for his conservative politics as well, if i didn't say so earlier, i should reiterate, that mcclellan was an outspoken conservative democrat. every man, this is julian speaking, every man who loved negro slavery better than his country and would sooner see republican ruins than the slaves set free is the unflinching champion of mcclellan. perhaps an overstatement but you get the point. he was replaced as chief of the army of the potomac by ambroes burnside who was unready and correct. he was crushed by lee at fredericksburg. he was followed in january '63 by joseph hooker whom you heard a moment ago. known as fighting joe hooker who had commanded the first core under mcclellan and burnside.

he was crushed in turn by lee at chancellorsville. in june, lee invaded pennsylvania. on june 28th, on the eve of gettysburg, hooker was abruptly removed and replaced with george meade. who was rather surprised. meade though a democrat, hooker and burnside i should tell you by the way were republicans. the committee was pretty friendly to them. i went generally went easy on them. i'm not going to take time to devil into that but there may be a little time to say a few more words about how they handled republican generals as opposed democrat ones. a fairly conservative was largely an apolitical professional. but not very likeable. bruce catten, the historian

rereferred to him as crab and decemb dispep tick, after his deployment, he led the army to victory in gettysburg and despite meade's overwhelming numbers after the battle and troops high more ral, he failed to vigorously pursue lee who managed to escape to virginia with his army. lincoln wrote in a letter to meade the following. i do not believe that you appreciate the magnitude of the misfortune involved in lee's escape. your golden opportunity is gone and i'm distressed because of it. so were the radicals in the joint committee. the squandering of what had been the long awaited destruction of lee's army, was in effect a repeat of mcclellan's hopeless tactics of 1861 and '62 and from

then on wade and his colleagues, most of whom regarded hooker's proposal as a mistake, put meade in the hot seat and kept him there for the rest of the war. i'm going to move -- this by the way is meade and his staff around the time of gettysburg. just a word because i can't do this talk without at least mentioning dan sickles, who was one of the most colorful officers, not only in the civil war but arguably in any american war. he was totally corrupt tamny hall democrat, a lawyer, fabulously fascinating man, who was -- who scandalized washington by showing up to

galas with well known prostitutes and shot dead francis scott key in front of witnesses and managed -- because key was having an affair with sickles' wife. sickles had affairs with a lot of people's wives but nonetheless he shot key for returning the favor. he managed to get off on the first successful plea of temporary insanity in american history. and 1861, he raises through his connections and raises a regiment and rises quickly by 1863 to core command. and unfortunately in his case, ambition, rank and colorful were not congruent with competence and he nearly lost the battle forgetties burg when he advanced

his corps beyond the federal line leaving it dangerously exposed. and in the process of the ensuing battle, one of his legs was shot off or amputated and that leg may be seen or the bone may be seen in the what used to be the army -- now the national museum of health and medicine in silver spring. it's just a bone, not really disgusting. at any rate, sickles, who was nothing, did not shrewd and canning, realized that his bacon was on the fire, even with his missing his leg, he got to friends in washington as quickly as possible, basically started to tell everyone that he, he was the one who had really compelled meade to fight at gettysburg rather than retreat.

and that he was the real hero of the battle of gettysburg even though he actually almost lost the battle. and the committee, even the committee loved people like sickles. why was that? because he was a hard war man, an aggressive and talked a very good line, repeatedly i must say the committee was somewhat taken by men of this type. benjamin butler is another one i'll talk about in a few minutes. at any rate, so sickles kind of sets the tone for the committees ongoing hostility to meade. and with good reason though, lincoln and the radicals were terribly frustrated by meade's failure to bring lee to battle -- by meade's failure to

bring lee to battle. in autumn of '63. sickles wasn't with the army at the time, but the committee asked repeatedly for his opinions of meade's actions anyway. the committee characterized meade's strategy as a retreat rather than as meade described it maneuver for topography cal advantage. one general after another testifies before the committee about meade's short comings and they include abener doubleday who he failed to give corps command and david burnny, removed from corps command which was given to another general, william french. the hooker loyalists daniel butterfield who meade temporarily carried over as chief of staff and dropped and alfred pleasanton who was unfriendly to meade. and their testimony, i'll give

