Abraham Lincoln wasn’t just gifted at rhetoric, politics, and moral leadership. He was also the greatest proponent of technological progress ever to inhabit the presidency. Today is not “Presidents’ Day,” it is George Washington’s birthday. Abraham Lincoln, whose birthday was last weekend, has no federal holiday of his own. But surely, no American is more worthy of celebration than Lincoln. There are many notable aspects to Lincoln’s character. One that should not be overlooked: Among all of our presidents, he was the most diligent apostle of technological progress.
Born February 12, 1809, Lincoln was part of the first generation in world history to come of age with multiple major changes in the technology of daily life at once, and the first to grow up expecting that technological change would be a continuous fact of life. That had a transformational impact on how Lincoln’s generation saw the world in comparison with their parents. Charles Darwin was born the same day.
Unlike Thomas Jefferson, Lincoln had comparatively little interest in the abstract study of science, although he was fascinated by astronomy and kept a telescope in his office as president. He does not seem to have read Darwin’s Origin of Species, published in 1859, or to have involved himself in public debates over evolution or other questions of scientific theory. His concern was the practical application of machinery for human advancement. Lincoln was the only president to hold a patent (although some of Jefferson’s inventions surely could have been patentable). In 1849, Lincoln invented a device — never manufactured — to use bellows to free steamboats that were trapped on sandbars in the river. The Smithsonian still has a model.
An Age of Wonders
The revolution in transportation and communications parallels Lincoln’s life. Before the 19th century, men, goods, and news moved no faster than feet, hooves, and sails. It had been that way since antiquity. In 1807, Robert Fulton demonstrated his prototype steamboat on the Hudson River. Within a few short years, it would remake transportation in the wide, roadless spaces of the United States, opening not only the rivers of the Atlantic seaboard but also the mighty Mississippi. In time, it would revolutionize internal commerce, warfare, ocean transportation, and overseas communication. In 1819, the Savannah became the first steamship to cross the ocean; the first to make the journey on steam power alone came in 1838. In 1825, the Erie Canal was completed, another engineering milestone in waterborne commerce.
In 1830, the first railroad in the United States, the Baltimore & Ohio, was inaugurated — 18 years after the first commercial railroad in England. By 1850, America had 9,000 miles of railroad, the most in the world. It exceeded 30,000 by 1861, less than a third of which was in the Confederate states. Railroad schedules drove the standardization of time, with Britain introducing Greenwich mean time in the 1840s. By the time of the battle of Vicksburg in 1863, military men could coordinate a bombardment and assault from distant points by synchronizing their watches.
In 1844, Samuel Morse gave his first public demonstration of the electric telegraph, which grew explosively over the following decade. A telegraph wire was laid across the English Channel in 1851, and the first (short-lived) wire crossed the Atlantic in 1858. Photography, debuted in Paris in 1839, was brought to America by Morse soon after. Gas-lamp streetlights were introduced in London in 1807, and reached Baltimore by 1816. They lit up Springfield, Ill., in 1855.
The Railroad Lawyer
At age 21 in 1830, Lincoln moved from Indiana to Illinois, which was then just twelve years removed from statehood. Until the admission of Iowa in 1846 and Wisconsin in 1848, Illinois was the last stop before the western territories. For a young man on the frontier — especially one with no interest in farming — the railroads, riverboats, and newspapers were a lifeline to a wider world. From the time Lincoln entered the state legislature as a Whig in 1834, he backed Henry Clay’s program of tying the nation closer by canals, roads, rails, and bridges. Lincoln championed the state’s construction of the Illinois and Michigan Canal, which connected the Great Lakes to the Mississippi — the Midwestern counterpart to the Erie Canal. After he left the legislature, he was appointed to the state’s commission to hear claims of damages caused by the canal’s construction.
New technology featured heavily in Lincoln’s career as a lawyer. Innovation, then as now, spawned lawsuits. Lincoln was hired as Illinois counsel in a patent dispute over Cyrus McCormick’s reaper, which ended up being tried by Edwin Stanton, later Lincoln’s secretary of war. He was stung when Stanton dismissed him from the trial team when the case moved to Ohio, but he remembered Stanton’s talent.
