Sovereignty and an Empty Purse: Banks and Politics in the Civil War (review)

176CIVIL WAR HISTORY graph. But it must be pointed out that the editors have wisely used Haskell's original manuscript which is in the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission collection. The editors' careful footnoting has pointed out the differences between the original and the version printed by the Wisconsin History Commission. The scholarly, detailed footnoting and research displayed throughout add depth and significance to the volume. The photographs have been chosen to fit Haskell's life and are not the hackneyed ones of Gettysburg. Detailed maps of South Mountain, Second Fredericksburg, and Bristoe Station would have been useful. It is tantalizing to conjecture what eyewitness Civil War accounts Haskell might have produced had he not been felled at Cold Harbor. The proof of the value of this volume of the existing works of Frank Haskell will be seen in years to come as author after author adds to his own work more and more of the words of the Wisconsin soldier, taken from this source. E. B. Long University of Wyoming Sovereignty and an Empty Purse: Banks and Politics in the Civil War. By Bray Hammond. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970. Pp. 400. $10.00.) Shortly after completing the manuscript of this book Bray Hammond died, concluding a varied career that had both carried him to high office in the Federal Reserve system and allowed him to win the Pulitzer Prize in History with his massive and magisterial Banks and Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War. In Mr. Hammond's last book he has described the economic crises of the Union and the responses of Salmon P. Chase, Lincoln's first Secretary of the Treasury, the members of Congress, the financial community and the general public to them. Seven of the eleven substantive chapters in the book describe the evolution of monetary and banking legislation, most specifically the amendment of the Independent Treasury Act, authorizing the government to deposit funds in banks, the Legal Tender Act and the National Bank Act, all passed by the Thirty-seventh Congress. In the realm of the purse, no less than in that of the sword, the author believed that nationalism carried the day, vitalizing the government that proceeding administrations had "stunted." Mr. Hammond's factual emphasis differs somewhat from that of earlier historians of Civil War finance, as in his stress upon the role of John B. Alley in promoting major monetary legislation. But the controversial features of this book lie in his extremely critical treatment of Chase and in his willingness to predict the outcome of the policies that he believes the secretary should have followed but did not. Chase, he explains, was "neither experienced nor facile," possessed of a "callow addiction to book reviews177 stunted federal powers," and given to "false logic and lofty manners," as well as to "anfractuousities." He stubbornly refused to use the banking system effectively by converting the government's finances to a check and deposit basis but instead drained the banks of their gold reserves so that the Treasury could continue business as usual by paying the nation 's creditors in specie and treasury notes. His loan policies forced both the major banks and the nation to the edge of bankruptcy. He was unduly slow to accept the need of legal tender currency and the national banking system, although a signficant reform in the long run, did little to solve the financial exigencies of the hour. The reader will have long since decided that Mr. Chase could not have made clerk in the Federal Reserve long before Mr. Hammond confides on page 349, "on the whole, it seems to me Chase's administration of the Treasury was a misfortune." This statement is preceeded by a long series of might-havebeens followed by an amazing passage in which the author concludes that the "lasting result" of Chase's program of monetary reform was "the stultifying bureaucratic complex of matchless redundancy with which the country is still blest." (p. 351). Although Mr. Hammond's use of the counterfactual proposition is intriguing , his methods of research were traditional. And we must take his explanations of action in the House of Representatives and the...