3.17 Self-making, Ambition and the Civil War
Supplement to Endnotes
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It was the orchestrator of the Union war, Abraham Lincoln, who after the bloodiest summer of the conflict stood before returning troops to remind them of the “nature" of the struggle. “Nowhere in the world is presented a government of so much liberty and equality. To the humblest and poorest amongst us are held out the highest privileges and positions." Lincoln continued, “the present moment finds me at the White House yet there is as good a chance for your children as there was for my father’s.”[1] Earlier in that month Lincoln addressed two other regiments bound for home. “I wish it might be more generally and universally understood what the country is now engaged in,” Lincoln told the soldiers. “We have, as all will agree, a free Government, where every man has a right to be equal with every other man.” And again, four days later Lincoln stood before more uniformed men, and trod down the same rhetorical path.
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I beg you to remember this, not merely for my sake, but for yours. I happen temporarily to occupy the big White House. I am a living witness that any one of your children may look to come here as my father’s child has. It is in order that each of you may have through this free government which we have enjoyed, an open field and a fair chance for your industry, enterprise and intelligence; that you may all have equal privileges in the race of life, with all its desirable human aspirations. It is for this the struggle should be maintained, that we may not lose our birthright….The nation is worth fighting for, to secure such an inestimable jewel[2]
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Lincoln produced these distillations of the American Dream in the wake of Grant’s bloody offensive in late spring of 1864. Between May and mid-June General Grant’s army alone suffered over 60,000 casualties. Americans gasped at the butchery. When Grant’s deadly campaign devolved into a stalemate in the fields around Petersburg and Richmond, even Lincoln’s staunch supporters began to wonder.[3] Lincoln, no doubt, had his improbable reelection in mind when he begged the soldiers to remember all that was at stake. But Lincoln wasn’t pandering so much as repeating what he always believed was the best justification for the horror. Amid confusion, and in the preceding calm, he had believed this to be the brightest ideological North Star, the single common ideal that attached men to the Union. In 1859, roughly a year before being elected, Lincoln held forth before a humongous crown in Cincinnati, assuring them that free labor -- what he and contemporaries called wage labor, and labor down by free people -- promised that no man would ever have to “remain through life in a dependent condition.” Unless given to “vicious habits,” or “singularly unfortunate,” every American could rise as Lincoln had. The “great principle” for which the government had “really” been formed, Lincoln assured the crowd, was to protect “The progress by which the poor, honest, industrious, and resolute man raises himself….”[4]
With the war just underway, and the bloody costs only half-imagined,[5] Lincoln addressed Congress in the summer of 1861 and dilated the war into a grand struggle for nothing less than “maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object it is, to elevate the condition of men—to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all—to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.”
While it is striking what Lincoln is arguing here—that mass annihilation would be a fair price for self-creation, a death wish for what Lincoln called the “race of life”—his following comments are equally important. “I am most happy to believe,” he continued, “that the plain people understand and appreciate this.” That is, this was not some ethereal defense of the war. Common folks, Lincoln seemed to suggest, understood that Union soldiers would be killing their southern counterparts so that men would have a “fair chance” to channel private ambition into careers and social rank. And to prove it, Lincoln then went on to make what now seems like an absurd claim—that up to that point, July 4, 1861 not a single common soldier had deserted the ranks of the Union army.[6]
So where and when did this emphasis on rising up begin? Christopher Lasch argued that the Republican Party unwittingly flipped the American mental map of freedom on its side—changing the orientation of conceptions like “opportunity” and “mobility” from a horizontal orientation to the vertical. In his jeremiad against American meritocracy (in which he strains to let Lincoln and his party off the hook) Lasch admits that the Morrill College Land Grant Act of 1862, passed during the war by an unconstrained Republican Congress and signed by Lincoln, was a watershed moment.[7] Though its backers hoped the Act would encourage stable farm communities and dignify manual labor, it did more to “exalt the professional status,” fulfilling the Jeffersonian yeoman ideal even as it began the certain killing of it.[8]
Lasch found the origins of Americans’ lust for upward mobility and wealth in the Civil War, and especially afterward. Others have located the origins much earlier. The works of Joyce Appleby, Gordon Wood and Stephen Watts show a steady rise of status-mad, self-made men casting about for ways to get ahead and move upward in the early Republic.[9]
And as I clarify in footnote #19, George Forgie argued that it was Lincoln and his generation that, as children, came to see the Civil War as a seductive opportunity to rise in the world. Ambition for upward mobility, stoked in antebellum America, had much to do with the American Civil War.
