Illusions of power Book

Pretty disappointing overall. The author's so interested in providing statistical tables of votes in the House of Representatives (and dividing all votes into "statist" or "antistatist" positions) that he often neglects to identify what actual laws are passed and enacted, what they did, and how they operated. His entire description of the money market operations of the Treasury department in the last half of the book seem extremely confused, and he doesn't connect that description with most of the info from the first half of the book or form a coherent story out of it.

Some interesting takeaways though. I had no idea how borderline treasonous Buchanan's administration was. His General-in-Chief Winfield Scott said after secession the government should just allow the fragments of "the great Republic to form themselves into new Confederacies." Scott's secretary took all the notes on security arrangements from a secret meeting and gave them directly to Southern politicians. The Secretary of War John Floyd tried to transfer arms to the South from a Pittsburgh arsenal before mob action stopped him. The Secretary of the Treasury Howell Cobb of Georgia was widely rumored to be harboring an active "disunion plot" inside the very cabinet. The fact that the republic survived at all until Lincoln came into office is kinda amazing.

Also, his discussion of the Confederate government is pretty interesting. It was basically more centralizing and controlling than the federal government. By 1863 it had given the Secretary of the War total discretion to exempt certain groups from the ubiquitous draft, which the South started a year before the North, and which allowed him to basically control all labor movements in the Confederacy. By the end of the war the central government in Richmond was basically running the whole Railroad system using both impressment and labor controls. It also taxed slave overseers (exempt from the draft by law) to pay for poor relief to families with soldiers at war. The Confederate government collected the funds and then distributed them to the states, an early grant-in-aid program ahead of its time. By the end of the war almost 1/3 of families in some states were receiving relief, though in increasingly worthless Confederate currency.

Still, despite a few interesting tidbits, I wish the book had been better organized and better written.