![]() ![]() The man fighting the war with inflation-as Roger Lowenstein narrates in Ways and Means: Lincoln and His Cabinet and the Financing of the War-was Lincoln’s treasury secretary, Salmon Chase. ![]() Meanwhile, newspapers were describing another aspect of the crisis: the “novel inflation of the currency.” 1 As the New York Times reported just days after the Fort Sumter anniversary, “Almost every necessary of household consumption is … from 75 to 100 per cent higher than it was a year ago.” 2 The crises the Lincoln administration faced compounded across four years of war superadded to them all was inflation. Success appeared likely, eventually, but it had not yet arrived. Grant had one month previously been promoted to become the commanding general of the Union Army, but he had yet to mobilize his troops against the Confederates in the war’s eastern theater. Its last major victory, five months previous, at Chattanooga, was defensive, holding territory it had earlier captured the July 1863 victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg were even further in the past. ![]() In April 1864, the Union Army entered its fourth year of war, having made little recent progress. Three years after the firing on Fort Sumter, the Civil War still dragged on. ![]()
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