B6 EZ BD THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, APRIL 3 , 2022
trap us or free us? And she floats theoretical
explanations for what she sees as “emotional
recurrences in families” that our current sci-
ence can’t explain.
But as “Ancestor Trouble” progresses, it
shifts into a memoir of spiritual experimenta-
tion. Newton embarks on a journey to connect
with her ancestors, working with practitioners
of “Ancestral Medicine” who help her commu-
nicate with the spirits of the dead. She can see
these spirits as figures or colored light; they
give advice and offer insight into the dysfunc-
tion of her family tree.
Over time, she comes to find these connec-
tions deeply healing and begins to see “syn-
chronicities” between generations. She is as-
tounded by a parallel between her demon-ob-
sessed mother and a ninth-great-grandmother
“accused of consorting with spirits,” and to
find herself booked at an Airbnb on Martha
Avenue while attending a workshop to “heal”
the spirit of her grandmother, whose name
was Martha.
There is something moving about Newton’s
efforts to honor the forgotten, and I found
fascinating the idea that in literally attempting
to know the dead, we better understand our
place in the world. But her insistence on seeing
intergenerational patterns, no matter how far
back or far-fetched, threatens to undercut the
nuance and rigorous research that character-
ize the rest of her book.
If Newton’s attempts to connect with the
past are unusual, her clear-eyed look at her
ancestors’ complicity is nonetheless a valuable
and bracing portrait of one American family
tree that we know represents many, many
more. This is why we look back, and it’s why
genealogy can be so powerful — because the
past is still with us, because we can’t change
the present until we’ve retraced the path that
led us here.
Because, as Newton puts it: “I was born in- The Civil War ended in 1865. A hundred
and fifty years is nothing. It’s the blink of an
eye.”
to understand their shared pasts.
As she traces her family, Newton lays out her
theory of the importance of genealogy, not just
for setting the record straight on history and
wrestling with how we can repair our ances-
tors’ wrongs, but also as a means of orienting
ourselves in the world. Using scholarship in
anthropology, history, religion and philoso-
phy, she frames the hobby as a modern twist on
an ancient practice that connects us to one
another and to the Earth. She is captivated by
cultures that revere the dead — worshiping
ancestors, burying loved ones beneath family
homes — and suggests that ours has lost a
great deal in its distance from them. “Ancestor
hunger,” as she terms it, “has often been cast as
a narcissistic Western peculiarity. Historically,
though, it’s far more usual for people to seek
connection with their forebears than not to
seek it.”
Newton uses findings from genetics, cogni-
tive science and other fields to wrestle with
ideas around inheritance — does knowing who
gave us our eyes and (perhaps) our tempersgreat-grandmother declared herself happy
when Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered.
Such beliefs were buttressed by decades of
mainstream eugenics, a profoundly flawed
understanding of the science of genes that still
contaminates aspects of our culture and poli-
tics.
The poison of these generations found toxic
expression in Newton’s father, whose cruelty
was writ large and small, and from whom
Newton is now estranged. He mourned the end
of slavery, applauded a 1927 Supreme Court
decision upholding the forced sterilization of
human beings and mocked the disabled; at
home, he kicked the dogs and spanked his
daughter when she was constipated. Newton’s
bracing portrait of him and of her ancestors’
evil offers a reckoning that our culture at large
still refuses to have. But the growing populari-
ty of family history research may be changing
that. In recent years, I’ve heard about a num-
ber of genealogical reconciliation projects,
including efforts by Black and White descen-
dants of the same enslavers working togetherYork, London and Paris, and to industrialists
on both sides of the Atlantic.
Slavery was a huge liability for the South
not because it resisted the power of capital
markets. Slavery fueled capital markets.
Slavery hampered the White South’s seces-
sion effort because it meant that the economy
of the Confederacy rested on the forced labor
of people who ultimately rose up and de-
stroyed the system that oppressed them. Some
200,000 Black people served in Union uni-
form by the end of the war. Hundreds of
thousands more left the cotton fields to follow
behind Union armies, depriving the Confeder-
acy of their labor and smashing its social
structure in the process. In the Emancipation
Proclamation, Lincoln not only struck a blow
for justice. He also exploited the White South’s
greatest vulnerability.
For public finance purposes, the chief diffi-
culty for the Confederacy was not slavery.
Enslavement and finance went together all too
well. The Confederacy’s problem was one that
attaches to any would-be separatist effort. The
failure of the South’s war meant that its
creditors were wiped out. The 14th Amend-
ment to the U.S. Constitution flatly prohibited
repayment of Confederate debts. The North
faced financing challenges, to be sure, but its
creditors knew that it would survive to collect
taxes another day, no matter what the out-
come in the South. This basic proposition of
public finance explains why separatist civil
wars so rarely succeed against modern states,
at least not without the support of outside
powers.
