Here we are in front of our nation's capitol building, and as you can see, they're doing a little restoration on it.

MATT WEBER: But in 1861, when President Lincoln was inaugurated, that dome didn't even exist.

It was still under construction.

CRAIG BENZINE: In fact, Lincoln insisted that they continue building it, even through the Civil War.

Since then, a lot of government buildings and programs have been built, and along with that growth has been a lot of debate.

CRAIG BENZINE: With the recent inclusion of the Affordable Care Act, a lot of people think that our government has gotten too big.

But if you think the reach of the federal government expanded a lot in the past few years, that's nothing compared to the change that happened over the course of the Civil War.

[music playing] Today the federal government does a lot of stuff.

It makes the laws, regulates industry and commerce, and provides for the defense of the entire country.

But before the Civil War, the federal government was not nearly as visible nor as powerful as it is today.

No, it wasn't, Matt.

Like before the Civil War, how did people, like, view the federal government?

Like, did they even think of it as like the government that is controlling everything, or-- No, because it didn't.

MATT WEBER: This is Ed Ayers, history professor and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond, and he's also a host on the NPR show Back Story.

So the federal government didn't do too many things before the Civil War.

It collected taxes at the borders.

It ran the post office.

MATT WEBER: Most important decisions were made at the state level rather than the federal one.

The main thing the federal government did was distribute land.

The United States is still growing and expanding into the west, and there were only like 33 or 34 states at the time, depending on what month we're talking about.

CRAIG BENZINE: But there were vast amounts of territory in the west that the government was divvying up.

Because the United States was taking land from the American Indians, and suddenly there was free land.

But in general, the federal government was a government out of sight.

You didn't see it very much.

And the government that you knew was a government of your locality, your county government, your city government, maybe your congressman, maybe your senator, that the president-- quick, name presidents before Abraham Lincoln, right?

You have a hard time.

George Washington.

Yeah, exactly.

And then yadda, yadda, yadda, Abraham Lincoln, right?

So the Civil War is basically about government, and it's about the question of are we a nation or are we a union of states?

Does the federal government have responsibility for the common welfare and the common law, or can individual states determine if they will obey a federal law?

And most profoundly, if a state disagrees with what the majority in the federal government have decreed, may it leave the United States?

MATT WEBER: Remember that land that the government was in charge of distributing?

CRAIG BENZINE: Mm-hmm MATT WEBER: Well, Abraham Lincoln campaigned for the presidency, promising to stop the spread of slavery into those Western territories.

CRAIG BENZINE: And before Abraham Lincoln was even elected, the Southern states threaten to secede from the union over the issue of slavery.

MATT WEBER: The economy in the South depended on the institution of slavery, and they saw this prohibition as detrimental to their livelihood.

So they said, to heck with you Lincoln!

We're out of here!

CRAIG BENZINE: And by the time of Lincoln's inauguration, seven states did secede, forming their own government and declaring their independence from the federal government.

These states had many grievances, but at the top of the list was the protection of slavery.

And then suddenly the question becomes, is they're going to be a federal government?

You know, Abraham Lincoln, one reason he resists the secessionist is he says if it starts by breaking off the South, what's to stop California and Oregon from breaking off?

What's stop New England from becoming it's own nation as opposed to the Midwest?

And so there's the real question of will the United States as we know it, unified by federal government, exist?

MATT WEBER: So if Lincoln wanted to keep the United States united, he'd have to assert more federal control than the country had ever used before in its history.

CRAIG BENZINE: With the South's attack on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, the Civil War began and the issue of keeping the Union together became a military effort.

ED AYERS: And If you told anybody that the War is going to last four years and kill the equivalent of over 8 million people today, and end the largest and most powerful system of slavery in the modern world in four years, nobody would believe that.

That was impossible.

How did it happen?

The United States was able to tap the power, the latent power of its federal government.

So what did the government have to do to prepare for the War and get ready for it?

The short answer is everything.

You know, there's not a large American army, and Americans didn't believe in large armies.

MATT WEBER: At the beginning of the Civil War, the US Army consisted of only an estimated 16,000 soldiers, and those soldiers were scattered all across the country from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

And many of those soldiers in the South resigned and joined the Confederate army.

The Civil War's amazing in that both sides basically had to create everything they used to fight each other for four years from scratch.

MATT WEBER: The federal government would need to fund all the normal things for war, except in a much larger scale than ever before.

CRAIG BENZINE: The United States would need ships, cannons, uniforms, food supplies, and anything an army might need.

And the United States doesn't have enough money to do this.

So one of the most important and enduring things that happens in the Civil War is that the federal government and the North invents greenbacks.

MATT WEBER: Before the Civil War, believe it or not, we didn't have a national paper currency like we do today.

CRAIG BENZINE: At that time the only kind of money issued by the federal government came in the form of gold and silver coins.

