In Roger Lowenstein’s latest book, Ways and Means: Lincoln and His Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil War, Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Chase, the 37th Congress, and banker Jay Cooke are the stars leading the drama that ends with Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox. Abraham Lincoln, The Great Emancipator, looms large but plays a supporting role.

Nominated as treasury secretary a month before Fort Sumter, Chase, a former U.S. senator from Ohio and fervent abolitionist, knew immediately that shoring up the Union’s finances was key to winning a conflict in which, Lowenstein wrote, “both North and South reckoned that … money would be decisive.”