you a line or two of it for the flavor. pleasanton is being interviewed here, very cause tick, asked, what effect is produced on the men by the constant shrinking from an engagement? it discourages them very much. if the hearts of the leaders of the army are not in the enterprise, it is easy for them not to act with the spirit by which success is generally achieved. is that not so? >> i do not know any profession in which the character of one man stamps itself more indellably among the masses of men in the military profession. question. and the spirit of the commander jep diffuses itself through the whole army? yes, sir. here's them eliciting what it wants to hear. paul has made a threatening gesture here, i'm going to speed it up. if you know paul, you have to take that seriously. i've already alluded to the fact as hard as the committee was on

certain generals. and i think with some justice incidentally. i think meade did more or less duplicate mcclellan's behavior. and meade nonetheless was kept on by lincoln and kept on by grant. he essentially served as a super chief of staff for grant and grant essentially directed the army of the potomac strategy from '64 on. the committee favored john c fremo fremont. the path finder, total failure as a general. benjamin butler, a remarkably brilliant politician, a pre-war democrat and voted i think it's 27 times for jefferson davis as the 1860 democratic candidate

for the -- candidate for democratic nomination for president becomes a radical republican during the war. brilliant politically, a complete incompetent on the battle field which he managed to lumber into the field, which was not often. and what do these men have in common? partly was politics, partly it was they all embraced an agresish war policy what has been termed a defensive style of warfare that appealed to the conception of battle. julian said what we need is action and defiant action, scourging faithless men from power, sweeping obstacles and those officers who could talk that line generally found favor with the committee.

i must say a word or two about what happened at fort pillow, you saw in the previous image an african-american volunteer soldier. i think the critics of the committee basically are focused on this preoccupation with personalities and tended to not look at it as a political entity, which is fundamentally what it was. and critics tend either to omit or treat as an afterthought the committee's fierce and overarching commitment to the hum ab rights of african-americans. however, to the radicals itselves, a destruction of slavery wasn't an ancillary concern. it was central to the war's purpose. the committee's most force if the reports and by far the most chilling to read. and i recommend everybody go online and read it, the report on the cold blooded massacre of

hundreds of unarmed union soldiers, most of them black at fort pillow in tennessee in 1864 by nathan bedford forest, a prewar slave traitor. a talented cavalry founder and ku klux klan. he captured fort pillow and what followed was the worst war crime perpendiculared during the civil war. hundreds of federal soldiers as they said, mostly black, were shot, hacked with sabres and beaten to death with rifle buts and some were burned to death in huts and others thrown in pits and buried alive. two members of the committee went to tennessee, went to tennessee and interviewed

survivors in the field and witnesses. i'm sorry there's not time to quote them. but you will find some of this on my website as well. just google it. it will be on there. and without the committee's efforts to record the facts, the massacre might have been scrubbed from history, even though it was played down and discredited during the long years of jim crow politics and jim crow his treography when the whole role was air brushed from the nation's memory. so to conclude, i'm getting there, paul, getting there, paul. the committee's leadership may have been limited in their grasp of strategy, but they are politically far sighted and saw the political dangers the generals didn't care about. the violence that run amuck at fort pillow would still thrive

in the post war -- still thrive in the post war south unless reconstruction was carried out with real determination and sustained commitment to the rights of african-americans. and they feared with good reason that what had been won in blood on the battle field would be surrendered by politicians and generals in a hurry to yield authority to their confederate enemies. and they were press yent as we well know. i've already told you the committee's reports provide a remarkable detailed records of what the principle players thought happened. and worth reading for their own sake. how much did a committee effect lincoln? it sometimes provided him with cover for trying to push dill tri generals forward but lincoln was a canny political who didn't need the committee to tell him how to think about the war and

in time early day like most northerners gave way to hard realty and he accepted a hard war view, his seconds inaugural tells you what he was feeling by the spring of 1865. the committee's impact on the war, it certainly didn't help the careers of mcclellan and meade and few other generals but lincoln always fired those he did fire when he was ready to do it. he was not a man to be bullied by the committee. and i want to reiterate that i think the committee was fundamentally right. one in its investigation, in undertaking these investigations and if you read what the committee actually was doing, it's own words, it makes sense. and a lot of what people came to think about the committee was a smear by later historians and

