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Review
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Sacred Debts: State Civil War Claims and American Federalism,
1861-1880, by Kyle S. Sinisi. Fordham University Press, 2003.
203 pages, $50.00 cloth.
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Kyle S. Sinisi's Sacred Debts is an institutional history
of the attempts made by state governments to be reimbursed for the
expense of supplying militia to fight for the Union during the Civil
War. Unlike many social histories of the Southern home front that
use individual claims to shed light on Southern Unionism, Sinisi's
study focuses on the recovery of claims by states that remained
in the Union. By tracing the history of state claims, Sinisi hopes
to illuminate some of the darker corners of the period that Mark
Summers has called the "Era of Good Stealings."
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Sinisi begins his study with a look
at the history of state claims from the beginning of the republic
to the Civil War to develop context. Prior to the Civil War states
would recruit, outfit, and transport militias with the expectation
that they would be paid by the Federal government for fighting wars.
States therefore assumed that the Union would follow the same pattern
when they mustered state militia for the Civil War. Reimbursement
after the Civil War, however, was complicated by the "ill-tempered
and humorless" Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase.
In 1861 Chase imposed a set of stringent rules for payment of states
for war expenses in the face of the rapidly expanding costs of the
war ($1 million dollars a day). Chase required original receipts
and vouchers for every transaction, classification of all expenses
into abstracts which were broken into categories, and well kept
payroll records. Faced with rapid mobilization or with situations
requiring immediate responses such as the Confederate raids into
Kansas and Ohio, states lacked the institutional structures to insure
that records that would satisfy Chase's requirements were kept.
When states attempted to recover expenses from an increasingly stingy
Treasury Department, they were met with several layers of bureaucratic
stonewalls requiring several audits and congressional approval for
all payments. Some states, like Missouri, hired agents to negotiate
the Byzantine process of indemnification. Successful agents like
Missouri's John B. Gray collected and organized documents, lobbied
Treasury Department bureaucrats, and lined up Missouri's congressional
delegation to organize support for repayment. Other states like
Kentucky resorted to playing politics in an effort to circumvent
Chase's rules by appealing to the courts and the Army to make up
for bad record keeping. Another example, Kansas was simply inept
at recovering war claims because the state government was inexperienced
in Washington, allowing a commission to handle claims rather than
an experienced agent who could more effectively grease wheels in
congress and at the Treasury. Often, attempts for repayment were
complicated by local state politics, being caught between ambivalence
about hiring slick agents and pork barrel chasing cronyism. States
had difficulty deciding whether claims were best handled by agents,
governors, commissions, or legislatures. More often control of the
process in states was a tug of war between all of the above. The
one thing that was certain in the repayment game, according to Kansas
Governor Samuel J. Crawford, who experienced great frustration in
Gilded Age Washington, was that "nothing is certain in this
detestable hole."
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In this work, Sinisi succeeds in
demonstrating that the institutional history of Gilded Age America
must get beyond the stereotypes of corruption that have their roots
in the popular reactions to the scandals of the Grant administration.
Historians should look beyond politics and the courts as lenses
to analyze the evolving relationship between states and the Federal
government during the post Civil War period. He shows that states
had to learn ways to develop institutional support within congress
and the Federal bureaucracy. At first they failed to get beyond
single interest lobbying efforts, were slow to recognize that slick
agents were necessary to get things done in Washington, and did
not understand that they could be more powerful if they stood together
to press common issues. In this case a formidable Federal bureaucracy
stood between the states and repayment. However, once states learned
all of the tricks required to grease the wheels in Washington and
developed and streamlined administrative structures at home, they
became more successful in pursuing their interests at the Federal
level. Sinisi's point is that there was a tough learning curve for
states in the Gilded Age and that the Treasury Department, at least,
defies stereotypes of bureaucrats on the make, standing for rationalized
apolitical processes in an era better known for political corruption.
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Sacred Debts is a book that specialists
on the Gilded Age and institutional historians will find valuable.
However, the study of state claims and the focus on case studies
of only three states ultimately serve to narrow Sinisi's perspective
to a point where overarching conclusions about Gilded Age institutions
are problematic. While Sinisi does a fine job of sifting through
and untangling state and local issues, his conclusions about the
changing nature of Federalism are better seen as conjectures than
as established fact. His conclusions need to be confirmed by more
general studies that examine more states and more issues than as
established fact. Until then, Sinisi helps us see that the "Era
of Good Stealings" may be more appropriately labeled the "Era
of Bad Dealings."
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Holy Innocents' Episcopal School, Atlanta
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Paul Horton
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