Abraham Lincoln, Public Power, and the Expansion of the Market Economy, 1835-1877

FAIN: FB-57150-13

Stewart Winger
Illinois State University (Normal, IL 61790-0001)

This project aims to produce a book as well as articles demonstrating the crucial role played by an active government at the national and especially the state level in promoting and transforming the market economy from 1835-1877. Research in Illinois Supreme Court and corporate records as well as standard sources will show that the "myth of a stateless American past" is just that, a myth. This work calls for a re-conceptualization of the market economy in this period, not as the absence of regulation, but as itself a regulatory scheme and incentive structure established by the state. While most legal historians continue to assume that the United States either suffered from or benefitted from a relatively weak state, this work bolsters the work of legal historians who have called that picture into question, while adding the crucial dimension of party politics on the high court. Lincoln's uniquely well-documented career provides an accidental window onto all of these developments.

Associated Products

Remember the Whigs I: The Historiography of Lincoln’s Political Economy and the Myth of a Stateless American Past (Book Section)
Title: Remember the Whigs I: The Historiography of Lincoln’s Political Economy and the Myth of a Stateless American Past
Author: Stewart Winger
Editor: Michael Green
Abstract: This is one of two chapters on the historiography of Lincoln and economics for the upcoming Blackwell Companion to Abraham Lincoln. In it I treat scholarly treatments as well as political appropriations of Lincoln's economic views and programs from his death to about 1970. This historiography is analytic and has a thesis. I argue that the need for a "self-made man," for a homespun, "common man", and especially, the need to believe that the American past was "stateless" especially regarding the role of government in the economy, led to the disappearance from scholarship and American memory not only of Lincoln's political economy, but of his entire political party. Only by recovering the Whigs and the extensive role of government in the 19th century economy can we fully recover Lincoln place in the history of U.S. political economy.
Year: 2015
Publisher: Wiley Blackwell
Book Title: A Companion to Abraham Lincoln

Remember the Whigs II: The Historiography of Lincoln’s Political Economy and the Myth of a Stateless American Past (Book Section)
Title: Remember the Whigs II: The Historiography of Lincoln’s Political Economy and the Myth of a Stateless American Past
Author: Stewart Winger
Editor: Michael Green
Abstract: This chapter picks up where "Remember the Whigs I" left off with Gabor Boritt's work on "Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream" of the 1970's. It continues the duel focus on scholarship and popular appropriations of Lincoln's record on the role of government in the economy. In particular I critique Republican Party and libertarian narratives that assume a stateless American past and decry what they then see as a descent into big government. Libertarians blame the descent on Lincoln while mainstream Republicans look for a way to get Lincoln off the hook. Both assume a picture of past American political economy that is unsustainable. Indeed they have the story backward. Radically liberal anti-state theories arise AFTER the Civil War and did not characterize the antebellum period. Only occasionally have Democratic politicians sought to enlist Lincoln for their cause while the scholarly left seems largely uninterested. Political writers and scholars of all persuasions have underestimated the degree to which creating the conditions in which men could achieve economic independence rather than rising wages or material prosperity was the generally accepted goal of political economy in the Lincoln's lifetime. This goal was largely abandoned on all sides, right ant left, by the 20th century.
Year: 2015
Publisher: Wiley Blackwell
Book Title: A Companion to Abraham Lincoln

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