The Greatest Nation of the Earth: Republican Economic Policies during the Civil War (review)

I48CIVIL WAR HISTORY oppose enforcement of the Federal Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Peter Knupfer uncovers the generational roots of the Constitutional Union party in the 1 860 presidential election and reveals that the party leadership represented the statesmanship of a previous age. The four remaining chapters in the book relate to African American history and race relations from the nineteenth century through 19 13. Louis S. Gerteis discusses the evolution of racism and the rising popularity of blackface minstrelsy ; he indicates some points of interaction between these parallel developments in the nineteenth century. "Who freed the slaves?" is the central question of Ira BerUn's essay. BerUn explains that ending slavery was a complex process and that slaves themselves were among the many who contributed to the coming of emancipation. Brooks D. Simpson provides a study of Ulysses S. Grant and the African American soldiers under his command during and after the war. Simpson concludes that Grant's policies concerning black soldiers were based on a combination of the general's racial views and his perception of military necessity. David W. Blight presents an analysis of historical memory; he finds that reunion and race were competing strands of the memory of the Civil War, 1 8751 9 1 3. By the fiftieth anniversary ofthe Battle ofGettysburg, whites remembered the war as a tragic quarrel with racial overtones to be forgotten for the sake of national reunion, while blacks recalled it as part of a revolution in race relations to be remembered in the interest of racial justice. This volume displays characteristics of fine scholarship valued by Professor Emeritus Sewell. The essays exhibit careful research, present clear arguments, and contain good prose. Undoubtedly, Union and Emancipation will be of interest to the readership of Civil War literature. William W. Giffin Indiana State University The Greatest Nation ofthe Earth: Republican Economic Policies during the Civil War. By Heather Cox Richardson. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. Pp. viii, 342. $35.00.) While furnishing men and matériel for the Union war effort, the Thirty-seventh and Thirty-eighth Congresses managed to enact a series of domestic legislation that massively expanded the power of the federal government, particularly its authority to promote market economic development. In his pioneering examination of Union congressional policymaking, Blueprintfor Modern America: Nonmil'itary Legislation of the First Civil War Congress (1968), Leonard P. Curry lucidly narrates, but does not attempt to explain, Republican lawmakers' passage of the Homestead Act, the Morrill Land-Grant College Act, the Pacific Railroad Act, a set of increasingly high protective tariffs, and the First and Sec- BOOK REVIEWS149 ond Confiscation Acts. This explosive growth of national governmental activity receives more analytical treatment in Richard Franklin Bensel's Yankee Leviathan : The Origins ofCentral StateAuthority inAmerica, /859-/877 (1990), which depicts the policy decisions of wartime congressional Republicans as responses to military exigencies and to the pressures of the northern manufacturers , workers, and farmers who composed the party's constituency. Offering a fresh interpretation of Civil War-era national governance, Heather Cox Richardson , in The Greatest Nation ofthe Earth, stresses the independent influence that Republican lawmakers' ideology exerted on their legislative behavior. Portraying congressional Republicans as autonomous actors in the policymaking process, Richardson contends that the party's worldview mediated its members' responses to the needs of the Union war effort and the demands of interest groups. Republican legislators, argues Richardson, "channelled wartime and regional pressures into a set of domestic policies that reflected initial Republican economic beliefs" in the centrality of labor to national economic prosperity and in the harmony of interests between the various sectors of society (6). Opposed to the territorial expansion of the South's system of slavery, which appeared to deny incentives for industriousness, the Republican party had also by i860 come to advocate national governmental intervention in the economy in order to facilitate labor's creation of prosperity. Richardson succeeds in demonstrating that this belief system structured congressional Republicans' reaction to war-generated imperatives, particularly those stemming from the party's method of financing an expensive military effort. Having made the solvency ofthe Union government contingent upon the wealth of the northern citizenry through the sale of billions of...