The railroads were Lincoln’s most lucrative clients. His biggest case involved a precedent-setting clash between railroads and steamboats. The Rock Island railroad bridge was the first across the Mississippi. It was a magnet for controversy: Not only did trains compete with steamboats, but then–secretary of war Jefferson Davis had also tried to stop the construction of the bridge because it was seen as a possible path for a northern route in constructing a transcontinental railroad (Davis, overseeing the surveying, wanted a southern route). The bridge was rammed by a steamboat just two weeks after it opened. The resulting fire destroyed both boat and bridge.
The steamboat owner sued, claiming that the bridge was an obstruction on the river, a tort-law theory that would have imposed prohibitive liability on the railroads if adopted. Lincoln, defending the railroad and bridge, had handled other cases raising the same issue, but this one was widely publicized and seen as a bellwether for the theory. The railroad men muttered darkly that it was sabotage. Lincoln himself suggested at trial that the boatmen engaged in arson for the insurance money. The case was tried in federal court in Chicago for 15 days in September 1857, with Supreme Court justice John McLean presiding (fresh off his dissent in Dred Scott v. Sandford). It required of Lincoln a detailed mastery of the technical aspects of river navigation and bridge construction. The jury deadlocked after voting 9–3 in Lincoln’s favor, presaging the long-term legal victory of the railroads.
In 1858–59, Lincoln briefly tried his hand at the lecture circuit. His chosen topic was “Discoveries and Inventions.” As he told his audience: “The great difference between Young America and Old Fogy, is the result of Discoveries, Inventions, and Improvements. These, in turn, are the result of observation, reflection and experiment.”
Before he ran for national office, Lincoln backed the transcontinental railroad. Even amid the war, launching its construction was one of the centerpieces of Lincoln’s domestic agenda in Washington. Wartime also gave new urgency to the transcontinental telegraph, which had been financed by Congress in 1860 and broke ground on July 4, 1861. Lincoln received its first message, from California governor-elect Leland Stanford, on October 24: “Today California is but a second’s distance from the national Capital.” Two days later, the Pony Express announced that it was hanging up its spurs.
New Media
Lincoln’s rise to the presidency was the first to depend heavily on national media coverage. Technological progress, in turn, drove the growth of the press. German inventor Friedrich Koenig made the first steam-powered printing press in 1812, allowing a print run of a thousand two-sided pages per hour. The London Times in 1814 became the first newspaper to adopt it. By the 1850s, the rotary press could turn out 12,000 pages an hour. The development of lithography expanded the capacity of newspapers to print images. With lower printing costs, the 1830s saw the dawn of the “penny press,” a steep drop from the previous cost of six cents for a daily newspaper. For the first time, this placed a daily source of written news in the hands of ordinary workingmen, ending an era when news could spread only through meetings in taverns where the literate few expounded what the papers said.
Readership exploded. Manhattan alone, with 200,000 people, had 161 newspapers by 1828. Alexis de Tocqueville remarked from his 1831–32 journeys that the number of newspapers in America “beggars belief” even on the frontier: “In the Michigan forests there is not a cabin so isolated, not a valley so wild, that it does not receive letters and newspapers at least once a week.” According to the American Antiquarian:
By the 1830s the United States had some 900 newspapers, about twice as many as Great Britain — and had more newspaper readers, too. The 1840 U.S. census counted . . . a total annual circulation of half a billion copies for a population of a little under 23.2 million people. . . . Indiana, for example, had only one newspaper in 1810 but seventy-three by 1840.
The 1850 census reported 254 daily newspapers in the United States, double the figure in 1840, and ten times the number in 1820. Where the largest newspaper in America had a circulation of 4,500 in 1833, that grew to 30,000 in 1850, and 60,000 in 1860.
