Will Morrisey Reviews

Abraham Lincoln: “Address to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society.” Milwaukee, Wisconsin, September 30, 1859. Speeches and Writings 1859-1865. New York: The Library of America, 1989.

 

The audience at the agricultural fair sponsored by the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society probably did not expect that their invited speaker would address them not only on the cultivation of the soil but the cultivation of the human mind and heart. Readers today might be equally surprised. They know Lincoln’s great themes of political union and human liberty, without suspecting his prowess as what we might now call a ‘culture warrior.’

He begins not with culture but with institutions. Agricultural fairs “are becoming an institution of the country,” and “useful” ones. The Declaration of Independence identifies governmental institutions as means of securing natural rights. Agricultural fairs are institutions that address the distinction drawn a century later by Carl Schmitt, the distinction between friend and enemy. But while Schmitt valorizes the distinction, making it central to his conception of political life, Lincoln aims to ameliorate it, on the eve of civil war in his country and with an eye toward peace among nations. Agricultural fairs are civil-social institutions that secure natural rights by doing what institutions do for any regime, channeling human thoughts and activities in directions that serve the purposes of the regime—here, a democratic and commercial republic.

“From the first appearance of man upon the earth, down to very recent times, the words ‘stranger’ and ‘enemy’ were quite or almost, synonymous.” Whether among individuals or nations, “it was deemed no offense, but even meritorious, to rob, and murder, and enslave strangers.” Tamed, the inclination nonetheless persists in the modern world, even among men of “the highest cultivation.” Social and political institutions serve as ‘pathways’ of authority, thoughts, and sentiments in any community; agricultural fairs advance “civilization” in the United States by “mak[ing] more pleasant, and more strong, and more durable, the bond of social and political union among us.” Quoting Alexander Pope, Lincoln identifies happiness as the “end and aim” of human being, human nature. Most immediately, happiness consists of pleasure, the pleasure of “recreation” marked by “virtue and advantage, and free from vice and disadvantage.” In this way they afford fellow-citizens pleasure without pain.

Agricultural fairs have as their “chief use” the improvement of work, not recreation: “the great calling of agriculture.” The pleasant sociality of recreation comes as a side-benefit of the serious sociality of work, “mak[ing] mutual exchange of agricultural discovery, information, and knowledge” general, no longer the preserve of one or few. In doing so, the fairs excite “emulation” not only for material rewards but “the pride and honor of success—of triumph, in some sort.” These institutions redirect ‘thumotic’ passions, especially the love of victory, away from war and toward peace and prosperity. In this, they are the social equivalent of the patent clause of the United States Constitution, which guarantees that the inventors who design the useful implements displayed at such fairs will be secure in their ‘intellectual property.’

Before elaborating on these themes, Lincoln needs to address the speaker’s perennial problem: Why should you listen to me? Why am I here before you, today? He assures them that he does not come bearing flatterery—something a likely presidential candidate might well be suspected of doing. Farmers “are neither better nor worse than other people,” although in the America of 1859 they are “more numerous than any other class,” and therefore much flattered by vote-seekers. He concedes that the most numerous class justly lays claim to being “the largest interest” of the many interests in the country, “that if there be inevitable conflict between that interest and any other, that other should yield.” The question of majority rule and natural right, the possibility of a tyrannical majority, had formed the centerpiece of Lincoln’s debates with Senator Stephen Douglas, only a year earlier. How will a majority that knows itself to be a majority in a democratic republic bring itself to self-restraint, to that degree of self-government which refrains from trampling the natural rights of minorities? That is as much a task of civilization as the sociality cultivated by agricultural fairs, and requires a similar disinclination to view others as strangers and enemies.

Lincoln doesn’t flatter himself, either, another thing politicians are wont to do; admittedly, he is “in no sort a farmer.” He will not pose as an expert. He comes as a fellow citizen, inviting farmers to think along with him, not as an authority claiming the right to tell them what to do. Neither ‘the many’ nor ‘the one’ rule without consideration for the other.

