Lincoln: Expanding the Franklin/Hamilton “American System” to Make US World’s Leading Industrial Power by Dr. Stuart Bramhall
A Book Review: Who We Are: America’s Fight for Universal Progress, From Franklin to Kennedy Volume II 1830s-1890s
Who We Are: America’s Fight for Universal Progress, From Franklin to Kennedy Volume II 1830s-1890s
By Anton Chaitkin (2025)
Book Review
(Part 1)
In Volume II, Chaitkin carefully traces the crucial role of American advocates for the Franklin/Hamilton “American System” (see Hidden History: How Ben Franklin and Friends Created Britain’s Industrial Revolution) in making the US the world’s foremost industrial power.
For me the most interesting parts of Volume II concern Lincoln’s career as an ardent supporter of the American System of political economy and the legacy of Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia Philosophical Society in 1) trying to industrialize the South during Reconstruction; 2) fostering Thomas Edison’s role in bringing cheap electrical energy to America’s poor; and 3) using American System economic concepts and inventions to spur industrialization (and thwart British imperial ambitions) in Germany, Russia and Japan.
Lincoln joined the pro-industrialist movement started by Benjamin Franklin (see Hidden History: How Ben Franklin and Friends Created Britain’s Industrial Revolution) in the 1830s. The former was an ardent supporter of pro-industrialist Henry Clay, who represented Kentucky in both the House and Senate and ran (unsuccessfully) as president against incumbent Andrew Jackson in 1832.
Significant milestones in Lincoln’s career include
1834 – elected to Illinois legislature for eight years, where he champions legislation (the construction of the Illinois and Michigan canal and a rail link-up to Philadelphia and Columbia Railroad). After Presidents Jackson’s and Van Buren’s anti-tariff policies triggered the Panic of 1837, Illinois was forced to sell the railroad to private interests. Completed in the 1850s, the canal would ultimately make Chicago the center of the world’s greatest industrial complex.
1840 – successfully campaigns for Whig (pro-industrialist) President William Henry Harrison, who dies mysteriously after a month in office.
1846 – elected to House of Representatives as a Whig candidate. I
1847-49 – Lincoln’s first motion after taking his seat is to declare President James Polk’s (1845-1849) war against Mexico unconstitutional, on the basis Polk deliberately lied to the public about the reasons for the war.*
1854 – participates in formation of Republican Party, dedicated to preventing the spread of slavery to the West.
1858 – narrowly defeated by incumbent Senator Stephen Douglas as a Republican candidate for Senate.
1860 – elected 16th president of US.
1861-65** – A strong supporter of the “American system” of protective tariffs, Czar Alexander II frees 23 million Russian serfs one day prior to Lincoln’s inauguration. As seven Southern states had already seceded, Republicans gain control of the Senate and speedily passes Lincoln’s protective tariff legislation. The later enabled Philadelphia’s industrialists to build the country’s first steel and oil** industries as well as the Pennsylvania-New York railroad loop. The latter would prove vital to transporting and supplying Union troops.
Lincoln and his economic advisor Henry Carey (son of Matthew Carey – see History of the Long US Battle to Industrialize) also pushed through legislation to:
address Southern soil depletion (the main driver behind the push to expand slavery westward) by creating a U Department of Agriculture and enacting the Morill Land Grant College Act (donating federal land for colleges)
pass the Pacific Railway Act to build a transcontinental railroad
industrialize the South
issue $450 million dollars of government currency known as Greenbacks after Wall Street collaborates with British banks to stymie funding of the Union war effort
*The Southern slave owners instrumental in Polk’s election had a desperate need to expand slavery westward as bad farming practices had badly depleted Southern soil. Mexico declared war on the US after they illegally annexed the Mexican territory of Texas. Many officers serving in the war against Mexico subsequently joined private armies organized by Southern plantation owners to conquer Latin American and Caribbean countries in an effort to expand slavery there. Ten years later these private mercenaries would assume leadership of the Confederate army. Because the Union had no military leaders to train recruits, it lost most battles in the early years of the Civil War. Another disadvantage was that Britain was primarily responsible for funding and arming the Confederate Army (while the British Navy served as the Confederate Navy – sinking US merchant marine ships).
**Chaitkin includes a fascinating appendix documenting how Teddy Roosevelt’s Anglophile uncle financed the Lincoln assassination via British intelligence in Montreal.
***The Pennsylvania Railroad organized and developed the US petroleum industry in the 1850s, with many Civil War veterans joining in oil prospecting at the end of the war. In part by deliberately shrinking the money supply to trigger a global depression (1873-79), J P Morgan and John D Rockefeller, with the support of of British financiers, essentially bankrupted the Philadelphia railroads, enabling Morgan to gain total control of most railroads and Rockefeller of oil mining and distribution.
