![]() ![]() ![]() The South’s inability to adapt, to shift capital to more vital industries. ![]() According to Lowenstein, “Labor was locked in place, as surely as with medieval serfs, and given the difficulty of converting property to cash on any scale or with any dispatch, assets were practically immobile. In the South, wealth was largely tied up in fixed assets, above all land and slaves. Lowenstein disagrees with the claim of the 1619 Project that “American capitalism is an evolved form of slaveholding.” The antebellum southern economy, he argues, was the antithesis of dynamic, modern capitalism. A new book by Roger Lowenstein, Ways and Means: Lincoln and His Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil War, provides an excellent introduction.Īlthough, as his title suggests, Lowenstein devotes more time to the North than the South, some of the most interesting sections of his book are about the South, both during and after the war. Today, with Russia’s war against Ukraine dominating the headlines, and with inflation in the United States at its highest level in four decades, is an apt time to revisit the financial side of the most important war in American history, the Civil War. ![]() Two thousand years ago, Cicero observed that the only way to win a war is to raise money, which he called the “sinews of war.” The means of financing a major war have not changed much over the centuries: governments can tax their people they can borrow or they can print currency, leading to inflation. ![]()
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