if i didn't say so earlier. every man who loathe d better than this country and would sooner see the republicans ruined is the advocate. placed as chief of the army of the potomac. and was crushed in fredericksburg. known as fighting joe hooker. returned in 1863.

in june, lee invaded pennsylvania leading the battle of -- who was rather surprised. i should tell you by the way. the committee was pretty friendly. i went easy on them. i'm not going to take time to say a few more words. at any rate, historians referred to him as peptic and never with

the volunteer system. he led the army to victory at get tysburg. lincoln wrote in a letter to mede which he did not post the following. i do not believe you appreciate the magnitude of the missfortune involved in almolee's escape. the squand derring of what had been the long await of lee's army was the tactics of 1861 and 1862. and from then on, they put mede

in the political hot seat and kept him there for the rest of the war. all right. i'm going to move -- this by the way is mede and this staff around the time of getties gettysburg. i can't do this talk with menti mentioning sickles. he was a totally corrupt democrat, a lawyer, fabulously fascinating man. you scandalized washington by showing up to galas with

well-known prostitutes and shot dead the son of francis scott key in laugh yet park in front of witnesses because key was having an affair with sickle's wife. 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. in 1861 he races a regimen and rises very quickly by 1863 to core command and unfortunately in his case rank and colorful ness and nearly lost it when he advanced his core beyond the line leaving it dangerously

exposed. in the process of the battle, one of his legs was shot off or was amputated and that bone may be seen in what used to be the army -- well it is now the national museum of health and medicine. it is just a bone. sickles who was nothing if not shrewd and canning realized that his bacon was on the fire even with missing his leg. he started telling everyone that he was the one who had really compelled mede to fight at getty

gettysburg rather than retreat and he was the real hero over the battle oeven though he had almost lost the battle. the committee loved people like sickles, why was that? because he was a hard war man and was aggressive and talked a very good line. and i must say the committee was somewhat taken by men of this type. but at any rate, so, sickles kind of sets the tone for the committee's on going hostility to mede and with good reason though, lincoln and the radicals were frustrated by his failure to bring lee to battle.

time. the committee characterized the strategy as a retreat rather than a moo maneuver for advantage. one general after another testifies before the committee about his shortcomings. they include agonner doubleday. and the third core which was given to another general, william french. butt butterfield and pleasantfield and their testimony i'll give you a line of two of it for the flavor.

pleasantton was being interviewed here. he was asked what effect was produced it discourages them very much. if the hearts are not in the enter price is it ease yes for them is that so? >> i do not know of one profession that stamps itself on the masses of men than in the military profession. >> yes, sir. >> so, here is the committee eliciting what it wants to hear. >> okay i'm going to speed it up since paul has made a threatening gesture and if you now paul, you know enough to take that seriously. okay, i have already eluded to the fact that as hard as the committee was on certain generals, and i think with some

justice i think mede did more or less duplicate mcklellan's behavior. he was kept on by lincoln and grant. he served as a super chief of staff for grant. and grant directed the army of the potomac's strategy from 64 on. the committee favored john c freemont. well, let's see who we've got here. john c free n mont. total failure as a general. benjamin butler. a remarkably brilliant policies. he voted 27 times for davis as the 1860 candidate for democratic nomination for

president becomes a radical republican during the war. brilliant a complete and competent on the battlefield when he managed to lumber into the field. which was not off tten and whatd these men have it common? partly it was politics partly that they embraced an emwarfare and battle. sweeping away obstacles and those that talked that line generally found favor with the committee. um, okay, i must say a word or

two about what happened at fort pillow. you saw an african-american volunteer soldier. critics of the committee focused on the preoccupation and have tended to not look at it as a political entity which is what it was. and critics tend to omit or treat it as an afterthought the critics fierce human rights of african-americans and the destruction of safely wasn't a concern it was central to the the committee's forceful reports and by far the most chilling to read. i recommend go online and read it. hundreds of unarmed union so

soldiers in 1864 by nathan bedford forest, a prewar slave trader. and post war founder of the klu klux klan. he captured fort pillow and what followed was the worst car crime perpetrated during the civil war. hundreds of federal soldiers as i said mostly black were shot and beaten to death and wounded men were slaughtered and some were burned to death and others were thrown into pits and buried alive. two members of the committee went to tennessee and interviewed survivors in the field and witnesses.