June 30, 2015
Post Civil War Reconstruction: What You Never Learned in School
Book Review
(Part 2)
Volume II of Who We Are covers the post-Civil War Reconstruction in far more detail than most schools and universities
Following Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, former slave owner Vice President Andrew Johnson became president. The latter was a Southern Democrat who ran with Lincoln on the National Union Party ticket in the 1864 election. One of his first acts was to issue a blanket pardon to all lower Confederate officers, to allow them to resume their seats in the Republican-controlled Congress. In response, House Republican leader Thaddeus Stevens sponsored a successful bill to call a joint Senate-House committee, which required the former Confederate states to call biracial conventions to choose new representatives to the House and Senate. It was a slow process, and it wasn’t until 1870 that the final four states (Virginia, Mississippi, Texas and Georgia) were readmitted to the Union.
Concerned about Southern black codes and Jim Crow laws being used to jail freed slaves, Stevens also introduced the 14th Amendment (in 1866). It explicitly grants citizenship to all persons born in the US.
After a New Orleans police-sanctioned mob broke up a Louisiana voting convention and burned the homes of Black participants, Stevens also introduced the 1867 Military Reconstruction Act. The new law deployed Union troops to keep the peace in the South.
Determined to resist Southern industrialization (which Republicans viewed as essential to provide jobs for freed slaves with no property or educations), New York and Boston bankers and entrepreneurs colluded with British interests to establish the “free trade” branch of the Republican party. Determined to retain the Southern plantations, using freed Blacks as cheap labor, they also deliberately created an economic crisis by drastically reducing the money supply. .
Running as a Republican, General Ulysses Grant easily won the 1968 election, as federal troops still protected Black voting right several former Confederate states were still excluded from voting.
In 1869, the Grant administration filed The Alabama Claims, demanding damages from the United Kingdom for the naval vessels Britain provided the Confederacy. After international arbitration (in Geneva) endorsed the claim in 1872, Britain settled by paying the United States government $15.5 million.
Neglected under Johnson, Philadelphia railroad expansion flourished under the pro-industrialist Grant. In 1869, the transcontinental railroad begun by Lincoln was completed. In 1870 a Philadelphia-based company built a rail network joining the North and South, hoping to stimulate Southern industrialization.* For similar reasons The Texas-Pacific Railroad completed a railroad line to Texas and San Diego. The Northern Pacific Railroad extended the railroad to Seattle the same year.
In 1876, Neither D Samuel Tilden nor Rutherfood Hayes received a majority of votes, so the presidential election was decided in the House. Southern Democrats who were pre-war Whigs (and supported industrialization) agreed to vote for Hayes provided the Republican leadership agreed to withdraw troops from the South and subsidize the extension of the Texas-Pacific Railroad into their districts.
The withdrawal of federal troops effectively ended Reconstruction.
*James A Roosevelt, the father of Franklin, was president of the Southern Railway Security Company.
The Battle Between Edison Supporters and J P Morgan to Electrify America
Book Review
(Part 3)
My favorite chapter in Who We Are concerns the role of Philadelphia supporters of the “American System” of political economy (see Lincoln: Expanding the Franklin/Hamilton “American System” to Make US World’s Leading Industrial Power) in fostering the career of inventor and entrepreneur Thomas Edison.
Early History
Thomas Edison was the son of a Canadian revolutionary named Samuel Edison who fled to Michigan after being charged with treason. After learning Morse code, Thomas became a telegraph operator at 15, also became a founding member of the National Telegraph Union at 18.
The Battle with J P Morgan
General William J Palmer, long time civil engineer for the Philadelphia railroads, hired Edison in 1870 to help him launch the Automatic Telegraph Company in competition with J P Morgan controlled Western Union.* Two of Edison’s inventions, the automatic printing telegraph and a technology to send multiple transmissions over a single wire were essential to this enterprise. In 1876, Palmer and other Philadelphia oil and railroad industrialists set him up in Menlo Park New Jersey. It was there Edison invented the carbon transmitter microphone, enabling the telephone invented by Alexander Graham Bell to carry a voice signal over long distances.
While at Menlo Park, Edison also developed the phonograph to record speech and the “telemachon,” a dynamo/generator capable of illuminating eight electric lights simultaneously. J P Morgan, who owned the patent on lightbulbs and a controlling interest in the natural gas used to light streets, blocked Edison’s efforts to manufacture lightbulbs. He was extremely wary of Edison’s ability to provide consumers with cheap electrical energy at a fraction of the cost of gas.
In response Edison sold his stock in the Edison Electric Light Company in 1880 to set up the Edison Lamp Works.
Edison Construction Company
Although his board opposed him, J P Morgan also sought to prohibit the building of any new generators in towns and cities. Edison now formed the Edison Construction Company, which supported local invests to set up generators in their own towns. In return for a fraction of their stock, Edison and his team would build their generators, operating pant and transmission networks. They then operated the plants for a brief period before turning them over to a local utility.
A mechanic named Henry Ford joined Detroit Edison when it first formed in 1886 and by 1894, he was their chief engineer.