For George Cole’s contemporaries, who shared the political views of the young Republican Party, the Civil War was a violent struggle to contain slavery where it existed; or, for some, it was a war to end it; or it was a fight over the West and whether or not it would become an extension of Yankee culture and its bustling markets. For nearly all Republicans, it was a war to preserve the Union. Antislavery Americans believed, as Lincoln put it, that the war’s purpose was “to clear the paths” in the race of life. For Lincoln and his backers, it was a war for freedom, a war to elevate the condition of mankind by protecting the fruits of all men’s labors. It was a war for noble ambitions and the right to improve upon the condition one inherited from parents.
For many Rebels the war was over the right to dissolve it. And the war was a justifiable response to northern aggression, or to the atomizing gospel of Yankee freedom which threatened to break down all hierarchy and order, even the family.[10] It was fought to protect a way of life – especially the right to own humans as property.
Almost any vision of the war, though, was at its core about how men stood in relation to others, and how they might best advance in the world. Defenders of slavery argued that if slavery were stripped from the southern states, it would rob white men of a major source of wealth and property, and bar the way to prosperity for ordinary whites. Southern boys, like their northern counterparts, cut their teeth on patriotic books by the likes of Mason Weems; but men below the Mason-Dixon Line developed substantially different ideas about manhood, and how to make good on the promises of the Founding Fathers.[11]
It is not an exaggeration to say that the war was fought over two incompatible ideas about manhood and merit, inherited from a common revolutionary past. By Lincoln’s election many southern apologists boasted how no southern white man could ever occupy the lowest rung and that in this way all southern white men could rise to higher ranks. Slavery provided the bedrock below which no white man could ever be buried. Slavery, it was argued, made good on the Revolution’s promises of equality by erasing class distinctions. It created a world where all white men could become masters of themselves by first collectively enslaving others.[12]
While the cult of self-making was not the preserve of Northerners, as the two regions squared off over the spread of slavery, heated debate pushed self-making into the cultural bailiwick of Yankees. Over the second third of the nineteenth century the respective regions contracted into increasingly hostile domains with incompatible visions of how white men could best get ahead.[13] For many southerners the lash kept the world aright. For a wide variety of northerners, though, an imagined world free from coercion (from father or master), and open territories unsullied by competing slave drivers, promised the truest equality.[14] As these cultural contractions took place, antebellum men, particularly in northern towns and cities, navigated a shifting meaning of manliness—one that was more competitive, individualistic, muscular, yet self-controlled. David Leverenz describes this shift as going from patrician and artisan models to an aggressive entrepreneurial type he calls “men of force.”[15] As northern men envisioned themselves in vertical motion, their ideal of manhood evolved into one with indispensable attributes for making the climb: aggressiveness, grit, and outward ambitiousness. Men of force willingly wagered their savings and familial intimacies in the hopes of outpacing competitors.[16] But competitive entrepreneurs, and white men looking for work, could hardly hope to compete with a slave system that paid nothing to a permanent work supply that reproduced itself. When the crisis over slavery threatened to disrupt this new vision of manliness, throngs of these “men of force” rushed to war—not merely to safeguard the myth of unrestrained mobility, but to obtain within the army the elusive ascent they could not find without.[17] I think this describes well George Cole’s journey into the war.
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[1] Abraham Lincoln, Speeches and Writings, 1859–1865: Speeches, Letters, and Miscellaneous Writings, Presidential Messages and Proclamations, 2 vols., edited by Don Edward Fehrenbacher (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1989), pp. 626-7.
