1 of 8
In 1855, the Rock Island Railroad and its subsidiary, the Rock Island Bridge Company, built a bridge across the Mississippi River at Rock Island, Illinois. A year later, the steamboat Effie Afton collided with one of the bridge piers, and the boat's owners promptly filed suit in federal court against the bridge company, asking for compensatory damages and the removal of the bridge as a hazard to navigation.
More was here, though, than met the eye: the bridge represented the first reach of the northern railroad system across the Mississippi, and the Effie Afton's Saint Louis owners saw this as a direct threat to the grasp that the river and the slave-holding South held on midwestern agriculture. At the trial, the bridge company's chief counsel charged that the boat had been deliberately wrecked as a political gesture, with the owners of the Afton attempting to break up the Northern railroads in just the same way that Southern politicians were threatening "a dissolution of the Union" in order to shore up the slipping hegemony of slavery. But then, he added, the wreck of the Afton was also a psychological gesture. The pilot of the Afton had been driven, not just by the politics, but by "passion"—by a mad, unreasonable urge to wreck what could not be controlled—when, if reason had been in charge, "the chances are that he would have had no disaster at all." The jury listened to both arguments, and then deadlocked, nine to three, in favor of the bridge company.
The chief counsel for the bridge company was Abraham Lincoln.
It does not come as a great surprise to find that Lincoln in 1857 would discover a political analogy between Southern threats to disrupt the railroads and Southern threats to disrupt the Union. Lincoln was a successful railroad lawyer in Illinois throughout the 1850s and had "always been an anti-slavery man," and the Effie Afton suit presented an irresistible convergence of the two.
What strikes us as peculiar was why Lincoln followed his political explanation for the wreck of the Afton with that strange psychological argument about passion. But the burden of Daniel Walker Howe's Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln is that these two arguments, political and psychological, were a single argument in more minds than just Lincoln's, and that conflict about the political order of the American republic closely tracked particular theories about the architecture of human consciousness. This is a startling proposition, since few people in the twentieth century imagine that there should be any significant connection between cognitive psychology and political theory. But the surprise that may emerge from this proposition is dwarfed, by the close of this book, by the even more provocative suggestion that the eighteenth century, and not the twentieth, might have had the better view of this connection.
Daniel Walker Howe, who has taught at Yale and UCLA and is now the Rhodes Professor of American History at Oxford University, has spent his career chasing the ideas that mattered most to Americans between the Revolution and the Civil War. But Howe's curiosity about the history of American thought has pushed beyond cataloging schools of American thinkers to ask about the quirky ways that sets of explicit, formally organized systems of ideas cast broader shadows of attitudes, style, and culture.
What was it, for instance, about the Whig party's commitment to national projects of "internal improvements" in the 1830s that held so much attraction for American evangelicals that they formed a sort of Moral Majority for the Whigs (despite the fact that the Whig standard bearer, Henry Clay, was a notorious womanizer and gambler)? Howe's answer, in his landmark The Political Culture of the American Whigs (1979), focused on the idea of improvement, and how the transformation of the American landscape into an orderly and productive economic system in the 1800s paralleled the evangelical urge to transform unruly American souls into orderly and productive citizens.
share this page
RSS Feed