Lincoln’s son Robert Todd formed Chicago Edison in 1887,
The US Government, a well as Edison and Philadelphia industrialist who supported them all facilitated electricity development in Europe, Mexico, South America and India and Africa.
The Development of Alternating Current and Edison’s Demise
When Thomas Houston and Westinghouse (who bought the patents from Tesla, a former Edison employee) promoted alternating current (AC) because it could be transmitted over longer distances. Unwisely Edison resisted adopting it in his own business, which proved unable to compete. J P Morgan eventually took over Edison’s entire enterprise (which he renamed General Electric) and froze Edison and his associates out of the businesses they had started. Morgan immediately put the brakes on expansion of electrical generation in favor of financial manipulation. This denied numerous sectors (farmers especially) access to electrical machinery for at least two decades. They would wait until the late 1920s, when governor Franklin Roosevelt renewed electrification efforts for residents of New York state. Southern electrification would wait until his 1932 election as president and the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority.
*General William J Palmer was a Civil War veteran and civil engineer who built first bridge and across the Rio Grande and completed two-thirds of the railroad ink to Mexico City before a major attack by Boston financiers caused the financial collapse of his railroad
**Using the Pennsylvania Railroad right of way to construct telegraph poles and lines, Western Union completed the first transcontinental telegraph line in 1861. In the engineered depression that followed the Civil War, J P Morgan assumed a controlling interest in both the Pennsylvania Railroad and their Western Union spinoff.
Fighting British Imperialism by Spreading the “American System” Internationally
Book Review
(Part 4)
During 19th century, there was a continued effort by US supporters of the “American System” of political economy to spread their ideas and technology to other countries – seeking international support in ending British imperial domination over global trade and economics.
Matthew Carey’s son Henry and his Philadelphia supporters payed a major role in shaping political revolutions in both Germany and Japan, as well aa reinvigorating Ireland’s battle for independence. They helped organize donations of cash and guns to the Irish republicans, ultimately leading to the formation of Sinn Fein.
It was largely thanks to their efforts that Chancellor Otto von Bismark ended the free trade agreement agreement with Britain, which was destroying the economies of the independent German principalities and unified Germany as a sovereign nation state in 1871.
Henry Carey had first sponsored German immigrant Frederich List to return to Germany in the 1820s and 1830s, were he helped develop the Zollverein (a protective tariff union of German principalities) List also met with Count Camillo Cavour, who was battling for Italian unification.
Under Bismark, protective tariffs would become permanent national policy. The chancellor also enacted unemployment compensation and pensions, as well as intensifying state sponsorship of education, infrastructure development and electrification.
Thanks to huge federal support for the “American System” under Lincoln, Grant and Hayes, after 1880 the US became the global number one industrial power, with Germany becoming number two
In response the British and Hapsburg oligarchy panicked and concocted the Austrian school of ultra free market (and anti-tariff economics) under Frederich von Hayek, a close associate of Otto von Hapsburg and other Hapsburg nobility.*
Russia had a link to “American System” supporters dating back to the visits of Pennsylvania colony envoy Benjamin Franklin. During the Civil War, Alexander II sent naval vessels to the US Atlantic and Pacific Coast to thwart British and French efforts to invade the US Mexico (in support Of the Confederacy). In return, the Lincoln administration sent US engineers (and US-produced locomotives) to Russia to assist in the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railroad. After meeting up with Carey’s associates at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in 1875, Russian envoy Dmitri Mendeleev returned to Russia to fight for full scale industrialization.
In 1852-54, Commodore Perry undertook the first US expeditions to Japan, opening the country to the outside world after 200 years of isolation. Influenced by the US Civil War, the Japanese overthrew their feudal warlords in 1868 and established their first national bank in 1873. Under President Grant, Ambassador John Bingham achieved the revocation of the universal treaties (imposed by Western powers) that prohibited Japan from enacting protective tariffs. He also supported new laws that freed Japanese serfs and compelled warlords to sell their lands and gave them loans to become industrialists.
During this period the British were covertly building Japan’s naval fleet and engineering a Japanese attack on Russia. In 1904 Anglophile Wall Street banker colluded with the UK foreign office in financing the 19 month Russo-Japanese War. The latter would effectively end the strategic US-Russia alliance against British imperial strategy. Thirteen years later Schiff would also help finance, via Leon Trotsky, the Bolshevik Revolution. See Who Financed the Bolshevik Revolution?
*They also supported the work of Fredrick Engels, a vocal free trade advocate who viciously attacked Frederick List, as well as Karl Marx, also an enthusiastic free trader. See https://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1847/06/01.htm and https://libcom.org/library/on-free-trade-karl-marx
Volume I: Hidden History: How Ben Franklin and Friends Created Britain’s Industrial Revolution by Dr. Stuart Bramhall – The Human: Jack Heart, Orage and Friends
