The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Ways and Means: Lincoln and His Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil War by Roger Lowenstein

Episode Date: March 11, 2022

Ways and Means: Lincoln and His Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil War by Roger Lowenstein 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.

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2022. Hot off the presses. It's probably still steaming. It has that beautiful new ink smell that you can get hot off of. Ways and Means, Lincoln and His Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil War. We have Roger Lowenstein on the show with us. He's going to be talking about his amazing new book. This is really cool. Abraham Lincoln is kind of making a comeback, evidently. Lots of books have been written about him. He is a gentleman who has written, I'm assuming he's a gentleman.

He seems very fine so far. He has written numerous critically acclaimed books, including the New York Times bestsellers, Buffett, When Genius Failed, and The End of Wall Street. He has three children and lives with his wife, Judy Slovin, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Tennant's Harbor, Maine. Welcome to the show, Roger. How are you? Chris, I'm great.

I'm just smelling that new ink smell and trying not to get too high off it, but I'm great. Isn't that great when you open up that box of your first books and you get to touch them? It's like a new car. And you're the author of seven books, correct? That's right. That's right. Awesome stuff. The first four or five were all contemporary financial books, sort of financial thrillers,

and the last few have been historic. Nice. This one obviously goes back to the 19th century. So give us your plugs, your.com, so people can find you on the interwebs and know more about you. So rogerlovenstein.com and rogerlovensteinatsubstack.com and Twitter at Roger Lovenstein. That's a tough one. There you go. Is the Substack one of those ones where people can subscribe to your newsletter?

It absolutely is. It absolutely is. It absolutely is. Nice. Nice. Subscriptions are open as we speak. There you go. I'll have to get on that list. So what motivated you on to write this book? So I love finance and I love history. And the last book I wrote was about the origins of the Federal Reserve, which was started in 1913. It turned out that when the

Fed was set up, they replaced a system that had been created during the Civil War. And I got kind of curious that during the middle of the Civil War, when they had plenty to occupy them, they went to the trouble of setting up a new financial system. And the more I looked into it, I discovered that it wasn't just a new banking system. They instituted the first income tax ever in the country. They created the first fiat currency. A fiat currency is just paper money that's legal tender. It's money because the government says it's money. There's nothing backing it, just like the money we have today.

They built the Transcontinental Railroad. They created the Morrill College Act, Land Grant Act, which funded colleges, affordable colleges for the middle class for the first time in American history. They really created a federal government where none existed besides the Postal Service and a few other very small chores. And for the first time, they created a federal government that could not only finance the war, but would look after its people, both in a social sense and an economic sense, something close to the idea of the government we have today. And I was just, I was so taken by that and particularly taken when I learned that Abraham Lincoln had believed in all these things for most

of his career. In fact, most of his career was about creating economic opportunity. It was about economics. Slavery only became a hot issue for Lincoln and for the country in the six, seven years or so before the Civil War. But Lincoln was a guy who had always wanted to create opportunity for people like himself, people that started out with nothing. And this avalanche of Civil War legislation did that. And the other thing that was pretty amazing is Lincoln and the Republicans did so much, the way they financed the war really helped them win it. And as I hope we'll talk about, it was in great contrast to the abysmal efforts of financing in the Confederacy.

It had a lot to do with the war. Yeah, this really surprised me. There really wasn't like, you write in the book, there was no federal bank, there was no currency. Like what sort of currency were they using back then before this? So you could go to your bank and you could deposit gold because why would you want to keep gold coins in your house? They're clunky. Somebody might take them.

