Thomas Ferguson

Beyond Their Means? The Costsof Democracy From Jefferson

to Lincoln

Anyone embarking on an appraisal of The Rise of American

Democracy does well to recall the brouhaha that greeted Joseph Horowitz’s

Understanding Toscanini. Never mind that Horowitz began by frankly af-

firming that the legendary musical god from NBC’s machine could “legiti-

mately be called a ‘great conductor.’”1 This statement, along with the rest

of his insights, just flew over the heads of many agitated critics and read-

ers. All they could perceive was a barbaric assault on traditional musicology

that threatened to displace the reverent appreciation of musical genius with

relentless muckraking, economics, and sociology.

I would be distressed if my reaction to Sean Wilentz’s huge (1,044 pages)

new work were so one-sidedly misunderstood. There is no question that the

volume is a major achievement, at once synoptic and almost infinitely de-

tailed, in the way earlier studies by Bancroft, the Beards, Schlesinger, and a

few other similarly gifted historians have been. In literary works, unlike the

universe or history itself, it is often reasonable to take evidence of intelligent

design by a benevolent creator at face value. Wilentz’s study seems clearly

conceived as an example of the “new narrative history.” Works in this genre

typically aim to present intelligible accounts of their subject—usually polit-

ical history, understood in an almost traditional way—as a whole. Wilentz,

The Journal of The Historical Society VI:4 December 2006 501

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however, undertakes the daunting task of actually integrating more than a

generation of specialized, “bottom up” labor, African American, Hispanic,

and women’s histories into one broad narrative of the rise of American

democracy from Jefferson to Lincoln.

His success is remarkable. A recurring peculiarity of American history is

the way it is punctuated by shockingly abrupt, almost hallucinatory changes

in direction and tone, reminiscent of a Latin American magic-realist novel.

One minute the Jacksonians are triumphantly smashing the Bank of the

United States in the name of popular democracy; barely a couple of years

later, “New School” Whigs arise seemingly out of nowhere to banish the

populist specter in the name of benevolence and public improvement, and so

on. Wilentz’s accounts of the American body politik’s multiple personality

disorder are exceedingly well crafted: careful, plausible, usually sympathetic,

almost always striking a fine balance between generalization and exceptions.

Detailed research into primary sources that Wilentz undertook for his

earlier highly regarded studies in labor history enriches his discussion here,

as does his uncommonly wide reading among contemporaneous newspapers.

The range and quality of voices that his text brings to life is impressive; they

lend a polyphonic richness to the work that quite exceeds most others of its

genre.

The book, in short, constitutes a kind of “Phenomenology of the American

Spirit,” as it expressed itself in the slowly maturing struggle for more democ-

racy in the period before the Civil War. This focus on mass politics and po-

litical culture lends strength and verve to his exposition, but not far into the

narrative, it also reveals itself as something of a limitation.

The first sign of trouble comes with Wilentz’s lightning-fast dash past the

Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. For any study of The Rise of

American Democracy, the depth of the Founders’ commitments to democ-

racy and the extent to which their economic interests constrained those com-

mitments must rank as major concerns. In an age of sound bites, where

brevity is now less the soul of wit than the prerequisite of any communica-

tion at all, Wilentz’s copious footnotes and discussions of other historians

are usually a special pleasure to peruse.

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Costs of Democracy From Jefferson to Lincoln

But his analysis of what happened in Philadelphia in 1787 is surpris-

ingly abbreviated. He does not discuss, or even mention, Robert McGuire’s

painstakingly detailed and devastating quantitative vindication of Charles A.

Beard’s old concerns.2 One would have thought that McGuire’s practice—

which I consider an exemplary advance in social science method—of repeat-

edly testing the strength of straightforward economic variables by combin-

ing them in regressions with markers for cultural and ideological allegiances

would provide a perfect vehicle for critically assessing the interplay of ideol-

ogy and economics in the making of the Constitution. Instead, rather like the

political moderates he often extols, Wilentz nods to all sides in the contro-

versy. He largely contents himself with insisting that the document could be

stretched beyond the reactionary intentions of many of its authors—a point

no one really disputes.

