The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [26]
Lincoln, who enjoyed less than one year of formal schooling, was essentially self-educated. He read widely in nineteenth-century political economy, including the works of the British apostle of economic liberalism John Stuart Mill and the Americans Henry Carey and Francis Wayland. Although these writers differed on specific policies—Carey was among the most prominent advocates of a high tariff while Wayland favored free trade—all extolled the virtues of entrepreneurship and technological improvement in a modernizing market economy. (Wayland, the president of Brown University and a polymath who published works on ethics, religion, and philosophy, made no direct reference to slavery in his 400-page tome, Elements of Political Economy, but did insist that people did not work productively unless allowed to benefit from their own labor, an argument Lincoln would reiterate in the 1850s.) Throughout his life, Lincoln remained fascinated by technological innovations, even receiving a patent in 1849 for “a new and improved manner of combining adjustable buoyant chambers with steam boats.” A decade later, he listed patent laws along with the art of writing and the “discovery” of America as the three greatest improvements in human history. When he delivered a lecture to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society in 1859, Lincoln noted, “I have thought a good deal, in an abstract way, about a steam plow.” He lauded the advantages of scientific, mechanized farming, urging agriculturalists to combine physical labor with “cultivated thought.” These attitudes were characteristic of the Whig party.12
By the 1840s, having married a woman from a prosperous family and established a good career as a lawyer, Lincoln had achieved respectability. Yet along the way, he had experienced poverty and failure. In New Salem in the 1830s, he invested his meager funds in stores that “winked out” (went bankrupt), accumulating debts that took many years to repay. Lincoln took all sorts of odd jobs in New Salem, working at a grain and saw mill, harvesting crops, and splitting rails. He received assistance from his friends in fending off creditors and from the local, state, and national governments, relying on employment as a postmaster, surveyor, and member of the legislature to make ends meet. Like his idol Henry Clay, Lincoln saw government as an active force promoting opportunity and advancement. Its “legitimate object,” he wrote in an undated memorandum, “is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do…for themselves.” He offered as examples building roads and public schools and providing relief to the poor. To Lincoln, Whig policies offered the surest means of creating economic opportunities for upwardly striving men like himself.13
Lincoln came of age as two great transformations unleashed by American independence—the market revolution and the democratic revolution—reached fruition, and he embraced them both. Many conservative Whigs retained a distaste for popular democracy inherited from the old Federalists. They preferred government by a “natural aristocracy” and disapproved of the elimination of property qualifications for voting, which occurred in nearly every state between 1800 and 1828. Lincoln was part of a younger generation of “New School Whigs” comfortable with the world of mass political democracy, and was convinced that the party could compete head-on with the Democrats for the votes of humble citizens. Another forward-looking young Whig, William H. Seward, later Lincoln’s secretary of state, alarmed conservative members of his party by actively seeking the support of the state’s poor immigrant voters when he served as governor of New York from 1839 to 1843.14
By the time of Andrew Jackson’s presidency, the axiom that the people