The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [74]
Slaveowners, Lincoln continued, had taken labor, “the common burthen of our race,” and placed it on “the shoulders of others.” In so doing they had degraded their own society, for “hope” was a far more powerful incentive to “human exertion” than “the rod.”43
In these speeches, Lincoln elaborated more fully than at any other time in his career a vision of northern society and “the true, genuine principle of free labor.” In the free states, Lincoln told an audience at the Wisconsin State Fair in late September 1859,
a large majority are neither hirers nor hired. Men, with their families—wives, sons and daughters—work for themselves, on their farms, in their houses and in their shops, taking the whole product to themselves, and asking no favors of capital on the one hand, nor of hirelings or slaves on the other…. This, say its advocates, is free labor—the just and generous, and prosperous system.44
Lincoln’s ideal America, the world of small independent producers, should not be confused with the humble self-sufficiency of his youth. In his Wisconsin address and in a lecture on discoveries and inventions he delivered a number of times between 1858 and 1860, Lincoln spoke, rather, of an interconnected society of farms, shops, and mercantile establishments, of new inventions, improving agriculture, and a constantly rising standard of living. He advised farmers to abandon traditional ways in favor of new methods of plowing and crop rotation and new fertilizers, seeds, and agricultural machinery. Lincoln chided Young America for excessive materialism, but could not suppress his own enthusiasm for the globalized consumerism the market revolution had brought to the United States—“cotton fabrics from Manchester and Lowell,…silk from France; furs from the Arctic regions…tea from China, and spices from India.” Inventions and the circulation of material goods, Lincoln declared, had made possible not only a continual improvement in the standard of living, but intellectual advancement as well—liberation from the “slavery of the mind.” This was the engine of progress in free society.45
Lincoln’s vision of northern life arose from the world he knew: agrarian and small-town Illinois, with its widely dispersed farm ownership, small-scale manufacturing, numerous family-owned businesses, and rising living standards during the decade of the 1850s. In Springfield, where Lincoln had become one of the wealthiest residents, the gap between the classes was growing, and what his wife called “palaces of homes” were rising during the 1850s. But many of the richest residents had in fact begun life in humble circumstances. In Illinois as a whole, the majority of male heads of household (although not the seven-eighths Lincoln claimed in one speech) owned productive property. Lincoln’s understanding of wage labor as a permanent feature of northern life, but a temporary status for individuals, still seemed plausible. The free-labor ideology seemed far less appropriate to the urban centers and factory towns of the Northeast, where a permanent wage-earning class had come into existence, inequalities of wealth were increasing, and wages had stagnated during the 1850s. This was not a world Lincoln knew or found easy to explain. In free society, he believed, every man controlled his own destiny. If one did not rise above the condition of wage-earner, it was “not the fault of the system,” as advocates of slavery claimed, “but because of either a dependent nature which prefers it, or improvidence, folly, or singular misfortune.”46
Lincoln had little sense of the emerging class relations of an industrializing society. He spoke of economic relations as a “race of life,” a metaphor that dated back at least as far as Adam Smith and that encapsulated a meritocratic view of social justice in which individuals competed for advancement and success went to the most talented, so long as the competition was