VI. DEPARTMENT OF THE TREASURY

The Civil War records of the Department of the Treasury document functions that even before the war required an elaborate field organization. The Department had been established by an act of Sept. 2, 1789 (1 Stat. 65), and even before 1861 its increasingly complicated financial structure and the assignment to it of some nonfiscal functions had resulted in the Department's including many bureaus and offices that eventually were to be transferred elsewhere--notably to the Department of Commerce and the General Accounting Office.

As the Civil War opened the Treasury Department's organization, besides the Office of the Secretary, comprised the Offices of the First and Second Comptrollers, the Treasurer of the United States, the Register, and the Solicitor; the separate offices of the six Auditors designated numerically except for the Auditor for the Post Office Department; the Office of the Commissioner of Customs; and the Bureau of Construction. The U. S. Mint at Philadelphia, the branch mints, and the assay offices operated as a part of the Department; so did the Customs Service, the U. S. Coast Survey, the Office of the Superintendent of Weights and Measures, the SteamboatInspection Service, the Light-House Service, the Revenue-Cutter Service, and the Marine Hospital Service. All these offices and services continued through the Civil War--some with functions curtailed or redirected to the war situation, others with greatly increased responsibilities.

On June 30, 1861, as the Secretary of the Treasury observed in his 1864 report, the national debt was "comparatively so inconsiderable as hardly to deserve the name." The opening of the war, however, created an entirely new situation in Government finance, and the Treasury Department necessarily entered new fields of fiscal activity. Within the 4 years from 1861 to 1865 the national debt increased more than 2 1/2 billion dollars, a new na tional currency system was created, and new sources of revenue were tapped. Besides enlarging its existing offices the Department created new offices for its new responsibilities. These included significantly the Office of Internal Revenue (1862) and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (1863). The former controlled the work of the several direct tax commissions in the Southern States; and the latter (known also as the National Currency Bureau) supervised the so-called First Division (or Engraving or Printing Bureau), established in 1862. Still another function was added with the establishment of the Secret Service Division (1865) as a part of the Office of the Solicitor of the Treasury. Details of these new activities and of the records resulting from them are given under the appropriate headings, below.

With all its new and expanded activities, the Department soon filled the Treasury Extension and rented buildings in the neighborhood besides. In the Register's Office, for instance, the "extraordinary increase in the national expenditures" had its effects. "The large loans, represented by treasury notes, coupon bonds, and registered stock, which have been made since the month of March last," wrote the Register in his annual report for 1861, "... have had a similar effect upon the business of the loan office. " Expansion was general; increases in the work of the offices of the Auditors and the Comptrollers were as great as the added duties of the Register's Office. In the office of the Second Auditor the war period resulted in the "great embarrassment" of insufficient room for the files and an increased clerical force. The Office of the Fourth Auditor during fiscal year 1865 received 66,822 letters, over a third more than in fiscal 1864. In several Treasury bureaus or offices the employment of many "female clerks" helped to relieve administrative pressures.

The work of the Commissioner of Customs was expanded when he was put in charge of accounts of captured and abandoned property. He also kept the accounts of commercial intercourse with the States and parts of States declared to be in insurrection; and he had general charge of all matters pertaining to captured and abandoned property. These functions--discussed in the detailed descriptions below--grew more complex and demanding with the establishment, beginning in 1862, of nine special agencies to restrict commercial intercourse and (later) to control abandoned, captured, and confiscable property.

Printed as congressional documents, the wartime fiscal year reports of the Secretary of the Treasury on The State of the Finances were as follows:

1860. S. [i. e. H.] Ex. Doc. [2], 36 Cong., 2 sess., Serial 1093. 1861. S. Ex. Doc. 2, 37 Cong., 2 sess., Serial 1121.

1862. S. Ex. Doc. 1, 37 Cong., 3 sess., Serial 1149. 1863. H. Ex. Doc. 3, 38 Cong., 1 sess., Serial 1186. 1864. H. Ex. Doc. 3, 38 Cong., 2 sess., Serial 1222. 1865. H. Ex. Doc. 3, 39 Cong., 1 sess., Serial 1254. 1866 H. Ex. Doc. 4, 39 Cong., 2 sess., Serial 1287.

The reports of heads of the Department's offices, bureaus, etc., are appended to these reports. A plan for the reorganization of the Treasury Department at the end of the war was presented by the U. S. Revenue Commission (H. Ex. Doc. 34, 39 Cong., 1 sess., Serial 1255). See also the Secretary's report of July 4, 1861, S. Ex. Doc. 2, 37 Cong., 1 sess., Serial 1112.

OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY

On Dec. 6, 1860, Secretary of the Treasury Howell Cobb, in a letter to the people of Georgia, advocated immediate secession, and he was the first Southern member of President Buchanan's Cabinet to resign. In his place Buchanan appointed Philip F. Thomas of Maryland, but Thomas resigned within a month because of his Southern sympathies. It thus fell to John A. Dix, who became Secretary of the Treasury on Jan. 15, 1861, to maintain the nation's financial stability in the last months of the Buchanan administration Salmon P. Chase, Lincoln's appointee, was Secretary of the Treasury during much of the war.

George Harrington served as the only Assistant Secretary until, 4 days after the passage of an act of Mar. 14, 1864 (13 Stat. 22), Maunsell B. Field was appointed as another Assistant Secretary. Still a third was added when William E. Chandler was so appointed on Jan. 5, 1865.

