Download Free Greenbacks And The Cost Of The Civil War Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Greenbacks And The Cost Of The Civil War and write the review.

“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 “Ways and Means, an account of the Union’s financial policies, examines a subject long overshadowed by military narratives . . . Lowenstein is a lucid stylist, able to explain financial matters to readers who lack specialized knowledge.” —Eric Foner, New York Times Book Review 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.
This is a book about the late-nineteenth-century money debates in American politics, and about the role of history in American political development.
Reveals how the Rothschild Banking Dynasty fomented war and assassination attempts on 4 presidents in order to create the Federal Reserve Bank • Explains how the Rothschild family began the War of 1812 because Congress failed to renew a 20-year charter for their Central Bank as well as how the ensuing debt of the war forced Congress to renew the charter • Details Andrew Jackson’s anti-bank presidential campaigns, his war on Rothschild agents within the government, and his successful defeat of the Central Bank • Reveals how the Rothschilds spurred the Civil War and were behind the assassination of Lincoln In this startling investigation into the suppressed history of America in the 1800s, Xaviant Haze reveals how the powerful Rothschild banking family and the Central Banking System, now known as the Federal Reserve Bank, provide a continuous thread of connection between the War of 1812, the Civil War, the financial crises of the 1800s, and assassination attempts on Presidents Jackson and Lincoln. The author reveals how the War of 1812 began after Congress failed to renew a 20-year charter for the Central Bank. After the war, the ensuing debt forced Congress to grant the central banking scheme another 20-year charter. The author explains how this spurred General Andrew Jackson--fed up with the central bank system and Nathan Rothschild’s control of Congress--to enter politics and become president in 1828. Citing the financial crises engineered by the banks, Jackson spent his first term weeding out Rothschild agents from the government. After being re-elected to a 2nd term with the slogan “Jackson and No Bank,” he became the only president to ever pay off the national debt. When the Central Bank’s charter came up for renewal in 1836, he successfully rallied Congress to vote against it. The author explains how, after failing to regain their power politically, the Rothschilds plunged the country into Civil War. He shows how Lincoln created a system allowing the U.S. to furnish its own money, without need for a Central Bank, and how this led to his assassination by a Rothschild agent. With Lincoln out of the picture, the Rothschilds were able to wipe out his prosperous monetary system, which plunged the country into high unemployment and recession and laid the foundation for the later formation of the Federal Reserve Bank--a banking scheme still in place in America today.
The U.S. monetary system is based on paper money backed by the full faith and credit of the fed. gov't. The currency is neither valued in, backed by, nor officially convertible into gold or silver. Through much of its history, however, the U.S. was on a metallic standard of one sort or another. On occasion, there are calls to return to such a system. Such calls are usually accompanied by claims that gold or silver backing has provided considerable economic benefits in the past. This report reviews the history of the GS in the U.S. It clarifies the dates during which the GS was used, the type of GS in operation at the various times, and the statutory changes used to alter the GS and eventually end it. It is not a discussion of the merits of the GS. A print on demand oub.
Predatory lending: A problem rooted in the past that continues today. Looking for an investment return that could exceed 500 percent annually; maybe even twice that much? Private, unregulated lending to high-risk borrowers is the answer, or at least it was in the United States for much of the period from the Civil War to the onset of the early decades of the twentieth century. Newspapers called the practice “loan sharking” because lenders employed the same ruthlessness as the great predators in the ocean. Slowly state and federal governments adopted laws and regulations curtailing the practice, but organized crime continued to operate much of the business. In the end, lending to high-margin investors contributed directly to the Wall Street crash of 1929. Loan Sharks is the first history of predatory lending in the United States. It traces the origins of modern consumer lending to such older practices as salary buying and hidden interest charges. Yet, as Geisst shows, no-holds barred loan sharking is not a thing of the past. Many current lending practices employed today by credit card companies, payday lenders, and providers of consumer loans would have been easily recognizable at the end of the nineteenth century. Geisst demonstrates the still prevalent custom of lenders charging high interest rates, especially to risky borrowers, despite attempts to control the practice by individual states. Usury and loan sharking have not disappeared a century and a half after the predatory practices first raised public concern.
In this elegant book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer explores the manifold ways in which the Civil War changed the United States forever. He confronts its costs, not only human (six hundred thousand men killed) and economic (beyond reckoning) but social and psychological. He touches on popular misconceptions, including some concerning Abraham Lincoln and the issue of slavery. The war in all its facets "grows in our consciousness," arousing complex emotions and leaving "a gallery of great human images for our contemplation."
“Does for the Civil War period what Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States did for the study of American history in general.” —Library Journal Historian David Williams has written the first account of the American Civil War as viewed though the eyes of ordinary people—foot soldiers, slaves, women, prisoners of war, draft resisters, Native Americans, and others. Richly illustrated with little-known anecdotes and firsthand testimony, this path-breaking narrative moves beyond presidents and generals to tell a new and powerful story about America’s most destructive conflict. A People’s History of the Civil War is a “readable social history” that “sheds fascinating light” on this crucial period. In so doing, it recovers the long-overlooked perspectives and forgotten voices of one of the defining chapters of American history (Publishers Weekly). “Meticulously researched and persuasively argued.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"James M. McPherson’s Tried by War is a perfect primer . . . for anyone who wishes to under­stand the evolution of the president’s role as commander in chief. Few histo­rians write as well as McPherson, and none evoke the sound of battle with greater clarity." —The New York Times Book Review The Pulitzer Prize–winning author reveals how Lincoln won the Civil War and invented the role of commander in chief as we know it As we celebrate the bicentennial of Lincoln's birth, this study by preeminent, bestselling Civil War historian James M. McPherson provides a rare, fresh take on one of the most enigmatic figures in American history. Tried by War offers a revelatory (and timely) portrait of leadership during the greatest crisis our nation has ever endured. Suspenseful and inspiring, this is the story of how Lincoln, with almost no previous military experience before entering the White House, assumed the powers associated with the role of commander in chief, and through his strategic insight and will to fight changed the course of the war and saved the Union.