Lincoln Unbound (19 page)

Instead, he ascended to glory. In time, he won the larger argument—­at a cost in blood and treasure that would have seemed unimaginable to him standing on those debate platforms with Douglas. After his election to the presidency, on his long trip to Washington in early 1861, making stops and speeches along the way, he addressed the New Jersey Senate. He remembered how “away back in my childhood, the earliest days of my being able to read, I got hold of a small book, such a one as few of the younger members have ever seen, ‘Weem's Life of Washington.' ” He said the events surrounding the battle at Trenton transfixed him and stayed with him still: “You all know, for you have all been boys, how these early impressions last longer than any others. I recollect thinking then, boy even though I was, that there must have been something more than common that those men struggled for.” That something, he continued, “held out a great promise to all the ­people of the world to all time to come.”

He stopped at Independence Hall in Philadelphia to lead a raising of the new flag bearing thirty-­four stars, after Kansas had just joined the union and Oregon in 1859. In an impromptu talk, he invoked the deeper promise of the founding generation “that in due time the weights should be lifted from the ­shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance.” With threats to his personal safety in mind, he continued, “But, if this country cannot be saved without giving up that principle—­I was about to say I would rather be assassinated on this spot than to surrender it.”

He wouldn't be assassinated. Not yet. Not on that spot. Not before he waged and won a war that defeated the Southern system and opened the way for the ascendance of the vision that had motivated him from his very first stirrings as a politician.

 

Chapter 5

“A Great Empire”: Lincoln's Vision Realized

I chant the new empire grander than any before . . . My sail-­ships and steam-­ships threading the archipelagoes, My stars and stripes fluttering in the wind.

—­
W
ALT
W
H
ITMAN, “
A
B
ROADWAY
P
AGEANT,” 1860

R
ight after his reelection in 1864, Lincoln wrote the first draft of his annual message to Congress, on pieces of pasteboard or boxboard.

In a passage of the data-­laden document, he evoked the waxing strength of the Union. He noted its increasing population as shown in the higher number of voters than in 1860. “A table is appended showing particulars,” he noted, before getting to the larger point: “The important fact remains demonstrated, that we have
more
men
now
than we had when the war
began
; that we are not exhausted, nor in process of exhaustion; that we are
gaining
strength, and may, if need be, maintain the contest indefinitely. This as to men. Material resources are now more complete and abundant than ever. The national ­resources, then, are unexhausted, and, as we believe, inexhaustible.”

He exaggerated only slightly.

In the war, Lincoln's industrializing, rapidly growing capitalist republic overwhelmed the agrarian South partly through sheer demographic and economic muscle. Hamilton trumped Jefferson. Free labor beat slavery. The dynamic North—­hustling, innovating, pulling ­people in from abroad—­bested the underdeveloped South. “We began without capital and if we should lose the
greater
part of it before this [war] is over,” Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase boasted in 1863, “labor would bring it back again and with a power hitherto unfelt among us.”

The notion that the war itself, a charnel house for America's youth and a great grinding wheel of material destruction, drove the industrialization of the North is a myth. But it represented a victory of Lincoln's style of modernizing capitalism. It wiped out slavery and vindicated his view of the American creed. It decisively broke the South's political power, and the remnants of the South's economic model moldered in a region that became as “peculiar” in the American context as the institution of bound labor that had precipitated the war. The country set out on a path of robust democratic capitalism that made it richer—­and better—­than if it had chosen any other alternative. In the aftermath, the country emerged a budding world power with, in the words of Herman Melville, “empire in her eyes.”

Before General Winfield Scott ever had reason to come up with his Anaconda Plan (“Scott's Great Snake”) to subdue the Confederacy, the South felt squeezed. On the cusp of the nineteenth century, the North and the South had similar populations. The immigrants who poured into the country—­5 million in the four decades prior to the war—­overwhelmingly made their home in the more congenial free North rather than the South. Another 800,000 came during the course of the war. In 1860, the North had 19 million ­people to the South's 12 million, counting the almost 4 million slaves. In 1800, the South accounted for 46 percent of Congress; in 1860, just 35 percent.