Lowenstein’s book is a compelling account
of how the United States acquired and exploit-
ed the stunning power that modern statehood
delivers.and cities all issued money of their own. By
1863, U.S. greenbacks even began to seep into
exchange in the South — a sure giveaway that
the Confederate state was struggling. When
the value of those greenbacks surged in March
1865, the market was effectively announcing
what Robert E. Lee’s formal surrender at
Appomattox would confirm weeks later. The
war was over.
Lowenstein quotes a Confederate veteran
as saying: “The Yankees did not whip us in the
field. We were whipped in the Treasury De-
partment.”
The heart of Lowenstein’s account is the
claim that the North won because its relent-
lessly dynamic form of “modern financial
capitalism” was more effective than the
South’s premodern “system of seigneurial
wealth” at supporting 19th-century warfare.
The South’s “fixed capital” in enslaved people
and land, he contends, was inferior to the
“liquid capital” that powers modern econo-
mies. In Lowenstein’s telling, a new genera-
tion of histories of race and capitalism, culmi-
nating in the New York Times Magazine’s
controversial 1619 Project, has missed this
fundamental point. Capitalism and slavery, he
insists, were fundamentally different.
Lowenstein is right when he says that
treating Southern slavery and Northern capi-
talism as the same makes it difficult to explain
the Civil War. (Why did conflict between the
two produce a conflict that killed more than
700,000 Americans?) But he is mistaken about
the sources of conflict between them.
As an outpouring of recent histories of
slavery and capitalism has shown, the South-
ern planter class had created a modern system
of finance capitalism on the backs of enslaved
people. Slavery had existed for millennia in
ways akin to medieval serfdom. But in North
America, it became a dynamic system of highly
mobile and tradable assets in the form of
human beings. Heavily mortgaged enslaved
property connected the extractive agriculture
of the South to bankers and insurers in Newvalue of the greenback became an exquisitely
sensitive barometer of the prospects of the
Union war effort.
The war produced a new banking system,
too. A phalanx of federal banks replaced the
prewar hodgepodge of state banks, creating
institutions that would not only finance the
conflict but also fund the postwar economy.
As Lowenstein effectively recounts, the
South could claim no such record of innova-
tions. Chase’s counterpart, a South Carolina
lawyer named Christopher Memminger,
gained the benefit of early windfalls. The
Confederacy seized $6 million in gold from
federal customs houses, and $15 million more
poured into Confederate coffers from bond
sales to patriotic White Southerners touched
with the enthusiasm of secession’s first days.
But such early boosts belied a grim reality.
The South’s industrial base was one-fifth the
size of the North’s. Memminger and Confeder-
ate President Jefferson Davis hoped that with-
holding cotton from the mills of Manchester
and Marseille would pressure England and
France to throw their support to the new
Confederacy. But a bumper cotton crop in
1860 blunted whatever market pressure the
South hoped to exert. Shortages of basic goods
quickly arose. Inflation, already a problem in
1861 and 1862, turned into hyperinflation in
1863 and 1864. The same dollar in gold that
bought $1.05 worth of Confederate notes in
May 1861 was worth $100 in Confederate notes
four years later. The cost of flour in the South
more than doubled between 1860 and early
1863; sugar increased by a factor of 14 over the
same period. Between 1863 and 1864 prices of
wheat and bacon shot up 20-fold.
Memminger’s best hope was to take on debt
secured by the promise of future cotton crops.
The blockade by the U.S. Navy, porous though
it often was, hindered even that strategy.
Meanwhile, the Confederacy proved unable to
enact a legal tender law. A cacophony of
private promises circulated as currency in-
stead. States, railroad companies, small firmsBook World
WAYS AND MEANS
Lincoln and His
Cabinet and the
Financing of the
Civil War
By Roger
Lowenstein
Penguin Press.
432 pp. $30W
ar costs a lot of money. Vladimir Putin
is no doubt remembering the point
today. And in U.S. history, this basic
military-fiscal proposition is one reason it was
a staggeringly risky strategy when 11 states
concluded in the winter of 1860-1861 that they
could successfully secede from the United
States of America.
Consider the financial challenge involved.
On the eve of the conflict, the annual federal
budget was around $80 million. During the
war, the U.S. Treasury alone spent nearly that
amount on average every month. Four years of
war cost the South $2 billion. The United
States and the Confederacy each tried to raise
revenue through higher tariffs and new taxes.
But most of the money needed to be borrowed.
And when combat is existential — when the
existence of a state is at issue, or when its
future revenue capacities are threatened —
borrowing becomes a high-wire act.
Longtime business writer Roger Lowen-
stein’s new book, “Ways and Means: Lincoln
and His Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil
War,” draws on several generations of scholar-
ly literature to bring the vital but oft-over-
looked story of the Civil War’s financial chal-
lenges to a larger audience. His account starts
in the North, where Treasury Secretary Salm-
on Chase needed to raise more money, as
Lowenstein notes, than had been expended
since the beginning of the republic. The feder-
al government had long relied on revenue
from import duties. But secession slashed
tariff receipts by eliminating busy Southern
ports and by launching a fleet of Confederate
privateering vessels on the seas. Jittery New
York financiers demanded that Washington
strike a deal with the seceding states. Interest
rates charged on federal debt doubled. Presi-
dent Abraham Lincoln observed that he had
arrived in Washington only to find “an empty
Treasury and a great rebellion.”