i'm sorry there is not time to quote them. but you will find some of this on my website. and without the committee'se efforts to record the facts, it may have been recorded from this tri. when the roll of african-american troops aair brush brushed i'm getting there, paul. the committee's leadership may have been grafted in strategy but they saw the political dangers that generals didn't care about. they understood that the violence that ran among at fort pillow would still thrive in the

post war south. and they feared with good reason that what had been won in blood on the battlefield would be surrendered to generals. and they were presealed. as we well know. i have told you that the report provided detailed records of what happened worth reading for their own sake. how much did the comment affect lincoln? it sometimes provided him with cover for trying to push generals forward but frankly lincoln was a canny politician who didn't need the committee to need to tell him how to think about the war. and in time gave way to hard

reality and he also accepted a hard war view. his second inaugural tells you what he was feeling in 1865. the impact on the war, it didn't help the careers of the generals, but, lincoln only fired them or 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 right. one in the investigation and if you read what the committee was actually doing, its own words it makes seps and a lot of what the people came to think about the committee was a smear by later historians and that may be a strong word but i think you see

where i'm going. and i think finally, we have to remember that wars, any wars that are fought without serious oversight are wars that get out of hand. and with the war in vietnam would have had a better result telling americans year after year that victory was at hand. i think more of less the same thing. we can thank the joint committee along with hundreds of thousands of union soldiers that the war proceeded as it did.

thank you. [ applause ] >> we are going to not have questions after this talk because we are running a bit late. but there is going to be as i said earlier a panel of the speakers later today so you will be able to ask questions then. we are going to proceed now to jennie bourne now. and then her masters from the university of chicago. she aa prolific scholar and lives in different worlds. she writes in law reviews and is also working with the minnesota department of revenue to help prepare the tax review study for

the state of minnesota which i think shows her breath but most importantly but just published an article. how you finance of innocence. so i'm delight the to introduce her. [ applause ] >> thank you, paul. another member of the audience asked me if i was going to show formulas like i did last year. i'm not going to do that. i do have some graphs but they aren't that bad. so raising an army means paying

for an army. and what they did to pay for the civil war forever changed financial markets in this country. they established the direct sale of federal bonds to the public and best of ul invented the irs. the world had never before seen, okay let me see here, is this supposed to advance? there we go. thank you. okay. the world had never before seen anything to compare so the size of the union army. as you can see from the slide, before the union army came into being the only thing that came close was napoleon's troops in

1816. en listments totalled 2.8 million soldiers but many men enlisted more than once. my great, great grandpa for example. the one on the right john thoma thomas, enlisted on july 16th, 18 f 1. he was honorably discharged after being wounded in the hip. and family legend has it that he limped a little more when he went in to get his veteran's pensions. the other one, john mcdaniel enlisted on april 1st, 1862, just in time for shilo. he reenlisted two months later so he could be there for chancellorchanc chancello chancellorsver chancellorsville. so the 2.8 million is an

overstatement due to reenlistments. the number of individuals serving is more like 2 to 2.2 million. the best guest is about 750,000 which is still a pretty big numb ber. >> this slide give us snapshots of the numbers of soldiers and sailors that were on the roles at different times during the war. you can see the federal advantage in numbers widening over time with its payroll expanding. and, of course, official numbers really don't tell us everything. absentee rats were high, especially in the south. but all of those troops, absent or not, cost a considerable amount. for the first time in history, government spending for any government went over 1 billion units of the currency. so just as an aside, the u.s. government, perhaps, recalling its most recent con fliflicts c

