Democratic statecraft and technological advance: Abraham Lincoln's reflections on discoveries and inventions

Review of Politics

Volumn 63, Issue 3, 2001, Pages 485-515

  Miller, Eugene F ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 34248080051     PISSN: 00346705     EISSN: 17486858     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S003467050003093X     Document Type: Article

References (72)

1. Economic themes, such as tariff protection and internal improvements, were prominent in Lincoln's speeches up to 1854, but were deemphasized after he reentered politics to oppose slavery's expansion. Some revisionist historians have explained this shift as Lincoln's opportunistic effort, after the demise of his Whig Party, to revive a fading political career. See the historiographical essays in Boritt (Gabor S. Boritt, Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream [Memphis, TN: Memphis State University Press, 1978])
2. and Fraysse (Olivier Fraysse, Lincoln, Land, and Labor, 1809-1860, trans. Sylvia Neely [Urbana: University of Illinois Press 1994]), but more recent studies have brought out the seriousness of Lincoln's convictions and the continuity of his thought.
3. Jaffa (Harry V. Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided. [Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959];
4. Jaffa, A New BirthofFreedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War [Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000])
5. and Anastaplo (George Anastaplo, Abr/wm Lincoln: A Constitutional Biography [Lanham, Md: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999]) show that Lincoln, from the beginning of his political career, was deeply attached to principles of natural right and human equality that underpin his later opposition to slavery and, moreover, that his antislavery views emerge in early speeches, particularly his 1838 Lyceum speech and his 1842 Temperance Address
6. (see also Glen E. Thurow, Abraham Lincoln and American Political Religion [Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1976]). Jaffa, more than anyone, has shown that Lincoln's speeches have great depth and repay close analysis of the kind undertaken in the present article. The development of Lincoln's economic thought is treated comprehensively by Boritt
7. (a condensed account is found in Boritt, Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream)
8. and Fraysse, Lincoln, Land, and Labor, 1809-60. Boritt grants that political motives-fear of dividing the antislavery coalition and the desire to remain widely acceptable as a presidential nominee to all factions of his party-were partly responsible for Lincoln's deemphasizing his Whig economic views after 1854, but sees Lincoln's mature position on slavery as the outgrowth of his economic vision
9. (Boritt, Lincoln the Economics of the American Dream, pp. 155-74,189-93). He characterizes the 1859 Wisconsin Fair Address as "Lincoln's most extensive meditation on free labor in an open society" and notes that the section that I call Lincoln's "discourse on labor" is repeated in 1861 and 1864 (ibid., pp. 185,217-19). My aim is to show the close link between Lincoln's moral and political principles, as embodied in his doctrine of free labor, and his advocacy of "discoveries and inventions."
10. Abraham Lincoln, The Collected Works, ed. Roy P. Basler, 8 vols. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press 1953-1955). All citations to Lincoln's writings are to this edition, by volume and page number.
11. Wayne C. Temple, "Lincoln as a Lecturer on 'Discoveries, Inventions, and Improvements."'JflcfcsonwiZ/eJounM/ Courier, 23 May 1982, pp. 1-12.
12. Allen C. Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans 1999), not only presupposes two separate lectures, but misses the critical side of Lincoln's account of technological advance: Lincoln was "unreflectively" describing "a history cast in terms of ever-mounting stages of progress, culminating unapologen'cally in joint creation of the steam engine and the American republic" (pp. 173-74).
13. Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America (New York: Touchstone, 1992), p. 103.
14. Ibid., pp. 105-106; cf. 46,153.
15. The topic of Bancroft's lecture, which was delivered in 1854 before the New York Historical Society, is "the necessity, the reality, and the promise of the progress of mankind" (George Bancroft, Literary and Historical Miscellanies /New York: Harper and Brothers, 1857], pp. 481-517).
16. In the idiom of the German Idealism that he had absorbed while studying abroad, Bancroft proclaims that "God is visible in History" {ibid., p. 492), working to realize the ideal through the movement of the human mind, taken collectively, towards absolute truth. Lincoln's lecture is much more Baconian or Lockean in emphasizing what human beings have achieved by their own efforts at discovery and invention. Implicitly it questions or depreciates the contribution of divine will or providence to human advancement. Lincoln dwells much more on material comforts and the satisfaction of bodily needs. Unlike Bancroft, he invites us to distinguish between technological advance and the progress of liberty. Although hopeful of improvement in both areas, Lincoln does not insist on the "necessity" of progress in either. He offers no guarantee that freedom will triumph (cf. ibid., p. 513), but instead suggests that technological advance might bring new forms of enslavement. Whereas Bancroft celebrates America's position at mid-century and endorses its mission to bring about "the unity of the [human] race" (ibid., p. 507), Lincoln paints an unflattering picture of "Young America" and warns of the youth's imperialistic tendencies.