To make matters worse, Chase was a finance
novice. As a Democrat from Ohio, he had been
a skeptic of federal economic authority. Like
many Western politicians, he shared Andrew
Jackson’s preference for a small federal gov-
ernment and decentralized economic power.
But in Lowenstein’s account, Chase quickly
came to understand that the horse-and-buggy
treasury he had inherited was ill-equipped for
the age of modern warfare. The federal gov-
ernment in 1861 had no central bank. (Jackson
had crushed the Second Bank of the United
States three decades earlier.) There was no
federal currency, and federal law barred the
treasury from borrowing the state bank notes
that were the nation’s de facto medium of
exchange. Chase was left badly dependent on
loans of gold and silver from a small cohort of
New York bankers.
What followed in the North was four deci-
sive years of financial innovation. Chase devel-
oped a close (sometimes too close) relation-
ship with Philadelphia broker and future
railroad financier Jay Cooke, who remade
public finance for the modern era. Cooke
broke the monopoly of the New York bankers
by taking the fundraising project to the Ameri-
can middle class. Cooke and his network of
brokers sold U.S. Civil War bonds far and wide
through newspaper advertisements and door-
to-door sales. By early 1862 Cooke was hawk-
ing federal debt as Chase’s exclusive agent,
turning Union bond sales into a vast engine of
war finance. Cooke alone would ultimately sell
nearly half a billion dollars in war bonds.
Government debt alone was not enough.
War occasioned the first federal income tax.
And in February 1862, Congress took the
momentous step of enacting the Legal Tender
Act, establishing federal “greenbacks” (so
called because their reverse side was printed
in green ink), which were payable in fulfill-
ment of all debts. For the rest of the war, the
In waging the Civil War, North and South faced financial battles
HISTORY REVIEW BY JOHN FABIAN WITT
LIBRARY OF CONGRESSTreasury Secretary
Salmon Chase,
second from left,
joins President
Abraham Lincoln
and other Cabinet
members for a
reading of the
Emancipation
Proclamation in
this 1866
engraving. Chase
faced enormous
challenges in
raising money to
fund the Civil War.John Fabian Witt teaches law and history at Yale
and is the author, most recently, of “A merican
Contagions: Epidemics and the Law from Smallpox
to Covid-19.” He won the Bancroft Prize for “Lincoln’s
Code: The Laws of War in American History.”As she grew older, Newton wrestled with
her own demons, including a tumultuous
romance and anxiety about her mental stabili-
ty. When she peeled back the layers of her
parents’ and forebears’ lives, revealing pat-
terns of violence, abandonment and mental
illness, her genealogical curiosity became a
decades-long quest to understand how her
family came to be so screwed up and how its
legacy may live on in her. She was able to
confirm and flesh out the disturbing stories
she’d long heard: One grandfather was mar-
ried at least 10 times to nine different women;
a great-aunt danced naked in the street, men-
aced her mother with a knife and died in an
asylum.
But far more disturbing, Newton was able to
document the “hundreds, if not thousands” of
human beings her father’s forebears were
responsible for enslaving. At its best, “Ancestor
Trouble” becomes a kind of personal reconcili-
ation project, one that tells of generations of
White violence, cruelty and theft, as well as
entrenched intergenerational brainwashing.
How is the poison of racism passed down?
Along Newton’s paternal line, it was a grand
project bolstered by stories of valor and hard
work, convictions about the natural order of
human beings, and the logic that material
wealth must be proof of goodness. Newton
found this whitewashing in many places, in-
cluding family accounts of a great-grandfather
named Big Joe who ran a sharecropping plan-
tation in the Jim Crow South, a system that
was notoriously exploitative. “No one I have
ever known was held in higher respect than he
was among the black people of the Mississippi
Delta,” one relative wrote in the 1990s. In the
1960s, Newton’s great-great aunt, a school-
teacher, wrote a newspaper column advocat-
ing resistance to the Civil Rights Act, and a
FAMILY FROM B1
Trying to understand
her family’s cruel legacy
ANCESTOR
TROUBLE
A Reckoning
and a
Reconciliation
By Maud
Newton
Random House.
400 pp. $28.99Libby Copeland is a former staff writer for The
Washington Post and the author of “The Lost
Family: How DNA Te sting Is Upending Who We Are.”HARRY HARRIS/ASSOCIATED PRESSMaud Newton
writes that her
father wouldn’t let
her watch “Sesame
Street” because it
showed children of
different races
playing together, as
in this 1972 episode
featuring New York
Jets quarterback
Joe Namath.