Lincoln on Democracy

Introduction

Introduction BY GABOR S. BORITT It was planting time in the Kentucky valley where the Lincoln clan made its home. Children had to learn work very young. Little Abraham was starting his lessons, walking behind his father, dropping pumpkin seeds into the hills made by Thomas Lincoln's crude hoe. Two seeds into every second corn hill, in every second row. Then the Sabbath came and with it a great cloudburst up on the hills above them. It did not rain in their valley, but the water came swirling down from the hills, washing away corn, pumpkin, and topsoil. The reward of their labors was lost. This was the earliest memory, earliest pain the grown man Lincoln could recall. Nearly half a century later he told another Kentuckian , abolitionist Cassius Clay: "I always thought the man who made the corn should eat the corn." Much happened to the United States during that half century, from the time of the cloudburst on the Knob Creek farm during the presidency of James Madison to the time of Lincoln. But amid it all, clearly the chief business for this strange and beautiful people called Americans was to rise up and grow, as James M. McPherson explained in his Battle Cry ofFreedom. And grow the Americans did, as never before or since in their history. In the twentieth century much of this phenomenon is called economic development. The territory of the United States quadrupled between 1803 and 1853. The thin strip of states along the Atlantic coast grew to a great land that stretched to the Pacific. The population of the country moved 4 LINCOLN ON DEMOCRACY westward, more than quadrupled, and, incidentally, grew more diverse. The gross national product, to use another modern term, expanded almost seven times. Countryfolk, like Lincoln, moved to urban places at a fast pace. The majority, who stayed on the land, in turn increasingly entered a market economy. The rise in living standards surpassed imagination -and also the levels in much of the world. Yet even as the average income ofAmericans went up tremendously, the real wages of workers may have gone up only half as much. A price paid for better life under capitalism was greater inequality. That the environment needed protection was quite beyond the culture's ken. Indians lost outright in this brave new world, most blacks endured as slaves, and modern eyes judge the place women had in society as sadly unequal. Violence erupted periodically, taking fuel from class, ethnic, and finally sectional tensions. And yet an ever-growing number of European immigrants testified that America provided rich opportunities for those whom Lincoln called "the many poor." Or, as he put it in 1838, America was "the fairest portion of the earth." It also had "a degree of political freedom," he added four years later, "far exceeding" that of other nations. Nearly all understood that the two elements were related and that the contrast to much of old Europe was stark. The political worlds of the United States revolved around issues generated by growing pains. Some historians, like Richard Hofstadter, saw the party systems of Lincoln's adult lifetime-Democrats versus Whigs and later Republicans-in terms of consensus, arguing that Americans, their many battles notwithstanding, held fundamental matters largely in common. Other scholars, led by J. G. A. Pocock and Gordon Wood, saw sharply competing values in America, which they called repUblicanism and liberalism. (The first emphasized the commonweal at the expense of individual pursuits. The second argued that the common good was best reached through the efforts of individuals seeking their own good.) Still other historians, often of older schools, understood matters in terms of sectional, class, or ethnocultural divisions . If we ignore certain idiosyncratic alignments, it might be better not to conceive of the sharp political wars of those antebellum decades, in which battles about economic issues were paramount, as between the haves and have-nots, as Marx diagnosed them for Romanticism's ''Aile Menschen" (All Mankind). The conflict then can be visualized as Lincoln and the American Dream, 1832-1852 5 mostly between haves who wanted to have a little more and other haves who wanted much more and, without fully recognizing the fact, were willing to change the American way of life, indeed the ways of millennia , in order to get it. The former were the diligent and the persevering , yet a large majority of them fit...