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A successful tradition of self-reliance requires an optimistic theory of human nature to bolster it.
Revolutionary America had a belief in common people never seen anywhere in the past. Before
such an independent economy could be broken apart and scavenged for its labor units, people had
to be brought to believe in a different, more pessimistic appraisal of human possibility. Abe
Lincoln once called this contempt for ordinary people "mudsill theory," an attitude that the
education of working men and women was useless and dangerous. It was the same argument, not
incidentally, that the British state and church made and enforced for centuries, German
principalities and their official church, too.
Lincoln said in a speech to the Wisconsin Agricultural Society in September 1859 that the goal of
government planning should be independent livelihoods. He thought everyone capable of reaching
that goal, as it is reached in Amish households today. Lincoln characterized mudsill theory as a
distortion of human nature, cynical and self-serving in its central contention that:
Nobody labors, unless someone else, owning capital, by the use of that capital,
induces him to it. Having assumed this, they proceed to consider whether it is
best that capital shall hire laborers, and thus induce them to work by their own
consent; or buy them, and drive them to it without their consent. Having
proceeded so far, they naturally conclude that all laborers are necessarily either
hired laborers, or slaves. They further assume that whoever is once a hired
laborer is fatally fixed in the condition for life, and thence again that his
condition is as bad as or worse than that of a slave. This is the mudsill theory.
(emphasis added)
This notion was contradicted, said Lincoln, by an inconvenient fact: a large majority in the free
states were "neither hirers nor hired," and wage labor served only as a temporary condition
leading to small proprietorship. This was Abraham Lincoln’s perception of the matter. Even more
important, it was his affirmation. He testified to the rightness of this policy as a national mission,
and the evidence that he thought himself onto something important was that he repeated this
mudsill analysis in his first State of the Union speech to Congress in December 1861.
Here in the twenty-first century it hardly seems possible, this conceit of Lincoln’s. Yet there is the
baffling example of the Amish experiment, its families holding nearly universal proprietorship in
farms or small enterprises, a fact which looms larger and larger in my own thinking about schools,
school curricula, and the national mission of pedagogy as I grow old. That Amish prosperity
wasn’t handed to them but achieved in the face of daunting odds, against active enmity from the
states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Ohio, and elsewhere, and hordes of government agencies
seeking to de-Amish them. That the Amish have survived and prevailed against high odds puts a
base of realistic possibility under Lincoln and Brownson’s small-market perspective as the proper
goal for schooling. An anti-mudsill curriculum once again, one worthy of another civil war if need
be.
It takes no great intellect to see that such a curriculum taught in today’s economic environment
would directly attack the dominant economy. Not intentionally, but lack of malice would be poor
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