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Hijacked
In his new book, What
Lincoln Believed, Michael Lind attempts to rebalance the legacy of
Abraham Lincoln and debunks many of the beliefs that have been attributed to Lincoln. Along the way,
Lind hijacks Lincoln’s
legacy in another direction, through emphasizing the social and political
trends that shaped and formed him. Readers looking to expand their
impressions about the Great Emancipator will find this book challenging and
interesting. Here’s an excerpt, from the beginning of Chapter Two,
“All-Conquering Mind: The Education of Abraham Lincoln,” pp. 29-35:
After Abraham Lincoln was
shot on April 14, 1865, by John Wilkes Booth and died the next day, Richard
Oglesby, the governor of Illinois, pleaded
with Mary that the former president be buried in Springfield. The grieving widow finally
consented, but, over the objections of the governor, who wanted Lincoln’s tomb to be near the governor’s mansion, she
ordered that he be buried in Oak
Ridge, a suburban cemetery. If she did not get her
way, she threatened to have him buried in Chicago.
Why
not Chicago?
After all, it was in the vast
“Wigwam” in Chicago that the Republican
Convention had nominated Lincoln for president
while he waited for the news in Springfield.
It was on lecture stages and in offices and hotel bars in Chicago
that Lincoln
had spent much of his political and professional life, orating, socializing,
wheeling and dealing. Often Lincoln had sat in
theaters in Chicago,
listening to actors deliver his favorite lines in Shakespeare’s plays or
laughing at white actors in blackface imitating blacks in the minstrel shows
that he enjoyed. Lincoln was at home in Chicago.
But to later generations the
juxtaposition of Lincoln and Chicago has seemed incongruous. The great
industrial center of the American Midwest may have been in Lincoln’s
state, but it was not in Lincoln’s
world. Later generations have been taught to think of Lincoln as a quaint
rural figure, more at home in the village of New Salem, Illinois, where he
spent part of his young adulthood, than in the larger city of Springfield,
where he spent most of his career. Lincoln’s
world is an idyllic world of green trees, gurgling creeks, and meadows
fenced by rails he split by hand—not an urban landscape of skyscrapers, meat
processing plants, smoking factory chimneys, ornate mansions, immigrant
tenements, steel bridges, and converging railroads. To avoid Chicago, and
even Springfield, a dangerously substantial city where Lincoln owned a
disturbingly big house in which he and his family were waited on by a series of
white and black maids, the popular imagination, influenced by countless
books, plays, and films, skips over most of Lincoln’s life so that Lincoln
goes almost directly from splitting rails in tiny New Salem to Washington,
D.C. Here he saves the Union and frees the slaves, pausing only to defend the
ideal of human equality in his debates with Stephen A. Douglas, his
Democratic rival for a U.S. Senate seat from Illinois.
The Lincoln of popular myth is a Jeffersonian
Lincoln, the embodiment of the Jeffersonian ideal of the yeoman farmer,
uncorrupted by contact with cities and big business and political machines.
The genuine Lincoln was the product of a
pioneer farm family on what was then the Western frontier of settlement in
the United States;
in that respect, he fit the Jeffersonian stereotype. But his principles as a
politician and public philosopher were those of the tradition founded by Jefferson’s rival, Alexander Hamilton. Jeffersonians liked government to be small and close to
the people; Lincoln
as a matter of principle favored a strong, centralized, activist federal
government that promoted industrial capitalism. Jeffersonians
thought that independent farmers were nobler than factory workers; Lincoln from his twenties onward campaigned for state and
government sponsorship of manufacturing industries in Illinois and the nation as a whole. Jeffersonians preferred the country to the city; Lincoln, born on the
farm, became not only an urbanite but an enthusiastic “booster” of schemes
to turn wilderness and farmland into cities. Lincoln’s early biographers, his former law
partner William Herndon, and his bodyguard Ward Hill Lamon
shared his contempt for the low level of civilization found on the frontier.
Herndon described it as a “stagnant putrid pool” while Lamon
said it was a “dung hill” characterized by “the utter absence of all
romantic and heroic elements.”
