![]() ![]() 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. 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. 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. 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. ![]() ![]() The government had no authority to raise taxes, no federal bank, no currency.īut 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. Even before the Confederacy’s secession, the United States Treasury had run out of money. Upon his election to the presidency, Abraham Lincoln inherited a country in crisis. In Ways and Means: Lincoln and His Cabinet the Financing of the Civil War 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. ![]()
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