“labor is the superior — greatly the superior — of capital”—Abraham Lincoln

On September 30, 1859 Abraham Lincoln gave a speech in Milwaukee in which he repeated his long held position, that “labor is the superior — greatly the superior — of capital.”

Lincoln was responding to an 1858 speech by Senator James Henry Hammond of South Carolina, the “mud sill” speech. Hammond stated that:

In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement. It constitutes the very mud-sill of society and of political government.

Hammond was arguing for the superiority of the Southern system of enslaving laborers over the Northern system of free labor. To Hammond the Southern system was true because it relied upon “inferior” Black laborers who neither had nor deserved political power. In contrast the Northern laborers were white and voted and thus had political power. Hammond:

Our slaves do not vote. We give them no political power. Yours do vote, and, being the majority, they are the depositories of all your political power. If they knew the tremendous secret, that the ballot-box is stronger than “an army with banners,” and could combine, where would you be? Your society would be reconstructed, your government overthrown, your property divided, not as they have mistakenly attempted to initiate such proceedings by meeting in parks, with arms in their hands, but by the quiet process of the ballot-box.

Lincoln insisted that: “In one word Free Labor insists on universal education.”

Charles Koch and the WalMart heirs (now there’s a job!) who fund Democrats for Education Reform (funded by,  among others, famous Democrat Rupert Murdoch)  and Massachusetts Parents United and National Parents Union see you as mud sill.

Which side are you on?

“We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” – Louis Brandeis

“It violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. And the same thing applies to governors and U.S. senators and congress members. So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election’s over. … The incumbents, Democrats and Republicans, look upon this unlimited money as a great benefit to themselves.”–Jimmy Carter

[Full disclosure: as a (now retired) educator in the UMass system, I am a union member. I write about dark money, democracy, and oligarchy. My book, Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization, is now in print.]