The villains in America’s
Jeffersonian mythology are the friends of Lincoln, an affluent lawyer whose clients
included giant corporations, millionaires, real estate speculators, and
corporate executives. Lincoln
came from humble origins, but he made his career among the prosperous and
powerful. In American myth, Lincoln
resembled the Jeffersonian ideal of the honest, awkward maverick in public
service more than one of the villains of the American morality play: the
cunning party politician making secret deals in smoke-filled rooms. Lincoln,
an abstemious man, did not smoke or drink, but he rose to prominence in a
cloud of cigar smoke within earshot of spittoons.
The legendary Lincoln in the popular imagination is a
martyred saint succeeded by scoundrels. The Civil War, a crusade for human
liberty, is followed by the Gilded Age, an era of massive political
corruption, class inequality, and industrial pollution. How and why the good
Republicans of the Civil War turned abruptly into the bad Republicans of
Western railroad scandals and gaudy mansions in Newport is never explained.
The same popular culture that for
generations vilified the post—Civil War Republican North has also idealized
the elegant lost world of the antebellum plantation South. The industrial
North won the Civil War, but the agrarian South along with the agrarian West
won the cultural war. The millionaire industrialist may be an American
archetype, the city slicker may have been the norm for generations, but the
rural American—the yeoman farmer, the cowboy, even the aristocratic Southern
planter—has been the American ideal, to judge by Hollywood
movies and popular fiction. Industrialization and urbanization represented a
fall from Arcadian innocence in the American collective mind. The farmer
defending his land against commercial real estate developers, the cowboy
gazing sadly at the barbed wire fence mutilating the once-free range—these
symbols have a deep resonance in the American imagination.
It is no wonder, then, that Americans
have chosen to pretend that Abraham Lincoln was someone other than a lifelong
proponent of urbanization and industrialization. The real Abraham
Lincoln—the lifelong opponent of the Jeffersonian politicians of his day,
the urban lawyer who wanted to replace the woods and fields with factories,
cities, railroads, and canals— looks disturbingly like the serpent in
America’s Eden. The solution has been to bracket off his life and career from
the Gilded Age that followed and to pretend that the “robber baron”
industrialists betrayed Lincoln’s vision of America instead of fulfilling it in places
like late-nineteenth-century Chicago.
Chicago is the informal capital of the Midwest.
The single most important fact about Abraham Lincoln is that he was, by
adoption although not by birth, a Midwesterner. In the nineteenth century the
three major regions of the United States
were the Northeast, the South, and the Midwest.
The key political event of the nineteenth century was the regional
realignment in national politics caused by the issue of the expansion of
slavery. That realignment turned the Midwest
from an ally of the South in national politics into an ally of the Northeast.
When the South, fearing a loss of power in national government, attempted to
secede, the Northeast—Midwest alliance
crushed the rebels. From the 1860s until the 1930s the alliance of the
Northeast and Midwest within the Republican
Party dominated American politics and policy. Lincoln owed his presidency to this
alliance of the two regions. Despite his relative obscurity and lack of
extensive national political experience, Lincoln was chosen as the presidential
candidate of the Republican Party in 1860 chiefly because he was a prominent
Republican from an important Midwestern state. But Lincoln was not simply a passive
beneficiary of this regional coalition. From 1854 onward, by helping to lead
the campaign against the extension of slavery, Lincoln
had done as much as anyone to unite the Midwest
with the Northeast in a common cause.
Lincoln’s opposition to the expansion of
slavery was rooted in the experiences of his family—a family of white yeoman
farmers who had migrated from a South dominated by rich, slave-owning
landlords to the more egalitarian Midwest.
The Midwest to which they moved was a
promised land for ordinary white Americans compared to the Northeast,
dominated by wealthy urban families, and the plantation South. Americans in
later generations would attribute the egalitarianism of the Midwest—or, as it
was known in Lincoln’s time, the Old Northwest—to the conditions of the frontier. But
the frontier of the South expanded westward as well, along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, bringing hierarchy rather than equality
with it. In reality the egalitarianism of the Midwest
was the product of conscious social engineering by the federal government.
