Sacred Debts: State Civil War Claims and American Federalism, 1861-1880 (review)

Conventional wisdom depicts the American polity in the post-Civil War era as one dominated by corrupt politicians and their robber baron allies, undeveloped and inept bureaucratic structures, and political party machines that dispensed government resources without regulating their use. In this study of the efforts of states to recoup from the federal governments debts incurred in fighting the Civil War, Kyle Sinisi offers a partial revision of this negative portrait. In addition, his work suggests that the federal system of policymaking in the nineteenth century cannot be adequately understood using the modern analytic lenses of interest group politics and interstate governmental cooperation.

Early on in the war, the federal government instituted draconian rules of item verification that made it difficult for states to be indemnified for war-related expenses. Bipartisan fiscal parsimony, coupled with factional struggles within states, fear of centralization, ubiquitous charges of corruption, and jealousies between states prevented either a wholesale federal assumption of states' Civil War claims, consistently coherent state strategies for attaining reimbursements, or concerted efforts toward that end on the parts of either financially hard-hit states or even state and federal politicians from the same state.

Focusing on the experiences of Missouri, Kentucky, and Kansas, Sinisi uncovers the use of private agents and ad hoc commissioners whose skills at lobbying congressional committee members, more than partisanship or logrolling, accounted for whatever limited success states had in wringing funds from the federal government. Although some agents and officials were corrupt, most were honest and worked indefatigably on behalf of their constituents. The author also credits federal officials and their underlings for painstakingly analyzing state and private claims against the federal government, a task made more difficult given the skeletal bureaucratic structures in which they worked and the backlog of claims they were charged with auditing.

Although the subject matter of this book will not, I suspect, engage most readers, Sacred Debts plays an important if somewhat cloudy role in the ongoing efforts at "bringing the state back" into our understanding of nineteenth-century American government. Though Sinisi argues that his findings do not comport with Richard L. McCormick's and others' contention that political parties played a significant role in the distribution of government largesse, he agrees with McCormick's contention that American voters pretty much got the kind of federal government they wanted: one which paid lip service to demands that state claims be handled equitably, but which, because of the universal dread of both corruption and the Leviathan state, could rarely act on those demands.