Ways and Means: Lincoln and His Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil War by Roger Lowenstein, and: Bonds of War: How Civil War Financial Agents Sold the World on the Union by David K. Thomson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Ways and Means: Lincoln and His Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil War by Roger Lowenstein, and: Bonds of War: How Civil War Financial Agents Sold the World on the Union by David K. Thomson Joseph P. Reidy (bio) Ways and Means: Lincoln and His Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil War. Roger Lowenstein. New York: Penguin Press, 2022. ISBN 978-0735223554. 448 pp., cloth, $30.00. Bonds of War: How Civil War Financial Agents Sold the World on the Union. David K. Thomson. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. ISBN 978-1-4696-6661-7. 288 pp., paper, $29.95. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European monarchs faced the challenge of identifying reliable sources of revenue to underwrite overseas adventures and defend their far-flung territories from internal and external foes. In the age of revolution, leaders of successful anti-republican movements fared similarly [End Page 112] as they maneuvered to consolidate their power. Whether in the interest of kings or commoners, regimes at war resorted to one or more of the following fiscal strategies: borrowing, taxing, and increasing the money supply. After Fort Sumter, Union and Confederate planners followed suit as they committed their respective societies to all-out warfare in the industrial age. By 1865, federal officials were spending more than $1.3 billion annually, twenty times the prewar level, and the federal deficit of more than $2.6 billion was more than forty times the 1860 total. The Confederate central and state governments amassed $1.5 billion in debt over the course of the war. Though different in certain respects, Roger Lowenstein’s Ways and Means and David K. Thomson’s Bonds of War cover similar ground and, in fact, complement each other. Lowenstein has authored several best-selling books that focus on business and financial topics past and present and that draw largely from secondary works, printed primary sources, and Internet-accessible manuscript collections. With engaging prose, he spins a fast-paced and riveting tale of oversized personalities and dramatic turning points. He explores not only how effective fiscal management supported military operations but also how battlefield setbacks—such as George B. McClellan’s embarrassing Peninsula Campaign of spring 1862—weakened investors’ confidence in the cause. Whereas Lowenstein’s view of Civil War finances is panoramic, Thomson’s is microscopic. Bonds of War, Thomson’s revised doctoral dissertation, mines unpublished archival records in both the United States and European nations stretching from England to Turkey to understand the mechanics of the Union’s successful borrowing campaign. Although Thomson treats the recent historiography of American capitalism somewhat more closely than Lowenstein does, both authors write clearly and with stylistic flourish. Each author briefly surveys prewar national finances to suggest how ill-prepared both Union and Confederate strategists were for what lay ahead. Salmon P. Chase, the Republican former governor of Ohio, emerged as the guiding spirit of the Union’s fiscal planning, notwithstanding his relative inexperience in that area. Lowenstein explains how, following a cool rebuff from New York’s commercial bankers, Chase turned to Congress, which obligingly authorized the national government to issue bonds and print paper money (which became known as green-backs). Supplemental legislation designated the new currency as legal tender and established a network of national banks capitalized by federal bonds and committed to circulating the greenbacks. Despite Chase’s “innate conservatism,” the net effect of these changes was “revolutionary” (163). Additional measures opened Western lands to homesteaders, offered federal support for higher education to each state, and authorized construction of the Pacific railway. These measures not only won the war but also transformed the national political economy, opening [End Page 113] the door for the further westward expansion of European settler-colonialism, the emergence of New York City as the nation’s chief financial center, and the concentration of both political and economic power in the hands of the Northeastern industrial capitalist elite. For all its virtues, Lowenstein’s account falls short in accounting for the Confederacy’s fiscal strategy, casting it as a counterimage of failure against the Union’s model of success. Because the plantation interest and its proslavery ideology all but...