17. Wills merely cites Bruce, who in turn points indirectly to Lincoln's colleague, Henry Clay Whitney, as the source for the idea that Lincoln's lecture "evolved from a piece by George Bancroft" (Robert V. Bruce, Lincoln and the Tools of War [Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1989], p. 13). Whitney reports that while he and others were travelling with Lincoln in the fall of 1855, the companions read Bancroft's lecture aloud by turns and discussed it. Lincoln said nothing at all to the group about wishing to imitate Bancroft, but instead informed them "that he had for some time been contemplating the writing of a lecture on man," which would "review man from his earliest primeval state to his present high development." Apparently Lincoln's planning was well along, for "he detailed at length the views and opinions he designed to incorporate in his lecture"
18. (Henry Clay Whitney, Life on the Circuit with Lincoln [Caldwell, ID: Caxton Printers, 1940], p. 209).
19. Whitney, Life on the Circuit, p. 136.
20. Emmanuel Hertz, ed., The Hidden Lincoln: From the Letters and Papers of William H. Herndon (New York: Viking Press, 1938), p. 113.
21. See, Lincoln, Complete Works, 2: 32-36. Whitney observes that when he traveled with Lincoln on the circuit, before railroads, and would stop for dinner at a farm house, Lincoln would hunt up "some farming implement, machine or tool, and he would carefully examine it all over, first generally and then critically; he would 'sight' it to determine if it was straight or warped: if he could make a practical test of it, he would do that; he would turn it over or around and stoop down, or lie down, if necessary, to look under it; he would examine it closely, then stand off and examine it at a little distance;
22. he would shake it, lift it, roll it about, up-end it, overset it, and thus ascertain every quality and utility which inhered in it, so far as acute and patient investigation could do it. He was equally inquisitive in regard to matters which obtruded on his attention in the moral world; he would bore to the center of any moral proposition, and carefully analyze and dissect every layer and every atom of which it was composed, nor would he give over the search till completely satisfied that there was nothing more to know, or be learned about it" (Whitney, Life on the Circuit, p. 121;
23. cf. William H. Herndon and Jesse W. Weik, Herndon's Life of Lincoln, intro. and notes by Paul M. Angle [New York: Boni, 1930], pp. 477-78;
24. and see Robert J. Havlik, "Abraham Lincoln and the Technology of 'Young America,'" Lincoln Herald 79 [Spring 1977]: 3-11).
25. Bruce, Lincoln and the Tools of War.
26. Lincoln's quotation is drawn, in slightly altered form, from Joseph Addison's Cato, Act V, Sc. 1, where Cato the Younger is meditating on Plato's Phaedo. Cato's resolve to take his own life rather than submit to Caesar is strengthened by the thought that the soul's "longing after immortality" intimates its eternal or undying nature. Young America, in longing instead for territory, forgets the soul and the eternal. Tocqueville had linked this forgetfulness of the soul to a materialism that arises in democracies from equality of condition; America's preference for useful discoveries and inventions over contemplative science and the fine arts has the same origin (Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence and ed. J. P. Mayer [New York: Harper Perennial 1988], pp. 442-449,462-65,530-32,542- 47). Lincoln appears to be troubled more by Young America's expansionism than by the youth's materialism and elevation of utility. He does not admonish hearers to care about their souls in either the Platonic or the Biblical way;
27. instead, his analysis of the Bible justifies attention to bodily needs and their efficient satisfaction.
