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Democratic Statecraft and Technological Advance: Abraham Lincoln's Reflections on “Discoveries and Inventions”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Eugene F. Miller
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Extract

What moderns call technology is requisite to liberal democracy, for without the increase of wealth, knowledge, and opportunity that technology provides, the ruling majority could not be an enlightened middle class. Nevertheless, critics point to advancing technology's harmful side, with some hoping to prevent these harms by tight controls and others despairing that technology lies beyond our control. In a neglected 1858–59 lecture and related speeches, Abraham Lincoln wrestled with these issues and their implications for democratic statecraft. Although convinced that “discoveries and inventions” had rescued humankind from savage beginnings, produced abundance, and put genuine democracy within reach, Lincoln recognized that advancing technology alone would not guarantee freedom, but might bring new forms of mastery. Lincolnian statecraft seeks to moderate or limit this advance not through stringent controls, but by a moral teaching that builds on the natural right to oneself and includes a comprehensive doctrine of labor.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 63 , Issue 3 , Summer 2001 , pp. 485 - 516
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2001

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References

Research for this article was completed in part during my tenure in 1999–2000 as a Liberty Fund Visiting Scholar. I am grateful to Liberty Fund for this opportunity.

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 (Boritt, Gabor S., Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream [Memphis, TN: Memphis State University Press, 1978Google Scholar]) and Frayssé (Frayssé, Olivier, Lincoln, Land, and Labor, 1809–60, trans. Neely, Sylvia [Urbana: University of Illinois Press 1994]Google Scholar), but more recent studies have brought out the seriousness of Lincoln's convictions and the continuity of his thought. Jaffa (Jaffa, Harry V., Crisis of the House Divided. [Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959]Google Scholar; Jaffa, , A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War [Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000]Google Scholar) and Anastaplo (Anastaplo, George, Abraham Lincoln: A Constitutional Biography [Lanham, Md: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999]Google Scholar) 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 (see also Thurow, Glen E., Abraham Lincoln and American Political Religion [Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1976]Google Scholar). 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 (a condensed account is found in Boritt, , Lincoln and the Economics of the American DreamGoogle Scholar) and Frayssé, , Lincoln, Land, and Labor, 1809–60Google Scholar. 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 (Boritt, , Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream, pp. 155–74, 189–93Google Scholar). 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.”

2. Lincoln, Abraham, The Collected Works, ed. Basler, Roy P., 8 vols. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press 1953–1955).Google Scholar All citations to Lincoln's writings are to this edition, by volume and page number.

3. Temple, Wayne C., “Lincoln as a Lecturer on ‘Discoveries, Inventions, and Improvements.”‘ Jacksonville Journal Courier, 23 05 1982, pp. 1–12.Google ScholarGuelzo, Allen C., Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans 1999),Google Scholar 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 unapologetically in joint creation of the steam engine and the American republic” (pp. 173–74).

4. Wills, Garry, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America (New York: Touchstone, 1992), p. 103.Google Scholar

5. Ibid., pp. 105–106; cf. 46,153.

6. 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” (Bancroft, George, Literary and Historical Miscellanies [New York: Harper and Brothers, 1857], pp. 481–517).Google Scholar 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.

7. 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” (Bruce, Robert V., Lincoln and the Tools of War [Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1989], p. 13).Google Scholar 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” (Whitney, Henry Clay, Life on the Circuit with Lincoln [Caldwell, ID: Caxton Printers, 1940], p. 209).Google Scholar

8. Whitney, , Life on the Circuit, p. 136.Google Scholar

9. Hertz, Emmanuel, ed., The Hidden Lincoln: From the Letters and Papers of William H. Herndon (New York: Viking Press, 1938), p. 113.Google Scholar

10. See, Lincoln, , Complete Works, 2: 32–36.Google Scholar 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; 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;Google Scholar cf. Herndon, William H. and Weik, Jesse W., Herndon's Life of Lincoln, intro. and notes by Paul M. Angle [New York: Boni, 1930], pp. 477–78;Google Scholar and see Havlik, Robert J., “Abraham Lincoln and the Technology of ‘Young America,’” Lincoln Herald 79 [Spring 1977]: 3–11).Google Scholar

11. Bruce, , Lincoln and the Tools of War.Google Scholar

12. Lincoln's quotation is drawn, in slightly altered form, from Addison's, JosephCatoGoogle Scholar, 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. Lawrence, George and ed. Mayer, J. P. [New York: Harper Perennial 1988], pp. 442–49, 462–65, 530–32, 542–47).Google Scholar 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; instead, his analysis of the Bible justifies attention to bodily needs and their efficient satisfaction.