Lincoln was the first presidential candidate to exploit this new mass medium to its full potential. Before him, every president but Franklin Pierce had been vice president, secretary of state, speaker of the House, or a conquering general — men who made national reputations in the capital or on the battlefield. Pierce, breaking that mold a bit, had been speaker of the New Hampshire house, a congressman and a senator, United States attorney, a brigadier general in the Mexican War, and state party chairman, and had declined an offer to be James K. Polk’s attorney general. He was still seen as a “dark horse” unknown to the public. Not Lincoln.
Lincoln’s résumé in 1860 was thin: eight years as a state legislator, including service as the minority leader, a single term in Congress, and a failed Senate campaign in 1858. But the Lincoln–Douglas debates in that campaign captivated the nation. The lengthy arguments in the Illinois countryside were the first campaign events to be transcribed in full by traveling stenographers. Their reports, thanks to the telegraph, were swiftly spread nationwide. Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, among others, reprinted the Illinois senate debates in full. Of course, in that age of openly partisan press, the faithfulness of transcription varied by which side the newspaper supported (Democratic papers tended to soften Stephen Douglas’s frequent use of the n-word). After the election, Lincoln capitalized on the newspaper coverage by having the debates reprinted as a book, which sold 30,000 copies — ten times the sales of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick over the previous decade.
The readership for his arguments made Lincoln an in-demand speaker in the Northeast. That made possible his much-celebrated Cooper Union speech in New York in February 1860, whose national dissemination raised his profile in advance of the Republican convention in Chicago in mid-May. Moreover, in an age when open campaigning was frowned upon, reprints of Lincoln’s speeches allowed his message to circulate further. He became the first man to talk his way into the White House, and exploiting new media made that possible.
The Tinkerer
A wartime presidency brought out Lincoln’s innovative, tinkering side. The Crimean War, fought between 1853 and 1856, may deserve the title of the first modern war. It ended the age of wood-walled sailing ships and was the first major war to feature telegraphs, steam warships, supply railways, explosive naval shells, the Minié ball rifle (which made the musket obsolete), war correspondents, photography, and medical triage, among other innovations. But the Crimean War lasted two and a half years against the technologically backward czarist Russia. The American Civil War lasted four years and was fought between contending Americans, whose society already rivaled Britain’s as the most technologically innovative on earth. The Confederacy delivered men to the First Bull Run battlefield by rail in 1861 and deployed ironclad ships, torpedoes, and the first true submarine. Defeating it required all the Yankee ingenuity at hand.
The Union was up to the task — nobody more so than Lincoln, who was miles ahead of any other world leader of his day in terms of technological sophistication. Before 1861, Lincoln had never worked directly with the telegraph. He ended up haunting the telegraph office, sometimes even sleeping there, poring over dispatches as they came in and using the new technology to move armies and direct the war. Adapting to the terse style of the telegraph even influenced Lincoln’s prose, as we can see by comparing his lengthy pre-war speeches and multi-hour debates with the compact, almost poetic style of the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural — speeches short enough, not coincidentally, to be distributed by telegraph and reprinted whole on the front page of a newspaper. Tom Wheeler’s 2006 book dubs his missives “Mr. Lincoln’s T-Mails.”
Lincoln also took eagerly to new developments in statistical cartography, a field that hardly existed before the 1830s. A U.S. Coast Survey map of the density of slave populations in the South often stood on a tripod in his office, and he consulted it so regularly that when Francis Bicknell Carpenter painted Lincoln’s cabinet to commemorate the Emancipation Proclamation, he depicted the map propped in a corner.
Lincoln’s enthusiasm for new weapons and technology was crucial to the Union war effort, often requiring his vigorous intervention to overcome hidebound military brass resistant to new ideas. He touted ironclad ships as early as his 1847–48 term in Congress, and his support ensured that the Union was ready to respond with its own U.S.S. Monitor when the Confederacy debuted the ironclad C.S.S. Virginia. He pushed relentlessly for the construction of mortar boats that proved critical to the capture of New Orleans. He got the Navy to try incendiary shells that were used against Charleston in 1863. He encouraged the Union’s own, unsuccessful submarine program.