His treatments of Hamilton’s fiscal program and the Jeffersonian com-

plaints about the policies of Washington and Adams raise additional misgiv-

ings. A kind of purposeful haze envelopes his discussion: “To Madison, the

debt funding and assumption schemes reeked of oppressive favoritism.”3 “In

local fights as well, there was mounting alienation over perceived Federalist

favoritism toward the wealthy and well connected.”4 Not much agonizing

about pinning down “wie es eigentlich gewesen ist” here; not what was, but

what was perceived often seizes center stage.

One almost takes away the impression that the whole “First Party Sys-

tem” arose from a gigantic miscommunication. The analysis would be much

sharper, and, I think, much truer to life, if Wilentz could simply bring himself

to state outright that Hamilton’s supporters rather clearly figured to benefit

disproportionately from many of the Federalist proposals, while the costs

usually promised to fall more heavily on their opponents. He could also use-

fully have drawn more attention to the astonishingly large number of elite

partisans on each side who were related, as well as often in business with

one another.

By the time we reach Jackson and the Bank War, however, it is obvious that

this reluctance to state facts and render judgments is highly principled. Be-

cause of the emphasis Wilentz has placed in other writings on the importance

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of delineating historical context, it would perhaps be going too far to la-

bel The Rise of American Democracy a great synthetic work—perhaps

the first—of postmodernist American history. But I think it is accurate to

observe that what drive the political “system” depicted here are primar-

ily language and ideology, mediated by personalities either harkening to or

disregarding efforts by groups struggling to express themselves and gain

recognition in public space.

The near-mythical Bank War, however, poses fundamental issues in a par-

ticularly sharp form. It is all very well for Wilentz to claim that the underlying

motivation for Jackson’s attack on the Bank of the United States was his con-

viction that “an office as powerful and unchecked as [Bank of the United

States President] Biddle’s was intolerable in a democratic republic.”5 But

there is no way of understanding that protean engagement and its convul-

sive aftermath—the deposit withdrawals, the boom, the “pet banks,” the

Specie Circular, or the business downturns that destroyed van Buren and

helped elect William Henry Harrison—that does not make razor sharp dis-

tinctions between what Jackson and his opponents likely believed they were

doing and what they actually did. The gulf between their understandings of

how money, banks, and the economy worked then and what later research

indicates is just too big.6

Merely drawing such distinctions shows at once just how limited Jackson’s

influence over the economy truly was and how much of what transpired was

driven by forces that had little or no connection to his policies—such as the

disturbances to China’s trade with the United States that fueled the runaway

boom by suddenly bottling up inflows of Mexican silver that had previously

been leaking away from the United States to Asia.7 Making such distinctions

also points up the limits of what phenomenologies of the American spirit can

and cannot hope to demonstrate. Old Hickory and his opponents abruptly

shrink down to something more like life size (though beside the dwarfs like

John Tyler or Millard Fillmore, who came after him, Jackson still stands

pretty tall). The delusory quality of so much of the rhetoric on all sides—

which raises a yellow flag about the content of the new democracy’s mass

political deliberations—also becomes impossible to miss.

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Costs of Democracy From Jefferson to Lincoln

Wilentz’s treatment of the Bank War, I think, highlights what I consider this

fine work’s most problematic feature: its lack of clarity about the relations

between politics and economics and, especially, the roles (there are more than

one) that money—particularly big money—has played in the U.S. political

system.

