Abraham Lincoln and the Working Class
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A short but powerful historical essay that examines Lincoln not just as the Great Emancipator, but as a man who understood labor from the inside — because he was a worker himself. Schlüter, a German-American socialist and historian, traces Lincoln's lifelong sympathy with working people and shows how his policies shaped the future of American labour.
Study notes
🔹 Lincoln was a working man — born in a log cabin, he split rails, worked as a labourer, and never forgot what it meant to toil with his hands. He remained one of the people even in the White House
🔹 "Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital" — Lincoln's most famous principle: labour comes first. Capital is the fruit of labour; it should be its servant, not its master
🔹 Free labour vs. slave labour — Lincoln saw clearly: a nation cannot endure half free and half slave. But more — if one group can be owned and exploited, all labour is degraded. Free workers cannot truly prosper where slavery exists
🔹 The Homestead Act (1862) — one of his greatest legacies: land in the West made available to ordinary settlers. Schlüter argues this gave workers an alternative — they didn't have to sell their labour on someone else's terms
🔹 Friendship to labour organisations — Lincoln welcomed early unions and affirmed the right of workers to combine. Yet he was no revolutionary: he believed in progress through reform, not upheaval
🔹 A balanced view — Schlüter is honest: Lincoln was a man of his time, with limits and contradictions. But his core conviction never changed: the strength of a nation lies in the people who work
Lincoln did not simply rule over the working class — he rose from it, believed in it, and built his greatest victories on the truth that labour is the foundation of all human progress.
Published: 1924 — Haldeman-Julius Co. (Little Blue Book series)
Author: Hermann Schlüter (d. 1919) · Edited/Introduced by Emanuel Haldeman-Julius