Ways and Means; Lincoln and his Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil War
After writing books about Wall Street and Warren Buffet, Roger Lowenstein turns to the economics of the Civil War in Ways and Means. He reminds us that few Northerners cared much about the fate of slaves and fought instead to preserve the Union—a word that conjured a vision of free white industrial labor and small farms spread like a comfortable quilt across the continent.
To win the war, Abraham Lincoln and the Republican-controlled Congress (the GOP was the liberal party in those days) retooled the federal government as an engine of progress, financing infrastructure and contributing greatly to the general wellbeing of the nation, “They launched the country’s first truly national currency, created a national banking system and the first credible program for federal taxation. They inserted the government into railroads, education, agriculture, immigration, the sciences, financial regulation,” Lowenstein writes. Some of these measures were done to defeat the Confederacy while others had been proposed for decades but stymied by politicians from the backward South.
