Labour System

Americans in the mid-nineteenth century could point to plenty of examples, real as well as mythical, of self-made persons who, by dint of "industry, prudence, perseverance, and good economy" had risen "to competence, and then to affluence." With the election of Abraham Lincoln, they could point to one who had risen from a log cabin to the White House. "I am not ashamed to confess that twenty-five years ago I was a hired labourer, mauling rails, at work on a flat-boat just what might happen to any poor man's son!" Lincoln told an audience at New Haven in 1860. But in the free states, a man knows that "he can better his condition, there is no such thing as a freeman being fatally fixed for life, in the condition of a hired labourer" "Wage slave" was a contradiction in terms, said Lincoln. "The man who laboured for another last year, this year labours for himself, and next year he will hire others to labour for him." If a man "continue through life in the condition of the hired labourer, it is not the fault of the system, but because of either a dependent nature which prefers it, or improvidence, folly, or singular misfortune."