The Hunger of Lincoln

The political obsession of the young Abraham Lincoln, and many men like him on the western frontier of those days, could be summed up in two words: internal improvements.

On the frontier, men hungered to bring civilization to them. Internal improvements, everyone knew, were the key to bringing it there. 

The phrase was very potent in its day. It usually meant canals and roads. Roughly it could be equivalent to mean large-scale public works, but in those days it was not assumed that such projects would necessarily be taken by public entities. The fact that we think of these projects as naturally public today reflects the victory of the political movement to make it so.

In the first half of the Nineteenth Century, the political party best associated with a platform of internal improvements were the Whigs. Not surprisingly, they were led during much of that era by a prominent man from the western frontier, namely Henry Clay of Kentucky, which was a hotbed of Whigism.

The platform of the Whig Party, on a national level, reflected the frustration and hunger of the West at bringing civilization to it. This frustration was borne out of the political reality of the day, namely that internal improvements, although considered within the realm of what government could undertake, were nevertheless established as being (with few exception) the responsibility of the individual state governments, and not the national government.