Winner of the 2011 Tom Watson Brown Book Award

An award-winning exploration of a Civil War financial conspiracy in Missouri—and its reverberations today

In this original work, Mark W. Geiger explores the impact of a previously unknown financial conspiracy in Civil War–era Missouri, a sham-loan scheme that devastated the state’s planter elite, caused a revolution in land ownership, and fueled a ferocious insurgency in the state.  

Geiger’s book—the first detailed study of the grassroots nature of financing for military mobilization in the American Civil War—shows how Missouri’s ill-conceived plan has affected the political direction of the state to this day.