It is not proposed to give to this Guide a history of Government fiscal operations under the successive Secretaries of the Treasury, their Assistant Secretaries, and their corps of assistants (among whom may be named especially Register L. E. Chittenden, Treasurer F. E. Spinner, Second Comptroller J. M. Brodhead, and Second Auditor E. B. French). They did their work so as to assure victory and economic stability in the end. The records they left behind, however--except for the few that are in print-have been little used for historical research. Hence the attention to detail here in the descriptions of the functions and records of the Secretary's Office and other offices of the Department. The increasing administrative responsibilities of the Office of the Secretary during and immediately after the Civil War resulted in the gradual development of the Office into an organization of many small divisions and units, increasing as new functions were assumed. In 1863, for example, apparently only one division, the Loan and Treasury Note Branch, was operating as a functional unit in the Office, but by 1865 this had apparently been divided into a Loan Branch and a Note and Redemption Division and an Internal Revenue Branch had been added. Although this handful of administrative units may not indicate the scope of activities within the immediate purview of the Secretary's Office, the records created in the Office most assuredly do. They include not only the highest-level letters and reports on the collection of the revenue, the supervision of expenditures, and the management of the public debt and the national currency, but also--often as separate "units" or series--records relating to all matters of Treasury Department concern during the war. Successive Secretaries of the Treasury during the Civil War period:

Philip F. Thomas, Dec. 12, 1860.

John A. Dix, Jan. 15, 1861.

Salmon P. Chase, Mar. 7, 1861.

William P. Fessenden, July 5, 1864.
Hugh McCulloch, Mar. 9, 1865.

Annual reports of the Secretary of the Treasury on The State of the Finances, cited above; Morgan Dix, comp., Memoirs of John Adams Dix (New York, 1883. 2 vols. ); Diary and Correspondence of Salmon

P. Chase, American Historical Association, Annual Report, 1902, vol. 2 (Washington, 1903); Francis Fessenden, Life and Public Services of William Pitt Fessenden (Boston and New York, 1907. 2 vols.).

Record Group 56. --Most series of Secretary's correspondence lack subject indexes, but chronological registers of correspondence, including abstracts of letters, are available for the Civil War period. The extensive and varied letters received by the Secretary came to him from Congress, the President, and other executive departments, from within the Department of the Treasury, and from the general public. The letters from Congress during the war are in separate subseries, beginning earlier, of letters from individual Representatives and committees of the House and of letters from the Senate. More important in documenting the adoption and changes of

official policies are the letters received from executive officers (the President and the Cabinet). Besides communications from the departmental secretaries (State, War, Navy, and Interior) there are series of those received by the Secretary of the Treasury during the war from the Postmaster General and city postmasters; from the Attorney General and the Federal judiciary in the States and Territories; from the General Land Office and receivers of public moneys; from other Interior agencies on Indian, patent, census, and pension matters; from the Court of Claims; and from the Smithsonian Institution. Other incoming wartime or war-related correspondence, organized by subject, concerns internal revenue informer cases, 1865-71; internal revenue and navigation, from 1860; and national banks. There are also miscellaneous letters received, mainly from the general public; many of these throw light on such wartime matters as blockade running, seizures, and frauds.

In separate subseries of incoming correspondence are letters received during the war from the following Treasury offices or agencies: the Assistant Secretaries of the Treasury; the Treasurer of the United States; the Register; the First and Second Comptrollers; the Solicitor; the Commissioner of the Currency, from 1863; the Commissioner of Customs; the six Auditors; the First Division (that is, the Bureau of Engraving or Printing), from 1862; the Construction Branch (later the Office of the Supervising Architect); the Assistant Treasurers at Boston, Denver, New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and St. Louis; the U. S. depositaries at Baltimore, Chicago, Cincinnati, Detroit, Louisville, and Pittsburgh, with special reports of funds on hand; and the collectors of customs (available as National Archives Microfilm Publication 174, in many rolls for the Civil War period).

Letters sent to Lincoln by the Secretary of the Treasury are on p. 461-533 of a volume of fair copies of letters to the President, Apr. 9, 1833-Mar. 19, 1866; among these are letters sent by Chase dealing with the collection of duties and enforcement of revenue laws in Southern ports, the restriction of trade between Illinois and Missouri, and the Fort Pillow massacre. There are also series of fair copies of the Secretary's letters to the executive departments, Members of Congress and congressional committees, Federal courts, and private individuals. The Secretary's wartime letters to collectors of customs are in many volumes organized separately for the collectors at the principal ports of Baltimore, Boston, New Orleans, New York, and Philadelphia; the collectors at Pacific ports (available in part as National Archives Microfilm Publication 176); and the collectors at small ports. Moreover, there are copies of letters to or concerning collectors and assessors of internal revenue, State officers, and banks, 1862-78 (37 vols.); appraisers and surveyors, 1845-78 (14 vols.); depositaries, 1863-67 (2 vols.); subtreasuries, 1840-78; and marine hospitals, 1833-78 (17 vols.). In other letter books are copies of letters sent during the war relating to the Steamboat-Inspection Service, Indians, public lands, "awards and decisions," and foreign matters; and telegrams sent are in a 6-volume series, 1850-74. Also, letters sent (and those received) by the Secretary concerning restricted commercial intercourse with and in the States declared to be in insurrection should be especially noted.

There are many series of personnel registers, correspondence, oaths, and commissions that offer possibilities for studying the effects of the war on Treasury Department personnel management--resignations, dismissals,