And the bank would give you a note. The note might say, first chemical bank of Buffalo or something. Or where am I reaching you? Utah. Utah. Well, there weren't a whole lot of banks in Utah then. But anyway, there were banks all around the country, and they'd give you a note. And then you could take your note to the dry goods store down the block,

and they'd probably give you $0.01 a dollar for it, maybe $0.99 and a half, something like that. The trouble is if you went out of state from Utah, if you went to Kansas or Minnesota or Illinois or something, they'd probably not get down to 93 cents or 86 cents or something. And so there were all these different monies, thousands of different banks circulating their own notes and being valued at different prices. Needless to say, it was a sort of hopelessly confused system and a system that wasn't nearly up to financing either the country during a great war or for that matter, an economy which was now industrializing very quickly

and really needed a modern financial system. Yeah, and that's what really surprised me because I've always just kind of had this assumption that like, well, I don't know, somebody came up with the dollar after the Constitution was formed and everything has just always been here. But this is really interesting because, number one, he had to finance the war. But Abraham Lincoln was an amazing guy, I've been learning from a lot of the authors we've had on the show on him. He, the guy was so, he had a very wide span. I'm not sure the correct word that I'm looking for, but he seemed very intelligent and empathetic. And it was just amazing how much he did during his presidency and how much knowledge he really seemed to have.

All of those things, empathetic and intelligent and wise and self-taught. He said in his, he wrote a campaign biography when he ran for president in 1860. And he said he went to school by Littles' Quirrell. Two weeks here, four days there. And he said all of his schooling didn't amount to one year, and yet he could quote from Shakespeare. And he wrote these beautiful speeches that were familiar with such beautiful expressions. And his financial, so much of what he wanted to do came from his own experience. When he grew up in Kentucky, then Indiana and Illinois, the land there and the societies there were bank notes. There were no banks in Illinois when he first moved there. And they had to get

notes from the banks back east. There weren't very many. And people just didn't have credit because there weren't banks. So he worked very hard for a new banking system. When he first ran for the state legislature, his first campaign plank was for a central bank. We had one, the second bank in the United States in Andrew Jackson in the 1830s. Lincoln wanted it back. He believed in the central bank. He was actually clerk for a store. And the store, as he said, winked out, which was his term for failed. If people don't have credit, it's very hard, if there's no currency circulating, to speak of, to do much retail business. And so the same way he saw the need for roads at canals and later railroads, because where he was out in illinois they were traveling with teams of oxen

on very muddy roads rutted roads and he saw the need for this and then only government could build them so he very much wanted to expand the profile and the functions of the federal government so they would help people to as he put it to have a chance to rise up yeah the. And if those banks failed, those private little banks failed, people lost all their money. And usually there was credit usually given to by shopkeepers. They'd offer credit and then they'd get stiff. I mean, one of the big things of the Mormons was back in, where were they? I think they were in Illinois at one point. They were moving around because they kept getting run out of cities. Yeah, they were in Illinois. And point. They were moving around because they kept getting run out of cities. At one point,

Joseph Smith had a bank, and they would come into a city, they would run up credit on everybody's history, and then they couldn't pay their credit, and they would leave town and just stiff everyone. They would go from city to city doing that. At one point, Joseph Smith created a bank, and then

bankrupted the bank. So yeah, if you gave these people gold and whatever, and I'm sure there was a lot and then bankrupted the bank. So, yeah, if you gave these people gold and whatever, and I'm sure there was a lot of bankruptcies of the thing that created a lot of instability. But you talk about how he basically enacted laws that established basically a government, currency, raise armies, underwrite transportation, higher education, assist farmers, and, of course, the fun part, taxes. And taxes. You know, an interesting thing about Lincoln is he was so conscious of being a self-made man.

And he said, there's no one I respect more than someone who's raised himself up. And many people, that type of background and views are sort of, well, everybody can do it for themselves. I did it for myself mentality, but not for, although he certainly believed in self-help and certainly didn't believe in sort of the modern conception of a welfare state, which would have been beyond people in the 19th century. He also believed that the government existed to try to help others to get a leg up. So he signed the Morrill Act, which created land-grant colleges at a time when almost nobody could go to. He passed a bill for the transcontinental railroad because

there was no railroad to California and the private industry obviously wasn't able to do it. They hadn't done it. He created the greenback currency to give the government a currency to pay for the war. He created a banking system. And as you said, he legislated taxes, which the Republicans were convinced if you didn't have a tax base, then people wouldn't lend you. And if they didn't lend you, you couldn't raise the funds to pay for the war. And that was a seminal difference between North and South. The South, after all, had seceded because they didn't want a federal government telling them what to do. Didn't want a federal government interfering with slavery. Didn't want a federal government telling them what to do. They didn't want a federal government interfering with slavery. They didn't want a federal government