[2] ibid., pp. 623-4.
[3] Philip Shaw Paludan, A People's Contest: The Union and Civil War 1861-1865 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996), pp.307-8.
[4] Abraham Lincoln, Speeches and Writings, 1859–1865: Speeches, Letters, and Miscellaneous Writings, Presidential Messages and Proclamations, 2 vols., edited by Don Edward Fehrenbacher (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1989), pp. 84-5.
[5] Roughly 600,000, and perhaps as high as 800,000, soldiers died in the war; Yet such an estimate does not take into account the tens of thousands of deaths precipitated in southern society due to disease, dislocation, malnutrition and gunfire. See: James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 63. n.53.
[6] Abraham Lincoln, Speeches and Writings, 1859–1865: Speeches, Letters, and Miscellaneous Writings, Presidential Messages and Proclamations, 2 vols., edited by Don Edward Fehrenbacher (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1989), pp. 259-60.
[7] The Morrill Land Act was first passed by congress in 1859, but was vetoed by the Democratic president, James Buchanan. When the amended Morrill Act was passed again Abraham Lincoln signed it into law. The Act essentially gifted large tracts of land to individual states which could then be sold or used for the creation of learning institutions, primarily colleges and universities. These institutions would be required to teach agriculture, military or engineering sciences. See: Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites: and the Betrayal of Democracy (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995), esp. pp. 77-9; Phillip S. Paludan, A People's Contest: The Union and Civil War 1861-1865 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), pp. 129-30.
[8] See: Christopher Lasch, “Social Mobility," in A Companion to American Thought, eds. Richard Wightman Fox and James T. Kloppenberg (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1995), pp. 631-34.; Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites: And the Betrayal of Democracy, pp.70-9.
[9] Joyce Appleby, “New Cultural Heroes in the Early National Period," in The Culture of the Market: Historical Essays, eds. Thomas L. Haskell and Richard F. Teichgraeber (Cambridge England: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 163-88; Joyce Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2000); Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1993); Steven Watts, The Republic Reborn: War and the Making of Liberal America, 1790-1820 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).
[10] Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
[11] Mason Locke Weems published Life of Washington, one of the most widely read books in antebellum America, from which almost all legends about Washington originated. For two of the most important works on manhood in white antebellum South, see: Kenneth S. Greenberg, Honor & Slavery: Lies, Duels, Noses, Masks, Dressing as a Woman, Gifts, Strangers, Humanitarianism, Death, Slave Rebellions, the Proslavery Argument, Baseball, Hunting, and Gambling in the Old South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). For the complexities of antebellum manhood (north and south) see the classic articles: Elliott J. Gorn, “Good-Bye Boys, I Die a True American': Homicide, Nativism, and Working-Class Culture in Antebellum New York City," Journal of American History 74, no. 2 (1987), 388-410.; Elliott J. Gorn, “Gouge and Bite, Pull Hair and Scratch': The Social Significance of Fighting in the Southern Backcountry," American Historical Review 90, no. 1 (1985), 18-43. Gorn’s work reminds us how violent and fractious manhood could be among backwoods southerners or males who walked the same streets and frequented the same bars in New York City.
[12] The degree to which the South was a “herrenvolk democracy”—a place where a master race of white men experienced significant equality—is still debated by scholars. See: George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). For our purposes though, there were many prominent spokesmen for the South who made claims that slavery opened up careers for the talented. While doing so, these men usually railed against the class divisions in northern cities, where so called free-labor pitted classes of white men against one another, relegating an entire class of white men to slave status (without the supposed cradle-to-grave social care that southerners disingenuously attributed to slavery). The defense of slavery often claimed the moral highroad by emphasizing the ways in which southerners did not compete against one another but instead were united by slavery which benefited all white men. Emphasizing that deserving white men never had to scrape like hirelings in northern factories, George Fitzhugh claimed: “Actual liberty and equality with our white population has been approached much nearer than in the free States. Few of our whites ever work as day laborers, none as cooks, scullions, ostlers, body servants, or in other menial capacities.” See: George Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South Or, the Failure of Free Society (Richmond, Va: A. Morris, 1854), pp. 253-5.