13. Sanders, George N., “Eighteen Fifty-Two, and the ‘Coming Man.’” Democratic Review 30 (06 1852): 486.Google Scholar

14. Curti, Merle E., “Young America,” American Historical Review 32 (10 1926): 34–55;CrossRefGoogle ScholarSpencer, Donald S., Louis Kossuth and Young America: A Study of Sectionalism and Foreign Policy, 1848–1852 (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1977), pp. 116–20.Google Scholar

15. On Douglas and Young America, see Johannsen, Robert W., The Frontier, the Union, and Stephen A. Douglas (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1973), pp. 344–73;Google ScholarJohnson, Allen, Stephen A. Douglas: A Study in American Politics (New York: MacMillan, 1908), pp. 191–219.Google Scholar

16. Johnson, , Stephen A. Douglas, pp. 216–17.Google Scholar

17. Holzer, Harold, ed., The Lincoln-Douglas Debates, (New York: HarperPerennial, 1994), p. 109;Google ScholarSanders, , “Eighteen Fifty-Two, and the ‘Coming Man,’” p. 492.Google Scholar

18. See Johannsen, , Frontier, the Union, and Stephen A. Douglas, pp. 98, 92;Google Scholar Douglas's technological rationale for manifest destiny is explored by Jaffa, , House Divided, pp. 65–71.Google Scholar

19. Lerner, Ralph, Revolutions Revisited: Two Faces of the Politics of Enlightenment (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), p. 50.Google Scholar

20. Compare Grant's, George (Technology and Empire [Concord, Ontario: Anansi Press, 1969])Google Scholar 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.

21. 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 1:26–28Google Scholar). Ellul, Jacques, “Technique and the Opening Chapters of Genesis,” in Theology and Technology: Essays in Christian Analysis and Exegesis, ed. Mitcham, Carl and Grote, Jim (Lanham, NY: University Press of America, 1984),Google Scholar 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. White, Lynn Jr, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” Science 155 (1967): 1203–07,CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed 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. Novak, Michael, “Creation Theology,” in Co-Creation and Capitalism: John Paul II's Laborem Exercens.” ed. Houck, John W. and Williams, Oliver F. (Washington: University Press of America, 1983)Google Scholar (see also The Fire of Invention: Civil Society and the Future of the Corporation [Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997Google Scholar]) 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 the great modern discoveries and inventions.) Whereas Novak praises Laborem Exercens, Hauerwas, Stanley, “Work as Co-Creation: A Critique of a Remarkably Bad Idea,” in Co-Creation and CapitalismGoogle Scholar, citing its faulty reading of Genesis and its “blessing of technology/’ calls it “a disaster.” 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 (“Mining the Earth's Womb,” in Machina Ex Dea: Feminist Perspectives on Technology, ed. Rothschild, Joan [New York: Pergamon Press, 1983]).Google Scholar

22. 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). Frayssé finds intentional sexual connotations in Lincoln's references to “the getting up of the apron” and “thread[ing] the needle” (Lincoln, Land, and Labor, 1809–60, pp. 40, 213–14Google Scholar). This interpretation, if correct, would be significant for two reasons: Lincoln would be treating a somber Biblical event lightheartedly; and he would be linking our first parents′ discovery of their nakedness to arousal rather than to disobedience.

23. 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. Campbell, R. H., Skinner, H. S., and Todd., W. B., 2 vols. [Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1981], p. 625).Google Scholar 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).Google Scholar 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 (Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996], p. 190).Google Scholar

24. Rahe, Paul A., “Slavery, Section, and Progress in the Arts,” in The Revival of Constitutionalism, ed. Muller, James W. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988),Google Scholar 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.Google Scholar

25. Blake, W. O., The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade, Ancient and Modern (1858; New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1969), pp. 95, 98.Google Scholar 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.

26. 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.

27. Blake, , History of Slavery, p. 94.Google Scholar

28. See especially Fogel, Robert W., Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York: Norton, 1989),Google Scholar which restates and develops key arguments of Fogel, Robert W. and Engerman, Stanley L., Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974);Google Scholar also Starobin, Robert S., Industrial Slavery in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970),Google Scholar and Dew, Charles B., Bond of Iron: Master and Slave at Buffalo Forge (New York: Norton, 1994).Google Scholar

29. 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)

30. Postrel, Virginia, The Future and Its Enemies (New York: Free Press, 1998)Google Scholar restates the classical liberal argument that market forces, operating within a system of general laws but without central controls, produce the best outcomes. Feenberg, Andrew, Critical Theory of Technology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991)Google Scholar and Alternative Modernity: The Technical Turn in Philosophy and Social Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995)Google Scholar and Sclove, Richard E., Democracy and Technology (New York: Guilford Press, 1995),Google Scholar while also favoring technological advance, call for strong democratic controls. Grant, (Technology and Empire)Google Scholar, following Heidegger, (The Question Concerning Technology: And Other Essays, trans. Lovitt, William [New York: Harper and Row 1977]),Google Scholar sees the modern technological advance as severely harmful to humankind, but doubts that it can be brought under human control.

31. Hammond, James H., Selections from the Letters and Speeches of the Hon. James H. Hammond of South Carolina, intro. and notes by Clyde N. Wilson (1866; Spartanburg S C: Reprint Company, 1978), pp. 317–19.Google Scholar

32. 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], in Early Essays and Miscellanies, ed. Moldenhauer, Joseph J. and Moser, Edwin [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975], p. 117).Google Scholar Whereas Lincoln corrects Genesis to elevate work, Thoreau does so to elevate leisure.

33. See, for example, Etzler, John Adolphus, The Paradise Within the Reach of All Men, Without Labor, by the Powers of Nature and Machinery. An Address to All Intelligent Men. In Collected Works, ed. Nydahl, Joel (1833; Delmar, NY: Scholars′ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1977).Google Scholar