interfering with building roads. It was in their constitution that the new government of the Confederacy couldn't build roads or couldn't have a protective tariff or do a lot of the things that the North was doing. And they certainly didn't succumb to federal and the new Confederacy taxes. And as a result, only one side of this war was well financed. Lincoln said early on in the war, the side with the most resources is the side that will win. He saw that. The Confederacy saw it too, but not to the end. One Treasury official actually said they fought with terrific bravery, the Confederates, but one official said towards the end, we weren't whipped in the field. We were whipped in the Treasury Department.

We had radio host Tom Hartman on the show who wrote a book about oligarchies. And he said that part of the start of the Civil War was the oligarchies, the very richest slave owners and landowners in the South, were the ones who really wanted the war to go on and secede from the Union. So is that true, what they were trying to do? They didn't want the oversight of the government getting in their business? It's absolutely true that it was a, I call it in the book, a revolution from above. Only one state, Texas, had a referendum for secession, and that was because Sam Houston insisted on it. The others didn't dare because they knew that if it was put to a popular vote, the people wouldn't approve secession. Why? Because the main, yeah, some democracy, the main interest in secession was to protect the institution of slavery. Well, three quarters of the white folks in the South

didn't own any slaves, and the vast majority either owned none or maybe one or two. The large slaveholders were a very small proportion. So why would anybody else want to secede? This was a rebellion on behalf of the very rich. And there's a very interesting comment from the governor of Georgia, Joseph Brown, at that time. What he said was, slavery is the poor man's best government. Slavery is the poor man's best government. What he meant was, you don't need government to do all these things for you, to help send you to college, to create a tax base, to build railroads, create an agriculture department, to help farmers like in the North. You don't need government for any of that. The best government is slavery. And what he meant by that, he was trying to convince the poor whites

because he said it was the poor man's best government. He was trying to convince poor whites that if they lived in a slave society and were superior to the plight of enslaved African-Americans, that'd be the best government for them. They were trying to basically hose poor folks into thinking that the rich planters had their interest at heart. Wow. That's just amazing. Because I've had people tell me all sorts of stuff about why the Civil War started. And I'm like, no, I'm pretty sure it was about slavery.

So one of the things he does, he issues bonds. And did they finance the... Because I heard the numbers in the war recently to run that war, and it was astounding the amount of money. Did they sell the bonds to other countries, and that's what they were using? Was that the first time that America used bonding to raise funds? So in the beginning, Simon Chase, the Secretary of the Treasury, wanted to finance the war the way other wars had mostly been financed, which was to go to

bankers. And today we think of bankers or banks, we think of vast institutions with these marble or stone columns outside. We think of hundreds of thousands of employees. But back then, bankers were entrepreneurial. They had very few employees. Most of the capital they were lending was actually the capital of the owner and a few partners. They of the capital they were lending was actually the capital of the owner and a few partners. They were personal and they were much smaller. And it quickly became apparent that the scale of this war was vastly too big for a collection of private banks in New York and Philadelphia and Boston, which were the banking centers

to fund them. But Chase, with great difficulty, got the banks to loan $50 million to him, which was a vast sum back then. It was basically equal to the pre-war budget of the United States. And he insisted that it be in gold. Chase was a real stickler. He didn't want any of this paper. And the banks were saying, take our notes.

We can keep the gold in our vaults. We can use it to make more notes. And we'll have much more circulating if you let us keep the gold. Chase said, no way. I want the gold coin. And the banks cobbled together the $50 million. And they had a celebratory dinner at the Willard Hotel in Washington with Chase and representatives of the banks. And the leading banker got up and said, Mr. Secretary, I hope you're satisfied with this $50 million.

