"Captivating . . . [Lowenstein] makes what subsequently occurred at
Treasury and on Wall Street during the early 1860s seem as
enthralling as what transpired on the battlefield or at the White
House." -Harold Holzer, Wall Street Journal "Ways and Means, an
account of the Union's financial policies, examines a subject long
overshadowed by military narratives . . . Lowenstein is a lucid
stylist, able to explain financial matters to readers who lack
specialized knowledge." -Eric Foner, New York Times Book Review
From renowned journalist and master storyteller Roger Lowenstein, a
revelatory financial investigation into how Lincoln and his
administration used the funding of the Civil War as the catalyst to
centralize the government and accomplish the most far-reaching
reform in the country's history Upon his election to the
presidency, Abraham Lincoln inherited a country in crisis. Even
before the Confederacy's secession, the United States Treasury had
run out of money. The government had no authority to raise taxes,
no federal bank, no currency. But amid unprecedented troubles
Lincoln saw opportunity-the chance to legislate in the centralizing
spirit of the "more perfect union" that had first drawn him to
politics. With Lincoln at the helm, the United States would now
govern "for" its people: it would enact laws, establish a currency,
raise armies, underwrite transportation and higher education,
assist farmers, and impose taxes for them. Lincoln believed this
agenda would foster the economic opportunity he had always sought
for upwardly striving Americans, and which he would seek in
particular for enslaved Black Americans. Salmon Chase, Lincoln's
vanquished rival and his new secretary of the Treasury, waged war
on the financial front, levying taxes and marketing bonds while
desperately battling to contain wartime inflation. And while the
Union and Rebel armies fought increasingly savage battles, the
Republican-led Congress enacted a blizzard of legislation that made
the government, for the first time, a powerful presence in the
lives of ordinary Americans. The impact was revolutionary. The
activist 37th Congress legislated for homesteads and a
transcontinental railroad and involved the federal government in
education, agriculture, and eventually immigration policy. It
established a progressive income tax and created the
greenback-paper money. While the Union became self-sustaining, the
South plunged into financial free fall, having failed to leverage
its cotton wealth to finance the war. Founded in a crucible of
anticentralism, the Confederacy was trapped in a static (and
slave-based) agrarian economy without federal taxing power or other
means of government financing, save for its overworked printing
presses. This led to an epic collapse. Though Confederate troops
continued to hold their own, the North's financial advantage over
the South, where citizens increasingly went hungry, proved
decisive; the war was won as much (or more) in the respective
treasuries as on the battlefields. Roger Lowenstein reveals the
largely untold story of how Lincoln used the urgency of the Civil
War to transform a union of states into a nation. Through a
financial lens, he explores how this second American revolution,
led by Lincoln, his cabinet, and a Congress studded with towering
statesmen, changed the direction of the country and established a
government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
General
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