I suppose the take-away from this thread is that Lincoln was an idiot for not letting the Trent Affair escalate into a full-blown war, given all the benefits an Anglo-American war would bring to the Union cause.![]()
Well what people ought to take away is that Lincoln was rather clever for being able to steer around the potential conflict and realizing it would be rather difficult to commit to more than one war at a time.
Well, TFSmith has previously claimed that America could never run out of money to fight a war, because she could always just raise taxes and print more cash. After all, it's not like these sorts of financial strategies have ever backfired...
To be fair it is possible that the Union could have stabilized any rampant inflation by a massive sale of government bonds in the early months of the conflict (using that surge of patriotism in the early period) but any further stabilization would have depended on a constant stream of Union victories to boost public confidence in the economy. Any setbacks could be rather disastrous for the economy.
If the war drags on too long military setbacks, blockade, and the inability of the internal market to soak up all the lost commerce will tell.