28. George N. Sanders, "Eighteen Fifty-Two, and the 'Coming Man.'" Democratic Review 30 (June 1852): 486.
29. Merle E. Curti, "Young America," American Historical Review 32 (October 1926): 34-55;
30. Donald S. Spencer, Louis Kossuth and Young America: A Study of Sectionalism and Foreign Policy, 1848-1852 (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1977), pp. 116-120
31. On Douglas and Young America, see Robert W. Johannsen, The Frontier, the Union, and Stephen A. Douglas (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1973), pp. 344-73;
32. Allen Johnson, Stephen A. Douglas: A Study in American Politics (New York: MacMillan, 1908), pp. 191-219.
33. Johnson, Stephen A. Douglas, pp. 216-217
34. Harold Holzer, ed., The Lincoln-Douglas Debates, ( New York: HarperPerennial, 1994), p. 109;
35. Sanders, "Eighteen Fifty-Two, and the 'Coming Man'" p. 492.
36. See Johannsen, Frontier, the Union, and Stephen A. Douglas, pp. 98, 92;
37. Douglas's technological rationale for manifest destiny is explored by Jaffa, House Divided, pp. 65-71.
38. Ralph Lerner, Revolutions Revisited: Two Faces of the Politics of Enlightenment (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), p. 50.
39. Compare George Grant's (Technology and Empire [Concord, Ontario: Anansi Press, 1969]) harsh indictment of America's technological civilization for its imperialistic and domineering propensities, its greed and self-centeredness, its inordinate thirst for novelty and contempt for tradition, and its suppression of the soul's longing for a transcendent good. Grant, seeing no remedy for these vices, repudiates modern technology.
40. Whether or not the biblical view of human destiny agrees with the one elaborated in the modern technological project is, of course, a difficult and controversial question, which revolves in part around the meaning of God's declaration that man should have "dominion" over the earth and "subdue it" (Genesis 1:26-28).
41. Jacques Ellul, "Technique and the Opening Chapters of Genesis," in Theology and Technology: Essays in Christian Analysis and Exegesis, ed. Carl Mitcham and Jim Grote (Lanham, NY: University Press of America, 1984), denies that a technological imperative can be found here and, in contrast to Lincoln, sees a radical deterioration in humankind's condition after the Fall.
42. Lynn White, Jr., "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis," Science 155 (1967): 1203-1207, however, argues that the idea of "dominion" in Genesis favors the exploitation of nature and, as transmitted through Western Christianity, shares blame for our current "ecological crisis." White and his followers would thus find Lincoln's interpretation of scripture credible, even while faulting his ardent embrace of technology. Pope John Paul II's 1981 encyclical Laborem Exercens bears on this controversy.
43. Michael Novak, "Creation Theology," in Co-Creation and Capitalism: John Paul II's Laborem Exercens." ed. John W. Houck and Oliver F. Williams (Washington: University Press of America, 1983)
44. (see also The Fire of Invention: Civil Society and the Future of the Corporation /Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997]) brings out substantial parallels between the Pope's views on technology and human labor and the views expressed by Lincoln. (Note, however, that Novak simply ignores the fact that Lincoln includes "the Lutheran Reformation in 1517" among die great modern discoveries and inventions.) Whereas Novak praises Laborem Exercens
45. Stanley Hauerwas, "Work as Co-Creation: A Critique of a Remarkably Bad Idea," in Co-Creation and Capitalism, citing its faulty reading of Genesis and its "blessing of technology" calls it "a disaster."
46. David Hollenbach, "Human Work and the Story of Creation: Theology and Ethics in Laboren Exercens," in Co-Creation and Capitalism, defends the encyclical's reading of Genesis while playing down its technological mandate. Carolyn Merchant's survey of writers who condemn "the mining of Mother Earth" helps one to see what is at stake in Lincoln's central metaphor of mining
47. ("Mining the Earth's Womb," inMachina Ex Dea: Feminist Perspectives on Technology, ed. Joan Rothschild [New York: Pergamon Press, 1983]).
48. Adam discovers his nakedness in Eve's presence, and according to Lincoln, she takes the leading part in making the fig-leaf apron (3.357-60). Fraysse finds intentional sexual connotations in Lincoln's references to "the getting up of the apron" and "thread[ing] the needle" (Lincoln, Land, and Labor, 1809-1860, pp. 40,213- 14). This interpretation, if correct, would be significant for two reasons: Lincoln would be treating a somber Biblical event lightheartedly;
49. and he would be linking our first parents' discovery of their nakedness to arousal rather than to disobedience.
50. Compare Adam Smith, who identifies "the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind" as the discovery of America and the discovery of sea passages to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope (Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell, H. S. Skinner, and W. B. Todd., 2 vols. [Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1981], p. 625).