What he can offer, without arrogance or irrelevance on this occasion, in front of this audience, amounts to a general framework of how to think about agriculture. American farmer have a problem. Their acreage now yields much less produce than it did, quite recently. And even at its peak, crop yields were below the land’s potential. Farmers need to know how to reverse this. New techniques of working the soil, analysis of soils themselves, fertilizers, varieties of seed, meteorology: all these need investigation if farmers are to obtain more produce on their acreage. As the population increases, land prices will go up and there will be more mouths to feed. Without discoveries in agronomy, farmer will need to cultivate more land just when land becomes scarcer; moreover, larger farms will increase costs for maintaining property boundaries and for transporting equipment in the race against time that farming entails.

Only renewed economy of means toward the ends will meet the problem. Improved cultivation of the land thus requires a more “thorough cultivation of the farmer’s own mind” and heart. By doing “what he does well” a man feels proud; failure humiliates. “With the former, his heart in in his work, and he will do twice as much of it with less fatigue,” giving energy to his labor, whereas failure makes him look at his work with “disgust,” “imagin[ing] himself exceedingly tired.” Even as agricultural fairs give happiness in the form of pleasure, work well done gives happiness in the form of “satisfaction.” A satisfied mind and heart benefits the land that has rewarded the farmer’s economy—feeds back into it, as it were—by spurring him to protect and care for his land.

Agricultural fairs display new inventions. Lincoln invites the farmers to consider the steam-powered plough, which, if feasible, will “afford an advantage over plowing with animals.” Again he claims no expertise in the matter, instead inviting his audience to think with him about the technical problems that need to be overcome, including the size and weight of the machine, its fuel supply, and the supply of water needed to produce steam. He connects investigation into the feasibility of the steam plow to the honors bestowed at agricultural fairs: “Our thanks, and something more substantial than thanks”—namely, profit—”are due to every man engaged in the effort to produce a successful steam plow.” Even those who try and fail “will bring something to light, which, in the hands of others, will contribute to the final success.” Lincoln understands how scientific experimentation and discovery work.

The topic of thoughtful work provides Lincoln with an opening for addressing the fundamental moral and political issue facing Americans in 1859: free labor versus slavery. If farmers constitute the majority interest in the country, they will need to be persuaded that free labor is better than slave labor, that the kind of labor Wisconsin farmers do and use makes better sense than the kind of labor seen in, for example, South Carolina. “The world is now agreed that labor is the source from which human wants are mainly supplied,” not climate or soil. But what kind of labor? Some assume that capital is prior to labor, “that nobody labors, unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow, by the use of that capital, induces him to do it.” The only question then becomes, Which kind of labor is better, that provided by hired men who “work by their own consent,” or that provided by slaves, who work because compelled? Such thinkers also assume that once a laborer, always a laborer; that such a man’s condition “is as bad as, or worse than that of a slave.” Not only will the poor always be with us, but the same people will be poor, all of their lives. Named by South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond only a year earlier, this “‘mud-sill’ theory” of free labor conceived as wage slavery was held by both Southern plantation owners and and in a different way by Karl Marx, all contemporaries of Lincoln and his audience. Whether consisting of chattel slaves or wage slaves, for the plantation owners the “mud-sill” serves as the indispensable foundation of every social ‘house,’ and the house will be fatally ‘divided’ if that foundation crumbles. Marx thinks so, too, but looks forward to that crumbling, envisioning a new, egalitarian society in which there will be no such miserable foundation.

Others take the opposing view. Following John Locke, they hold labor as “prior to, and independent of, capital,” that “capital is the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed.” (Marx takes up this ‘labor theory of value,’ which is why he expects the oppressed working-class foundation of modern societies to hold firm while the oppressive social and economic structure above it collapses.) These thinkers point to the fact that most laborers are neither hire laborers nor hire themselves out. “Even in our slave States, except South Carolina, a majority of the whole people of all colors, are neither slaves nor masters” but men who work the land with their families. Lincoln does something both subtle and indispensable here; he associates white and black men as members of the majority, the rulers of the democratic republic. He well knows how virulently prejudiced many whites are, when it comes to blacks; Stephen Douglas had exploited these prejudices in their debates, race-baiting Lincoln’s supporters as “black Republicans,” to which taunt they raged back in self-defense, “White! White!” Just as Lincoln asked the majority class of farmers to think along with him to discover the first principles of agriculture, so he suggests that they and black farmers are together in the same class of industrious American workers.