We really struggled to get it, and we really think this should do it for you to finance the war. So I have to tell you that before they were done, Chase would spend 60 times that amount. And that was a lot of money back then. That was a lot of money back then. So it became obvious that he would have to sell bonds. And he found this Philadelphia banker, Jake Cook, who was outside the established bankers.

And Cook kept telling him, look, you don't need to go to the banks, to the J.P. Morgans of that day. J.P. Morgan hadn't been founded yet. If you let me, I'll go throughout the country. I'll go to courthouses and post offices and little banks, and I'll find agents, and I'll sell them to average people. And this appealed to Chase, who was a populist. This appealed to him very much. Of course, Cook was self-interested because he wanted an exclusive franchise, which Chase gave him. But what Cook did really was to unlock the save millions of Americans in the North. It was the first time they'd been investing en masse.

It was really the beginning of investment banking, where you pool together savings of millions of Americans. And it just gave the North, the Union, a decisive advantage because the money kept flowing through. And to answer the other part of your question, they did go overseas. In the beginning, they really got the culture. The British and the Germans and the French said, we hear what kind of money you're trying to raise. We think you're crazy. The Confederacy looks like they may win this war anyway.

Oh, wow. And so for a long time, the financing was wholly or virtually wholly domestic. Towards the end, there began to be more overseas financing, but still the bulk of it always came from within the United States and within the North. Although by the end of the war, some of the conquered areas, the Confederacy, they sold a lot of bonds in Norfolk, Virginia, which by then was under Union hands. So was that basically the first time we'd issued war bonds? Did they call them war bonds back then? The first time war bonds, there was some, the government sold notes

in the, which war was it? In the Mexican-American war, there was some federal financing. That would have been the 1840s, but there was nothing like the scale of this war. And the Republic of Texas had raised public funding, vastly smaller scale. So this really, in fact, Cook was so pleased with himself, he publicly compared his feat to Napoleon's crossing the Alps. That was a bit of a stretch, but in financial terms, he really did cross the Alps, and he made a big difference in the North winning the war. Wow, that's amazing.

So if it, let me ask you this, if it hadn't been for the money, would the North have won? I mean, well, that's, that's a good question. Numerous in the South began to complain. They said, we need a salmon chase. And on the head, we're getting licked in the treasury department, not on the battlefield. If you look at the battles, the South never ran out of ammunition. They had plenty of men for almost the whole war. But what began to happen way before there were signs of military distress, the South began to lose the war on the home. Their families couldn't support themselves. Soldiers began to desert because their families were going hungry.

It's very tough to get a soldier to fight if he gets a letter from home saying that his wife and kids are starving. In early 1962, there were bread riots in Richmond, Virginia. The women of the town stormed the bakeries, which had been sort of closed up to provide flour to the troops.

And the Confederacy increasingly did this. They began to divert supplies, and they put some of these women briefly in a stockade. It's very tough to get people to fight if they're holding your women and children in a stockade for lack of bread. And the South just couldn't wrap their arms around the fact that to be able to raise money, you had to give investors confidence. And to have confidence, you had to have a revenue stream. And to have a revenue stream, you had to have taxes.

They were just ideologically and sort of constitutionally opposed to taxes at the national level, national within the Confederacy. The other thing that happened was they were just so, they said overplayed their hand. They were so overconfident. It reminds me of what we're seeing to play out, I think, I hope, in Russia and the Ukraine. Vladimir Putin thought he was holding the ace card with his energy supplies, and that Europe and NATO wouldn't dare resist because they need his oil and gas. The Confederacy was very similar.

The big commodity back in the 1850s and 1860s was cotton. Cotton was the raw material for textiles. Textiles was the first industry to take off in the Industrial Revolution, and most of it came from the American South. And you see as the 1850s moves on, you get closer to the Civil War, the South is more and more bolder. And really, it is a self-delusive state about the power to blackmail the world that their cotton gave them. In 1858, James Hammond, a senator from South Carolina, said, no one dares make war on it. The South, cotton is king.

