Thanks to Anton Chaitkin for the following: The Whig Party leader in the Illinois legislature, 30-year old Abraham Lincoln, had led the fight for the state-built railroads. He was justifiably bitter against the aristocratic free trade faction which had brought down the Founding Fathers economic system; the northeastern bankers, political followers of Swiss nobleman Albert Gallatin, president of John Jacob Astors National Bank of New York; and the South Carolina-based slaveowners secession movement, organized around the free-market doctrines of British revolutionary immigrant Thomas Cooper. Alexander Hamiltons program of protective tariffs, government-sponsored transportation projects, and the national bank, enacted in the first Congress over the opposition of Albert Gallatin, had now been aborted. The bankers-planters alliance was rolling the U.S.A. back to colonial status, to be a mere producer of cheap raw materials for the British Empire, with themselves the colonial overseers. Abraham Lincoln and the other Henry Clay Whigs were determined to rescue American financial, industrial, and political independence. From late 1839 through the presidential election of 1840, Lincoln led the Illinois Whig campaign by focusing his partys program around the restoration of the Bank of the United States. Lincoln knew that national survival depended on their political success. This is the conclusion of his Dec. 26, 1839 speech on banking: 2 mins · Like Max Hesh [A debate opponent] confidently predicts, that every State in the Union will vote for Mr. Van Buren at the next Presidential election. Address that argument to cowards and to knaves; with the free and the brave it will effect nothing. It may be true; if it must, let it. Many free countries have lost their liberty; and ours may lose hers; but if she shall, be it my proudest plume, not that I was the last to desert, but that I never deserted her. I know that the great volcano at Washington, aroused and directed by the evil spirit that reigns there, belching forth the lava of political corruption, in a current broad and deep, which is sweeping with frightful velocity over the whole length and breadth of the land, bidding fair to leave no green spot or living thing, while on its bosom are riding like demons on the waves of Hell, the imps of that evil spirit, and fiendishly taunting all those who dare resist its destroying course, with the hopelessness of their effort; and knowing this, I cannot deny that all may be swept away. Broken by it, I, too, may be; bow to it I never will. The probability that we may fall in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just; it shall not deter me. If ever I feel the soul within me elevate and expand to those dimensions not wholly unworthy of its Almighty Architect, it is when I contemplate the cause of my country, deserted by all the world beside, and I standing up boldly and alone and hurling defiance at her victorious oppressors. Here, without contemplating consequences, before High heaven, and in the face of the world, I swear eternal fidelity to the just cause, as I deem it, of the land of my life, my liberty and my love. And who, that thinks with me, will not fearlessly adopt the oath I take. Let none falter, who thinks he is right, and we may succeed. But, if after all, we shall fail, be it so. We still shall have the proud consolation of saying to our consciences, and to the departed shade of our countrys freedom, that the cause approved of our judgment, and adored of our hearts, in disaster, in chains, in torture, in death, we never faltered in defending. 2 mins · Like Max Hesh The Whig candidate, Gen. William Henry Harrison, was elected U.S. President. He appointed as Treasury Secretary Thomas Ewing of Ohio, stepfather of future Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman and co-leader of the Whigs with Sen. Henry Clay. But the boisterously healthy President Harrison mysteriously died of pneumonia complications one month after inauguration; the disloyal vice-president, John Tyler, assuming Harrisons place, vetoed the Bank. Another Whig President elected in 1848, Gen. Zachary Taylor, also died early in his term. Lincoln was forced to watch his country fall under the complete control of the free-trade faction. Instead of government-fostered industrial development edging out the slave plantation system, plantation cotton, supported by anti-industrial bankers in New York and London, spread westward and dominated national politics. The banking system itself was an unregulated, chaotic swindle. Each bank printed its own notes, redeeming what it would. There was no national currency. Bank-fed speculation exploded in 1857, collapsing much of the factory system. Lincoln, the respected political leader of the Henry Clay tradition, was elected President in 1860, prompting the anti- nationalists to launch secession and civil war. It was a two-front war, militarily in the South...and politically against the London-allied Northern bankers, only recently the main brokers of slave cotton. The Associated Banks of New York were led by James Gallatin, a resident of Switzerland and the son of Albert Gallatin. The Eastern banks had agreed to a $150 million government loan package just after the Civil War commenced in 1861. They would resell U.S. bonds in England with the Barings and Rothschilds, putting the United States at the mercy of the British aristocracy. In December 1861, President Lincolns own financial plan was presented by Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase (a free-trade liberal sweating and agonizing in the Presidents harness), and by Lincoln himself. Its measures included: a nationally regulated private banking system, which would issue cheap credit to build industry; the issuance of government legal-tender paper currency; the sale of low-interest bonds to the general public and to the nationally chartered banks; the increase of tariffs until industry was running at full tilt; government construction of railroads into the middle South, promoting industrialism over the Southern plantation system. Lincoln spelled out his underlying republican philosophy, and shot his barbs at the aristocratic bankers, in his Annual Address to Congress, Dec. 3, 1861: Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights. Nor is it denied that there is, and probably always will be, a relation between labor and capital, producing mutual benefits. The error is in assuming that the whole labor of the community exists within that relation. .... In most of the southern States, a majority of the whole people of all colors are neither slaves nor masters; while in the northern a large majority are neither hirers nor hired..................... 1 min · Like Max Hesh Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights. Nor is it denied that there is, and probably always will be, a relation between labor and capital, producing mutual benefits. The error is in assuming that the whole labor of the community exists within that relation. .... In most of the southern States, a majority of the whole people of all colors are neither slaves nor masters; while in the northern a large majority are neither hirers nor hired.... Many independent men everywhere in these States, a few years back in their lives, were hired laborers. The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. This is the just, and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way to all-gives hope to all, and consequent energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all. No men living are more worthy to be trusted than those who toil up from poverty -- none less inclined to take, or touch, aught that they have not honestly earned. Let them beware of surrendering a political power which they already possess, and which, if surrendered, will surely be used to close the door of advancement against such as they, and to fix new disabilities and burdens upon them, till all of liberty shall be lost .... 1 min · Like
Posted on: Wed, 13 Aug 2014 07:18:38 +0000
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