Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power Read Online Free PDF Page B

market economy and draw ever more farmers and mechanics into the newly emerging commercial and industrial order. When Lincoln arrived in central Illinois he saw in the richness of the soil, the abundance of the state’s natural resources, and the burgeoning immigration of southern-born and Yankee settlers the potential for formidable growth. His earliest political speech, at Decatur, dwelt on the need for improved waterborne transportation. In his first bid for office, two years later, the main burden of his address to Sangamon County’s electors was the need to improve the region’s poor communications: How else could they sell their surplus meat and cereals, and acquire the manufactured goods they needed? Presenting himself as a knowledgeable river pilot and adopting a tone of financial prudence, Lincoln commended the plan of clearing the Sangamon River, by which New Salem’s commercial future might be assured. 20
    Over the next decade ambitious internal improvements sat at the heart of Lincoln’s political agenda, the means by which he expected Illinois as a whole to achieve new levels of prosperity, increase its land values, and pull in new settlers. He told Joshua Speed he wanted to be “the DeWitt Clinton of Illinois”: the New York state governor’s celebrated Erie Canal could surely be copied further west. 21 The special session of the state legislature during the winter of 1835
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36 proved a watershed. Legislators, faced with a plan to build the Illinois–Michigan Canal, to link the Mississippi with the Great Lakes, the Erie Canal, and the Atlantic, authorized a $500,000 loan. Previously Lincoln had called for such projects to be supported by federal aid, raised by the sale of public lands; others had insisted on private funding alone. Now, carried along on the swelling speculative tide of the 1830s and alert to the grandiose projects under way in other states, and with private capital unforthcoming, they not only agreed to the principle of state-level funding, but in the subsequent Assembly sanctioned a massive railroad and river scheme to supplement the canal project. Two trunk roads, six spurs, and a variety of smaller projects—intended to secure the broadest possible base of political support—elicited a government loan of over $10 million. All was agreed without detailed estimates or proper surveys. Roads not only would be run at a debt-clearing profit, but would increase the price of land, allowing the state to sell off its domain, not least to foreign capitalists. As the party with most of the votes in the Assembly, the Democrats (notably Stephen A. Douglas) were the prime legislative movers, but Lincoln, the Whig leader, and his Sangamon colleagues gave support at every turn.
    Then came the financial panic of 1837, the collapse of land sales, falling prices and wages, and bankruptcies. The so-called Illinois System shuddered as revenues fell. Lincoln, determined to prevent its collapse, considered new ways of financing it. In particular, he came up with an imaginative if unrealistic plan to buy all federally owned land in the state at a discount and sell it at a profit to settlers, using the proceeds to pay off the debt: he secured the Assembly’s support, but Washington was not interested. He also endorsed a graduated land tax to replace the current levies, which were quite unrelated to land values. He thought the measure would be acceptable to the people “because it does not increase the tax upon the ‘
many
poor
’ but upon the ‘
wealthy
few.
’ ” The Illinois public, however, facing a deepening depression in 1839, turned increasingly against the system, and many previous political supporters jumped ship. Lincoln, though, remained steadfast, steeled by economic conviction and a sense of moral obligation. Even when it was plain that the plan must sink, he persisted in trying “to save something to the State, from the general wreck,” particularly the canal project. But he failed to