51. Smith traces the greatness of these events to their "commercial benefits" (ibid., 626), while Lincoln ties America's discovery more closely to the progress of technology and, ultimately, to the advance of political freedom (see, for example, his 1842 Temperance Address, 1.278). Hannah Arendt identifies "three great events" that "stand at the threshold of the modern age": the discovery of America, the Reformation, and the invention of the telescope (The Human Condition [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958], p. 248). These events-or the broader movements of exploration, acquisitiveness, and scientific inquiry they inaugurated-have produced that "world alienation" which Arendt sees as "the hallmark of the modern age" (ibid., p. 254). Thus while Smith and Lincoln link the discovery of America to the advance of freedom, Arendt argues that this event contributed eventually to the diminution of freedom, in the sense of possibilities for autonomous action on the public stage. As Dana Villa explains, "the discovery of America begins the process of shrinkage by which the vastness of the earth is reduced to objectifiable dimensions." The earth becomes "a representable object" which man can picture and conquer
52. (Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996], p. 190).
53. Paul A. Rahe, "Slavery, Section, and Progress in the Arts," in The Revival of Constitutionalism, ed. James W. Muller (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), views this passage in light of the development of patent law in England and America and the relevance of such law to the Founders' antisla very strategy. See also Novak, Fire of Invention.
54. W. O. Blake, The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade, Ancient and Modern (1858;
55. New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1969), pp. 95, 98. Blake attributes slavery's earlier demise in Europe to the feudal system, whose military needs were better served by free men, and, more significantly, to the influence of Christianity, which emphasized human equality and freedom.
56. In a sense, James H. Hammond can agree with Lincoln that Negro slavery is an invention of the white race: "The status in which we have placed them is an elevation. They are elevated from the condition in which God first created them, by being made our slaves." See note 31 below.
57. Blake, History of Slavery, p. 94.
58. See especially Robert W. Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York: Norton, 1989)
59. which restates and develops key arguments of Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974);
60. also Robert S. Starobin, Industrial Slavery in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970)
61. and Charles B. Dew, Bond of Iron: Master and Slave at Buffalo Forge (New York: Norton, 1994).
62. Lincoln acknowledges that the invention of the cotton gin had strengthened and extended slavery in ways unexpected by the nation's Founders, but he contests the technological determinism implicit in Representative Preston S. Brooks's claim that "by the invention of the cotton gin it became a necessity in this county that slavery should be perpetual." He goes on to attack Douglas for putting slavery "upon Brooks'cotton gin basis," thereby contributing to its perpetuation (3.316).
63. Virginia Postrel, The Future and Its Enemies (New York: Free Press, 1998) restates the classical liberal argument that market forces, operating within a system of general laws but without central controls, produce the best outcomes.
64. Andrew Feenberg, Critical Theory of Technology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991)
65. and Alternative Modernity: The Technical Turn in Philosophy and Social Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995)
66. and Richard E. Sclove, Democracy and Technology (New York: Guilford Press, 1995), while also favoring technological advance, call for strong democratic controls.
67. Grant (Technology and Empire), following Heidegger (The Question Concerning Technology: And Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt [New York: Harper and Row 1977]), sees the modern technological advance as severely harmful to humankind, but doubts that it can be brought under human control.
68. James H. Hammond, Selections from the Letters and Speeches of the Hon. James H. Hammond of South Carolina, intro. and notes by Clyde N. Wilson (1866);
69. Spartanburg S C: Reprint Company, 1978), pp. 317-319
70. Lincoln seeks to elevate work by making it a kind of inquiry, but he praises useful discoveries, welcomes "profitable enjoyment," and warns against replacing work with leisurely contemplation. Compare Thoreau: "This curious world which we inhabit is more wonderful than it is convenient, more beautiful than it is useful- it is more to be admired and enjoyed then, than used. The order of things should be somewhat reversed,-the seventh should be man's day of toil, wherein to earn his living by the sweat of his brow, and the other six his sabbath of the affections and the soul, in which to range this widespread garden, and drink in the soft influences and sublime revelations of Nature" ( "The Commercial Spirit of Modern Times" [1837], inEarly Essays and Miscellanies, ed. Joseph J. Moldenhauer and Edwin Moser [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975], p. 117). Whereas Lincoln corrects Genesis to elevate work, Thoreau does so to elevate leisure.
71. See, for example, John Adolphus Etzler, The Paradise Within the Reach of All Men, Without Labor, by the Powers of Nature and Machinery. An Address to AH Intelligent Men. In Collected Works, ed. Joel Nydahl (1833;
72. Delmar, NY: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1977).