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Abstract
Bonds of War: The Evolution of World Financial Markets in the Civil War Era, analyzes the distinctive role of Union bonds in global finance and state formation during the mid nineteenth century. Specifically I am interested in the American Civil War as sold by a quirky set of Union financiers spearheaded by Jay Cooke and his subcontractors who canvassed far and wide to sell a particular version of America to investors at home and abroad. Equally important to my study is the host of characterscrossing gender, racial, and national boundaries whose confidence in the imperiled American Union paved the way for a global Gilded Age in which increasingly complex, broadly-distributed financial instruments projected both American power and a new gospel of wealth. Civil War bonds enabled a new era of speculative finance to emerge that we are still contending with today. U.S. securities during the period were a global commodity. In ways weve never appreciated, high volume sales crossed the Atlantic to buyers in England, France, the German states, Switzerland, Belgium, Russia, Ireland, the Italian States, and the Netherlands, ensuring that the citizens of foreign countries had a vested interest in the Union. Despite the successful efforts to sell bonds domestically, international sales were critical to the success of the Union cause. International sales represented a critical recognition abroad of the soundness of the federal government, buoying confidence at home. Bonds even made their way to hundreds of Cuban investorsrevealing the interest held by individuals in a slave economy who still knew a good investment when they saw onehypocrisy be damned. As crucial as the Civil War was to global finance, it was in the immediate aftermath during Reconstruction that a new financial order emerged.