that may be a strong word, smear, probably excessive, but i think you see where i'm going. and i think finally we have to remember that wars -- any wars fought without serious oversight are wars that get out of hand. generals manipulate and suppress and deny unwelcome facts. and with the war in vietnam had a better result without aggressive congressional oversight or think of the war in iraq with its parade of federal officials and beribboned commanders telling americans year after year that victory was at hand and the enemy was a handful of dead-enders without the joint committee during the civil war, we would have had i think much the same thing. i think we can thank the joint committee along with hundreds of thousands of union soldiers who were better than their generals that we -- that the war

proceeded as it did. thank you. [ applause ] >> we're going to not have questions after this talk because we're running a bit late but there's going to be as i said earlier, a panel of the speakers later today and so you'll be able to ask fergus questions then. we're going to proceed now to jenny bourne, a professioner of economics at carlton college and received her bachelors from the indiana university, and her masters in economics from the university of chicago. jenny is a prolific scholar and lives in many different worlds. she writes in law reviews and been on this program before talking about various economic aspects of american history. she is also a scholar working with the minnesota department of

revenue to help prepare the tax expenditure review study for the state of minnesota, which i think shows her -- most importantly, i find this fabulous, she has just published an article called edith what are wharton, an economic interpretation of the house of mirth and age of innocence. what better thing to talk about how you finance the war then by starting with the age of innocence. so i'm delighted to introduce my good friend jenny bourne. [ applause ] thanks, paul, another member of the audience asked if he was going to show mathematicals last

like year? i'm not going to do that. raising an army means paying for an army. what congress and president abraham lincoln did to pay for civil war forever changed financial markets in this country. they created a unified currency and system of federal banks. they pioneered the use of money and established the direct sale of bonds to the public and invented the irs. the world had never before seen -- okay, let me see here. is this supposed to advance? here we go. there we go. thank you. okay, the world had never before seen anything to compare to the size of the union army and as you can see from the slide, before the union army came into being, the home thing that came close was napoleon's troops going into russia and as a

consequence russia's standing army in 1816. official enlistments in the federal forces totalled 2.8 million soldiers. but actually many men enlisted more than once. my great-great grandpa for example, i'll tell you a little bit. the one join a different regiment because his original one has disbanded because of mass

casualties. so the 2.8 million is an overstatement due to reenlistments. the number of individuals serving the union is more like 2 million to 2.2 million. by kpairsson, the best guess to those serving the confederacy is 750,000, which is still a pretty big number. this slide gives us snapshots of the numbers of soldiers and sailors actually on the rolls at different times during the war. you can see the federal advantage of numbers widening over time with its payroll expanding convi tam tantly. of course rolls don't tell us everything. absentee rates were high especially in the south. all those troops absent or not cost a considerable amount. for the first time in history, government spending in any government went over 1 billion units of the currency. just as an aside, the u.s.

government perhaps recalling its most recent conflicts chose to use the french billion rather than the english billion. for context, federal government spending in the u.s. is 1865 was nearly three times that in england and federal government spending was over 30% of gdp for the union in 1865 whereas the same figure was less than 10% in england. now, not all government spending went for the war, but a lot of it did. economist claudia golden and frank lewis estimated the direct cost of the war to the north including federal, state local government spending, loss of human cap cal and cost of the draft translates to about $96 billion in today's money. governments have basically only a few ways to finance their operations, direct taxation, property income and sales tax

and import tariffs, deferred taxation in the form of government bothering, the issuance of government bonds and the printing of money be, which can mean inflation or also imply a sort of deferred taxation. i'll just note the face on the greenback there. that's salmon p. chase. i'll refer back to him later. the federal government used each of these methods to finance the war and each spawned a new way of doing business that remains with us today. taxes actually only offered a meager source of revenue, especially at the outset of the hostilities, although the fir first -- these simply didn't raise a lot of money. partly because southern custom offices where most of the money was coming in didn't send their revenues to d.c. after president buchanan took office. the august act, second ma ril

