Lincoln Unbound Read online

  Dedication

  TO EDWARD D. LOWRY,

  MY DEAR FATHER.

  Acknowledgments

  Writing a book is a solitary pursuit that is only possible through the kindness and generosity of others. My wife Vanessa, my friend and my rock, was patient, encouraging, and willing to lend a hand whenever and wherever necessary. I started this project when we were engaged, and it was our constant companion for the first two years of our marriage. She hates clutter, but tolerated the ever-­growing stack of Lincoln books in our apartment. She likes relaxing weekends, but understood when the book took my Saturdays and then my Sundays, too. She showed more understanding than I could have expected when I was tired and distracted. Every day she shows me what love means, and for that I am grateful beyond words.

  My assistant, Madison Peace, who is unshakably cheerful and incredibly diligent, aided in research and a dozen other tasks related to the project. I couldn’t have finished without her.

  My brilliant agent, hilarious friend, and sometime co-­author Keith Korman was willing to do anything to advance the project. He always lent a sympathetic ear, even when he was telling to me to “Shut up and write.”

  Adam Bellow was encouraging when he needed to be and (constructively) critical when he needed to be, and made the book better for it. He is an exceptionally talented editor.

  Lewis Lehrman is a Lincolnian to the core who has done so much to aid the study and understanding of our sixteenth president. As far as I’m concerned, the flaw in David Herbert Donald’s book, We Are Lincoln Men: Abraham Lincoln and His Friends is that he left out Lew. He was unfailingly generous, always willing to do a favor, always willing to provide guidance.

  I have the privilege of working with some of the smartest and most interesting ­people on the planet at National Review. They provided characteristically good-­humored support. I’m especially ­indebted to our publisher, Jack Fowler, who has the heart of Mother Teresa and the accent of a cop from Bronx Police District 12.

  Noah Glyn and Scott Reitmeier provided early research and editorial help, as did Christeleny Frangos. I am grateful to those who read portions of the draft: Michael Burlingame, Bradford Short, Charles Kesler, Danilo Petranovich, Yuval Levin, Scott Winship, Mario Loyola, Charles C. W. Cooke, Adam White, Adam Keiper, Frederick Hess, and Abby Thernstrom. Of course, any and all errors are my own.

  Joe and Lorraine Palo were generous as always. I appreciate the support of Nicholas and Noel Vassallo.

  My friend Ric Andersen was there when it counted most and I will never forget it.

  I will never be able to repay my mom’s boundless love. My brother Robert is my friend and my joy.

  I dedicate this book to my dad, who passed away when it was nearing completion. An English professor and history buff, he was a great reader and lover of books. It is because of him and his library in the basement that I will always have the best associations with the smell of old, musty books. By his example, he taught me lifelong lessons in patience and much else. He is missed, but not gone.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  INTRODUCTION

  ·

  “An Inestimable Jewel”: Lincoln’s America

  CHAPTER 1

  ·

  “An Ambition that Knew No Rest”: Young Man on the Make

  CHAPTER 2

  ·

  “The Sober, Industrious, Thriving ­People”: A Devoted Whig

  CHAPTER 3

  ·

  “The True System”: The Genius of American Capitalism

  CHAPTER 4

  ·

  “Our Fathers”: The Lincoln-Douglas Debates and the Purpose of America

  CHAPTER 5

  ·

  “The Great Empire”: Lincoln’s Vision Realized

  CHAPTER 6

  ·

  “Work, Work, Work”: Recovering the Lincoln Ethic

  Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  Also by Rich Lowry

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Epigraph

  “Why if the old Greeks had this man, what trilogies of plays—­what epics would have been made out of him!”

  —­WALT WHITMAN, “DEATH OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN,” 1879

  Introduction

  “An Inestimable Jewel”: Lincoln’s America

  “He knew the American ­people better than they knew themselves.”

  —­FREDERICK DOUGLASS, “ORATION IN MEMORY OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN,” 1876

  In the summer of 1864, President Abraham Lincoln welcomed the 166th Ohio Regiment to the White House. His words that day didn’t make it onto the Lincoln Memorial. No schoolchildren ever recited them. But they capture the essence of Lincoln and of his idea of America.

  “I suppose you are going home to see your families and friends,” he said by way of greeting the regiment. These men were representatives of the Union army, whose camps and hospitals he visited, who were fighting and suffering for the Union and who would vote for him in overwhelming numbers in the November election, a contest that, at that moment, Lincoln believed he would lose. The day after seeing the regiment on August 22, Lincoln wrote his “blind memorandum” stipulating that it is “exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-­elected.”

