Lincoln Unbound by Rich Lowry

Author:Rich Lowry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

“A Great Empire”: Lincoln’s Vision Realized

I chant the new empire grander than any before . . . My sail-­ships and steam-­ships threading the archipelagoes, My stars and stripes fluttering in the wind.

—­WALT WHITMAN, “A BROADWAY PAGEANT,” 1860

Right after his reelection in 1864, Lincoln wrote the first draft of his annual message to Congress, on pieces of pasteboard or boxboard.

In a passage of the data-­laden document, he evoked the waxing strength of the Union. He noted its increasing population as shown in the higher number of voters than in 1860. “A table is appended showing particulars,” he noted, before getting to the larger point: “The important fact remains demonstrated, that we have more men now than we had when the war began; that we are not exhausted, nor in process of exhaustion; that we are gaining strength, and may, if need be, maintain the contest indefinitely. This as to men. Material resources are now more complete and abundant than ever. The national ­resources, then, are unexhausted, and, as we believe, inexhaustible.”

He exaggerated only slightly.

In the war, Lincoln’s industrializing, rapidly growing capitalist republic overwhelmed the agrarian South partly through sheer demographic and economic muscle. Hamilton trumped Jefferson. Free labor beat slavery. The dynamic North—­hustling, innovating, pulling ­people in from abroad—­bested the underdeveloped South. “We began without capital and if we should lose the greater part of it before this [war] is over,” Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase boasted in 1863, “labor would bring it back again and with a power hitherto unfelt among us.”

The notion that the war itself, a charnel house for America’s youth and a great grinding wheel of material destruction, drove the industrialization of the North is a myth. But it represented a victory of Lincoln’s style of modernizing capitalism. It wiped out slavery and vindicated his view of the American creed. It decisively broke the South’s political power, and the remnants of the South’s economic model moldered in a region that became as “peculiar” in the American context as the institution of bound labor that had precipitated the war. The country set out on a path of robust democratic capitalism that made it richer—­and better—­than if it had chosen any other alternative. In the aftermath, the country emerged a budding world power with, in the words of Herman Melville, “empire in her eyes.”

Before General Winfield Scott ever had reason to come up with his Anaconda Plan (“Scott’s Great Snake”) to subdue the Confederacy, the South felt squeezed. On the cusp of the nineteenth century, the North and the South had similar populations. The immigrants who poured into the country—­5 million in the four decades prior to the war—­overwhelmingly made their home in the more congenial free North rather than the South. Another 800,000 came during the course of the war. In 1860, the North had 19 million ­people to the South’s 12 million, counting the almost 4 million slaves. In 1800, the South accounted for 46 percent of Congress; in 1860, just 35 percent.

In the

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