Inside Lincoln's Cabinet: The Civil War Diaries of Salmon P. Chase

ix, 342 pp. "The vivid, lucid and extremely illuminating diary of Salmon P. Chase remained scattered until 1954 when they were published under the editorship of eminent Civil War historian David H. Donald. Chase served as Secretary of the Treasury in President Lincoln’s cabinet from 1861 to 1864, during the Civil War, despite the crisis he instituted the establishment of a national banking system and the issue of paper currency. Ambitious, talented and underhand, his diaries reveal the Civil War at its highest level on the Union side."