most worthy object of any good government.”

In those notes, Lincoln ruminated on what he considered the wasted cost of transportation of bringing goods here from overseas. In the much more consequential debate over slavery, he returned again and again to the biblical injunction to live from your own sweat. He denounced “the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it.” In contrast, Lincoln defended the principle that “each individual is naturally entitled to do as he pleases with himself and the fruit of his labor.” Or in more down-­to-­earth terms, “I always thought that the man who made the corn should eat the corn.”

The truth of this proposition was obvious enough to be itself self-­evident. In a fragment written for himself probably in the late 1850s, Lincoln said it had been “made so plain by our good Father in Heaven, that all
feel
and
understand
it, even down to brutes and creeping insects. The ant, who has toiled and dragged a crumb to his nest, will furiously defend the fruit of his labor, against whatever robber assails him. So plain, that the most dumb and stupid slave that ever toiled for a master, does constantly
know
that he is wronged. So plain that no one, high or low, ever does mistake it, except in a plainly
selfish
way.”

This view accorded with the thought of the philosophical inspirer of the Declaration, John Locke. The late-­seventeenth-­century English philosopher posited an inalienable right to life and liberty that extended to a right to property. Most fundamentally, we all have an equal and natural right to the inalienable possession of ourselves. “For men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent, and infinitely wise maker,” Locke wrote, “they are his property, whose workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another's pleasure.” We extend ourselves to the outside world through work, and therefore acquire the right to property in particular things: “Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.”

It is this short chain of reasoning, legal scholar Bradford William Short argues, that binds the natural-­rights philosophy of the Declaration to the economic premises of Lincoln and his allies: “Free labor ideology
is
the theory of the inalienable right to life and liberty,” Short writes. “It is more than that too, of course, but it necessarily always includes the theory at least at its core, as one of its first premises.”

Lincoln and his allies believed they had seen this view of the world play out in the North, “a dynamic, expanding capitalist society, whose achievements and destiny were almost wholly the result of the dignity and opportunities which it offered the average laboring man,” as Eric Foner puts it.

The South begged to differ.

Historian John McCardell traces the development of proslavery thought from an emphasis on a biblical, paternalistic foundation to a frankly racist argument, as the leadership of the South shifted from the old seaboard to the rapidly growing interior. In 1845, South Carolina governor James Hammond wrote letters defending slavery to a British abolitionist. Referring to the Bible and history, he maintained that slavery was “a moral and humane institution, productive of the greatest political and social advantages,” including free ­people who were “higher toned and more deeply interested in preserving a stable and well ordered Government.” The argument had a distinctly antidemocratic key. Hammond boasted that in the South, “intelligence and wealth” didn't give way to the “reckless and unenlightened numbers.”

Soon there arose a more “scientific” defense of slavery. ­Alabama doctor Josiah Nott championed a version of it that he charmingly deemed “niggerology.” He dispensed with the ­Bible to argue that blacks and whites were two different species, and published a collection of ethnological writing called
Types of Mankind
. In an ­essay directed to “The Non-­Slaveholders of the South,” influential journalist James De Bow underlined the implications: the white man “can look down at those who are beneath him, at an infinite remove.” Alabama's William Lowndes Yancey said the South elevated the white man “amongst the master race and put the negro race to do this dirty work which God designed they should do.”

The South boasted of the benefits of its system of racial hierarchy. In
Slavery Justified
, George Fitzhugh boasted how in the South “all is peace, quiet, plenty and contentment. We have no mobs, no trades unions, no strikes for higher wages, no armed resistance to law, but little jealousy of the rich by the poor.”

In their indictment of Northern capitalism, the Southern ideologists focused on the rise of wage labor, or “wage slavery,” as they deemed it. It had begun to supplant independent proprietorship as the dominant form of economic activity. According to Foner, by 1850 there were more wage earners than slaves, and by 1860, possibly more wage earners than self-­employed workers. Fitzhugh insisted that wage earners, rather than experiencing the ­beneficence of one master, were “slaves of the
community
.” He located the source of the North's inhumanity in the remorseless ethic of “every man for himself,” the “whole moral code of Free Society.”

