TURNING A GAME-CHANGING CORNER

 

In its review of the dialectic struggle the nation has experienced since almost its inception – that of a federal sense of liberty and of a natural rights sense of liberty – this blog is currently reviewing the contribution of Abraham Lincoln in that struggle.  Lincoln’s presidency is situated in time at a turning point other than that regarding slavery.  His administration occurred at the cusp of the nation’s industrialization phase of development.

          The last posting left off with describing Lincoln’s admiration of capitalism as an empowering turn for Americans.  He was taken by its vibrancy and how it promised to avail people of untold opportunities.  And he supported the notion that government should limit its doings to those areas of concern where people could not provide for themselves or provide for themselves to an optimal level.  This view is nuanced and while reserved, it is not a laissez faire position.

          Allen Guelzo quotes Lincoln, “we do wish to allow the humblest man an equal chance to get rich with everybody else … I want every man to have the chance.”[1]  And in that, slavery was most offensive.  It, Lincoln judged, perpetrated the ugliest offense against what capitalism promised.  But the problem was the restraints that the Constitution placed on its eradication since that institution was established and protected by state law as per the provisions of the national compact. 

And in a day when romantic movements were espousing the end of slavery, damn the Constitution, Lincoln held that the basic law should take precedent.  So, while national law could make slavery more cumbersome or less profitable, it could not legally prohibit it where it already existed.  Probably, its most promising route was to prohibit its expansion to the newly developing states and one can see that that question held a central position in the debate between pro and anti-slavery forces in the years leading up to the Civil War.

And it was Lincoln’s determination to stop its expansion that convinced the seven slave states to secede upon his election and before his inauguration (a total of eleven states eventually did so).  This was the case even though plans were being considered by which to buy out the slave holders as a way to bring the practice to an end.  Guelzo shares,

 

With a plan for federal compensation, a gradual timetable, and some form of referendum, either through Congress or the state legislatures, Lincoln was “quite sure” slavery “would not outlive the century … Gradual emancipation and governmental compensation,” he wrote, “would bring it to an end.”[2]

 

But with the attack on Fort Sumter, these considerations came to end.  Secession was not in the legal cards; the Constitution is a perpetual compact since its goals can never be fully accomplished.  It would have to be amended to accommodate such an option.  So, the nation was to suffer a tragic war, but its compact stood that test and still serves the American people today.  One good consequence of that sacrifice was that it afforded Lincoln the grounds – through his war powers – to end the inhumane institution of slavery on Confederate soil.

Toward the end of his life, just after his reelection, he gave his fellow Americans a glimpse of how that war changed his purview on life and politics.  Through his second inaugural address, Lincoln hints at a change of heart.  He reveals a turn from his more deterministic side to a more accountable view of human endeavor – the war seems to him to be a retribution for the sin of slavery. 

It seemed to lay bare some sort of hidden purpose by a supernatural power – eerily a Calvinistic notion harkening back to his early upbringing.  In that, perhaps a chink in his reasoned armor was exposed.  Of course, given the further tragedy of his assassination, that limits one’s ability to interpret his words more fully.  “Nothing about the Civil War, it seemed, had quite turned out as Abraham Lincoln, our last great Enlightenment politician, had expected.  Even less would turn out that way in the Gilded Age which followed.”[3]

And such a moving moment in this nation’s past ends one period and begins another.  What was to follow would fundamentally bring into question the basic assumptions that the founding fathers held in writing the founding compact.  Almost immediately, it would be amended by the three Civil War amendments, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments.  This blogger has heard a constitutional scholar describe the Fourteenth Amendment as creating a new compact – it was that basic a change.

And in its way, it allowed the nation to develop not only on a national level, but also on a global level.  It helped usher in the takeover of corporate entities in the economic sphere.  And so, this story moves on, as the American drama hardly pauses no matter how grave the loss due to the passing of an icon or the tragedy of a costly war.  What follows quickly introduces this next phase.

Michael Sandel describes how this aggrandizement of corporate power became a central issue toward the end of the 1800s and the beginning of the next century.  With the Progressive Era, a movement straddling the two centuries, there was a debate emerging as to what to do about the abuses attributed to corporate behavior, such as exorbitant pricing, unsafe and low-quality products, and the exploitation of labor.[4]  The Progressives, advocates of a reactive movement, were divided in how they defined these problems and furthered the dialectic struggle over freedom.

