Upon his election in 1860, Abraham Lincoln inherited a country in crisis. The U.S. Treasury had run out of money and had no authority to raise taxes, no federal bank, and no currency. But in great challenges Lincoln saw opportunity. While the Union and Rebel armies fought increasingly vicious battles, the Republican-led Congress enacted a blizzard of legislation that made the government, for the first time, a powerful presence in the lives of ordinary Americans, establishing a progressive income tax and creating the greenback-paper money. While the Union became self-sustaining, the South plunged into financial free fall. The North's financial advantage over increasingly hungry Southern citizens proved decisive; the war was won not on the battlefield, but in the Treasury departments. Roger Lowenstein reveals the unlikely story of how Lincoln used the urgency of the Civil War to transform a union of states into one nation. Through a financial lens, he explores how this second American revolution established a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.