When Lincoln wasn’t at the telegraph office, he could often be found at the Washington Navy Yard or the Smithsonian. He set up a program to develop alternative ways of making gunpowder, aiming to break American dependence on niter from British India.
Thaddeus Lowe, introduced to the president by the head of the Smithsonian, suggested using balloons for surveillance of the enemy. Lincoln personally escorted Lowe to general Winfield Scott, who had been ignoring him. Lowe, who invented a hydrogen generator to inflate balloons in the field, sent a telegram to Lincoln from his balloon and became the first man to direct artillery fire from the air. Lincoln hosted Lowe overnight at the White House while his balloon, the Enterprise, hovered overhead. The Union even launched balloons from a barge, the G.W.P. Custis, the world’s first aircraft carrier. A balloon flight by Washington Roebling, who later built the Brooklyn Bridge, was the first to spot Robert E. Lee’s army heading for Pennsylvania in the weeks before Gettysburg.
Lincoln’s personal involvement was key to forcing the Army to grudgingly adopt breech-loading and repeating rifles, both preexisting technologies not yet adapted to military use. The breech-loading rifles of Christian Sharps produced the Union’s celebrated “Sharpshooters.” Lincoln was similarly responsible for introducing the original machine guns, first put into action in March 1862 in Middleburg, Va. He christened an early machine gun the “coffee-mill gun” because its mechanism looked like a bean grinder, and the name stuck to all machine guns for the remainder of the war, even the later-celebrated Gatling gun.
Lincoln took a hands-on approach. As we would say today, he did his own research. When Christopher Spencer brought his repeating rifle to the White House, Lincoln had him disassemble it so the president could see for himself how the mechanism worked. He met with dozens of inventors, many of them with wild ideas Lincoln felt compelled to see for himself in what the brass derisively dubbed “Champagne experiments.” Not infrequently, Lincoln spotted the mechanical flaws in their ideas himself.
He participated in, or directly observed, at least 30 tests of new weapons. He test-fired rifles and machine guns, some of them on the White House grounds. This could get risky: In the middle of a civil war, in a city riddled with Confederate sympathizers, eccentric strangers were simply able to walk into the White House carrying guns and bombs and bring them to meet alone with the president. It’s a miracle Lincoln lived as long as he did.
On one occasion, he, secretary of state, William Seward, and treasury secretary, Salmon P. Chase, narrowly escaped injury when an experimental rocket exploded in front of them. This was an echo of 1844, when two members of John Tyler’s cabinet were killed by a Navy gun that exploded in its first demonstration, and the president himself escaped the same fate only by being briefly detained belowdecks.
Lincoln’s chosen cabinet shared his sense of innovation. Seward persisted, throughout the war, in pursuing an ambitious plan to link the United States with Russia, China, and Japan by a telegraph wire across the Bering Strait. Stanton revolutionized warfare by moving 20,000 men in eleven days to relieve the siege of Chattanooga through the coordination of railroad timetables, a miracle of logistics far beyond what the Confederates did at First Bull Run. Prussian general Helmuth von Moltke was credited in Europe for his innovative use of railroads for deploying men in force to the battlefield against Austria in 1866 and France in 1870, but a patent lawyer from Pittsburgh did it first.
Lincoln was not our only chief executive to advance the useful arts. Jefferson was an inventor and an amateur naturalist, zoologist, and paleontologist, and as secretary of state, he was responsible for the creation of the patent system. Jimmy Carter was training to be a nuclear engineer when he left the Navy. Other presidents are associated with particular projects: Teddy Roosevelt and the Panama Canal, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Manhattan Project, John F. Kennedy and the moonshot, Ronald Reagan and space-based missile defense, Donald Trump and Operation Warp Speed. But no other American president’s career and presidency were so intertwined in so many ways with so many forms of technological advancement. That is yet another of the great Lincoln legacies.
Dan McLaughlin is a senior writer at National Review Online and a fellow at National Review Institute.