What did Lincoln say about labor and capital?

The question you put to me is one I addressed on several occasions, and I am glad to speak to it plainly. The central error I identified was what some called the "mud-sill" theory — the notion that labor is only possible when capital sets it in motion, and that therefore all workers are either hired hands or slaves. I rejected that root and branch. In my Annual Message to Congress in December 1861, I stated the principle as directly as I knew how: “Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration” Now, I did not deny that capital has its rights, or that the relationship between capital and labor can produce mutual benefits. The error lies in assuming that all labor exists within that relationship. In truth, the great majority of men work for themselves — on their own farms, in their own shops — asking no favors of capital or of hired labor. And I always insisted, as I said at New Haven in 1860, on the freedom to rise. “I want every man to have the chance—and I believe a black man is entitled to it—in which he can better his condition” The hired laborer of today need not be the hired laborer of tomorrow. That open road of improvement — I called it in Milwaukee “free labor—the just and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way for all” That, in brief, is the system I believed in and fought to preserve.