Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859-1877

Richard Franklin Bensel treats the Civil War and Reconstruction as the moment a genuine national government came into existence in the United States, with the capacity to tax, conscript and control the currency. The sections on Confederate state-building are the most striking, showing a secessionist government forced into far more centralisation than the Union ever required. This is conceptual political science rather than narrative history.