And they were so confident of that that in 1860, after Lincoln's election, of course, South Carolina seceded. One of the few remaining Unionists in Charleston, South Carolina, remarked that South Carolina was too small for a republic. But he said too large for an insane asylum. That was how he viewed this state of his. And General Sherman, who was in Louisiana when secession broke out, he just said, the men here have ceased to reason. They really thought that cotton would give them a hammerlock. In fact, when the war broke out, one of Jefferson Davis' advisors

urged them to ship a lot of cotton to England in a hurry to finance the war. The sea lanes were still open, but he was laughed at. They laughed at the notion that the war would be long, that the South would ever run out of funds. They thought if the war did go on, England and France would be so desperate for their cotton that they would intervene and stop the war. How they would stop it? Across an ocean, they never spelled out. It was a terrible miscalculation. As I say, hopefully a similar miscalculation to the one Putin has made with his power to blackmail the world with oil and gas. But in any case, that very much played into the South really destroying itself

in the Treasury Department. That's really amazing because you kind of have to look at what this country would become if it, well, it wasn't a country. It became two countries and however many split up into all sorts of little,

I don't know, independent whatevers. The North was very worried about that. But some people say, why was it so necessary to keep the South in the Union? They were worried that if the South went, the country would disintegrate. They thought California then, separated by the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, a half a continent away, would drift away. New York City had already threatened to declare itself a neutral state. It could go, perhaps Pennsylvania, a border state, would separate. But remember back then, not every national group was unified.

The German states weren't unified. The Italians weren't. And one of the Wall Street figures who I followed in the book said it pained him to come from a country that was disintegrating. So this fracturing of the Union beyond even North-South was very much on Northerners' minds. It's one of the reasons they hastened through the Transcontinental Railroad Act to give California a greater sense of connection. It's really astounding. I mean, it really sounds like if it wasn't for Abraham Lincoln, we probably wouldn't be a country and achieve some of the things we've achieved. So Lincoln was, most Americans didn't think that Southern secession was a reason to go to war,

which is exactly what the South was counting on. They thought they could secede and just go about their merry way. Horace Greeley, the most widely read journalist in the country, said erring sisters go in peace. And when Lincoln pulled his cabinet, the majority were against resupplying Fort Sumter, which was the main federal installation still in Confederate hands. Of course, it was just off shore in the Charleston, South Carolina harbor. But Lincoln said it sat badly with him to let part of the republic that he was constitutionally bound to protect be taken away. And so he did a very clever thing. He provoked the South,

but he provoked them in a way that he wouldn't be firing the first shot. He sent a fleet to rescue Fort Sumter. They were running out of food, was the immediate crisis. He said, though, they wouldn't deliver arms or fire any shots as long as they weren't fired upon. Jefferson Davis realized that the integrity of his new, quote,

nation was being violated and to have any credibility, he couldn't let the Union fleet in. So they fired on the federal fleet. And when that happened, there was a sea change. Again, somewhat like the change, I think, in the Western world that we saw recently when Russia invaded Ukraine. However you felt about Ukraine the day before, there was a surge of support and patriotism and so on for Ukraine. The same thing happened in the North. Suddenly the North awakened to this incursion on United States sovereignty, United States honor, on the flag itself, which was, I think, a more important and cherished symbol than it is in our era. And suddenly people enlisted,

bankers who had been somewhat pro-Southern or certainly anti-war, suddenly began to raise troops and themselves. It just changed everything in the North. It really flipped from an attitude of appeasement to a war footing. Wow. That's just astounding and all the North. It really flipped from an attitude of appeasement to a war footing. Wow. That's just astounding and all the money. Now, so did Abraham Lincoln also set up a central bank? No. The last attempt at a central bank, as I mentioned, Andrew Jackson at the Congress had disbanded it in the 1830s, but we had a depression after that. There were a couple of attempts to set one up in the pre-Civil War period. And what Lincoln did instead, this was, it was a real third rail. And with anti-slavery in his hands, he didn't want another one. But he set up something very similar. He set up a system, a national system of nationally chartered private banks. These would be banks, they would all

