Abraham Lincoln did speak about keeping the man before the dollar, but he was talking at that moment about slavery, and referring to keeping the humanity of the slave higher in view than the self-interest of the slaveholders. This does not quite make Lincoln a challenger of the corporations; in fact, he prefaced those words by saying that Republicans were for the man AND the dollar.

Abraham Lincoln did speak about keeping the man before the dollar, but he was talking at that moment about slavery, and referring to keeping the humanity of the slave higher in view than the self-interest of the slaveholders. This does not quite make Lincoln a challenger of the corporations; in fact, he prefaced those words by saying that Republicans were for the man AND the dollar.

What Thomas DiLorenzo misses is that the other abolitions were either very limited as in the liberation of the serfs by Alexander II or far away from the metropolitan center of those nations - the French and British abolitions were of slavery in the West Indies.

Corporations did not achieve the scale we normally associate with them until the 1880s; but it's still hard to imagine that Abraham Lincoln would offered much in the way of determined opposition. William Herndon said that they always thanked the Lord when a corporation came knocking at their office door to hire them.

Abraham Lincoln would have been happy to have solved the slavery problem by compensation - in fact, drew up a gradual, compensated emancipation plan as early as November, 1861 - but no slaveholders were willing to go along with it.

Corporate organization in American business and commerce was already well under way by the time Abraham Lincoln became president. But all the evidence from his pre-war lawyering days is that he had little objection to the rise of corporations. As a state legislator, he had strongly favored the creation of an Illinois state bank, as well as sponsoring the chartering of public/private corporations like the Illinois Central Railroad.

One thing which Stephen A. Douglas was temperamentally incapable of doing was admitting he was wrong. He always believed that 'popular sovereignty' - the core doctrine of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill - was the right solution to the slavery controversy; and even though it had failed to solve much of anything in Kansas and Nebraska, he stubbornly insisted that this was because it had never been adequately tested.