I enjoy listening to the Great Courses lectures on my car iPod. I just finished Abraham Lincoln yesterday. It seems the older I get, the more history interests me. I knew that Lincoln is often mentioned as one of the greatest of our presidents, that he was the president when our country experienced the civil war, that he was behind the emancipation proclamation and that he was assassinated right after winning a second term. Listening to descriptions of politics, the news media (face to face and newspapers only) and general communications of the time emphasizes how different things are now from what they were then.
However, there are some surprising similarities between his first election in 1860 and today's situation as we move toward a presidential election in November. Lincoln had been a successful Illinois lawyer and a member of the Illinois legislature and the US House of Representatives. He wrote and spoke very well but had had little executive experience. The hot issue of the day was the expansion or lack of it of areas where it was legal to have slaves.
It is clear that everyone concerned assumed as a fact that African Americans were "racially" inferior to whites. This assumption figured largely in discussions of what emancipation would mean in both the north and the south. Another important concern was the property value of the slaves to their owners. The manufacturing forces in Britain had recently entered the age of machines and the demand for cotton by the main British industry was very strong. From the 1820's, the value of the labor that slaves provided had grown steadily and was the backbone of the wealth of the south. Slavers wanted new territories to be admitted as areas allowing slavery so they could expand. Meanwhile, many northern workers feared that emancipation would flood the labor market with people who had shown they could work hard and would do so at lower wages than northern workers received.
For some people, of course, the moral question of one human being owning another, benefitting from the work of another without fair recompense figured as the main question, the main point. Lincoln was a member of the Republican political party, which was newly formed and small, while the Democrats were the leading party for both sides. Their party was far larger, more experienced and better organized. However, that larger size meant more possible splinter groups and internal disagreements. The political situation of 1860 was such that several competing parties and groups split the power and votes of the Democrats while Lincoln's personal ability and luck of the situation enabled him to secure the presidency.
Despite what we sometimes hear about and see today, the manners and maneuvers of that time make me think that maybe we are about the same in civility, broadmindedness and subtlety of thought as they were. It is certainly not clear to me that we do a lot worse in such things.
(I am not expressing political preferences here, just discussing history.)
--
Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