issue the same currency, they'd be backed all by the same United States bonds, but they would be owned, each bank would be owned individually by individual investors. And listeners and viewers of a certain age remember that in every American city, there'd be banks called the First National Bank of St. Louis, Second National Bank of Wichita, and on. All these banks, you can still see those National Bank of chiseled on to old bank buildings in many American cities. Wow. They probably changed names, but you can see the old name. And these were the system of national banks that replaced the hodgepodge of individual banks, each with their

own monies. That's amazing. I did not know that. Yes, it was quite, you know, he was, people scoffed at the idea of setting up a banking system, national banking system, was quite complicated in the middle of a war. After all, didn't the union and Lincoln have enough to do? But Lincoln was quite adamant that the economy of the country had to continue to modernize, continue to grow. During the war, he was very proud of that. In his annual addresses, he would make note of all the new mines that had been opened up in the West, the flood of immigrants coming to the country, which is very important because they were able to replace the people who went off to war and keep the farms and factories running. He was very cognizant of the need to keep the economy growing.

In fact, after a short recession at the beginning of the war, it did. And it was, again, one of the reasons that gave the North such an advantage over the South, whose economy was slowly disintegrating. Yeah, I think I got that from John Avalon's recent book on Abraham Lincoln. He really had a vision for the economy, even after what would be, if he won the Civil War, how freeing slaves would help expand the economy. They would be able to work and contribute more to the economy. He really saw it as a kind of explosion of the economy. He said something in his way way quite beautiful,

that after the Emancipation Project, the Democrats, who were, of course, the opposition party then, and the party of the South, began to spread this fear that freed slaves would take the jobs of white Northerners. And Lincoln gave his speech to correct that notion, to rebut that notion. So now he was going further than just being anti-slavery. He was

speaking up for the freedom, the right to work of freed slaves. And he said, it is feared that blacks will spread throughout the land. And he said, but they are in fact already in the land. He was telling white America, they're here. They've been here for hundreds of years and they're here. And they're not going to, and then he went on to say, they're here. They've been here for hundreds of years, and they're here. And then he went on to say they're not going to be more numerous when they're freed than when they're enslaved. He also said to Southerners, he famously did not want, he wanted a quick restoration and reintegration of South and the North. He believed, I think he believed that economic recovery would be a healing solvent for Northerners and southerners. He didn't want an era of retribution. He said, I don't want to harm, this is after the war, he was saying this

to a southerner in a letter in the brief time that remained him. He said, I don't want to harm on any head. I don't want to harm a hair on any head. I want southerners back in their farms and shops. And he had this vision that when Northerners and Southerners began to trade with each other, do business with each other, that would heal the country as well as that. Did him establishing all this stuff, basically building a government at the time, was that a big selling point for people to believe in him

and stick with him in the war? Was that something that the populace was like, yeah, this sounds like a good idea, let's do more of this? Well, it was particularly a selling point. He became president. The Republicans, Licken, there was no doubt that he was anti-slavery, but anti-slavery was very controversial. Remember, the Republicans ran anti-slavery candidate Fremont in 1856, and he got beaten very bad. As Horace Greeley said in 1860, the public will only swallow a little anti-slavery. Sort of like a sub-Democrat now might say, well, to Joe Biden, well, the public's only going to swallow a little build back better.

And Greeley and other Republicans said we should stress other things that we're going to be doing, such as a Homestead Act to give acres to farmers, such as the Transcontinental Railroad, such as the College Act. And they stressed that in particularly the border states where anti-slavery was not particularly a popular position. And of course, Lincoln squeaked through because there were four candidates and it was a divided election. He won no votes in the South, not a few votes, zero votes in the South. Once the war began, these issues were quite popular. The greenbacks were very popular because it gave people money in their

wealth. People thought, the people who created the greenback were afraid that the average citizen wouldn't want them because they weren't backed by gold. And they were afraid that people would say, why should I carry these? In fact, people loved being able to carry money around. It was a lot easier than having to carry gold coins around. And informally, they began to call them Lincoln dollars. There were no Jefferson Davis dollars, but there were. And of course, the North was very patriotic and very involved in the war effort, and that drew them to Lincoln too. The toughest issue in terms of public support was the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln was very afraid it was going to cost him votes. And after it was issued, it was announced in September

