The Way Back. F. H. Buckley

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СКАЧАТЬ callous Northern wage-slavery was so much worse than the paternalistic slavery of the South.²⁰

      However it reads now, Fitzhugh’s Sociology for the South was not an especially radical book in its day. Today we would think Fitzhugh the most extreme of right-wingers, but had not his British contemporary Thomas Carlyle said much the same thing, and used the N-word to do so?²¹ On what might be taken for the Nineteenth Century British Left, writers such as Carlyle, Charles Kingsley, and Charles Dickens (with Mrs. Jellaby, his “telescopic philanthropist” in Bleak House) argued that England’s poor merited more concern than African slaves. Fitzhugh had placed himself in the mainstream of a nineteenth century attack from the Left and Right on the egalitarian political ideals of George Mason and Thomas Jefferson. And his attack on social mobility required an answer, which it would receive from a most unusual place.

The Promise Renewed

The farmers who gathered in Milwaukee on September 30, 1859 for the Wisconsin state fair were treated to displays and speeches about modern agricultural improvements. There were presentations on how to make champagne from gooseberries, prizes for the best pig, and a report on that noxious bird, the sapsucker. Some of the visitors might have stopped to listen to a visitor from Illinois, who had recently made a name for himself in a series of debates with Senator Stephen Douglas. Abraham Lincoln had accepted an honorarium of $100 to come to the fair, and one of the organizers, thinking they might as well get their money’s worth, asked him to give a speech. Lincoln joked that he had not a platform to stand on, whereupon someone brought him an empty dry-goods box.²²

      Finding himself before an agricultural fair, a rising politician could be expected to dwell on the virtues of agrarian life, the honesty, industriousness, and high-mindedness of farmers. That’s certainly what a Jeffersonian Republican would have said. But then Lincoln wasn’t a Jeffersonian Republican. He came to politics as a Whig, and his beau ideal of a statesman was always Henry Clay.²³ Lincoln liked “internal improvements” (federal support for infrastructure projects), high tariffs to pay for them, and most of all the idea of social mobility in which everyone is provided with the opportunity to flourish. Besides, he had seen farming life back in Kentucky, and got out of it as quickly as he could. His views on agrarian society could be expressed in three words, says Lincoln historian Allen Guelzo: “I hate farming.”

      Lincoln was not unprepared when asked to speak. He had frequently hit the lecture circuit, with talks on discoveries and inventions, and spoke for three-quarters of an hour in a speech that revealed his deepest thoughts on politics and society. What he didn’t do was pander. Farmers, he told the crowd, are wonderful people, but they’re really no better or worse than other people. What was exciting about agriculture was how it had progressed, thanks to scientific experiments and new technology. Steam power, he said, now that’s the ticket! What new technologies do is lighten the burden of physical labor while increasing production, and who could be opposed to that?

      No group more needed new technology or could profit more from book-learning than farmers, said Lincoln. There were the new harvesters, which substituted capital improvements for human labor and made farms much more productive. Then there were the new seeds, which might increase a harvest twentyfold. Farming had become an intellectual endeavor, and what made agricultural fairs so valuable was the way in which they spread the news of new discoveries and inventions. So said the only American president who ever held a patent in his name (for a barge that could navigate the shallow rivers of downstate Illinois).

      From his talk about labor and technology, Lincoln turned to labor and democracy, and to mud-sills. His law partner, William Herndon, had given him a copy of Sociology of the South and reported that no book had more angered Lincoln.²⁴ And as Lincoln tended to ramble in his talks, the leap from threshers to George Fitzhugh was an easy one. What Lincoln objected to, in the mud-sill theory, was the idea that mental and physical labor were the work of different classes of people.

      From that idea so much was to follow. It meant there were no sharp class distinctions between capitalists and laborers, since laborers use their minds and most capitalists labor for their profits. And since everyone uses their minds, education should be open and available to all. Crucially, one’s lot in life should not be fixed, and everyone should be permitted to ascend from the lowest stations in life, as Lincoln had himself had done, rising from the grinding and desperate poverty of a hardscrabble farm. Through his own efforts he had bettered himself, read voraciously, and became a lawyer; and from his personal rise he took an understanding of society that led in time to the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment’s abolition of slavery. That by itself would have made Lincoln the greatest leader of his time, but even apart from that, and the Civil War too, Lincoln’s domestic policies would have made him the dominant nineteenth century American president. From his premises about individuals and society, as expressed in Milwaukee and repeated in his July 4, 1861 Address to Congress, came land grant colleges, an open-border system of immigration, and free land for farmers under a Homestead Act that transformed his country. It was how, he told Congress, the fight to preserve the Union should be seen.

       This is essentially a people’s contest. On the side of the Union it is a struggle for maintaining in the world that form and substance of government whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men; to lift artificial weights from all shoulders; to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all; to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance in the race of life.

      “All honor to Jefferson,” Lincoln had written earlier that year.²⁵ Two years later, on his way to his inauguration in Washington, he told a gathering at Independence Hall in Philadelphia that “I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.”²⁶ Jefferson had introduced an abstract truth about equality, applicable to all men and all times. What Lincoln had done, however, was to give new meaning to the Declaration. First, and most obviously, Lincoln understood that Jefferson’s egalitarianism was incompatible with the institution of slavery. In addition, Lincoln had a different understanding about why equality mattered. More than an abstract truth, it was also a guarantee of social mobility.

       This progress by which the poor, honest, industrious, and resolute man raises himself, that he may work on his own account . . . is that progress that human nature is entitled to, is that improvement in condition that is intended to be secured by those institutions under which we live, is the great principle for which this government was really formed.²⁷

      Jefferson had spoken of a natural aristocracy in which the most gifted and able might rise to the top, but this was simply a happy by-product of equality. For Lincoln, however, it was more than that. Rather, the central idea of America, as expressed in the Declaration, became through Lincoln the promise of income mobility and a faith in the ability of people to rise to a higher station in life. There was nothing base about labor, as Fitzhugh had thought. Instead, what was ignoble was an aristocratic disdain for work and the failure to attempt to better oneself. That was his idea of what America meant, and his ideal of self-improvement and mobility has come down to us as the American Dream.

      That was our dream—but has our dream now fled?

       PART II

       The Way We Are Now

      I no longer wished for a better world, because I was thinking of the whole of creation, and in the light of this clearer discernment I had come to see that, though the higher things are better than the lower, the sum of all creation is СКАЧАТЬ