The “mud-sill” theorists also err in assuming that hired laborers constitute a permanent class. On the contrary, “the prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself, then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him.” Prudence and labor overcome poverty, so long as “the just and generous, and prosperous system” of liberty can defend itself against the unjust, ungenerous and impoverishing system of slave labor ruled by ‘the few.’

Here is where education returns, education reconceived for the new regime of democratic republicanism. Under the old oligarchic regimes, called aristocracies, educated persons “did not perform manual labor.” So long as education remained the province of the very few, this regime could survive, even prosper, at least for the benefit of the few. But Wisconsin numbers among the states arising from the old Northwest Territory. The Northwest Ordinance establishing that territory also established a system of public schools. Today, “especially in these free States, nearly all are educated.” This being so, the educated must work; if education were seen as part of an ‘aristocratic’ title to live off the work of others, the educated nation will starve. “Otherwise, education itself would become a positive and intolerable evil.”

How, then, “can labor and education be the most satisfactorily combined?” The “mud-sill” theory cannot help us, here, separating as it does the head form the hands. The free labor theory distinguishes the head from the hand, but notices that “the Author of man makes every individual with one head and one pair of hands, it was probably intended that heads and hands should cooperate as friends; and that that particular head, should direct and control that particular pair of hands,” directing them to feed the “particular mouth” in that particular head. To better effect this elementary, indeed alimentary, form of self-government, the head will need an education that “add[s] to its capacity for performing its charge”—the “universal education” provided in the Northwest Ordinance. Such education is the “natural companion” of free labor.

Having brought agriculture to intellectual and moral culture, Lincoln brings culture back to agriculture, observing that “no other human occupation opens so wide a field for the profitable and agreeable combination of labor with cultivated thought.” A mind “already trained to thought, in the country school, or higher school,” will find in agriculture “an exhaustless source of profitable enjoyment,” with “every blade of grass… a study” in botany, chemistry, and physics.

The thoroughness of “cultivated thought” directed at cultivating the soil and every useful species on it meets the needs of the regime of commercial republicanism. The more commercial republics there are (America’s old enemy, Great Britain, was transforming itself into one, during and after Lincoln’s lifetime), the less the world will be “inclined to wars,” and the “more devoted to the arts of peace, than heretofore.” This means that the world’s human population will “increase rapidly.” With population increase comes the need for better cultivation of the soil, inasmuch as land for agriculture may decrease as the human population increases, and must in any event produce more food. A prosperous nation in which free farmers remain the majority will never “be the victim of oppression in any of its forms”—”alike independent of crowned-kings, money-kings [the financial oligarchs of banks and stock exchanges], and land-kings [the plantation oligarchs of the South].” Such a nation will preserve the moral and political habits needed to sustain a democratic and commercial republic.

In his exordium, Lincoln good-humoredly remarks that his audience may be eager to stop listening to Lincoln and listen instead to the award of prizes. He parts with advice on how to think about this new, more peaceful form of competition, the competition in producing things useful to the American regime. Winners should reflect that they may be losers next year, if they “relax in [their] exertion”; meanwhile, “the vanquished this year, may be victor the next, in spite of all competition.” The old maxim, “true and appropriate in all times and situations”—”And this, too, shall pass away“—chastens us “in the hour of pride” and “consol[es] in the depths of affliction.” It is a maxim good for  a way of life animated by liberty, economic and political. What need not pass away is the progress of “individual, social, and political prosperity and happiness” sustained “by the best cultivation of the physical world, beneath and around us,” and “the intellectual and moral world within us.” Like the Founders, Lincoln wants progress without being a ‘progressive.’ Progress will come not from some necessary unfolding of an Absolute Spirit, biological evolution, or class conflict, not from a supposed law of ‘History,’ but from the free, undetermined and intelligent labor of human beings living in regimes of liberty.