Republicans Are Still the Party of Lincoln in One Key Way
His fights as a railroad lawyer would put him right at home in today's pro-corporate Republican party
Elected Republicans in West Virginia, and across the country, are carrying the banner of a young Abraham Lincoln in one major way: they are fighting to use government power to help corporations, no matter the cost to individuals or their private property.
Many people seem to forget that even when the Republican party was anti-slavery and pro-Civil Rights in the 19th century, it was also the party of New York financiers, railroad barons, and all the associated industries.
It was true even before Abraham Lincoln was the standard-bearer, and in part because of Lincoln’s work as a railroad lawyer, his work as a politician garnered lots of support from the railroads. Union Pacific still celebrates what Lincoln did to foster the railroads, and the rail monopolies.
Lawyer Sandra Lueckenhoff summarizes part of his career helping railroads to establish legal precedents that helped railroads specifically, and corporations generally.
“The Illinois Central Railroad, one of the largest Illinois corporations, retained Abraham Lincoln as counsel in the early 1850s. At a time when corporate law was in a state of change, Lincoln represented and advised this newly chartered corporate client in areas where legal rules were not always obvious and the outcome was far from guaranteed by precedent.' Through his experiences as counsel for the Illinois Central Railroad, Abraham Lincoln became known as "one of the most successful railroad attorneys.”
As James Ely Jr. notes, Lincoln even fought to make sure that landowners weren’t compensated when the government seized their land to build the privately-owned Illinois Central Railroad.
“Lincoln appeared before the Illinois Supreme Court on behalf of the [Illinois Central Railroad] in an important 1852 eminent domain case. At issue was the appropriate measure of damages in a proceeding to condemn a right-of-way over plaintiff’s land. The Illinois statute provided that no monetary compensation was payable unless the injury to the owner exceeded the additional value to the remaining land derived from construction of the line. The Illinois Supreme Court accepted Lincoln’s argument and sustained the constitutionality of the statute as satisfying the “just compensation” requirement. It reasoned that the state constitution did not mandate the type of compensation and that an equivalent was rendered to the owner in the form of the increased value of the rest of his land.”
Essentially, Lincoln argued, and the Court agreed, that taking the land was compensation in and of itself because it increased the value of the rest of the land that they didn’t take.
The railroads stole the land, told the farmer “you’re welcome” and Abraham Lincoln got the Illinois Supreme Court to agree that that was good enough.
If it seems like that flies in the face of Republican mantras about “private property rights” and “the rights of the individual,” that is only because you are thinking of human beings when you think about “individuals” and “persons.”
Lincoln, like modern Republicans, believed in corporate personhood. As lawyer Sandra Lueckenhoff noted,
““What status did Abraham Lincoln believe corporations held? In one of Lincoln's railroad cases,' a plaintiff's attorney attacked Lincoln for defending "great soulless corporations."' Lincoln's response indicates that he viewed a corporation as a "legal person"."'
So, you see, Lincoln may have been appalled that his party in West Virginia is fighting to preserve idols to a group of rebel states which he fought to bring back into the U.S.. He may even be surprised especially to see this in West Virginia, a state that seceded from the Confederacy for its mixed bag of reasons.
But, in the Republican Party’s fight to uphold corporate power over labor power in West Virginia, their fight for corporate rights over human rights, and their fight for the right of corporate property owners to offload their costs onto human property owners?
Well, those Republican fights might have railroad lawyer Lincoln feeling right at home in today’s profit-over-people Republican party.