For one, nothing will prove to challenge a cornerstone of federalism – its honorific positioning of local politics – than the nationalization and eventual globalization of the economy.  This development will, more than any other change, promote a divorce or a lack of intimacy between employer and employee.  Even the old family farm will experience drastic change with the introduction of labor-saving machinery that industrialization introduced.

With such advancements, economies of scale will prove to undo the economic viability of the family farm, the family town business, and the local charitable modes of assistance to the indigent.  The result is a nation that would be exposed to a level of depersonalization that undermined (and still does today) the ability of people to federate among themselves. 

With that, the forces of a natural rights mentality will be augmented, beginning to deem personal, communal sensitivities as old fashioned.  This blog will continue describing this dialectic struggle in its next posting.

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[1] Allen C. Guelzo, The American Mind, Part 2 of 3 – a transcript book – (Chantilly, VA:  The Teaching Company/The Great Courses, 2005), 79.

[2] Ibid., 80-81.

[3] Ibid., 82.

[4] Michael J. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent:  America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, MA:  The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996).

HARDLY AN “AW SHUCKS’’ FELLOW

This blog has been tracing a US dialectic tension – in various forms – that it has been experiencing through the years of its existence; that is, its social beliefs and behaviors that have pitted the forces of federated beliefs against natural rights sentiments.  The first is characterized by communal settings and emotional binding and the latter by a more individualistic mindset with self-centered behavior patterns. 

This individualism has expressed itself through movements such as the Enlightenment, transcendentalism, “Wild West” cowboy-ism, industrial capitalism, consumerism, and what one calls today the “Me Generation.”  Some have been imported from Europe and some emanated from domestic developments.  Either way, their effects have been cumulative to the point that individualism – always a telling characteristic of Americans – has become dominant for nearly eighty years.

          With this posting, the story picks up at the time of the industrial turn in the second half of the nineteenth century but with a look at the effect a transitional figure had in that development – although he did not get to see the results of his handiwork in this dialectic struggle.  He would become one of America’s iconic figures.

But first a contextual word:  One can readily see among the political class a transactional mindset firmly in place in political calculations within the American political scene by the time the Whig political party was fighting for its existence in the 1840s, and ’50s.[1]

Without the sobering influence of widespread Calvinism by the mid-1800s, the demystified philosophic core of American culture needed only a new standard of temporal ethics to have a foundational effect that has lasted until now.  That is, in a chipping away process, a continual array of cultural turns firmly connected a chain of institutional developments.  Those turns go a long way in explaining the incivility that the US society suffers from today. 

To begin with, there is the establishment of the economic system at a national level.  This profound development has many repercussions.  Michael Sandel[2] points out that through most of the 19^th century, the American dream for most people was to own their own business.  This meant, for the most part, owning a family farm, but aspirations for other small businesses were included. 

The notion was that unless a person owned his or her own business (the dream was a limited one for women because of the sexist attitudes of the time) the person was not truly free.  Americans commonly saw hired labor, in some respects, as a worse fate than being a slave.  At least slave owners found it in their self-interest to take care of their “property.” 

Business owners, on the other hand, accounted for their hired workers as a commodity and, therefore, the only concern they felt was for the productivity of their workers.  But even that level of disregard, with the changes in the economy, would experience a profound intensity.  This blog will return to this turn shortly, but first an account, over this and next posting, of that iconic figure.

And that figure is, of course, Abraham Lincoln.  His life exhibits some of the points this blog has highlighted.  To begin, he was born to highly modest surroundings and means.  That was in 1809 to a yeoman farmer household, much in the ideal that Thomas Jefferson admired.  The problem was that that farmer didn’t experience much success.  Starting in Kentucky, the family moved to Indiana in 1818 and then to Illinois in 1831.  That made Abraham twenty-two years old and old enough to know he didn’t want to continue in his family’s business.

