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 19th 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.
[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.
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