Thinking about Lincoln in a time of war and economic stress

First mainstream review of “Ways and Means” is a barnburner

The eminent historian Harold Holzer gave a rousing thumbs-up review in the Wall Street Journal to Ways and Means: Lincoln and His Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil War.

‘Finance is always the art of planning for the worst,” Roger Lowenstein argues in his captivating book on the Civil War—that is, on who paid for it, and how. Yet surprisingly little financial planning occurred in advance of the worst of times in America. The danger of violent secession had loomed for years, but neither North nor South entered the 1861 secession crisis positioned to fund prolonged armed conflict. (Only in 1865 did Abraham Lincoln explain that “neither party” had “expected . . . the “magnitude or the duration” of the war.) In “Ways and Means,” Mr. Lowenstein, a onetime reporter for this newspaper and the author of books on Warren Buffett and the Federal Reserve, makes what subsequently occurred at Treasury and on Wall Street during the early 1860s seem as enthralling as what transpired on the battlefield or at the White House.

You can find the full review here.

Ways and Means goes on sale March 8. 

Available now for preordering here.