Lincoln Unbound Read Free Page B

war—­the subsidies to railroads, the Homestead Act—­were a far cry from the transfer programs instituted in the twentieth century. The railroads got land and loan guarantees. The Homestead Act, as Lincoln historian Allen Guelzo argues, can be viewed as a gigantic privatization of public lands, which were sold off at a cut rate to ­people willing to improve their plots. *
    The surges in government that presaged explosions in its growth later in the twentieth century first arrived during the Progressive Era, in the Teddy Roosevelt and the Woodrow ­Wilson administrations. The New Deal represented a true rupture within the American tradition, and the Great Society—­born of the post-­1964 liberal ascendancy and of the particular hubris of post–World War II America—­doubled down on it. Lincoln never would have imagined a cradle-­to-­grave welfare state, or ­expansive government programs to support the able-­bodied who aren’t war widows or orphans.
    The likes of Mario Cuomo hang much of their case for ownership of Lincoln on a statement he wrote for himself circa 1854, in what may have been a draft note for a lecture: “The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of ­people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all , or can not, so well do , for themselves—­in their separate, and individual capacities.” In this he was referring, on the one hand, to policing and the prosecution of crimes, and on the other, to “public roads and highways, public schools, charities, pauperism, orphanage, estates of the deceased, and the machinery of government itself.” In other words, functions of government that are thoroughly uncontroversial. And when Lincoln talked of government, he didn’t necessarily mean the federal government.
    In the same document he writes, “In all that the ­people can individually do as well for themselves, government ought not to interfere.” He elaborated in a 1858 speech, “I believe each individual is naturally entitled to do as he pleases with himself and the fruit of his labor, so far as it in no wise interferes with any other man’s rights—­that each community, as a State, has a right to do exactly as it pleases with all the concerns within that State that interfere with the rights of no other State, and that the general government, upon principle, has no right to interfere with anything other than that general class of things that does concern the whole.”
    Obviously, Lincoln is not an exact fit with either of our two competing political ideologies. He was more favorable to government activism than conservatives are today. But progressives do him the gravest disser­vice by attempting to conscript him for their cause, a project that dates back to Teddy Roosevelt. Lincoln had more faith in the market and an up-­by-­the-­bootstraps individualism; a greater tolerance for economic inequality; a deeper commitment to bourgeois moral norms; a more realistic view of human nature; and a keener sense of constitutional limits and of natural rights than liberals do today.
    Lincoln’s policies sought to create more robust markets, with more ­people better equipped to pursue their own advancement, without government interference or guarantees. Lincoln warned a delegation of workingmen during the Civil War of the peril of a “war on property, or the owners of property”: “Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another; but let him labor diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built.” In March 1860, he said, “I take it that it is best for all to leave each man free to acquire property as fast as he can. Some will get wealthy. I don’t believe in a law to prevent a man from getting rich; it would do more harm than good. So while we do not propose any