tariff -- coffers until we had a tax collection mechanism. income taxes raised only about $20 million in 1864 and $60 million in 1865. despite this yawning gap between tax receipts and federal expenditures, which was about $1.3 billion in 1865, even these relatively low taxes troubled people at the time. the london times scoffed at the union's efforts saying, quote, if this mosquito cloud of taxation should ever settle upon the states of the north, it will be more effective than any fugitive slave law in preventing anyone, black or white, from crossing the borer states. lincoln would have probably liked to use progressive income and property taxes more than he did. when he was in illinois state legislature he had pushed unsuccessfully for graduated property tax on the basis of both equity and political feasibility. he observed that, quote, the

wealthy few are not sufficiently numerous to carry the elections, unquote. but the lack of institutional structure, the controversy surroundtion direct taxation and apportionate and the recallous trance of salmon chase, the revenue effect of direct taxes during the civil war was fairly minimal. despite the relative unimportance of tax revenue, though, tax developments in the civil war last at least two lasting contributions to federal taxing powers. it smoothed away for the 16th amendment allowing for the income tax and instituted the office of the commissioner of internal rerevenue. so borrowing was the union's primary means of finance, as this slide makes clear. borrowing or the deficit is what's on this slide. that's the difference between spending and tax revenue. let me tell you a little bit about debt, which isn't on this slide, but that's the

accumulated deficits. per capita, federal debt went from 98 cents in 1857 to $2 in 1860 to $76 in 1865. and congress borrowed in two ways, pure debt issuance and as we'll discuss in just a minute, greenbacks. now, raising revenue via pure debt issue was a tricky matter at this time. what you may know is at the time of the civil war we were on a bi-metallic standard. so in 1861 the federal government had to conduct all of its transactions in speesy, either silver or gold. and it had to do this via the independent treasury, which actually had a number of subtreasuries scattered around the major cities. so the treasury traditionally sold bonds to commercial banks to buy the bonds, however, commercial banks had to give up some of their speesy reserves. but the staggering amount of borrowing needed to finance the war really strained the system.

we had an influx of speesy recently during the cara meeen war, meant we had some money coming, in but the total amount that commercial banks held in 1860 was about $100 million. so how much did the treasury want to borrow? when salmon chase took over of in march 1861, his immediate predecessors had tried floating a total of $18 million worth of federal bonds within the previous five months but were unsuccessful. before congress convened in july, chase attempted to sell close to $40 million in treasury bonds and notes and a special session authorized him to borrow another $250 million with the act of july 17th permitting him to immediately issue $50 million in treasury notes payable on demand. and there were several additional tranches of bonds that were scheduled for later issue in the fall. recall that commercial banks only held $100 million in

speesy. 0 this was a big problem. it wouldn't have been a problem if the treasury had quickly spent the speesy paid by the banks for bonds and then people put their money, the speesy, back in the banks or if banks quickly sold the treasury bonds to the public for speesy. and abraham lincoln provided another way to grease the skids. he signed a bill in august to allow chase to deposit borrowed funds into solvent speesy paying banks rather than into the subtreasuries, which tended to lock the funds up and close the doors. unfortunately, despite congress' and lincoln's blessings, chase refused to deposit the speesy into the banks, instead letting the gold accumulate in a subtreasury where it couldn't be u used. then banks had trouble selling the bonds as they tried to juggle their reserves and so financier jake hook finally stepped in with a plan to market federal bonds directly to the public. this was never done before.

and his efforts eventually succeeded. lincoln in his first state of the union address thanked the citizens of the industrial classes noir patriotism and zeal for their country's deliverance from present peril because they shared their limited resources in buying federal bonds. but even this wasn't enough. on september 30th the new york herald reported that speesy in local banks had dropped from 48 million to 37 million in the span of six weeks where additional golds in the subtreasuries went up by the same $11 million just sitting there. from december 7th to december 28th, new york bank gold reserves shrunk by another one-third. and not only were the banks flailing, so was the military and the administration. as we've already heard there were a couple of things that went on by the end of 1861 things looked pretty bleak. we had lost significant battles at wilson's creek and ball's bluff, not to mention bull run. and abraham lincoln faced politica