By the 1850s, Southern apologists for slavery went further still to defend an aristocratic vision of society that came to be called the mud-sill theory. “Every social structure must have its substratum,” wrote George Fitzhugh.
In free society this substratum, the weak, poor and ignorant, is borne down upon and oppressed with continually increasing weight by all above. We have solved the problem of relieving this substratum from the pressure from above. The slaves are the substratum, and the master’s feelings and interests alike prevent him from bearing down upon and oppressing them.18
The mud-sill is the base of a building, on the bare earth. Above it, by stages, the mansion is erected, to be inhabited by those superior people who are the carriers of civilization.
Domestic slavery in the Southern States has produced the same results in elevating the character of the master that it did in Greece and Rome. He is lofty and independent in his sentiments, generous, affectionate, brave and eloquent; he is superior to the Northerner in every thing but the arts of thrift.19
Fitzhugh had taken aim at every institution of liberal democracy, from the English Revolutionary Settlement of 1689 with its Bill of Rights to the sentiments in the Declaration of Independence. His theory of class struggle resembled that of the Communist Manifesto, which he had read, with the difference that Fitzhugh sided with the upper classes. His attack on the materialism, individualism, and greed of a northern mercantile society is one which today’s Occupy movement might applaud, did they not know where it came from.
Most Southern apologists for slavery were merely racists, sometimes taking their inspiration from biblical texts, sometimes seeking a more up-to-date foundation in what passed for scientific racism. Fitzhugh was a racist, of course, but he was also something more than that. He simply liked slavery, and thought it inevitable. In defending the institution, he foreswore any advantage he might derive from what he saw as racial inferiority. Whites made good slaves too, he thought, and he would not discriminate on the basis of race or color. His was an equal opportunity slavery, and when he spoke of northern wage-slavery he meant real slavery. Nineteenth century industrial society had created a new class of slaves, with the difference that the callous Northern wage-slavery was so much worse than the paternalistic slavery of the South.20
However it reads now, Fitzhugh’s Sociology for the South was not an especially radical book in its day. Today we would think Fitzhugh the most extreme of right-wingers, but had not his British contemporary Thomas Carlyle said much the same thing, and used the N-word to do so?21 On what might be taken for the Nineteenth Century British Left, writers such as Carlyle, Charles Kingsley, and Charles Dickens (with Mrs. Jellaby, his “telescopic philanthropist” in Bleak House) argued that England’s poor merited more concern than African slaves. Fitzhugh had placed himself in the mainstream of a nineteenth century attack from the Left and Right on the egalitarian political ideals of George Mason and Thomas Jefferson. And his attack on social mobility required an answer, which it would receive from a most unusual place.
The farmers who gathered in Milwaukee on September 30, 1859 for the Wisconsin state fair were treated to displays and speeches about modern agricultural improvements. There were presentations on how to make champagne from gooseberries, prizes for the best pig, and a report on that noxious bird, the sapsucker. Some of the visitors might have stopped to listen to a visitor from Illinois, who had recently made a name for himself in a series of debates with Senator Stephen Douglas. Abraham Lincoln had accepted an honorarium of $100 to come to the fair, and one of the organizers, thinking they might as well get their money’s worth, asked him to give a speech. Lincoln joked that he had not a platform to stand on, whereupon someone brought him an empty dry-goods box.22
Finding himself before an agricultural fair, a rising politician could be expected to dwell on the virtues of agrarian life, the honesty, industriousness, and high-mindedness of farmers. That’s certainly what a Jeffersonian Republican would have said. But then Lincoln wasn’t a Jeffersonian Republican. He came to politics as a Whig, and his beau ideal of a statesman was always Henry Clay.23 Lincoln liked “internal improvements” (federal support for infrastructure projects), high tariffs to pay for them, and most of all the idea of social mobility in which everyone is provided with the opportunity to flourish. Besides, he had seen farming life back in Kentucky, and got out of it as quickly as he could. His views on agrarian society could be expressed in three words, says Lincoln historian Allen Guelzo: “I hate farming.”
Lincoln was not unprepared when asked to speak. He had frequently hit the lecture circuit, with talks on discoveries and inventions, and spoke for three-quarters of an hour in a speech that revealed his deepest thoughts on politics and society. What he didn’t do was pander. Farmers, he told the crowd, are wonderful people, but they’re really no better or worse than other people. What was exciting about agriculture was how it had progressed, thanks to scientific experiments and new technology. Steam power, he said, now that’s the ticket! What new technologies do is lighten the burden of physical labor while increasing production, and who could be opposed to that?
No group more needed new technology or could profit more from book-learning than farmers, said Lincoln. There were the new harvesters, which substituted capital improvements for human labor and made farms much more productive. Then there were the new seeds, which might increase a harvest twentyfold. Farming had become an intellectual endeavor, and what made agricultural fairs so valuable was the way in which they spread the news of new discoveries and inventions. So said the only American president who ever held a patent in his name (for a barge that could navigate the shallow rivers of downstate Illinois).
From his talk about labor and technology, Lincoln turned to labor and democracy, and to mud-sills. His law partner, William Herndon, had given him a copy of Sociology of the South and reported that no book had more angered Lincoln.24 And as Lincoln tended to ramble in his talks, the leap from threshers to George Fitzhugh was an easy one. What Lincoln objected to, in the mud-sill theory, was the idea that mental and physical labor were the work of different classes of people.
From that idea so much was to follow. It meant there were no sharp class distinctions between capitalists and laborers, since laborers use their minds and most capitalists labor for their profits. And since everyone uses their minds, education should be open and available to all. Crucially, one’s lot in life should not be fixed, and everyone should be permitted to ascend from the lowest stations in life, as Lincoln had himself had done, rising from the grinding and desperate poverty of a hardscrabble farm. Through his own efforts he had bettered himself, read voraciously, and became a lawyer; and from his personal rise he took an understanding of society that led in time to the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment’s abolition of slavery. That by itself would have made Lincoln the greatest leader of his time, but even apart from that, and the Civil War too, Lincoln’s domestic policies would have made him the dominant nineteenth century American president. From his premises about individuals and society, as expressed in Milwaukee and repeated in his July 4, 1861 Address to Congress, came land grant colleges, an open-border system of immigration, and free land for farmers under a Homestead Act that transformed his country. It was how, he told Congress, the fight to preserve the Union should be seen.
This is essentially a people’s contest. On the side of the Union it is a struggle for maintaining in the world that form and substance of government whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men; to lift artificial weights from all shoulders; to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all; to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance in the race of life.
“All honor