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EH.NET BOOK REVIEW 
 
Published by EH.NET  (January 1998) 
 
Heather Cox Richardson, _The Greatest Nation on Earth: Republican Economic 
Policies During the Civil War_.  Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard 
University Press, 1997.  viii + 342 pp.  $35.00 (cloth), ISBN: 
0-674-36213-6. 
 
Reviewed for EH.NET by Gavin Wright, Department of Economics, Stanford 
University.  <[log in to unmask]> 
 
     American economic historians do not pay enough attention to the 
history of economic policymaking, and when they do take up one of the usual 
policy suspects -- tariffs, banks, transportation -- these are often 
treated as specialty topics in isolation from each other and from the 
political context of the times.  We generally leave to political historians 
questions about contending economic philosophies and ideologies, especially 
for the nineteenth century and especially for the federal government. 
Perhaps we are implicitly committed to a view that American policies were 
driven by interest group pressures and pure politics, so that the whole 
concept of implementing an economic program seems out of place. 
 
     There is at least one glaring exception to this image, the insurgency 
of the Republican Party during the 1850s and its abrupt ascension to 
political power in the 1860s.  To be sure, wartime conditions were 
exceptional in ways that had little to do with ideology.  But even in the 
midst of war -- to some extent because of these extraordinary circumstances 
-- Republicans were able to push through sweeping changes in national 
policy in any number of areas, with a minimum of political opposition. Many 
of these are standards in the economic history curriculum -- tariffs, 
banking, the Homestead Act, railroad land grants -- but rarely are these 
treated as a cohesive policy package enacted by a party in power.  This 
quasi-neglected topic is the subject Heather Cox Richardson's new book, 
growing out of a Ph.D. thesis from the Harvard history department. 
 
     According to Cox, the story has the structure of classical tragedy. 
In the "self-righteous optimism" of their celebration of individual labor 
and private property, the Republicans enacted policies that "unwittingly 
lay the groundwork for the turmoil of the late nineteenth century" (255). 
Believers in active government support for economic development, party 
members thought they were opening opportunities for family farmers and 
ordinary workers. But because they underestimated greed, corruption, 
racism, and the exercise of economic power, what they gave the country 
instead was the Gilded Age: "their vision contained the seeds of its own 
destruction" (vii). This interpretation is not entirely novel -- this 
version is more-or-less what I remember learning in my undergraduate 
American history class -- but to map this transformation in historically 
specific detail would be no small achievement. 
 
     Unfortunately, the book's individual chapters are not up to the task 
of carrying such an ambitious historical structure. In her focus on 
legislative histories, Cox rarely gets close enough to the substance of the 
issues to be able to compare intentions and reality in any depth.  Her 
command is stretched to the breaking point in the second and third 
chapters, which deal with war bonds and monetary legislation.  These 
subjects are certainly important, and wartime financial policies had 
lasting consequences; but they hardly fit the framework of a fresh 
political opportunity to implement a pre-existing economic philosophy. What 
Lincoln said about his entire administration-- "I claim not to have 
controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me" -- 
applies as well to Chase's desperate struggle to pay the wartime bills, and 
to William Pitt Fessenden's reluctant support for greenbacks.  In general, 
Cox does not make enough room in her narrative for the possibility that in 
many areas,  Republicans were pressured by events into policies they would 
otherwise not have dreamed of adopting. 
 
     Her best cases are in the next four chapters: taxes and tariffs, 
support for agriculture -- not just the Homestead Act, but the founding of 
the Department of Agriculture, and the Morrill Act establishing land grant 
colleges -- transcontinental railroads, and, of course, slavery.  On many 
of these one can make the case that a naive enthusiasm for positive action 
gave birth to something quite different in practice.  On the other hand, 
one can also argue that many of these measures had positive long-run 
benefits, whatever the calculations and intentions behind them. To pursue 
these sorts of evaluations rigorously would require a different kind of 
book, one with more of an empirical base and more follow-up study into the 
postwar implementation of legislation that originated during the war.  To 
expect such material in a relatively conventional political history is 
doubtless unfair.  What Cox might have provided within her own frame of 
reference, however, is a better-developed sense of the political context 
behind each of these measures -- not just the Republican ideology, but the 
lineup of interest groups and the evolution of the debate over time. It 
would be extremely helpful to know whether the party really functioned as a 
legislative unit on economic issues, drawing up strategies, choosing 
leaders, imposing discipline.  But organizational matters like these are 
almost entirely neglected by Cox, and one is led to infer by its absence 
that by and large the party did not operate in these ways. 
 
     With her interest in ideology, Cox is often too ready to take 
political rhetoric at face value, as in the arguments of Justin Smith 
Morrill (influenced by Francis Wayland and Henry Carey) that his tariff 
legislation was not traditional special-interest protectionism, but instead 
would benefit all members of society (105).  Morrill may have been sincere 
in this belief, but how much of the political support for his tariff bill 
was attributable to his sincerity? 
 
     One particularly interesting shift in the Republican position is noted 
but not really explained.  Although the party had some of its roots in the 
nativism of the 1850s, by the end of the war it was a champion of 
immigration (160-168). Cox attributes the change to wartime shortages of 
farm labor.  But was it a permanent change, and did it correspond to a 
change in the party's political constituency? To answer these questions one 
would have to trace political developments beyond the wartime period, which 
Cox is not generally inclined to do. 
 
     Whatever the book's shortcomings, Cox has formulated or at least 
revived an extremely interesting set of issues that deserve further 
attention from economic historians and others.  Reading her concluding 
chapter, however, reminded me that there are still some fairly strong 
differences between political and economic historians in working 
assumptions about American history.  Cox takes it as axiomatic that the 
Gilded Age was a disaster. Republican policies, she says, "paved the way 
for the eventual demise of the small farm" (256).  "The standard of living 
for city workers, especially immigrants, fell to appalling levels" (257). 
None of these statements are footnoted, and the author seems unaware that 
documenting them would be a real challenge.  The deeper problem is that the 
entire construction of a disastrous Gilded Age is unexamined.  This 
willingness to accept contemporary rhetorical formulations at face value 
seems oddly out of date nowadays -- which is not to say that on closer 
examination these conceptions would be entirely wrong.  This promising 
subject area seems ripe for re-examination. 
 
Gavin Wright 
Department of Economics 
Stanford University 
 
Gavin Wright is this year's president of the Economic History Association. 
He is now revising for publication his 1997 Fleming Lectures on "Slavery 
and American Economic Development." 
 
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