  The Ohio troops had been mustered for a hundred days in the spring and had done garrison duty around Washington, D.C. Lincoln offered the soldiers “sincere thanks for myself and the country,” and then got to the point. “I almost always feel inclined, when I happen to say anything to soldiers,” he told them, “to impress upon them in a few brief remarks the importance of success in this contest.”*

  “It is not merely for to-­day,” he said of the significance of the war, “but for all time to come that we should perpetuate for our children’s children this great and free government, which we have enjoyed all our lives.” This was a more pedestrian expression of the rousing sentiment from the finale of the Gettysburg Address the prior November—­“that government of the ­people, by the ­people, for the ­people, shall not perish from the Earth.”

  “I beg you to remember this,” he continued, “not merely for my sake, but for yours. I happen temporarily to occupy this big White House. I am a living witness that any one of your children may look to come here as my father’s child has.” Lincoln characteristically refrained from saying “as I have,” with its whiff of immodesty. Free government is so valuable, he insisted, because it affords us an open, fluid society where anyone can ascend to the highest office in the land. Or at least ascend higher than where he started.

  “It is in order,” Lincoln said, “that each of you may have through this free government which we have enjoyed, an open field and a fair chance for your industry, enterprise and intelligence; that you may all have equal privileges in the race of life, with all its desirable human aspirations. It is for this the struggle should be maintained, that we may not lose our birthright—­not only for one, but for two or three years. The nation is worth fighting for, to secure such an inestimable jewel.”

  The priceless treasure is opportunity. It is the cause so dear that it was worth a conflagration that made the country, in the title of historian Drew Gilpin Faust’s moving book on wartime death, “this republic of suffering.” In Lincoln’s telling, America exists to give all ­people the chance to rise. We are, by birthright and through our free institutions, a nation of aspiration.

  This theme wasn’t patriotic pap for the boys. Lincoln believed it in the marrow of those strong bon
es with which he had labored all during his youth. It had suffused his determination, as a boy and into his early adulthood, to read and to learn, so he could do something besides chop and plow all his life. It had been the touchstone of his politics as a Whig and then as a Republican, in the Illinois House of Representatives, in Congress, and in his antislavery leadership in the 1850s that marked the beginning of the heroic phase of his career.

  Decades earlier, if the youthful Lincoln had been asked, upon his election as captain by his fellow Illinois militiamen in the Black Hawk War, to speak about the meaning of America, his remarks might not have been much different than they were to those Ohio troops. (Not that his fellow militiamen would have particularly cared. Lincoln’s first order to his roughneck troops, described by one observer as “the hardest set of men he ever saw,” was supposedly met with a hearty “Go to the devil, sir!”) A commitment to the fulfillment of individual potential—­his own and that of others—­was Lincoln’s true north, the bright thread running from his first statement as a novice political candidate in his early twenties to his utterances as one of the world’s greatest statesmen.

  If there is one thing to know about Lincoln, it is this. It isn’t his war leadership or his martyrdom, although they both have launched a thousand books, documentaries, and journal articles. Lincoln’s vision for the country goes deeper than either of those—­needless to say, highly compelling and consequential—­things. So much else about Lincoln is the how or what. This is the why.

  We might romanticize his background, the log cabins and all the rest of it. Lincoln didn’t. He didn’t want to be poor; he wanted to be respectable. He summarized his early life for a biographer with the dismissive phrase “the short and simple annals of the poor,” in a line he borrowed from a well-­known poem of the time. “That’s my life,” Lincoln said, “and that’s all you or any one else can make of it.”

  From his first stirrings as a politician, Lincoln committed himself to policies to enhance opportunity. He wanted to build canals and railroads to knit together the nation’s markets. He wanted to encourage industry. He wanted to modernize banking. He hated isolation, backwardness, and any obstacles to the development of a cash economy of maximal openness and change. He thrilled to steam power and iron, to invention and technology, to the beneficent upward spiral of a commercial economy. With Emerson, he celebrated “men of the mine, telegraph, mill, map, and survey.”

  From his youth, he exemplified a middle-­class morality at the core of the Whig and the Republican ethic. Self-­control and self-­improvement, rationality and abstemiousness were the necessary personal ingredients to economic advancement. Lincoln hewed to these qualities and evangelized for them. His characteristic advice to aspiring lawyers, to discouraged friends, and to penurious relatives came down to exhortations to work, and then to work some more.

  His opposition to slavery was caught up in his exalted view of work. He constantly invoked a verse from Genesis 3:19: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground.” In God’s sentence for Adam’s sin, Lincoln saw the most elementary justice. It was simply wrong for anyone to take the fruits of someone else’s labor, someone else’s property. Every fiber in his being revolted against what he called in the Second Inaugural “unrequited toil.”

  He made it his project in life to dissolve the isolation of the backwoods of his upbringing, and to unravel slavery in the South. In its separation from the market and the enlivening churn of commerce, the backwoods could only limit possibilities for individual advancement. In its aristocratic pretension and heinous system of human bondage, the slave South substituted for the true American creed a society built, in Lincoln’s words, on “classification” and “caste.”

