Enemy Within

Stoked by a series of major scandals, popular fears of corruption in theCivil War North provide a unique window into Northern culture in the Civil War era. In TheEnemy Within, Michael Thomas Smith relates these scandals-including those involvingJohn C. Frmont's administration in Missouri, Benjamin F. Butler's in Louisiana,bounty jumping and recruitment fraud, controversial wartime innovations in the Treasury Department,government contracting, and the cotton trade-to deeper anxieties.Themassive growth of the national government during the Civil War and lack of effective regulation madecorruption all but inevitable, as indeed it has been in all the nation's wars and in everyperiod of the nation's history. Civil War Northerners responded with unique intensity to thesethreats, however. If anything, the actual scale of nineteenth-century public corruption and theparty campaign fundraising with which it tended to intertwine was tiny compared with that of latereras, following the growth and consolidation of big business and corporations. Nevertheless, CivilWar Northerners responded with far greater vigor than their descendants would muster against largerand more insidious threats.In the 1860s the popular conception of corruptioncould still encompass such social trends as extravagant spending or the enjoyment of luxury goods. Even more telling are the ways in which citizens' definitions of corruption manifested theirspecific fears: of government spending and centralization, of immigrants and the urban poor, ofaristocratic ambition and pretension, and, most fundamentally, of modernization itself. Rationalconcerns about government honesty and efficiency had a way of spiraling into irrational suspicionsof corrupt cabals and conspiracies. Those shadowy fears by contrast starkly illuminateNortherners' most cherished beliefs and values.