In the early 1850s, the likes of Massachusetts politician Henry Wilson—­eventually a senator and a vice president—­could already vow to “surround the slave States with a cordon of free States and, in a few years, not withstanding the immense interests combined in the cause of oppression, we shall give liberty to the millions in bondage.” The South didn't consider it an idle threat. It feared the creation of more free states in the West, and the chipping away of the protective cocoon it had built around the slave system, from the
Dred Scott
ruling to the prohibitions of abolitionist literature in the mails. Robert Toombs, a senator from Georgia, warned of the pernicious effects of Republican patronage powers alone, predicting their exercise “would abolitionize Maryland in a year, raise a powerful abolition party in Va., Kentucky and Missouri in two years, and foster and rear up a free labour party in [the] whole South in four years.”

Slavery suffered from the abrasions inherent in its contact with the free North and with urban civilization. Border states and cities had relatively high populations of free blacks. As of the late 1850s, half of blacks in Maryland were free. Slave owners feared the dangerously subversive effects of urban life and industrial employment, although Southern industry did resort to slave labor. Frederick Law Olmsted, the great landscape designer and journalist, noted how owners hesitated to rent their slaves out to ironmongers and the like for fear the slaves “had too much liberty, and were acquiring bad habits. They earned money by overwork, and spent it for whisky, and got a habit roaming about and taking care of themselves.”

With the Republican victory in the 1860 election, the Northern system was certain to wax rather than wane, as its industry continued to grow and it settled a free West. The Southern Democrats and their 1860 presidential nominee, John Breckinridge (destined to become the Confederate secretary of war), wanted a federal government favorable to slavery. They wanted it to take Cuba as another slave state and eschew assistance to industry or the free settlement of the West. Failing that, there was the option of secession. “We must,” one planter with 2,000 slaves said, “do it now or never. If we don't secede now the political power of the South is broken.” It chose now. As William Lowndes Yancey of Alabama put it, “We propose to do as the Israelites did of old under Divine direction—­to withdraw our ­people from under the power that oppresses them and in doing so, like them to take with us the Ark of the Covenant of our liberties.”

With Ark in tow, the South deluded itself that King ­Cotton, feeding the maw of factories in the North and in England, could force surrender to his regal will. “The slave-­holding South is now the controlling power of the world,” South Carolina senator Hammond maintained, betraying more Southern patriotism than strategic sense. “The North without us would be a motherless calf, bleating about, and die of mange and starvation.”

There is no doubt that the South was the Saudi Arabia of cotton. At a low cost, it produced more cotton than anyplace else on the planet, about two-­thirds of the world's crop, accounting for $277 million of the South's $577 million gross farm income by one estimate. Exports went from 83 million pounds in 1815 to roughly 1.8 billion in 1860, with three-­quarters of the crop shipped to England. Although never enough to be decisive, the Confederacy had its share of sympathizers in New York (deeply involved in the transatlantic cotton trade) and in England (where so many depended on textile mills for their livelihood) on purely commercial grounds. The abolitionist Wendell Phillips complained in late 1860 of the self-­interested sentiment for appeasement in the North: “The saddest thing in the Union meetings of last year was the constant presence, in all of them, of the clink of coin—­the whir of spindles—the dust of trade. You would have imagined it was an insurrection of pedlers against honest men.”

The newly elected Lincoln arrived in February 1861 in a Washington rife with proposals for sectional compromise. (Lincoln didn't always make a good first impression. The ambassador from Holland sniffed after a fancy dinner with the president-elect and other diplomats that “his conversation consists of vulgar anecdotes at which he himself laughs uproariously.”) William E. Dodge, a “merchant prince” of New York who had relinquished his suite at Willard's hotel for the Lincolns, gave voice to the instinct toward accommodation. He warned Lincoln of the economic consequences of violent conflict. “The whole nation shall be plunged into bankruptcy,” he told him, and “grass shall grow in the streets of our commercial cities.” Lincoln replied that he would defend the Constitution, “let the grass grow where it may.”

The grass didn't grow, at least not in the North. It was already too far ahead. In 1860, the South contributed only about a tenth of the country's manufacturing. The North's industrial sector was already more mechanized than Britain's. Most foreign trade passed through Northern ports. The North had much more railroad mileage. Six of ten Northern workers were in nonagricultural occupations; less than 20 percent of Southern workers were. Pennsylvania produced 580,000 tons of pig iron, far more than the entire Confederacy. Financially, the South lagged as badly.

