Abraham Lincoln, America’s First Tech-Lawyer | Hacker News Reader

Abraham Lincoln, America’s First Tech-Lawyer

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50 pointsWaitWaitWha43 comments

Abraham Lincoln was a huge technological optimist. He was the primary counterweight in the 19th century to the ideas of Malthus and Darwin. The opening of the midwest to grain production was a huge rebuke at the time to Malthus's overpopulation pessimism. Lincoln wrote a number of speeches where he extolled the greatness of unlimited technological progress. They were influential worldwide and inspired the trans-siberian railroad among other projects.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/02/abraham-lincoln-the-t...

And Lincoln was a man of his time in this regard. Excitement about economic and moral progress was abundant in the Northern states during that period -- a big contrast to the South. (The cultural divergence caused by different economic systems was arguably the main cause of the Civil War.)

I recently finished reading Doris Kearns Goodwin's book Team of Rivals, and was struck by a passage describing the River and Harbor Convention, said to have been the largest convention ever gathered in the US prior to the Civil War. The convention attracted 5,000 delegates to Chicago in the late 1840s, a time when Chicago's population was only 16,000. What were all those people gathered to support? Infrastructure! They were incredibly passionate that the US federal government should fund infrastructure. There is no record of the final speech at the convention because reporters were too absorbed to write it down properly. But there are some passages recorded, e.g. "only by statesmanlike concession could problems of slavery and territorial acquisition be solved so that the nation could move on to material greatness." One observer wrote: "[the speaker] was interrupted continually by cheer upon cheer; and at its close, the air rung with shout after shout, from the thousands in attendance." (This is from pages 67-69 in Team of Rivals)

This euphemism is doing a lot of heavy lifting, "cultural divergence caused by different economic systems"

There is truth to it. A lot of anti slavery but still racist northern whites thought slavery was bad for southern whites. Thought it bred laziness in them and didn't incentivize industrialization.

So prior to reading the book, I thought of the Civil War as a morality tale: the North wants to end slavery, the South wants to continue it, and they fight a war over this.

After finishing the book, I still think it is a morality tale in the sense that the war had clear good guys and bad guys. In fact, I was struck by the heroism of those fighting for the North, and I wish we would do more to celebrate that heroism in addition to emphasizing how immoral slavery was.

However I also realized that my preconceptions were somewhat incorrect. Prior to the Civil War, a typical Northerner was "antislavery" without being abolitionist. Being "antislavery" meant you were against returning fugitive slaves to the South, and you thought slavery should be illegal in newly added states. A typical Northerner didn't like slavery, but thought it was going to die out on its own, and wanted to preserve the Union. Abolitionism was considered extreme.

Fugitive slaves generated a lot of headlines, but their absolute numbers were fairly tiny. You can probably think of some analogous modern-day political issues, where people get really worked up about something that has a fairly low impact in relative terms.

However, the newly added states thing was more important because it involved political control over Congress, the Presidency, etc. My impression from reading the book was that many Northerners were willing to seek compromise on this issue, but the Southerners were very pugnacious and kept demanding more and more slavery states, repeatedly threatening to secede if they didn't get their way -- to the point where it practically became a meme.

I think this is where the "different economic systems" thing becomes important. Slavery states and non-slavery states had very different economies (e.g. agriculture vs manufacturing), which lead to different economic interests, which is why they had consistent policy differences and control of the Congress/Presidency was important. (I'm extrapolating a bit in this paragraph -- the book doesn't explicitly put things together the way I did. However she does mention "the growing apart due to different economic systems" point from my previous comment. That wasn't something I invented myself.)

Eventually Northerners become radicalized because they can see that slavery is not ending on its own as they had hoped, because the South keeps asking for more and more slavery states, and also because of Uncle Tom's Cabin. In those days, transportation and communication were far more limited, so many in the North just didn't have much information about what slavery actually looked like as it was practiced in the South. (One of the big Republican figures of Goodwin's book, William Henry Seward, becomes a major anti-slavery activist after taking a vacation to the South with his wife. Even so, IIRC he doesn't self-identify as an abolitionist, but political opponents try to paint him as one in order to make him unelectable.)