  He prevailed in both contests. More and more of the country was enveloped in the net of the new, relentlessly modernizing economy. As for slavery, Lincoln had hoped to limit its spread as a means of effecting its ultimate extinction. Instead, in his words, as the Southern states broke from the Union, “the tug” came. The Civil War preserved a united America oriented around Lincoln’s democratic capitalism and defined by the truths of the Declaration of Independence, although the race-­based economic and social system of the South wouldn’t be fully dismantled for another century.

  For all of Lincoln’s rustic associations, contemporary America is much closer to his vision of the country than the world of his youth. It is the dense, creative commercial network that he imagined, but on steroids—­a heavily urbanized population of more than 300 million, robustly democratic yet highly educated and technologically proficient, featuring some of the most innovative companies in the world. It is open to talent and relatively free of irrational discrimination based on race or birth.

  Yet all is not well and everyone—­right, left, and in-­between—­feels it, even if they disagree about the exact problem and the nature of the solution. The American Dream is generally considered under threat, and rightly so. We suffer from a lack of mobility up from the bottom, from stagnating working-­class wages, and from a growing dependence on government. Above all, we are experiencing an erosion of the bourgeois virtues that undergird aspiration. America will exist as a great nation for a long time to come. It has a vast store of economic and military capital that it will take time to spend down even in the worst of circumstances and even under the worst policies. But it risks losing the fluidity and dynamism that have made it so admirable and the best place in human history for the pursuit of happiness.

  This is not simply a matter of income inequality, although that is part of the picture. The share of the national income going to the top 1 percent has increased since the 1970s, a trend that holds across the Western world. The rise in inequality in the United States comes in the context of slowing economic growth and ­diminished prospects for the non-­college-­educated. Men with only a high-school diploma saw their earnings decline from the early 1970s to the mid-to-late first decade of the 2000s.

  We are not quite the highly mobile society we imagine ourselves. Forty percent of those starting in the bottom fifth of the economic distribution stay there, when, if it were a matter of perfect chance, only 20 percent would. Nordic countries, Canada, Australia, and some Western European countries are more mobile than we are. If he were writing today, Horatio Alger might set his stories in Finland.

  Social capital in the form of family stability and bourgeois habits is increasingly the preserve of the best-­educated third of the country (a college degree or more). It is woefully scarce in the least-­educated third (no high-school diploma) and is eroding in the middle third (a high-school degree or some college). All of this points to a slow-­motion social and economic evisceration of a swath of Middle America and a divide between the classes that risks becoming more and more unbridgeable.

  It is in this context that it is important to recapture the ­essential Lincoln. His keen political sense, his deft statesmanship, his stalwart war leadership, his martyrdom—­all of these are important but incidental to his animating purpose of enhancing ­opportunity. Lincoln argued that the Declaration of Independence existed to exert a gravitational force pulling the country always back toward its ideals. Such is the totemic power of our sixteenth president that his life and example serve the same function.

  We all know the Lincoln of the Second Inaugural and the Gettysburg Address. We need to know the Lincoln of the Address before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society and of the Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions, both talks in which he vents his favorite enthusiasms. We need to understand his thirst for economic and industrial development. We need to realize that he was a lawyer for corporations, a vigorous advocate of property rights, and a defender of an “elitist” economics against the unreflective populist bromides of his age. We need to focus on his love for the Founders as guides to the American future. We need to grapple with his ferocious ambition, personal and political.

  The vast arc
hipelago of this (relatively) unknown Lincoln is the foundation for his greatness. Another man might have saved the Union; only Lincoln could have grasped and defined so precisely and profoundly what made it worthy of the saving. He felt it. He understood it. He had lived it.

  It is famously said that Lincoln is the second-­most written-­about figure in history after Jesus Christ. Yet it is easy to lose the true Lincoln in the haze of celebration. He wasn’t an Everyman. He wasn’t “out of the very earth,” in the words of James Russell Lowell, or an “aboriginal man,” in the words of Emerson. He was exceptional from his youth, possessed of a rigorous mind and an uncanny memory. For all his generosity of spirit, he was a slashing partisan for much of his political career and even after he mellowed, a merciless polemicist. He wasn’t an accidental president, or an accidental anything else in politics. He burned with a white-­hot desire for political distinction, and was a legislative mechanic, quasi-­campaign operative, and dispenser of patronage before anyone thought to build a monument to him. About to be dispatched to London as ambassador during the war, Charles Francis Adams was shocked when in a meeting with Lincoln and Secretary of State William Seward, the president exulted to Seward about finally resolving a knotty patronage appointment: “Well, Governor, I’ve this morning decided that Chicago post-­office appointment!”

  Decades ago, the distinguished Lincoln biographer David Herbert Donald coined the phrase “getting right with Lincoln” to describe the impulse nearly everyone feels to appropriate Lincoln for his political agenda. This is better than the alternative. What kind of country would it be if ­people felt compelled to get right with Jefferson Davis or John C. Calhoun? But this tendency often means doing violence to Lincoln’s memory.