Page images
PDF
EPUB

CHAPTER XXVII

LINCOLN AND LABOR

LINCOLN'S sympathy with the common soldier grew out of his sympathy for the common people. He was sure that God loved the common people, because He made so many of them.

It is pertinent to ask, and the more so because so many have already attempted to answer the question, What was the attitude of Lincoln toward labor?

We may be sure it was an attitude of profound sympathy, held by a man who had been born to poverty; and who knew the story of labor as only those can know it who have eaten their bread in the sweat of their face.

A consideration of the attitude of Abraham Lincoln toward labor requires us to remember, first of all, that he lived and died before the present-day industrial system had come into existence. Several people who have wanted to quote him on labor have forgotten this, and have attributed to Lincoln statements which can not be found in his published works and which are the outgrowth of conditions which came into being after he was dead. For instance, a widely quoted statement concerning the threatened rise of great corporations is known to have originated with another man in 1873; but it is quoted as from the pen of Lincoln.

Another popular quotation is this:

I am glad that a system of labor prevails under which laborers can strike when they want to, where they are not obliged to work under all circumstances, and are not tied down to work whether you pay them for it or not. I like a system that lets a man quit

when he wants to, and wish it might prevail everywhere. I am not ashamed to confess that twenty-five years ago I was a hired laborer.

This quotation can not be called strictly accurate. It is a garbled combination of two widely separated statements, each of which is worthy of some study.

The last sentence is the more readily located. The statement "Twenty-five years ago I was a hired laborer," was written, apparently, about a quarter-century after he ceased to work with his hands for other men.

With this clue, we have not far to go. We find the document on which this appears to be based. It is a fragment which he prepared on July 1, 1854. Whether he delivered it as an address we do not know; but he probably did. It certainly served as the basis of subsequent addresses. The fragment in full can be found in any of the editions of his works:

Equality in society alike beats inequality, whether the latter be of the British aristocratic sort, or of the domestic slavery sort. We know Southern men declare that their slaves are better off than hired laborers amongst us. How little they know whereof they speak! There is no permanent class of hired laborers amongst us. Twenty-five years ago I was a hired laborer. The hired laborer of yesterday labors on his own account to-day, and will hire the labor of others to-morrow. Advancement-improvement in condition-is the order of things in a society of equals. As labor is the common burden of our race, so the effort of some to shift their share of the burden onto the shoulders of others is the great durable curse of the race. Originally a curse for the transgression upon the whole race, when, as by slavery, it is concentrated on a part only, it becomes the doublerefined curse of God upon his creatures.

Free labor has the inspiration of hope: pure slavery has no hope. The power of hope upon human exertion and happiness is wonderful. The slave-master himself has a conception of it, and hence the system of tasks among slaves. The slave whom you cannot drive with the lash to break seventy-five pounds of hemp in a day, if you will task him with a hundred, and promise him

pay for all he does over, he will break you a hundred and fifty. You have substituted hope for the rod. And yet perhaps it does not occur to you that to the extent of your gain in the case, you have given up the slave system and adopted the free system of labor.

A study of this statement in the light of its context shows:

I. Lincoln was not contrasting capital and labor; and did not recognize the distinction between the capitalist and the laborer; he denied that America has, or then had, a permanent class of hired laborers. The hired laborer and the capitalist were to Lincoln the same man, in different steps of his career.

2. Lincoln was discussing, not the system of modern industry, but the system of negro slavery in its economic aspects and contrasting it with free labor.

3. He was not defending the right of the laborer to quit any more than he was defending or denying the right of the employer to quit hiring him; that right of either side was not challenged in Lincoln's day. The question of collective bargaining was not under discussion by Lincoln.

4. When Lincoln talked of the right of the working man to better his condition, as he did, he did not have in mind the strike as the working man's instrument, but was commending work and economy such that the working man might hope to rise out of the condition of a hired laborer into that of a man laboring for himself, and possibly employing others.

The other statement is less easy to locate. Lincoln lived so remote from a sphere of strikes, and his approach to the labor question was from so different an angle than that of the modern student of industrial conditions, it is not easy to think, at first, where he would have been likely to say such words as those attributed to him. He said them, or words much like them, in New Haven, Connecticut, on March 6, 1860, two months before lis nomination for the presidency. He disclaimed much knowledge of strikes and of the industrial conditions out of which they grew, but replied to the argument that the strike which he

found to be on in New England among the employees in the shoe factories of Lynn, Massachusetts, was the result of business conditions attributable to fear of a Republican victory. This charge Douglas and other Democrats had made, and Lincoln replied:

Another specimen of this bushwhacking-that "shoe-strike." Now be it understood that I do not pretend to know all about the matter. I am merely going to speculate a little about some of its phases, and at the outset I am glad to see that a system prevails in New England under which laborers can strike if they want to, where they are not obliged to work under all circumstances, and are not tied down and obliged to labor whether you pay them for it or not. I like the system that lets a man quit when he wants to, and wish it might prevail everywhere. One of the reasons I am opposed to slavery is just here. What is the true condition of the laborer? I take it that it is best for all to leave each man free to acquire property as fast as he can. Some will get wealthy. I don't believe in a law to prevent a man from getting rich; it would do more harm than good. So while we do not propose any war upon capital, we do wish to allow the humblest man an equal chance to get rich with everybody else. When one starts poor, as most do in the race of life, free society is such that he knows he can better his condition; he knows there is no fixed condition of labor for his whole life. I am not ashamed to confess that twenty-five years ago I was a hired laborer, mauling rails, at work on a flat-boat-just what might happen to any poor man's son. I want every man to have the chance and I believe a black man is entitled to it-in which he can better his condition-when he may look forward and hope to be a hired laborer this year, and the next work for himself, and finally hire men to work for him. That is the true system.

When Lincoln expressed sympathy with the strike, confessing that he did not know about it, the first fact of notice is that his sympathies were immediately with the workmen. He suggested that they stop working in factories, and go out to the farms, and become independent. He believed that factory life was a life less free than life in the open, and he hoped that the workmen who found the conditions of labor hard in factories would move from

New England to Illinois. He said so in that same address. But his main point still was his contrast of free labor and slave labor, and he made the point, that the white free laborer could stop working for the man who did not pay him what his work was worth, and the black slave could not do so; and Lincoln wished that the condition in which a man might stop working if he was not paid might prevail everywhere, meaning specifically, in the states where there was slave labor.

There is one other reference in all of Lincoln's writings or speeches to a strike. It is in a note marked "Private" and sent to Secretary Stanton on December 21, 1863. He said:

Sending a note to the Secretary of the Navy, as I promised, he called over and said that the strikes in the shipyards had thrown the completion of vessels back so much that he thought General Gilmore's proposition entirely proper.

What General Gilmore's proposition was, the War Department does not know; but evidently some cherished plan of the Navy Department had to be abandoned or modified because at that critical period, when the effort to keep England and France from recognizing the Confederacy depended upon ships, supposedly loyal men working in the shipyards went on strike. It would be interesting to know whether Lincoln would have said that under those conditions he still wished men everywhere might feel free to strike. Perhaps he would have said it was their economic right to strike and their patriotic duty not to do so; but I will not attempt to put words into his mouth.

That the government had trouble with workmen in the navy yards, who insisted on higher rates of pay than those current in private establishments, and who threatened to strike, is known to be true, although a careful search of the records, reports, and histories of the various navy yards made by the Navy Department for this work fails to produce any mention of a strike which retarded the progress of construction of ships for the navy.

« PreviousContinue »