Three government policies created the Midwest of Lincoln’s day and later
generations—the Northwest Ordinance, Indian removal, and the reform of
American land laws.
The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 was
enacted by the final U.S. Congress that met under the Articles of
Confederation, before a new federal government under the present federal
Constitution took power in 1789. The Northwest Ordinance was a republican
solution to a political dilemma—what to do with the vast territory east of
the Mississippi and north of the Ohio River
that the federal government had obtained from Britain at the conclusion of the
American war for independence. For the inhabitants of this territory to be
ruled without their consent by Washington, D.C., as the colonists had been ruled by London, would be unrepublican. Therefore the ordinance’s first provision
was to divide the Northwest Territory into
six states, each of which, on meeting a minimum population standard, would be
admitted to the union “on an equal footing with the original states.”
Ultimately the Old Northwest was divided into the states of Ohio,
Indiana, Illinois,
Michigan, Wisconsin,
and Minnesota.
Because a literate citizenry was considered essential for a republic, the
Northwest Ordinance’s second provision was that revenue from the sale of part
of each township in each state would fund public education—an early example
of federal support for American education. The third provision was that “neither
slavery nor involuntary servitude” would be permitted in the Old Northwest. Finally, the ordinance said that the
rights of the Indians would be respected.
The first three
provisions of the Northwest Ordinance were enforced, but the promise to
respect Indian rights was soon ignored. The British imperial government had
prevented the American colonists from coming into conflict with Indians by
banning settlement west of the Appalachians.
The resentment this provoked was one of the causes of the Revolutionary War.
No longer restrained by London, white settlers
swarmed over the Appalachians. In the wars
that resulted, the settlers, with the aid of the federal and state
governments, swept Indian communities aside. The Shawnee
were conquered and expelled from Ohio
in the 1790s. The last great battle for the Midwest between whites and
Indians was the Black Hawk War of 1832, in which the young Abraham Lincoln
served in the Illinois
militia. The Fox and Sauk tribes had been forced into the Iowa
territory and then returned to their old homes in northern Illinois. The war began when Illinois settlers murdered the emissaries of Sauk and
Fox Indians, led by Black Hawk, and ended after Illinois
militia massacred Sauk men, women, and children at the Bad
Axe River
in Wisconsin.
This ethnic cleansing of Indians was the precondition for converting the
Midwest into a paradise for white settlers like the Lincolns.
A third government policy
that profoundly affected the future development of the Midwest
was the Northwest Ordinance’s provision that all government sales of land would
be in “fee simple.” This represented a victory for Jeffersonian populists.
The Jeffersonians did not achieve their most ambitious
goal, which was the provision of free land by the government to settlers who
agreed to work it; that would be achieved much later by the Homestead Act of
1862, which President Abraham Lincoln would sign into law. But Jeffersonians succeeded in inserting a provision in the
Northwest Ordinance that guaranteed that yeoman farmers would own their land
free and clear, and not suffer from the complex forms of “fee-tail” or encumbrances
which in British law were a relic of feudalism.
Already in his lifetime Abraham Lincoln
was being identified as the archetypical Midwesterner—and with good reason.
The history of the Lincoln family was shaped by the three trends that formed
the Midwest: the conflict between settlers and Indians (the grandfather for
whom Lincoln was named was killed by an Indian); the injustice caused by
feudal land law (Lincoln’s father was forced to give up two farms because of
uncertainties about his title to them); and the creation of the new
Midwestern states, including Indiana and Illinois, to which the Lincolns
moved as a part of a major migration of poor white Southerners drawn by the
opportunities of the Old Northwest.
Lind’s weak credentials as a historian
may lead to critics of his scholarship in What
Lincoln Believed. Much of this book prepares for criticism with a
defensive position on many issues. Frequent Lincoln readers may find nothing
new on these pages, but general readers will come away with a wider
understanding of Lincoln’s beliefs in a number of areas, particularly race,
and a renewed skepticism that some of the things they’ve heard attributed to
Lincoln may not necessarily be true, and that the point of view Lind
expressed in What
Lincoln Believed may also be highly skewed.
Steve Hopkins,
August 25, 2005
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