The flurry of legislating was indeed “transformative,” as Bordewich says. He points in particular to four pieces of legislation as landmarks. The Homestead Act promised 160 acres of federal land to any citizen willing to live on it and farm it for five years. The Pacific Railway Act financed the transcontinental railroad and further opened up the western territories to white settlement. The third bill created the federal Department of Agriculture. And the Morrill Land Grant College Act would distribute federal land to states and localities for the purpose of building public institutions of higher learning dedicated to teaching agriculture and other practical arts—a miracle of democratization in the history of American education.
Yet in Bordewich’s telling, Lincoln had little to do with the ambitious measures, as if the bills were signed by autopen during coffee breaks. In fact, two of them were explicitly endorsed in the Republican platform that Lincoln ran on in 1860; he made a special plea for the Department of Agriculture in his first annual message to Congress. Bordewich also downplays the inevitable unintended consequences that accompany government expansion, even what seem to be the most benign reforms. The railway act, with its crony capitalism and funny-money bond issues, led straight to the Gilded Age and the creation of half a dozen robber-baron fortunes. Those “federal lands” that Washington gave away in the railway and homestead acts were not, except in the sneakiest sense, the federal government’s to give away; the land rush they touched off may have guaranteed the otherwise merely predictable genocide of the Native Americans already living there.
In the name of designating the Radicals as the forerunners of contemporary liberalism, Bordewich tries to draw a continuous line from the Civil War Congress to the New Deal and the Great Society. Yet the line has too many zigs and zags and ups and downs to clinch a causal connection. And in fact, many of the features of big government (19th-century style) fell away before long. Calvin Coolidge, for instance, 60 years after the Civil War and a few years before the New Deal, oversaw a federal government that was in most respects closer in size and scope to the antebellum government than to the modern state that was soon to emerge.