It is telling that nowhere in more than a thousand pages does Wilentz

cast any but fugitive glances at party finance. Who paid for these often wild

parties and how that changed over time just does not interest him. Nor does

he make any effort to assess how the comparative advantages of various

wealthy groups and interests evolved by comparison with either one another

or the rest of the citizenry.8 He is far more sensitive to pain than gain: While

keenly aware of class conflicts, he is not really interested in the specifics

of the growth of American business, or how sectoral or firm conflicts and

alterations in the scale of enterprises, by changing the “market” for politi-

cians, reshaped American political coalitions. And, in a style reminiscent of

the Federalist-era “politics of deference” his book describes, he is curiously

diffident about admitting that U.S. politicians—even those as celebrated as

Daniel Webster—normally expected to be compensated for their exertions

on behalf of the public welfare.9

As a result, throughout his study he underestimates the “money-driven”

character of American politics—how, because classical approaches to democ-

racy typically underestimate the real costs voters face in terms of time and in-

formation evaluation, power so often passes almost by default into the hands

of blocs of major investors, who, accordingly, constitute the real “market”

for politicians and policies.10

In regard to the Bank War itself, this leads him to sustain a complex chain

of misjudgments. A generation ago, Bray Hammond, who worked for the

Federal Reserve Board and well understood his subject, showed that a broad

coalition of state banks strongly backed Jackson’s attack, with the idea of

either undermining or, in a few cases, supplanting Biddle’s Bank of the United

States.11 Wilentz fleetingly acknowledges the presence of state banks lurking

somewhere in the background, but emphasizes the unique importance of the

great man’s own convictions.

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This is unhelpful. As Temin and a long line of earlier scholars have

shown, the pivotal Veto Message of the congressional act to recharter the

Bank is a muddle, a Through the Looking Glass farrago of contradictory

claims and views. No doubt Old Hickory’s views are represented there, as

Wilentz suggests, but so are a lot of other people’s, including many who

embraced radically different convictions about money and the economy. Al-

most the only clear point of agreement among them was that the Bank should

die.12

Wilentz is inhibited from treating the Veto Message as a typical product

of coalition politics partly because of his emphasis on the Old Hero, but also

because he credits criticisms of Hammond’s claims by later scholars with-

out further checking. He cites Frank O. Gattell, in particular, who attacked

one of Hammond’s crucial ideas, which was that the Bank War was a vehi-

cle by which New York supplanted Philadelphia as the financial center of

the United States. Gattell claimed that the Albany Regency, a key part of

the Democratic machine backing Jackson, had few or no ties to banks in

New York City. But this is simply false; subsequent research into primary

sources has demonstrated that a very large number of Jackson’s close advi-

sors and protagonists in the attack on the Bank had strong and direct ties to

state banks in and out of Gotham.13

By itself, the realization that Hammond was essentially right certainly puts

a strikingly different face on Jackson’s “democracy.”14 Just as the Jacksoni-

ans insisted, the Bank’s nationwide branching network gave it a comparative

advantage in corrupting Congress and the Executive branch through con-

cessionary loans, attorney fees (such as those paid to Clay and Webster,

prominent congressional champions of the Bank), and campaign assistance.

But all that destroying the Bank accomplished in the end was the replacement

of one financial oligarchy with another, broader one, rooted in a swarm of

smaller, but collectively just as ubiquitous, institutions.

Another of the few significant works that Wilentz does not mention is

Henry Cohen’s Business and Politics in America From the Age of Jackson

to the Civil War. Cohen’s detailed research in the papers of W.W. Corcoran,

probably the leading banker in Washington in the period between the final

ruin of the Bank of the United States and the Civil War, demonstrates in

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Costs of Democracy From Jefferson to Lincoln

sometimes stunning detail how critical these swarms of banks were to the

financing of both politicians and newspapers in this era.15 Indeed, Cohen’s

work indicates that banks, politicians, and newspapers constituted three

sides of a Bermuda Triangle into which the democratic space Wilentz is

concerned with largely disappeared.

