Mark W. Geiger is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Sydney and will also be a Kluge Fellow at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress for the 2011–12 academic year.
Winner of the 2011 Tom Watson Brown Book Prize, awarded by the
Society of Civil War Historians
Winner of the 2011 Francis B. Simkins Prize, awarded by the
Southern Historical Association
Honorable Mention for the 2011 Lincoln Prize, awarded by Gettysburg
College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
“In this remarkable new book, Mark Geiger uncovers an audacious
financial conspiracy that has eluded previous historians, to divert
funds from the banks of Missouri to arm rebel military forces at
the outbreak of the Civil War. The disastrous consequences
stretched far into the postwar era, as documented by Geiger’s
meticulous reseearch. This is first-rate economic and social
history, and it also happens to be a cracking good story.”—Gavin
Wright, author of Slavery and American Economic Development
“This is an important book, period. Geiger persuasively explains
the intensity of guerrilla conflict in Missouri. No one knew about
the financial frauds that lay at the heart of Missouri’s guerrilla
problem until Geiger discovered the evidence of it in obscure
county court records and reached his astounding conclusion:
financial schemes to lend money to the Confederacy from Missouri
banks bankrupted the planter aristocracy of the state and made the
sons of the planters a desperate class from which to recruit the
bitterest and most destructive guerrillas in America’s Civil War.
In short, this is one of the finest monographs on the Civil War I
have read in twenty-five years.”—Mark Neely, winner of the 1992
Pulitzer Prize in history for The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln
and Civil Liberties
“This study bridges financial, political, social, and Civil War
history in an exciting, creative way. Using as his jumping off
point a series of law suits filed in Missouri during the Civil War
to recover bank loans granted to Confederate sympathizers, Geiger
is able to map the spread of both the ‘market revolution’ and
slavery through the region, shed new light on the politics of this
important border state, illuminate the techniques used by both the
North and the South to finance the Civil War in its early stages,
and explain the unique course of the war and its aftermath in the
region—the vigor of the guerilla movement in Missouri and the
failure of elite planters to reestablish their dominance.”—Naomi R.
Lamoreaux, University of California, Los Angeles
“In American memory, the Civil War was fought on fields of honor,
where armies met in formal battles under such icons as Grant and
Lee. But in the border state of Missouri, far from Gettysburg and
Shiloh, a bitter guerrilla conflict turned neighbor against
neighbor in a spiral of atrocities and martial law. Unfortunately,
our understanding of that terrible episode has long been shaped by
unquestioned assumptions and comforting legends—many involving
Frank and Jesse James, who fought as Confederate guerrillas. Now
Mark Geiger, through startlingly original research, provides a
provocative new perspective on Missouri’s Civil War. A fascinating
study that historians will find impossible to ignore.”—T. J.
Stiles, author of Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War and The
First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, winner of the
National Book Award
Ask a Question About this Product More... |