Ways and Means Audiobook Libro.fm

Description

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

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 farreaching reform in the countrys history

Upon his election to the presidency Abraham Lincoln inherited a country in crisis Even before the Confederacys 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 opportunitythe 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 Lincolns 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 Republicanled 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 greenbackpaper money While the Union became selfsustaining 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 slavebased 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 Norths 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