As Cohen documented thoroughly, editors and publishers, like Congress-

men, were commonly for sale or rent. Major organs of mass politics often

resembled jukeboxes, which played only if someone paid, or were from the

outset conceived as vehicles for interests of their owners that often tran-

scended profits from the sale of “information” per se. Cohen shows how

depressingly low even such famous Jacksonian publicists as Kendall or Gouge

stooped.16 He also demonstrates precisely what the New York banks got out

of wrecking the Bank of the United States, including, his evidence suggests,

a direct takeover of the Bank’s old regulatory functions over other banks by

a cartel of the largest New York institutions that only finally broke down in

the 1850s.17

In a longer discussion, it would be worth commenting on aspects of

Wilentz’s treatment of agriculture (the study is very urban-oriented, which

I think is a problem in an age in which most of the population lived on the

land) and, especially, his identification of the Loco-Focos as radicals.18 Here,

however, it is only possible to pursue the broad points about the relation be-

tween mass politics and political economy.

For Wilentz, what brought about the final divorce between the North

and South is slavery, full stop. He traces in detail how abolitionist argu-

ments acquired increasing resonance over the course of the 1850s (although

he is clear that most Northerners were not abolitionists), as battles between

North and South grew increasing raucous, and finally, in “bleeding Kansas,”

sanguinary. Ultimately he sees the North as upholding, if not exactly un-

waveringly, the democratic promise of Jefferson; the southern secessionist

argument, he claims, “was a thorough repudiation of Jeffersonian politics,

especially about equality and natural rights, in favor of what its proponents

upheld as the natural differences among men.”19

This is just close enough to the truth, I think, to be seriously misleading—

and the problem stems directly from a failure to recognize the role played

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by investor blocs in picking up and emphasizing issues with the electorate.

By comparison with the gigantic enterprises that grew up in the Gilded Age

and, especially, the merger movement of the 1890s, most antebellum busi-

ness enterprises and fortunes were comparatively small of scale. Even the

largest New York banks used correspondents for much of their Washington

business and lobbying and, with the telegraph just coming into wide use,

remote-control fine tuning of congressional deals and allies was immensely

costly and rare. By default, most electioneering, fundraising, and political

campaigning occurred, by necessity, at the local level. In effect, the national

market for politicians was exceedingly thin; one might even question whether

one really existed, though that is probably going too far.20 Before the Civil

War, accordingly, national political coalitions normally were built up by bar-

gaining between regional or local congressional champions, such as Henry

Clay, Webster, or Calhoun, usually acting with a relative handful of leading

businessmen and an endlessly circulating legion of interested (in many senses)

smaller fry. Decision making was messy; implementation and enforcement

of agreements was correspondingly uneven.

There is a name for this type of politics. It comes from another coun-

try divided between an industrializing North and a rural South, where it

seemed for a long time as though the balance of political power could

change only slowly: “Trasformismo.” Quite like Italian elites at the end of the

nineteenth century, American elites, all typically handsomely rewarded by

various affected private interests, struck backroom deals (often baptized for

public consumption as “Great Compromises”) that kept most everyone with

money’s shows together and foreign investors—whose pressure was contin-

uous and powerful—generally satisfied.21 Wilentz’s discussions of presiden-

tial campaigns, notably those that brought Polk, Pierce, and Buchanan to

power, are, as one might expect, illuminating and interesting in regard to the

tenor of mass campaigning. But he has very little to say about the arrange-

ments between investor blocs that led to these developments that startled so

many.

Although he is careful not to claim as much, the narrative usually conveys

an impression that some mysterious alchemy of personality and context is

at work. But if one is trying to comprehend Trasformismo, it is essential

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Costs of Democracy From Jefferson to Lincoln

to track what various investor blocs really want versus what the public

is hearing. Work by Cohen and others makes it relatively easy to trace at

least the main lines of the increasingly complex chain of deals, bribes, and

arrangements (and occasional accidents) that produced these jack-in-the-box

candidacies. Although I lack the space to develop the argument, it seems clear

that the drive to put Polk into the White House, for example, was a good deal

more complicated than Wilentz’s brief account suggests.22 The campaign on

behalf of Franklin Pierce was briefer, but perhaps still more complicated,

while Buchanan’s nomination stretched back through an astonishing range

of land claims, bond defaults, and railroad land grant proposals pushed by

politicians and businessmen deliberately coordinating across North-South

lines.23

For decades, it has been generally acknowledged that a railroad develop-

ment scheme championed by Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas played a

