If Greeley and Lincoln Were Alive Today, They Wouldn't Recognize the Republican Party

The Maine Republican party has recently adopted a new platform that challenges the principles of national sovereignty and active federal government.  The platform invokes the 1854 words of New York newspaper editor Horace Greeley that the then new Republicans were “united to restore the Union to its true mission of champion and promulgator of Liberty.”  But Greeley, Abraham Lincoln, and other Republican founders would have been astonished at the policies that Maine’s Republicans are claiming as their inheritance.

Both Greeley and Lincoln were ardent nationalists who supported the priority of the national Constitution and the national people (as in “we the people” not “we the peoples”) over those of the states.  They did not reject federalism.  Federalism was and is an entrenched part of the American political system, and states and the peoples of the states retain sovereignty in those places and spaces where the federal government is denied authority.

But to Greeley and Lincoln, there could be no doubt, as President Lincoln put it, that the nation preceded the Constitution and that the Constitution spoke for a single people united by Revolution and politics.  “The Union is much older than the Constitution,” Lincoln reminded his audience in his 1861 inaugural address.  Lincoln, of course, was challenging secessionists who believed the Constitution was a primarily federal rather than national document.  The first Republican president, in contrast, was willing to use American troops to defend the sovereignty of a single, national people formed in the crucible of the war for independence.

Greeley and Lincoln were also among America’s greatest advocates of publicly-funded internal improvements, what today would be called infrastructure.  They understood, with Maine’s Republicans, that freedom was not natural, that it had to be protected.  But they also knew it had to be cultivated.  Economic freedom required economic opportunity, and this required providing ordinary Americans with education and access to markets.  Republicans in Greeley’s and Lincoln’s era therefore supported expanding public schools, increasing access to higher education via the Morrill Act, and redistributing wealth by offering western lands at free or cheap prices to poor Americans.

Greeley and Lincoln, like the state’s Republicans today, believed in free labor as vital to democratic freedom.  But Greeley distinguished clearly between the ideal of free labor and the realities of work in actual markets, where workers were coerced by poverty, law, and the greater power of capital.  Greeley certainly did not believe American laborers were free in the mid-nineteenth century.  In fact, Greeley was one of American labor’s best friends.  He condemned corporations and capitalists who used their power to extract the cheapest wages from American workers.  Greeley understood that unregulated wage markets led to what Americans of the time called “wage slavery,” in which the formal freedom of workers in the market was undermined by the actual economic power of the wealthy.

Greeley’s real concern was that without regulating the workplace, workers would lose their freedom as employers treated them as “a commodity—a marketable product, like cheese or chocolate.”  Unless workers could regulate their working hours and conditions, freedom was meaningless and, in fact, employers would work their laborers so hard that they would be reduced to being animals.  "Man was not made merely to eat, to work, to sleep.  He has faculties which such a routine does not develop," Greeley wrote in 1850.  True economic freedom would encourage every American to develop his or her faculties rather than simply be a tool of the wealthy class.

Greeley and Lincoln believed that capitalism promised all people the opportunity to work hard and to achieve—to be self-made.  But they were equally aware that no one was self-made, that the promise of economic opportunity and economic freedom required government to step in by providing schools, economic infrastructure, ensuring the wide distribution of wealth, and ensuring that workers were not just formally but actually free.  In short, whether or not the state Republican party’s principles are good for Maine and the nation, they are radically different from those that were espoused by the party’s founders.