Some reviews say this book is primarily a bio of Salmon P. Chase as Secretary of the Treasury, but it’s not even that. Congressmen such as William Pitt Fessenden and Thad Stevens have major spots as well. (The subheader is wrong in one way: The rest of Lincoln’s Cabinet is less mentioned than the key Congressional players.) 

 

What it really is, is a “biography” of how the Union achieved the financial organization necessary to fund winning the war. Along the way, it shucked most of the Jefferson-Jackson shackles not only of finance in the narrow sense, but the broader issues of federalization behind that. As part of this, Lowenstein notes the number of times Republican leaders used the word “nation,” instead of “Union.” He also notes (which may have been also a part of a shift within American vs British English to treat collective nouns as singular not plural), phrasing such as “the United States is” rather than “are.” 

 

And, the scope of the Hamiltonian shift was vast. Lowenstein notes that the 27th Congress was arguably the most “activist” and successful in history. 

The meat:

 

1.     The Pacific Railway Act 

2.     The Homestead Act 

3.     The Morrill Act for land-grant colleges 

4.     The original Internal Revenue Act 

5.     The Legal Tender Act that gave us greenbacks 

 

And, those are just the highlights. The 28th Congress expanded on these, and also gave us the National Banking Act plus America’s first explicit immigration act. (Sidebar: For the pseudohistorians like  Scott Berg claiming Wilson’s first two year were the biggest act of presidential effort in history, think again. Lincoln may not have been personally as active in pushing a program as Wilson, but he was elected on the broad outlines of this program and most pushing would have been against a largely empty door. Besides, LBJ did more in the first two years of his full term than Wilson anyway.) 

 

Within all of this, you have Chase selling bonds via Jay Cooke and his brother, fighting for authorization to sell more greenbacks, trying to stave off depletion of US gold reserves (he would have been Grover Cleveland had he lived 30 years later) and between Cooke and his brother, and some of his patronage appointments, and turning a blind eye to Spoons Butler and his colonel brother in New Orleans, having a number of ethical challenges. 

 

Lowenstein also puts this into today’s context. He notes inflation, and compares prices then to today. On 2 and 3, he notes the land coming from American Indians on homesteads and at least part of it from then on colleges. (He adds that a second Morrill Act came along in 1890, the racism of the South with separate HCBU colleges for it, like Prairie View A&M here in Texas, and that tribal colleges were finally added in the 1990s.)

 

Couple of minor notes. 

 

First, per the opening paragraphs, if you are familiar with Civil War history, there’s very little new about Chase the Cabinet member and his politics playing. 

 

Second, hile not cutting Lincoln counterfactual slack on colonization, unlike Oakes and Reynolds among others, Lowenstein doesn’t get into the issue too much. And, while Halleck may have been as much to blame as McClellan for Second Bull Run, “more to blame” might be too much.