April 29, 1980

NEW SOLIDARITY

Page 5

For Real Re-Construction

"Shall we have peace?" asked Henry C. Carey, the economic adviser to Abraham Lincoln, in an open letter to General Ulysses S. Grant. It is a question that brings fears to the minds of Americans today. The answer depends, said Carey, on the attitude of the federal government to the construction of the nation. Writing in November 1868, Carey, who had helped forge the American System policies of Lincoln, faced a nation embittered and divided by war and, after the assassination of Lincoln, the defeat of the President's policies to reconstruct the South so that it would join the North on a level of industrial equality. What's more, Carey makes clear, it was because Abraham Lincoln the previous administrations had ignored the principles of the American Systemgovernment credit to industry and for internal improvementsthat the United States was forced to face its worst crisis: the Civil War. Carey makes his point by comparing the current state of the Union to that of Germany, where Carey's associate Friedrich List had returned, after becoming an American citizen, to construct the German nation on the basis of the American System. List created the German Zollverein (Customs Union), which enabled Germany to unify itself on the basis of an economic policy of government protection to industry. As Carey explains to Grant: "Five and thirty years ago, Germany and the American Union exhibited states of things directly antagonistic, the one to the other. The first was divided and disturbed, its internal commerce in every way embarrassed, its

people and its various government very poor, and with little hope in the future except that which resulted from the fact that negotiations were then on foot for the formation of a Customs Union, which, shortly after, was accomplished. In the other, on the contrary, everything was different, the internal commerce having been more active than had ever before been known, the public treasury filled to overflowing, the national debt on the eve of extinction, and capital so much abounding as to make demand, for the opening of mines, the building of houses and mills, and the construction of roads. . . . "But little later (1835), the two countries are once again totally opposed, Germany having adopted the American System and thus provided for freedom of internal commerce. America has simultaneously adopted that which to Germany had proved so utterly disastrous, and which had been there rejected. Thenceforth, the former moved steadily forward in the direction of creating a great domestic commerce, doing this by means of a railroad system which should so bind together her people as to forbid the idea of future separation; . . . the other meanwhile in accordance with the doctrine of laissez faire, requiring that government should abdicate the performance of its proper duties, wholly overlooking the fact that all the communities by which such are carried into practical effect now exhibit themselves before the world in a state of utter ruin. "Studying now our American railroad system, we find the great trunk lines to be, so far as regards the North and the South, purely sectional, all of them running east and west, . . . constituting a collection of spokes in a great wheel whose hub, wholly controlled by men like Laird and other workers in aid of this great rebellion, is found in Liverpool. . . . Prior to the war a single turn of the British screw had sufficed for ruining thousands of those who had invested their means in the opening of mines, the building of furnaces, or factories, and for thus crushing out the most important portions of our domestic commerce. . . . "Had our policy been differenthad we strengthened the centerthere would have been such a growth of domestic commerce that roads would have been made running north and south, northeast and southeast, southwest and northwest, thereby so tying together the various parts of the Union as to render it wholly impossible that the idea of secession should continue to have existence . . . the slave would have been becoming gradually free, independence would have been fully established, we should have had no rebellion, and we should have been spared the mortification of feeling that

the solution of the question as to whether or not the Union could be maintained rested almost wholly in the minds of men like Russell and Napoleon. "President Lincoln's attention having been, at the opening of war, called to the view that is here presented, he recommended to Congress the making of a road through Kentucky to and through East Tennessee, to connect with other roads leading to South Atlantic ports.... "Long persistence in a policy directly the reverse of that which had in so short a period built up the great German empire, has given us a rebellion, and that rebellion had led to a state of things wholly adverse to the maintenance of a permanent peace."