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INTRODUCTION When the Civil War ended, a long line of creditors and claimants piled up at the door of the United States Treasury. Contractors, banks, bond holders, and aggrieved citizens all wanted their share of the Union government’s money. Also in line, but certainly not new to it, were the states themselves. Since the very beginning of the war, the states had been the primary vehicles through which the United States had recruited and organized its armies. This cost the states money, and a lot of it. By one congressional estimate, the states could claim over $468 million. But that was hardly the beginning of what they might demand. Several states had become active war zones, leading not only the call for state-sponsored local defense forces, but also the invariable destruction of private and public property. Add in the accumulating monetary interest on these costs, and more than one lawmaker thought there might be no limit to what the states could claim. For a treasury that had already spent in excess of $3 billion on the war by June 1865, even the low estimate of $468 million was an amount that could not be repaid quickly. In fact, it was a figure that would never be repaid.1 This book tells the story of state attempts to recoup the costs of fighting the Civil War. It is an examination of the little-known financial contributions of the states to the Union war effort. More importantly , the book provides a window into the even lesser-known administrative operations of U.S. federalism from 1861 to 1880. Despite a recent explosion of scholarly interest in the government of this period, there has been little attendant research into, or acknowledgment of, federalism. To be sure, authors have written about the federated states and their constitutional relationship with the national government.2 However, this is not the same as treating federal1 U.S. Congress, House Report, 39th Cong., 1st sess., 1866, H. Doc. 16, serial 1272; The Statistical History of the United States from the Colonial Times to the Present (Stamford, Conn.: Fairfield Publishers, 1965), 718. 2 Works that touch upon state government collectively include Ballard Campbell, xii INTRODUCTION ism as a working system of intergovernmental operations.3 Simply stated, scholars have shed little light on an administrative system involving both state and national governments.4 An exploration of state war claims provides that opportunity because the claims represented the most sustained and expensive intergovernmental contact of the three decades following the war.5 My initial research into the claims was framed by the basic question of discovering how the claims system worked. It was followed quickly by the more substantive question of what determined success in a process that clearly had winners and losers among the states. This, in turn, led to the idea that the court system and political parties would be central to an issue that appeared to involve the United States’ historical litigiousness and its distributive party politics. It was also a framework for analysis at the core of the most recent works on Representative Democracy: Public Policy and Midwestern Legislatures in the Late Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980); William R. Brock, Investigation and Responsibility: Public Responsibility in the United States, 1865–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); and John Duffy, The Sanitarians: A History of American Public Health (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990). Ballard Campbell discusses some of the ideological ramifications of federalism in The Growth of American Government: Governance from the Cleveland Era to the Present (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). Richard Hamm has dealt extensively with the constitutional aspects of federalism in the period after that under discussion in this book. See his Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment: Temperance Reform, Legal Culture, and the Polity, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). 3 The term intergovernmental operations describes the administrative interaction of the national government and states. It should not be confused with the terminology of some scholars, who have used ‘‘intergovernmental relations’’ to describe the existence of a postfederal system. For an overview of this approach, consult Deil S. Wright, ‘‘A Century of the Intergovernmental Administrative State: Wilson’s Federalism , New Deal Intergovernmental Relations, and Contemporary Intergovernmental Management,’’ in A Centennial History of the American Administrative State, ed. Ralph C. Chandler (New York: The Free Press, 1989), 219–21. 4 One of the few works to examine the administrative interaction between the states and the national government in...

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