Remember that Abraham Lincoln was a Whig far longer than he was a Republican. As a whole, the Whigs looked upon banks and corporations as a more efficient means of development; the Jacksonian Democrats thought they were the tools of the devil, but Whigs like Lincoln disagreed. During his presidency, Lincoln favored the re-construction of a national financial system, and his most important 'internal improvement' project was the Pacific railroad.

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.

We still know so little about how the brain interacts with the body chemistry or, for that matter, whether we should be talking about the brain or the mind, that it would be perilous to hazard any guess about the way Abraham Lincoln's biological health may or may not have affected him. Of course, we don't have Lincoln on hand to ask him directly; but even if we did, we still might not be able to make sense of how all the parts worked together.

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.

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.

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.

No one loves an archive better than I do. I can smell a good one half-a-block away - all that brittle papyrus dust is music to my nostrils.