pivotal role in touching off the congressional maneuvers that led to the dis-

astrous Kansas-Nebraska Act. Wilentz does not at all deny this. But he does

try to lift the subsequent heightened salience of slavery completely out of its

context in railroad development. This is a mistake. Cohen has documented

an astonishing variety of other development schemes that were integral to

political outcomes in the 1850s and for a while promised to hold the parity

between North and South.24

Over time, however, as William H. Seward and many other contempo-

rary observers noticed, construction of railroads in the Old Northwest and

some border states was vastly outpacing growth in the south. The increas-

ingly dense railway networks, particularly if they were to be augmented by

a transcontinental railroad, would inevitably lead to the admission of new

states whose entry into to the union would upset the elaborately maintained

balance between North and South. Not surprisingly, over time, southern

political leaders looked with increasing skepticism on railroad development

or, indeed, almost any kind of national development schemes. Railroad land

grants, which had proliferated earlier in the 1850s, came to a dead halt under

the southern dominated Buchanan administration. In the North, business-

men anxious to promote the development of Chicago, industrialists seek-

ing tariffs, commercial interests favoring all sorts of railroads, including a

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transcontinental line to the West, and other groups all understood that their

projects faced endless blockades from southern political leaders.25

Some of the greatest business figures in the United States became active

supporters of Kansas Aid and, later, John Brown. There is no reason to doubt

that some of them truly detested slavery, such as John Murray Forbes, per-

haps the most important of all American railroad entrepreneurs, who backed

Kansas aid, assisted Brown, and was a Lincoln elector in 1860.26 Many oth-

ers, in all probability, related to the anti-slavery cause rather like most major

American corporate leaders do to evangelical Christian groups in today’s

Republican Party: They subsidize the Saints to go marching in, then watch

gratefully as a modern miracle of the loaves and fishes returns the value of

their contributions to them many times over in the form of favorable gov-

ernment policies. In any case, there is no doubt about the deep involvement

of railroads and allied business interests in the Lincoln candidacy from its

earliest days. Nor is there any question that the lawyer who made a famous

argument on behalf of the rights of railroads to build bridges anywhere won

the nomination by garnering crucial support from iron manufacturers, coal

mining interests, and other firms intent upon tariffs, land grants, and other

national developmental measures.27 Wilentz’s fluent, gracefully written anal-

ysis is a fine discussion of mass politics and likely to be a standard source

for a long time to come; all those trees have not died in vain. But its account

of The Rise of American Democracy would be even more illuminating and

helpful if it were more concrete and less ethereal.

NOTES

1. I am grateful to Walter Dean Burnham, Peter Temin, and Walker Todd for helpful com-ments on a draft. Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (NewYork: W.W. Norton, 2005); Joseph Horowitz, Understanding Toscanini (New York: AlfredA. Knopf, 1987), 3–4.

2. Robert A. McGuire, To Form a More Perfect Union: A New Economic Interpretation of theUnited States Constitution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

3. Wilentz, Rise, 45.4. Ibid., 545. Ibid., 367.6. See the discussion of the historiography of the Bank War in Peter Temin, The Jacksonian

Economy (New York: W.W. Norton, 1969). The reference to business downturns here ismeant slightly differently from Wilentz’s; it takes account of recent work by Davis on pre-World War I industrial production and business cycles. Some aspects of Wilentz’s discussion,especially of the Panic of 1819 and its aftermath, are likely to require reconsideration in light

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Costs of Democracy From Jefferson to Lincoln

of Davis’s findings, but the questions are too complex for a short discussion. Wilentz onlyoccasionally refers to election statistics; if he had, some of his conclusions about the 1840campaign in particular would probably change. The main advantage “New School Whigs”enjoyed in that campaign, I think, was that their man was not then in the White House;that was probably more important than any of their many campaign appeals. Cf. JosephH. Davis, “An Annual Index of U.S. Industrial Production, 1790–1915,” Quarterly Journalof Economics 119:4 (2004): 1177–1215; Davis, “An Improved Annual Chronology of U.S.Business Cycles Since the 1790s,” Journal of Economic History 66:1 (2006): 103–121.