Instead, he first tried his hand in a couple of non-farming businesses but found no success.  Maybe due to his voracious reading, the world of ideas spurred in him an interest in law.  He sought out the tutelage of a prominent lawyer and earned his practicing license in 1837.  This led to representing mostly commercially involved clients in over 5,000 cases.  According to his mentor, John Todd Stuart, Lincoln had a “‘mind of a metaphysical and philosophical order’ and ‘always studying into the nature of things.’”[3]

And perhaps that sort of thinking had him question and challenge the Calvinistic views he was exposed to in his upbringing from which he emerged.  And while transcendentalism promoted the will over reason and was in its heyday during his adult life, Lincoln was partial to reason.  One should remember his formative years – when he began his reading – were still concurrent with the Enlightenment movement. 

How much that movement made its way to a young Abraham is a matter of speculation.  Regardless, according to Guelzo, logic ruled within the young reader’s psyche.  This left little room for intuition, emotional laden thinking, or the power of the will as transcendentalism promoted.

And what did that reason lead Lincoln to believe?  Most importantly, he dismissed free will.  Humans, therefore, in his thinking were subject to the whims of fate.  While that would eliminate any or very little pride or boastfulness in himself, it did encourage him to be highly empathetic of others’ thinking and behaviors.  After all, they were also the results of their conditions, their fates.

But he did not reason himself away from the influences of capitalism – not yet named – and a view of it as a labor system.  As such, he fell into, to at least some degree, characterizing laborers as not owning their means of production.  Instead, they earned wages and were in constant competition with other workers.  This drove down their wages.  And unlike the yeoman farmers who were able to produce what they needed, a worker worked for cash and cash ruled the markets.

And then there was the function of government under this newer construct.  Government sets up the rules of the game under which a capitalist system does its thing.  Those rules can and do set limits on a variety of conditions in which a system operates from setting standards and regulations to being highly influential in the management of that stage in which it operates.

For example, the various governments from the local to the national one, set that stage for constructing infrastructure, maintaining that infrastructure and, to a large degree, managing highways, ports, canals, and the like.  Often, it is government that starts such facilities which might eventually fall into private hands.

Finally, it issues, collects, and polices the adherence to taxes and their accompanying laws.  Those practices reflect, perhaps more so than any other areas of policy, how a current set of officials behave in regard to the capitalist class.  The newer business class, those who ran the larger entities in the national overall market, probably felt more directly the rule of government through those taxing policies than from any other sort of interactions.

That encouraged the heads of those entities to be highly motivated to participate in the national (including at the state level) governance.  Through their ability to determine the conditions under which labor worked, where economic activity was either sustained or would move to, and their ability to provide new levels of contributions in the form of money donations to favored pols, these entities were able to exert inordinate influence over the political system.

Perhaps due to this newer system’s vitality, its reliance on smart, quick creative thinking, and its vibrancy, it attracted Lincoln’s imagination and he appreciated its merits.  With that bias, he was repelled by Jacksonian politics with its hostility to this entrepreneurial class – after all, that Jackson clan was led by a plantation slave owner who adopted a classical republican view of good governance – in line more with the traditionalist view of federalism which Daniel Elazar describes and which this blog shared a couple of postings ago.[4]

Lincoln instead admired a liberal republicanism (of a federalist type) which revitalized the thinking of Alexander Hamilton.  Much of that, and also influencing Lincoln, was the work of John Stuart Mill’s Principle of Political Economy (1848).  It was doubtful the lawyer/politician read that two-volume work; its ideas were having their effect on the Whig party that Lincoln first belonged to before he became a Republican. 

It seems Francis Wayland, a Whig moralist, drew on Mill’s ideas and he influenced Lincoln.  And here is where the link to federalist thought lies:  “Wayland represented an almost perfect marriage between Whig market economics and Protestant Whig morality.”[5]  And with that connection, this posting ends.  The next will look at some of the implications this disposition in Lincoln had on the development of his career, especially his years in the White House.

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[1] Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party:  Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York, NY:  Oxford University Press, 1999).  Of special note is the transactional quality involved with the dispensing of government jobs or patronage through the spoils system.

[2] Michael J. Sandel, Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996).

[3] Allen C. Guelzo, The American Mind, Part II – a transcript book – (Chantilly, VA:  The Teaching Company/The Great Courses, 2005), 74.  The factual information of this posting is derived from this source.

[4] See Robert Gutierrez, “Back on the Ol’ Plantation,” Gravitas:  A Voice for Civics (a blog, January 4, 2022), accessed January 10, 2022, http://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/2022_01_02_archive.html .

[5] Guelzo, The American Mind, 79.