Ep. 133: Lincoln and the Financing of the Civil War

“Lincoln was wise and humble. He didn’t lecture or harangue—he was pragmatic, opportunistic. The quality we lack today was his humility.”

Roger Lowenstein joins the podcast. The admired financial writer is out with the book Ways and Means: Lincoln and His Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil War. It tells the largely untold story of how the North and the South handled the finances of the Civil War—and the drastically different routes they took. 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.

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Roger Lowenstein reported for The Wall Street Journal for more than a decade. His work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, The New York Times, the Washington Post, Fortune, Atlantic, the New York Review of Books, and other publications. His books include the NYT bestsellers Buffett, When Genius Failed, and The End of Wall Street, and the critically acclaimed Origins of the Crash, While America Aged, and America’s Bank.

He has three children and lives with his wife, Judy Slovin, in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Tenants Harbor, Maine.