Confederate “Heritage” Month 2023, April 3: Lincoln as a small-d democrat
A recent example of a distinctly left-leaning take on Civil War history comes from the social-democratic site Jacobin, titled “Abraham Lincoln Is a Hero of the Left.”1
In Stanley’s view, one of the many significant historical images of Lincoln is what he calls a “workerist Lincoln”:
Seemingly from the moment of Lincoln’s martyrdom, the nascent labor movement presented him as a workingman, an ally of labor, and a symbol of the revolutionary proletariat to organize workers and envision a more democratic future. Freedpeople, black conventioneers, postwar labor federations, early Marxists, industrial unionists, and interracial farmer-labor radicals all portrayed the uncompensated destruction of chattel bondage as the pivotal first step in a wider emancipation of labor. In doing so they employed (often generous characterizations of) Lincoln’s prolabor speeches, such as his comments on the 1860 shoemakers strike in New England, the largest walkout to date.
This is a reminder that how people understand the past shapes their understanding of the future. And also how people who look for better understanding of the past look back on earlier times and often see it with fresh perspectives.
Abraham Lincoln as a Congressman
The New Deal period offered a new variation on this perspective:
The New Deal era witnessed an enhanced expression of [workers’] power - and of Lincoln memory. As historian Nina Silber argues, Americans broadened the Lincoln symbol during the 1930s beyond sectional reconciliation and liberal nationalism and toward anti-fascism and federal power in the service of common people.
For countless workers, President Franklin D. Roosevelt became a “new Lincoln” and his New Deal programs a “second Emancipation Proclamation.” As Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) official Len De Caux explained, “Our idea of a ‘new birth of freedom’ is an expansion of collective bargaining and industrial democracy.”
Stanley’s article does contain one historical error in a 1910 quote he gives from a Burke McCarty, who wrote, “We do not claim that Abraham Lincoln was a Socialist, for the word had not been coined in his day.” Actually, it was used as early as 1827 in the English Co-operative Magazine and Monthly Herald, a paper of Robert Owens' reform movement to describe the movement’s adherents.2
Stanley also notes that the left-labor view of Lincoln was not just later mythmaking:
Generations of leftists have … rightly celebrated Lincoln’s instrumental role in the emancipation of over four million enslaved people, which resulted in the largest liquidation of private property assets and the greatest relative redistribution of income in US history.
Stanley is restrained in characterizing the Republican Party of Lincoln’s time:
Would Lincoln’s sincere hatred of the Slave Power have translated aft er the war to a critique of the Money Power [concentrated wealth] and other forms of wealth-based domination? Would Lincoln have expanded or attempted to restrain his party’s democratic impulses in non-wartime conditions?
For the vast majority of leftist memory-makers, such questions have been of secondary importance. To be sure, post–Civil War Republicans moved away from the abolition-democracy of Charles Sumner, Thaddeus Stevens, and Frederick Douglass, and increasingly aligned with capital by the 1870s and 1880s. But part of the Lincoln myth remained frozen in April 1865, ensconced within the party’s more egalitarian origins.
The phrase “Money Power” was a term used by Andrew Jackson and his followers in their fight against the Bank of the United States. The Jacksonian reform coalition was a proto-populist movement that assembled a coalition behind opposition to the wealthy elite of which the Bank became the primary symbol.
Lincoln himself said that he considered Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson to be his two most important models for the Presidency.
Stanley writes, “Lincoln was neither an abolitionist nor a socialist.” The latter is true. Although in First Annual Message to Congress in December 1861, when the Civil War was already underway, he made these notable observations:
It is not needed nor fitting here that a general argument should be made in favor of popular [i.e., democratic] institutions, but there is one point, with its connections, not so hackneyed as most others, to which I ask a brief attention. It is the effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government. It is assumed that labor is available only in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it induces him to labor.3
Here he was addressing the slave form of labor in particular. But he also had a clear position on whether Capital should be “on an equal footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government.” He took a different view:
Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. [my emphasis]
But was he an abolitionist? There are many shades of opinion on this. But it’s safe to say of the President who signed the Emancipation Proclamation, led the country to victory over the violent rebellion of the Slave Power, and pushed the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery through Congress, that he came down solidly on the side of abolishing slavery.
Frederick Douglass offered his view on this subject in 1876:
His great mission was to accomplish two things: first, to save his country from dismemberment and ruin; and second, to free his country from the great crime of slavery. ... Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.4
Stanley, Matthew (2023): Abraham Lincoln Is a Hero of the Left. Jacobin 02/20/2023. <https://jacobin.com/2023/02/abraham-lincoln-historical-memoryamerican-left-emancipation-of-labor-racial-justice> (Accessed 2023-21-02).
Miller, Bruce (2009): Who you callin' a socialist? Contradicciones (Original) 11/22/2009. <https://oldhickorysweblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/who-you-callin-socialist.html> (Accessed: 2023-19-03).
Lincoln, Abraham (1861): December 3, 1861: First Annual Message. UVA Miller Center.<https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/december-3-1861-first-annual-message> (Accessed: 2023-24-03).
Douglass, Frederick (1876): "Oration by Frederick Douglass, Delivered on the Occasion of the Unveiling of the Freedmen's Monument." Frederick Douglass: Autobiographies, 1994, 921-924. New York: Library of America.