The attack on wage labor relied on a zero-­sum, class-­conflict analysis of the economy. The labor movement maintained this view even after the Civil War, and Jacksonians in the North could be just as fierce in their denunciations. The New England intellectual Orestes Brownson, a Democrat, denounced wages as a mere salve for those “tender consciences who would retain all the advantages of the slave system without the expense, trouble, and odium of being slaveholders.”

No matter what the North told itself, according to this critique, the workers at the bottom of society couldn't possibly escape their lot, any more than could field hands toiling in the cotton fields. They were doomed forever to remain the victims of Northern capitalism's soulless individualism. South Carolina's James Hammond deemed these workers the “mud sills,” part of the class in any society fated “to do the mean duties, to perform the drudgeries of life.” Only hypocrisy and self-­delusion keep the North from admitting, he thundered, that “[y]our whole class of manual laborers and operatives, as you call them, are slaves.”

Lincoln had no patience for arguments in favor of a benevolent hierarchy made by the ­people who happened to live comfortably atop that hierarchy. Circa 1858, he wrote a spirited fragment for himself punctuated like a schoolgirl's text message. He ­lampooned apologists for the South: “But, slavery is good for some ­people!!! As a
good
thing, slavery is strikingly peculiar, in this, that it is the only good thing which no man ever seeks the good of,
for himself.
Nonsense! Wolves devouring lambs, not because it is good for their own greedy maws, but because it [is] good for the lambs!!!”

He took particular aim at one Frederick A. Ross, an Alabama minister and author of
Slavery Ordained by God
. In deciding whether or not a hypothetical slave (called Sambo by Lincoln) should be free or not, Dr. Ross doesn't think to consult his slave. “While he consider[s] it,” Lincoln writes, “he sits in the shade, with gloves on his hands, and subsists on the bread that Sambo is earning in the burning sun.” Perhaps, Lincoln concludes, Ross might not be “actuated by that perfect impartiality, which has ever been considered most favorable to correct decisions.”

Lincoln's critique of the Slave South is inseparable from his view of the free economy as the field for self-improvement. He wrote in a note for a speech in the late 1850s: “Advancement—improvement of condition—is the order of things in a society of equals.” In his 1859 address to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, he evoked the America of upward mobility as “the just, and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way to all—­gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all.” The South's ideal worker, in contrast, was “a blind horse upon a tread-­mill.”

Defenders of free labor fiercely resisted the “mud sill” view of society and the imputation that the North reduced its workers to “wage slaves.” They believed in an essential identification between labor and capital. And however dire conditions might be in the industrializing cities of the North (overcrowded and unsanitary), they knew that the free laborer (obviously) had much more opportunity to exercise his autonomy and to better his condition than his alleged counterpart in bondage in the South.

“I have noticed in Southern newspapers,” Lincoln said in Kalamazoo in 1856, “the Southern view of the Free States.” He noted how they “insist that their slaves are far better off than Northern freemen. What a mistaken view do these men have of Northern laborers! They think that men are always to remain laborers here—­but there is no such class. The man who labored for another last year, this year labors for himself, and next year he will hire others to labor for him.”

This is a highly schematic portrayal, but it captures the essence of the matter. Free workers did tend to get better jobs over time, and to become better off than their fathers. If they felt stymied, they could always pick up and move elsewhere.

As for the South, the free-soil image of it was of a sink of backwardness wrought by slavery. Its romantic ­image of itself was of a bastion of high-­minded paternalism above the money-­grubbing of the degraded North. Neither was quite right, as the economic historian Robert Fogel demonstrates. Whatever ­justifications were thrown on the top of the slave system, it was basically a business proposition, a racket. What made it distinctive was the coercion and theft of labor, not separation from the market or absence of the profit motive.