The Jamie Dimon of the Civil War
The story of Jay Cooke & Co.
When a government is dependent upon bankers for money, they and not the leaders of the government control the situation, since the hand that gives is above the hand that takes.
Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of France, 1815
We don’t think about this nowadays, but financing wars used to be hard.
In the 1860s, for example, it was far from certain if the federal…
