Abraham Lincoln: Railroad Hack

Lynn Parramore’s piece exposing Abraham Lincoln’s history as a railroad lawyer has some demythologizing value, but it would be a lot more useful if it placed Lincoln’s railroad history within the larger context of the early Republican Party. Thinking of Lincoln as a corrupt Gilded Age Republican politician is not at all incongruous with Lincoln the Great Emancipator. Essentially the entire generation of early Republicans turned very quickly from emancipation to corporatization without a blink; in fact, their rapidly evolving ideas of free labor ideology made these two things entirely compatible. After reading so many books on the Gilded Age, including Richard White’s Railroaded, you see again and again the people who opposed slavery essentially treating workers almost like slaves themselves. The entirety of the difference was the actual ownership of labor. Once they were no longer actually owned, you could exploit them in all sorts of disturbing ways, a distinction that helps explain why so many Republicans were essentially fine with southern treatment of black labor after Reconstruction. While you can find the occasional quote from Lincoln bemoaning capital, it’s also entirely expected for Gilded Age politicians to worry about corruption from capital in public while also being incredibly corrupt themselves.

In other words, had Lincoln lived I don’t see any reason to think the Gilded Age would have happened any differently. Reconstruction is another matter. But the fundamental questions of labor and capital in late nineteenth century America was something an aging Lincoln almost certainly would have accepted and perhaps embraced.