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

In Sacred Debts, Kyle S. Sinisi examines the post–Civil War efforts of Missouri, Kentucky, and Kansas to secure federal indemnification for state wartime expenses. Sinisi sees the postwar claims system as a window into the "administrative operations of U. S. federalism from 1861 to 1880," because the claims "represented the most sustained and expensive intergovernmental contact of the three decades following the war" (xi, xii). From this vantage, Sinisi highlights the role of the state agent in the postwar federal system, emphasizes the ad-hoc nature of state interactions with the federal government in the Gilded Age, illuminates the origins of lobbying, and joins the chorus of studies that have challenged and qualified the "courts and parties" thesis of Stephen Skowronek, Richard McCormick and others concerned with U. S. state building in the nineteenth century. In the spirit of Morton Keller's classic Affairs of State (1977), Sinisi's monograph reminds historians not to overstate the effect of the Civil War on the expansion of the American state.

Sinisi spends four dense chapters showing that success in prosecuting the claims often depended less on the influence of courts or parties, and more on the industry and lobbying skills of ad hoc appointed, and well-connected state agents. Relying primarily on federal and state public documents and treasury records, newspapers, and relevant manuscript sources, Sinisi demonstrates that while state agents moved the claims process forward, paperwork demands, political infighting, various local pressures, and fraud often hindered the efforts of state governments to process their claims effectively. Facing an explosion of state claims on depleted federal funds, Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase established a stingy set of rules requiring the proof of vouchers and other documentation. While Chase's rules slowed the flow of federal money they also set the stage for a quarter-century of wrangling over the claims and created staggering paperwork demands on understaffed state governments. Sinisi recounts that to comply with Chase's rules Missouri state agent John B. Gray painstakingly gathered some 200,000 vouchers and 400,000 supporting documents to back Missouri's claim figure of $7.4 million. In terms of politics, the ambivalence of the major parties regarding the claims issue insured that no broad legislative solution would be found. Further, a national political climate that emphasized retrenchment led to allegations of profligacy even against the genuinely cost-effective efforts of the state agents. In Kansas, the distraction of Indian uprisings demonstrated just how local pressures could hinder the pursuit of claims. The discovery of fraud in an 1874 Missouri auditing commission ultimately destroyed the state's chances of recovering some remaining $2 million in alleged claims.

However, after telling a story of frustration, fraud, and constant political intrigue, Sinisi concludes that the claims process, on balance, worked pretty well. Of the three states he examined, only Kansas was unable to recoup all of its claims. Thus, challenging what he calls the "indictment thesis" (172) of Gilded Age corruption, Sinisi argues instead for "a more nuanced view of postwar administration" (173) that more carefully tallies the corruption and virtue attendant to the processes of postwar federalism. He points out that despite numerous instances of fraud and corruption particularly at the state level, the potential of the claims "to be among the biggest pork-barrel bonanzas of the postwar period" (175) never materialized. State delegations did not cooperate to turn the claims into a logrolling extravaganza, and attempts to fashion a general solution to the issue came to naught. As for virtue, Sinisi suggests—with perhaps a hint of nostalgia for an era of smaller government—that the ad hoc use of state agents was an appropriate administrative response given widespread public clamor for frugality in government spending, and...