to use the french billion rather than the english billion which was 9 zeros. government spending was nearly three times that in england. and government spending was over 30% of gdp for the union in 1865. now, not all government-spending went for the war, but a lot of it did. economists had estimated that the direct cost of the war to the north, including federal, state, local government spending, loss of human capital and the cost of the draft was about $3.4 billion in dollars of 1860. that translates to about $96 billion in today's money. now, governments have basically only a few ways to finance their operations. direct taxation, property income, excise and sales tax and import tariffs, deferred

taxation in the form of government borrowing and the printing of money which can mean inflation, or, as i'll discuss later, can also imply sort of defer taxation. i'll note the face on the green back there. that's sam p. chase. and the federal government used each one of these methods to fund the civil war that remains with us today. taxes actually only offered a meager source of revenue. although the first moral tariff kicked in just as lincoln took office. and the second moral tariff passed on august 5th. these measures simply raised a lot of money because southern customs offices where most of the money was coming in didn't send their money to d.c. after president buccanon took office. the second tariff also provided from income taxation.

proceeds from this didn't come until various amendments occ occurred and until we had a taxism. despite this yawning gap between tax receipts and federal expenditures, which was about 1.3 billi$1.3 billion in 1865, e relatively low taxes troubled people at the time. the london times scoffed at the union's efforts saying if this moss k mosquito cloud should ever get settled, it would be more effective than any law from passing the border states. lincoln would have liked to use progressive income and property tax more than he did. when he was in illinois state legislature, he had pushed unsuccessfully for graduated property tax on the basis of equity and political feasibility. he observed that the wealthy few are not sufficiently numerous to

carry the elections, unquote. but the lack of institutional structure, the direct taxation and the recalcitrants meant that federal income and property taxes were difficult to impose and collect. so, the revenue effect of direct taxes during the civil war was fairly minimal. despite the relative unimportance of tax revenue, know, tax developmentedmes in t civil war left at least two contributions to federal taxing powers. it smoothed away from the 16th amendment and it instituted the office of the commissioner of internal revenue. 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 by 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 debtish shun issuance and discuss, green backs. now, raising revenue was a turkey matter at this time. and what you may know is at the time of the civil war, we were on a bimetallic standard. so in 1861, the federal government had to conduct all 06 its transactions in specie. either silver or gold. and it had to do this via the independent treasury which actually had a number of sub categories skaterred around the major cities. so they traditionally sold bonds to commercial banks. it's a staggering amount of borrowing needed to finance the war really strained the system. we had an influx of specie

recently during the european crop failures just before the civil war meant that we had some money coming in. but the total amount that commercial banks held in 1860 was about a hundred million. so how much did the treasury want to borrow? when salmon chase took over, his immediate predecessors had tried floating a total of $18 million worth of federal bonds, but were unsuccessful. before congress convened in july, chase attempted to sell close to $40 million in treasury bonds and notes. and a specialized session authorized him to borrow another $250 million permitting him to immediately issue $250 million in treasury notes payable on demand. and there were several bonds scheduled for later issue in the fall. now, recall that commercial banks only held a hundred million in specie. this was a big problem.

it wouldn't have been a problem if the quickly spent the specie and then people put their plun back, the specie back in the banks or if banks quickly sold the treasury bonds to the public for spee si. rather than into the sub treasuries. which tended to lock the funds up and close the doors. unfortunately, chase refused to deposit the specie into the banks. instead, letting the gold accumulate in the sub treasuries where it couldn't be used. and then banks had trouble selling the bonds as they tried to juggle their reserves. so finance here, jay cook, finally stepped in with a plan to market federal bonds directly to the public.

and his efforts e vventually succeeded. but even this wasn't enough. on september 30th, the new york herald reported a drop in a span of 6 weeks. traditional gold went up by the same $11 million just sitting th new york bank gold reserves shrunk by another one-third. not only were the banks flailing, so was the military and administration. there were a couple things that went on. by the end of 1861, things went pretty bleak. we lost significant battles. and lincoln faced political fall out from the trent affair. new york