Reprint: R0308D
Abraham Lincoln would have well understood the challenges facing many modern emerging nations. In Lincoln’s America, as in many developing nations today, sweeping economic change threatened older industries, traditional ways of living, and social and national cohesion by exposing economies and societies to new and powerful competitive forces.
Yet even in the midst of the brutal and expensive American Civil war—and in part because of it—Lincoln and the Republican Congress enacted bold legislation that helped create a huge national market, a strong and unified economy governed by national institutions, and a rising middle class of businessmen and property owners.
Figuring out how to maximize the benefits of globalization while minimizing its disruptions is a formidable challenge for policy makers. How do you expand opportunities for the talented and the lucky while making sure the rest of society doesn’t fall behind? It may be helpful to look at the principles that informed the policies that Lincoln and the Republican Congress instituted after they came to power in 1861:
These principles drove the reforms that helped Americans cope with and benefit from rapid technological advances and the fast integration of the American economy in the nineteenth century. They may be instructive to today’s policy makers who are struggling to help their own citizens integrate into the fast-changing global economy of the twenty-first century.
On a spring night in 1856, the side-wheel steamboat Effie Afton crashed into a railroad bridge spanning the Mississippi River between Davenport, Iowa, and Rock Island, Illinois. The ship burned and sank.
