The Civil War changed America like nothing before or since. As Jeffry D. Wert tells us in “Civil War Barons: The Tycoons, Entrepreneurs, Inventors, and Visionaries Who Forged Victory and Shaped a Nation,” on the eve of the fledgling Confederacy’s 1861 attack on Fort Sumter “barely more than thirty-six thousand civilian employees worked for the [federal] government.” Of those, “85 percent worked for the post office.”

“Secession was likely to be easy where there was so little to secede from,” wrote the 19th-century journalist and historian Henry Adams, one of the many voices of the period that Mr. Wert quotes in his book to good effect. “The Union was a sentiment,” Adams continued, “but not much more.”

Photo: WSJ

Civil War Barons By Jeffry D. Wert

Da Capo, 276 pages, $30

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Happily, that sentiment proved powerful. Once the first battles put an end to the Northern states’ illusions of a brief war, Mr. Wert writes, the North realized that to strangle the rebellion and “save the Union, federal armies and navies, backed by the economic might of the citizenry, would have to conquer the vast Confederacy.” It was a task that demanded nothing less than the “mobilization of the entire Northern society,” the centralization of government and the transformation of the economy. The result was a vast increase in the powers and reach of the federal government and the explosive expansion of Northern manufacturing. “Civil War Barons” presents the stories of 19 Northern businessmen who helped transform the North’s “industrial capacity” into the “military might” that won the war.

Mr. Wert, the author of nine previous books on the Civil War, organizes his latest book thematically into chapters with titles such as “The Inventors,” “The Improvisers,” “The Dreamers” and “The Opportunists.” He tells of “visionary” Jay Cooke, a financier whose Civil War triumphs began in May 1861 with the sale of Pennsylvania bonds. With the states riven by conflict, his banking rivals predicted that investors would subscribe to the bonds only at a substantial discount. Cooke thought otherwise. Working alongside another firm, Jay Cooke & Co. appealed to the public’s “patriotic principles” and together sold $3.3 million worth of bonds in three weeks—at full value. Not a particularly modest man, Cooke considered his feat “an achievement as great or greater than Napoleon’s crossing the Alps.” He spent the rest of the war peddling bonds with an army of salesmen making similar appeals, handling almost three quarters of the $1.75 billion in bonds sold by the federal government. Jay Cooke & Co. thus made a critical contribution to the Union cause. The firm also made some handsome commissions.

Thomas A. Scott of the Pennsylvania Railroad was, according to Mr. Wert, one of “the preeminent railroad executives in the North” before the war. After the first shots were fired, Scott organized rail and telegraph traffic on behalf of both the Pennsylvania Railroad and the government, and served a stint as assistant secretary of war. Among his other accomplishments, he supervised the rapid rail transfer of two Union corps from the Army of the Potomac to Chattanooga, Tenn., to help bolster federal forces after their defeat in September 1863 at the Battle of Chickamauga. Scott’s efforts also produced “burgeoning profits” for the Pennsylvania Railroad. Gross revenues soared to $17.4 million in 1865 from $5.9 million in 1860. Along the way, the Pennsylvania Railroad paid its first dividends.


Mr. Wert also presents the stories of the McCormick brothers—Cyrus, Leander and William—and their mechanical reaping machines that freed so much Northern manpower for military service. The author introduces us to Henry Burden, whose horsehoe-making device fabricated 70 million horseshoes for the U.S. Army. We learn of the shipbuilder James Buchanan Eads and naval architect Samuel Pook, two men who built and designed the Union’s ironclad gunboats, which dominated the navigable rivers of the West. Quaker doctor Edward Robinson Squibb, disowned by two meetinghouses when he joined the U.S. Navy, was so appalled by the poor quality of the medicine being prescribed to the sailors that he invented methods for making purified drugs, thus improving the care of the wounded and saving many lives.

The most enjoyable anecdote in Mr. Wert’s book describes President Lincoln personally testing the rapid-fire, breech-loading repeating rifle invented by Christopher Miner Spencer. The president shot at a target board propped up in Treasury Park, near the unfinished Washington Monument, and hit the board six out of seven times. A naval officer who witnessed the “shooting match . . . cut off Lincoln’s end of the board and gave it to the inventor as a memento.”

Mr. Wert’s stories of innovation and economic accomplishment don’t tie into a narrative of the Civil War’s military and political progression, but rather assume that readers already grasp the basic outline of the war. The author also plays down the war-profiteering of many of his barons. Though they no doubt helped free slaves and preserve the Union, most gained great benefit from the war. The historian Richard White is quoted by Mr. Wert describing Scott, the railroad executive, as “not so much tainted by corruption as impregnated with it.” The transportation magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt’s “soulless business practices” continued throughout the conflict, despite his gift of an enormous $1 million steamship to the government. Charles Deere, son of John, organized a “plow makers’ society” that fixed prices and assured profits. The history doesn’t lack for other examples. For true heroes of the Civil War, look to Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman. Or to any squad of volunteer infantry.

Mr. Crouch is the author, most recently, of “The Bonanza King: John Mackay and the Battle Over the Greatest Riches in the American West.”