There were paper notes in circulation, but they consisted of a complicated system of script and promissory notes issued by privately owned banks.

But if the banks weren't good for the money or dissolved, the notes became worthless.

When it became apparent that the Union wasn't going to be able to finance the War without borrowing a significant amount of money from foreign money changers at high interest rates, the Legal Tender Act was passed on February 25, 1862.

This was the brainchild of Colonel Dick Taylor, an old friend of Lincoln's who he enlisted to solve the problem of financing the War.

His solution was to print money-- lots of it.

His plan allowed the government to issue greenbacks, paper currency that was solely backed by the promise of the federal government and not reserves of gold.

CRAIG BENZINE: When Lincoln asked him if the people would accept greenbacks as legal tender, he basically said, of course they will.

Duh.

They have to, we're the government.

LOL.

So this is really the birth of paper money as we think of it.

And without it, the United States wouldn't exist because it's how they paid for the Civil War.

MATT WEBER: The federal government would print over $450 million of debt free legal tender over the course of the War, making a National Army as well as a national currency.

CRAIG BENZINE: From 1861 to 1865, the United States battled the Confederate states, ending with General Lee's surrender to Grant on April 9, 1865.

As news of Lee's surrender spread, other Confederate general surrendered as well, ending the rebellion and effectively uniting the country.

But just because the War was over didn't mean that the government's responsibility to its army was over.

Hundreds of thousands of soldiers were returning home, many of them injured or disabled from the War.

The government had to make sure these veterans were taken care of and properly reimbursed for their service.

It's the largest expenditure of the federal government-- pensions for Civil War soldiers and their widows.

And so a lot of what we might think of today as big government, social welfare, an safety net and all that, it's actually provided to the veterans and their families of the American Civil War.

The Pension Act of July 14, 1862 increased pension rates and provided potential eligibility to every person in military or naval service since the beginning of the war.

Congress expanded this act in 1890 to include disabilities not directly due to war and in 1906, amended it to include old age.

MATT WEBER: Money had never been spent like this before, and the legislators at the time we're dubbed the billion dollar congress.

It doesn't sound like a big number now, but that was a big number at the time.

And a huge part of that would've been going to Civil War soldiers.

So this is another way that the Civil War does transform the role of the federal government in American life.

But it wasn't just soldiers that depended on the aid of the federal government after the war.

CRAIG BENZINE: There were over four million freed African Americans, and they had to make the transition from slavery to wage labor, and they had now where to turn.

You don't have any institutions that are created, mental institutions or hospitals, schools, anything for the African American population.

So where's that going to come from?

The white South didn't want it in the first place, and they don't have any money left because they spend it all on fighting an unsuccessful war against the United States.

So even before the War is completely ended, the largest experiment in what we would think of as a social welfare by the federal government begins.

And it's to aid people who had been dislocated by the Civil War, and people who have been the victims of 200 years of slavery.

This experiment was called the Freedman's Bureau.

It was established under the direction of Abraham Lincoln on March 3, 1865, and it's major aim was to help the slaves in the reconstruction of the South.

CRAIG BENZINE: The Bureau helped them obtain food, clothing, health care, and jobs.

MATT WEBER: One of the most important things it did was set up schools, and by the end of 1865, over 90,000 freed slaves were enrolled and receiving an education.

Nothing like this had ever been attempted before, and it was one of the federal government's first forays into large scale social welfare.

So if we think about the role of Civil War in the federal government today, we know that it basically created the federal government of today.

It created our basic currency.

It created the precedent that federal government can be a source of rights for people who are otherwise deprived of rights.

It could be used when the state governments are incapable of doing so, of providing a social safety net.

All those are huge precedence for our own time.

The Civil War showed for people who want those things, what it can do.

For people who don't want those things, it's even today still used as an example of federal overreach.

It's never going to go away.

It's never-- we're never just going to say, OK, the federal government should expand as much as it wants to, because the United States Constitution is built around a federal system.

I use the word federal, by which people often seem to mean national, right?

Federal really means that the states have power and the national government has power, and the federal system is one in which that power is shared.

And because the United States is built around that, we'll always be having a conversation about where's the right line between federal and state power.

So what do you think?

Where is that line, and what is the role of the federal government?

I'm sure you could answer that without any arguments.

And should a state be able to secede if it disagrees with the feds?

Let us know in the comments.

Don't secede from the comments section, OK?

Yeah, let's stay united in our commentary.

Yeah.

This is episode is brought to you by PBS Learning Media, a great source for classroom resources on Civil War history.

If you're interested in finding more video and lesson plans on what we talked about today, you can check out our page on Learning Media.

And for a more dramatic take on the Civil War, check out the new series "Mercy Street" on PBS.

A lot of what we explored in this episode gets talked about on that show, too, so head on over to pbs.org to find out more.

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