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

by Heather Cox Richardson

While fighting a war for the Union, the Republican party attempted to construct the world’s most powerful and most socially advanced nation. Rejecting the common assumption that wartime domestic legislation was a series of piecemeal reactions to wartime necessities, Heather Cox Richardson argues that party members systematically engineered pathbreaking laws to promote their distinctive theory of political economy.

Republicans were a dynamic, progressive party, the author shows, that championed a specific type of economic growth. They floated billions of dollars in bonds, developed a national currency and banking system, imposed income taxes and high tariffs, passed homestead legislation, launched the Union Pacific railroad, and eventually called for the end of slavery. Their aim was to encourage the economic success of individual Americans and to create a millennium for American farmers, laborers, and small capitalists.

However, Richardson demonstrates, while Republicans were trying to construct a nation of prosperous individuals, they were laying the foundation for rapid industrial expansion, corporate corruption, and popular protest. They created a newly active national government that they determined to use only to promote unregulated economic development. Unwittingly, they ushered in the Gilded Age.

Genres: History, American History

352 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1997

About the author

Heather Cox Richardson is a professor of history at Boston College and an expert on American political and economic history. She is the author of seven books, including the award-winning How the South Won the Civil War. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Guardian, among other outlets. Her widely read newsletter, Letters from an American, synthesizes history and modern political issues.

Reviews

[Anthony Lawson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fascinating history of Republican economic policies during the Civil War. Richardson covers these topics in chapters dealing with war bonds, monetary, tariff, tax, and agricultural legislation, the transcontinental railroad, and slavery. She shows how the Republican Party turned the central government into an activist agency for economic change for the country. She then shows in a concluding epilogue how these policies had some good outcomes but also undermined what the party wanted to achieve, "Republicans, in their optimism, pride, and self-righteousness, could not see that they had built their new America on a flawed theory that their own laws helped to antiquate." She continues this history in subsequent books on Reconstruction and on various facets of Republican Party history. Highly recommended.

[Brenda Kochis · Rating 5 out of 5]

When we think of the period 1860 to 1865, we generally think of the Civil War. But the period was so much more than the war between the Union and the Confederate. It was considerations of slavery, of how to fund the government, and of how to build a transcontinental railroad. This book well described the events that went on in congress during that time period. Excellent read from an outstanding historian.

[evan elizabeth]

recommended by heidi