When Southerners quit Congress, they gave Republicans carte blanche to pass their domestic agenda, which had previously foundered on sectional splits. The departed Southerners wrote themselves a new constitution that pointedly banned spending on internal improvements and import duties to protect industry, although these provisions did nothing to restrain the Confederate government's actual intervention in the private economy during the war. Granted a free hand, congressional Republicans effected a program to make old Henry Clay proud.

A restless ambition undergirded the Republican vision. They wanted to see America grow, spreading its system of enterprise and free labor across the continent, to the benefit of all regardless of class and to the ultimate end of realizing the country's inchoate greatness. Historian Walter McDougall calls the goal “a free-­labor empire challenging British supremacy.” Congressional Republicans laid the foundation with legislation on improvements, banks, the tariff, and the development of the West—­“all calculated,” in the words of Louis Hacker in his economic history of the United States, “to widen and defend the domestic market and lower production costs.”

They voted to create an artery to the West Coast with the Pacific Railroad Acts. Already in 1820, people were talking of a transcontinental railroad. The contention wasn't constitutional but sectional. Whenever a route was proposed through one section, it aroused enough opposition in the other to shut it down. Congress now simply selected a path in the North. Congress created the Union Pacific, the first time it had chartered a corporation since the ill-­fated Second Bank of the United States. The Union Pacific started from Omaha, while the Central Pacific began from Sacramento, California, and headed East. The government showered the two companies with millions of acres of federal land and millions in government bonds.

Congress had set the table for a movable feast of corruption. The alternative, though, was no transcontinental railroad at all, at least not anytime soon. Heather Cox Richardson recounts the case for the railroad in her valuable history of Civil War economic legislation. By definition, such a project couldn't be backed by one state, and it ran through Western territories directly controlled by Congress. Purely private financing almost certainly couldn't have been found for it. Besides the sheer size and cost, the project struck out across unsecured land vulnerable to attack by hostile Indians.

Without the railroad, getting to California was an adventure, sometimes a death-­defying one. James A. McDougall was a transplant to California via Illinois who eventually became a congressman and senator from his adopted state. According to a former colleague in Illinois, he once got lost in the mountains traveling from Illinois to San Francisco and almost starved. He arrived at his destination “in rags, clothed partly in skins, without money, and not having seen a barber or razor for months. He went to the best hotel in the city, and was at first refused admittance.”

Easing the transit would open the West to enterprising Easterners. It would encourage free farmers to settle in the prairie and give them a market back east. It would draw the West closer, lest California get detached by centrifugal forces pulling the country apart. It would facilitate trade with Asia. Finally, it would secure access to the West's newly discovered gold at a time when the country urgently needed the specie. Such was the faith in the ample riches to be had that one newspaper reported that Indians out west shot gold bullets from their guns.

Republicans regularized the nation's banking to finance the war. The country had a financial system appropriate to “an agrarian economy tributary to foreign markets,” as Richard ­Franklin Bensel writes in his brilliant history of this period,
Yankee ­Leviathan
. When London sneezed, the American financial system tended to get a cold. Obviously, the North lacked the financial architecture for fighting a war of national survival.

At the outset, currency in the West collapsed because it had been backed extensively by Southern state bonds; in Wisconsin, rioters targeted Milwaukee's banks. In late 1861, the government couldn't raise the funds it needed for the war. The banks suspended specie payments and the government abandoned the gold standard for domestic transactions. By the end of 1861, almost all the mercantile houses in New York had gone bust, with only 16 out of 913 still solvent. It was around this time that President Lincoln met with General Montgomery Meigs and lamented, among other things, that “Chase has no money and he tells me he can raise no more.” Then Lincoln summed up the situation in his memorably despairing phrase, “The bottom is out of the tub.”

Under extreme duress, Congress acted. The Legal Tender Act authorized the Treasury to issue notes, printed with green ink, hence known as “greenbacks,” that were legal tender for all public and private debts. Subsequently, Congress taxed the motley notes that were issued by state banks and circulated as currency to push them out of the way. In a step toward a more uniform system, it authorized charters for “national” banks that could issue their own notes, but had to meet a variety of standards for soundness. The number of national banks rose, while the number of state banks collapsed from roughly 1,500 to 300 in the two-­year period from 1863 to 1865. It was the advent of a version of the national banking system that had been so bitterly opposed by Jacksonians.