Ways and Means: Lincoln and His Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil War, by Roger Lowenstein, Penguin Press, 448 pages, $30
With Ways and Means, Roger Lowenstein, the author of several popular books on finance, has tackled the Civil War. The book's subtitle—Lincoln and His Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil War—is misleadingly incomplete, because Lowenstein covers far more than Union finance. He aims to demonstrate how the Republicans "vastly enlarged the government." He not only describes the war's expansion of state power across many dimensions; he celebrates this outcome as "an agenda for industry and growth, and to foster opportunity, especially for those at the bottom."