Even so, at the crack of the Civil War, the cause that the North was officially fighting for was preservation of the Union. In those days, the US was far more self-conscious about its status as a democracy in a world where almost all known countries were still running on monarchy/feudalism. The feeling in the North was that the US had to show the world that democracy was viable, and successful Southern succession would prove that the snobby aristocrats back in Europe were right all along. In the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln doesn't say anything about the inhumanity of slavery, but he does end on this note: "... that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." (emphasis mine)

It was only a while after the start of the war that people in the North became sufficiently radicalized that the Emancipation Proclamation became a politically viable move for Lincoln -- and even then it only applied in rebel states. Lincoln played an interesting role as a pragmatist humanitarian -- the subtext I got from the book was that he was always an abolitionist, keeping his cards close to his chest, and trying to help things along without ruining his political career. Obama's eventual support of gay marriage could be a good modern analogy here. What made Lincoln remarkable was his simultaneous concern for Black people (e.g. he once told Frederick Douglass that he valued Douglass' opinion more than any other American) and also his ability to empathize with Southern slaveholders (e.g. I think he once said something like if he'd been born a slaveholder, he would support slavery too). I found Lincoln inspiring because that sort of pragmatic, perspective-taking humanitarianism really appeals to me.

> (The cultural divergence caused by different economic systems was arguably the main cause of the Civil War.)

Arguably, sure. One can argue anything. But that argument would be incorrect and intellectually dishonest. Cultural divergence did not cause different economic systems, quite the opposite, in fact: the different economic systems caused the cultural divergence. What caused the Civil War was uncompromising differences between the free and slave states over the power of the national government to prohibit slavery. It was the economics of slavery and political control of that system that was central to the conflict. States rights and territorial expansion each took a back seat to the South's obsession with protecting the institution of slavery. Though it is more complicated, in a single word that anyone can understand, slavery caused the Civil War. But one may also argue accurately that it was the election of Abraham Lincoln, who did not appear on southern ballots, that caused the War, but that is merely passing the buck. Let's not hedge here: it was slavery.

>Cultural divergence did not cause different economic systems, quite the opposite, in fact: the different economic systems caused the cultural divergence.

That's exactly what I said :-)

Oof! ><

How did America get from Lincoln to Trump?

White and class supremacy never died.

As demonstrated by the rebound from the 12 years of post Civil War Reconstruction, to Jim Crow laws of racial discrimination far into the next century.

And in the North, non-slavery did not mean equality before the law in dozens of community matters, including marriage, education and employment.

And Lincoln was elected by the more populous Northetn states, did not appear on the ballot of Southetn states.

The decline of racism was radically reversed by Woodrow Wilson, who was an open white supremacist and hosted the KKK at the White House for example. He was perhaps one of the worst presidents in American history.

https://www.history.com/news/woodrow-wilson-racial-segregati...

Not clear that there was a racism decline, post-Reconstruction, on a collective national basis.

Millions of people and the cultural biases they carried and refreshed, with the following generations, never went away.

His chief economist Henry Charles Carey helped produce 100 years of prosperity through a balanced approach to trade and the free market. A very deep thinker about the impact of mechanization on labor, as well.

Lincoln was also a proponent of state surveillance. He reorganized the national telegraph network to spy on journalists and experimented with the use of spy balloons.

Yeah well Lincoln was the OG dictator. He'd rather kill than allow free association of the states.

Some people think the US died during the New Deal. No it died when Lincoln and the Supreme Court denied the right of secession. The states would have never entered the Union if it were made explicit the federal government would become what it has, and that they'd entered in a trap one way valve. If entering the Union was irrevocable it should have been spelled out when they joined rather than enforced retroactively.

How can someone even argue the US died? It’s the only superpower in the world. Also no one really knew if a state could leave or not - it’s a question that had to be settled with violence. Might is right and all that

The original notion of the US, as an association of sovereign states and a limited federal government, certainly died. Read the anti-federalist papers.

That is only one interpretation of the founding however. You could also argue that vision died with the Articles of Confederation or the Whiskey Rebellion

Or even Shays' Rebellion. The utopianism of the Anti-Federalists faded pretty quickly once it went up against the realities of running a newborn country.

Lincoln was an elected president and opposition to secession was not just his policy but that of the elected US government. Not a dictator.

Relevant: https://www.nps.gov/articles/secret-symbol-of-the-lincoln-me...

The question of whether States could secede from the Union had been settled a generation prior to the Civil War. If that's how you define the US "dying" then it died under Andrew Jackson while many of those who made the decision to enter the Union in the first place were still very much alive.

He's well known as the only President to file and be issued a patent. It was never put into practice, for some reason.

He was also involved in the case McCormick v. Manny about patent infringement of the Manny reaper. Though if Wikipedia is to believed he ended up not being directly involved.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_Manny

Really interesting, I knew Lincoln was a lawyer by training, but was unaware of his area of practice. Or for that matter, his interest in technology, or role in sounding the US Military's first aeronautical core.

He is still the only US President to have a US patent issued.

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