7. Temin, Jacksonian, 80ff. Wilentz, Rise, 890, n. 40, fleetingly mentions Temin’s discussion,though the point is blurred by other references that are not material.

8. It is somewhat problematic when most scholarly work lags behind more popular politicaldiscussions. Compare, for example, Kevin Phillips, Wealth and Democracy: A Political Historyof the American Rich (New York: Broadway Books, 2002) and my review in “Following theMoney,” Washington Post Book World (May 19, 2002), 7.

9. Wilentz, for example, refers at one point to Webster as “the most notorious of Biddle’s allegedplacemen” (875, n. 20). There was nothing “alleged” about it. See, for example, Webster’slegendary letter of Dec. 21, 1833, to Bank of the United States President Nicholas Biddle,complaining that “my retainer has not been renewed or refreshed as usual. If it be wished thatmy relation to the Bank should be continued, it may be well to send me the usual retainers.”Webster’s sympathetic biographer, Irving Bartlett, tries hard to explain why this does not meanwhat it says. But even he throws up his hands at another note of Webster’s to Biddle: “Fromour perspective, Webster’s candor in this letter seems astounding. He was explaining why heexpected a specific fee for getting a specific law passed.” See Irving Bartlett, Daniel Webster(New York: W.W. Norton, 1978), 129–130.

10. Thomas Ferguson, Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logicof Money-Driven Political Systems (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), especiallyChapter 1.

11. Bray Hammond, Banks and Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957).

12. Temin, Jacksonian, Chapter 2; see also Hammond, Banks, Chapter 14. For the last generation,it has been fashionable within American history to denigrate Hammond; this has mostly beendone by people whose own grasp of the actual mechanics of the banking system of the timeappears much less firm than his.

13. Wilentz, Rise, 874–875, n. 13, citing Frank Otto Gattell, “Sober Second Thoughts on VanBuren, the Albany Regency, and the Wall Street Conspiracy,” Journal of American History 53(1966): 19–40. Cf. “Party Realignment and American Industrial Structure: The InvestmentTheory of Political Parties in Historical Perspective,” in Ferguson, Golden Rule, 97, whichdraws on the work of a number of other scholars, including, notably, Philip Burch. Althoughit deals with the period just after the main battles of the Bank War, the dislike of many (notall) New York banks for the Bank of the United States comes through clearly in Henry Cohen,Business and Politics in America from the Age of Jackson to the Civil War (Westport, Conn:Greenwood, 1971).

14. Hammond might usefully have placed more emphasis on some divisions among the statebanks, but in fact he was aware of them.

15. Cohen, Business; see, e.g., 26, 29–30, and 116.16. Ibid., 134 for Gouge, 30 for Kendall. Note that the events discussed come slightly after

Jackson’s presidency. I do not think this makes any difference; Hammond’s appraisals ofmost Jacksonian journalists seem on the mark.

17. Ibid., 10ff. and Chapter 13.18. Wilentz several times points to Churchill Cambreleng, a recognized leader of the Loco-Focos,

as a relative radical. Cambreleng was actually a fairly wealthy merchant who worked for along time in the employ of John Jacob Astor. He was also a director of a prominent NewYork bank from the early 1820s on. See the discussion and references in Ferguson, “PartyRealignment,” p. 57. Cohen, Business, has a wonderful quotation from one of Corcoran’sassociates in the early 1850s: “Locofocos control all the R.R. [railroad] organizations—theydo generally” (183). Agriculture can be usefully analyzed along sectoral lines, too. It appears

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that there were major reorientations of corn and other crops on the eve of the Civil War. SeeCarville Earl, Geographical Inquiry and American Historical Problems (New York: StanfordUniversity Press, 1992), esp. Chapter 6.

