Lincoln believed this agenda would foster the economic opportunity he had always sought for upwardly striving Americans, and which he would seek in particular for enslaved Black Americans. With Lincoln at the helm, the United States would now govern "for" its people: it would enact laws, establish a currency, raise armies, underwrite transportation and higher education, assist farmers, and impose taxes for them.
But amid unprecedented troubles Lincoln saw opportunity-the chance to legislate in the centralizing spirit of the "more perfect union" that had first drawn him to politics. The government had no authority to raise taxes, no federal bank, no currency. Even before the Confederacy's secession, the United States Treasury had run out of money. Upon his election to the presidency, Abraham Lincoln inherited a country in crisis. From renowned journalist and master storyteller Roger Lowenstein, a revelatory financial investigation into how Lincoln and his administration used the funding of the Civil War as the catalyst to centralize the government and accomplish the most far-reaching reform in the country's history
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