of 1862. And in the fall elections in October, November, the Republicans did lose votes. But of course, Lincoln went ahead with it anyway. But that was a, even in the North, and even when we were fighting the Civil War, I say we, but when the Union was fighting the Civil War against a slave nation, anti-slavery was still controversial among a fairly wide swath of the Northern public. Oh, what a sounding thing. It's just, you think about the if, ands or buts, if they hadn't done that, has anyone sat down and looked at what that war cost and figured out what

today's dollars might be? Did you do that in the book at all? Well, it costs about a $3 billion today's money. Well, no, no, no,

no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

no, which is just astounding amount of money for that's something close to $100 billion today. And I mean, to give you an example, Lincoln was a very prosperous railroad attorney then. He made about, in his best year, about $3,000 in the money of that time. So this was $3 billion. The best way to describe it, Chris, is that the union spent more money than had been spent by every government since 1789 put together. Wow. Yeah, in those four years.

That is crazy, man. What a wild story, man. You just think about what would the ifs, ands, or buts if we hadn't done this, if we'd had a different president that maybe wasn't quite as competent at doing stuff. Buchanan said the secession was wrong, but I have no power to stop it. Wow. And as I mentioned, that was the attitude of many in the North and that many in the South expected. And it raises the question, why did they secede? Nobody was hurting slavery, touching slavery in the states where it existed. The Republicans had promised not to. It was agreed by all that the Constitution didn't

permit the federal government to interfere with slavery within the states. And then Frederick Douglass said that the South had overreacted to Lincoln's election by seceding. And so one of the really terrible ifs is, had the South not seceded, when would we have finally gotten rid of this scourge? And it's a noble, obviously. And just an amazing history of this country. You look at how much of that is a foundation for becoming. We did some great things. Some people say America's great, but I don't know.

We have our good, bad, and ugly. So this has been really insightful. People should really grab your book. Anything more you want to touch on before we go out? I think it's a testimony, Chris, at a time when there's so much questioning about government and what government can do, of how much it can accomplish. Here was a government with no means, no method of taxation, no method of raising funds under attack from a mortal enemy. And it not only raised the funds, it restructured and reinvented the purpose in a way that had a lasting, and I would say highly positive and fruitful effect on the generations to

come. It's quite extraordinary. Yeah. Without that foundation. And I think it was amazing. Like he even wrote stuff for prisoners and treatment of prisoners in war that are still used today. It's astounding.

What a brilliant. Did he learn a lot of his stuff from reading books? Is that where he got his intelligence? He was a voracious reader, but he had such a native intelligence. In the 1840s, he served one term in Congress, and he proposed a bill for internal improvements, infrastructure. And a Democrat took the floor and ripped it up, said it was a terrible idea. It was going to bankrupt the country. It was

unconstitutional, all kinds of miserable things about it. And when he was finished, Lincoln didn't defend the bill. He just said most things, especially the government policy, are neither wholly good nor wholly evil. Most things have some good and some evil in them. And we're just trying to find things that have more good than evil. And it was that basic and I think innate humility that endeared him to people. Yeah. What an amazing story. So give us your plugs one more time so we can find you on the interwebs, please. Yeah, rogerlovenstein.com and rogerlovensteinatsubstack.com, and I tweet at Roger Lovenstein. There you go. Thank you very much for coming on the show, Roger.

We really appreciate it. Chris, it was a real pleasure, and obviously Ways and Means is on sale at all the usual suspects. There you go, guys. It just came out today, so you can still grab it so you can read it first and tell your book club you beat him to it uh ways and beans lincoln and his cabinet and the financing of the civil war and grab roger's other books as well i'm always interested in money central banks and how everything works so be sure to check that as well go to our youtube.com for us as chris voss hit the bell notification button go to goodreads.com for us as chris voss and all of our groups on facebook linkedin twitter especially on linked. Thanks for coming by. We certainly appreciate it.

Be good to each other. Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time.