19. Wilentz, Rise, 773. I am inclined to agree with analysts who suggest that Lincoln’s own refer-ences to Jefferson were aimed at border states sentiment, so that the linkage between Lincolnand Jefferson is perhaps more utilitarian than Wilentz allows. Lincoln was clearly in favor ofa far more activist government than was Jefferson, the Louisiana Purchase notwithstanding.

20. Cf. Thomas Ferguson and Jie Chen, “Investor Blocs and Party Realignments in AmericanHistory,” Journal of the Historical Society 5:4 (2005): 527–529.

21. A particular merit of Cohen’s work is that it makes visible some of the concrete pressures thathelped hold the whole show together. His story about how Corcoran tore up a $7,000 note ofWebster’s (and sent along a new check for another $1,000) after the latter’s famous Seventh ofMarch Speech that helped advance the Compromise of 1850, for example, is priceless. Cohen,Business, 61; he comments that “Besides being a generous and sincere gesture of support formoderation, the gift represented an accurate estimate of the value of the speech in sparking arecovery of prices to earlier levels.”

22. See Cohen, Business, 26–27, on Robert Walker, whose role was probably crucial, along withthe references cited in Ferguson, “Party Realignment,” 58.

23. See the striking discussion in Cohen, Business, Chapter 12.24. Ibid., e.g., Chapters 10, 11.25. The railroad issues defy compact summary even for Southerners, but see the discussion and

references in Ferguson, “Party Realignment,” 61–68; Cohen, Business, 205–206. The honoredancestors of this general approach are, of course, the Beards. See Charles A. Beard and MaryR. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1927), Vol. 2,Chapter 17, although they tend to emphasize the spread of manufacturing. Note that railroadland grants were widely recognized to be linked to the tariff issue, since giving away orcharging less for public lands reduced Treasury revenues, thus building pressures for tariffs toraise revenues. See Lewis Haney, A Congressional History of Railways in the United States,4 vols. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1908; reprint, New York: Augustus Kelley,1968), Vol. 1, 381–384. A typical example of the southern anxiety over railroads was a speechof Senator Iverson: “Now, sir, I have not a solitary doubt, that if only one road is providedfor, and the route is left open to be selected by the company who shall undertake it, a northernroute will be adopted . . . pouring all its vast travel and freights . . . into the northern States andcities of the Union . . . and sir, I cannot but be surprised that any southern Senator should bewilling to vote such a magnificent donation of land and money. . . . I believe the time will comewhen the slave States will be compelled, in vindication of their rights, interests, and honor, toseparate from the free States, and erect an independent Confederacy; and I am not sure, sir,that the time is not near at hand when that event will occur.” The speech originally appearedin the Congressional Globe of 1857–1858, 242, cited in Haney, A Congressional Historyof Railways in the United States, Vol. 2, 60–61. Frank Heywood Hodder, “The RailroadBackground of the Kansas-Nebraska Act,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 12:1 (1925):3–22, is still well worth reading, although on details it needs to be checked against later work.

26. Ferguson, “Party Realignment,” 67–68. Forbes also promoted a hard line during the franticNorth–South discussions that followed Lincoln’s election.

27. For the campaign, see, for example, the discussion and references in Ibid., 67–69. The bridgeargument came during the famous Rock Island case; see, for example, John W. Starr, Lin-coln and the Railroads (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1927), Chapter 11. Starr’s Chapter 19also recounts how Lincoln settled the much discussed issue of the eastern termination ofthe transcontinental railway built by his friends and supporters by choosing Council Bluffs,Iowa—where he happened to own land sold to him by one of the railroad attorneys whohelped organize his campaign. For a striking example of how the railroads actively supportedLincoln at a crucial moment of the convention, see Lloyd Wendt, Chicago Tribune: The Riseof a Great American Newspaper (New York: Rand McNally, 1979), 121. I am grateful toErik Devereux for bringing this source to my attention.

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