[13] Ironically, it was a southern Whig from Kentucky, Henry Clay, who first coined the phrase “self-made man” in his defense of the “American System” in congress 1832. Clay argued that internal improvements and strict tariffs would create a robust, interdependent economy in the North, South and West. His crusade for internal improvements and industrial strength did not win over President Jackson or his party; but it made him a darling among many Whigs and proto-Republicans. Lincoln idolized Clay, referring to him as his “beau ideal of a statesman,” in a eulogy for the deceased “Harry of the West” delivered in 1852. Of course, the South also produced the iconic self-made man, Andrew Jackson. But while Jackson had enormous traction in both the North and South, the vitriolic split between Clay and Jackson augured their respective cultural legacies. While Lee Benson has dismantled the idea that Jackson represented the masses, and Whigs like Clay, the classes, Benson also pointed to deeper divisions based on religion and ethnicity. His broad categories of “Puritan Whigs” versus non-puritan Democrats may shed light on the diverging conception of how white men defined success and getting ahead, especially if we think of Puritanism as code for a certain sensibility about work and leisure. Charles Sellers, on the other hand sees class tensions, and in particular “subsistence folkways” versus entrepreneurial “money power,” as central to understanding Jacksonian America.
Interestingly, Sellers divides the populace between “arminian” capitalists and the “antinomian countryside.” Sellers loosely applies these religious modes (the first denoting that one can earn one’s salvation through development and doing all the right things, and the latter, a sensibility more given to familial allegiance, loyalty, and undeserved bounties) as a way to understand political affiliation in the age of Jackson. The use of “arminian” suggests a religiously informed sympathy for the self-created individual. Finally both Clay and Jackson were from the West, an area particularly important to Republican ideology as a sort of safety valve, a critical space for white men to obtain the dreams of mobility and independence that eluded them in the East. See: Lee Benson, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961); Charles Grier Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Harry L. Watson, Andrew Jackson Vs. Henry Clay: Democracy and Development in Antebellum America (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1998); Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War, esp. pp. 14, 26-8.
[14] Jim Cullen argues that slavery and self-making existed only with great tension among southerners; “being ‘self-made’ through slave labor was a wobblier construct.” Jim Cullen, The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea That Shaped a Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), esp. pp. 73-4.
It is what slavery did to party politics that seems to have played a crucial role in the migration of self-making into northern circles. Both Whigs and Democrats, because they were national parties, muted their respective critiques of northern mobility and slavepower’s version of white equality. When the Whig party gave up the ghost, and when Bleeding Kansas sent convulsions through the national political body, and Stephen Douglas helped sever the Democrat Party into two, the northern political remnants (the embryonic Republican Party) and the southern wing of the Democrats sharpened their already pointed criticisms of one another’s labor system. The emergence of an entirely northern party (Republicans) led to an unrestrained critique of slavery which contrasted bondage with the free market. It is in this simultaneous celebration and demonizing of respective systems that the image of the independent, ever-rising self-made man achieved its grip on many northerners’ minds, especially in Lincoln’s party. For more on the ramifications of the breakdown of the Whig Party, see: Don Fehrenbacher, Sectional Crisis and Southern Constitutionalism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995), pp. 45-65; Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, pp. xx-xxii.
[15] David Leverenz, Manhood and the American Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 372; E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), pp. 10-30.
[16] Kenneth J. Winkle, "Abraham Lincoln: Self-made Man," Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association: Vol. 21, No. 2 (Summer, 2000), pp. 1-16. Winkle argues that the myth of the self-made man “smoothed the potentially acrimonious transition from families as the basis of American society to the new economic order based on individual achievement.”
[17] Many others, for similar reasons, stayed home. Earnest soldiers in both the North and South addressed the prospects for gain in entering the war. They might openly admit the slim chances for promotion, or ensure loved ones that they stood less to gain by enlisting: See a southern soldier’s letter to his father in: Harry S. Stout, Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the American Civil War (New York: Viking, 2006), p. 84.