Scholars often frame Republican supporters in 1860 as the moral center of American politics. The Republicans, after all, were antislavery proponents, at least in a moderate sense. But it is important not to infuse Republican Party morality with a more modern ethic, such as an antiracist or antiviolence stance. Most Republicans focused on White enslavers and the institution of slavery without developing much policy on freed slaves beyond colonization - the removal of African Americans from the United States. Despite the Republican Party’s self-promotion as a coalition committed to peaceful law and order (in contrast to the bullying leadership of slaveholders and Democrats), it was an organization built to resist and fight. In the 1860 election cycle, the Wide Awakes, Abraham Lincoln’s Republican backers, engaged their Democratic counterparts in physical battle across the northern, urban landscape. Shootings, stabbings, chasings, and beatings marked these clashes. Chapter 6 explores how partisan physical and electoral fights would shape questions of violence and the national state in the challenging period between Lincoln’s election and his assumption of office.

At root, the problems with the Federal Reserve (and many other central banks) are institutional. The repeated recessions and crises in the era of the Fed show that we need a radical reimagination of the basic institutions of monetary policy. In this chapter, we survey the work of the three great classically liberal Nobel laureates of the twentieth century – James Buchanan, F. A. Hayek, and Milton Friedman – to show that each of them gave serious consideration to monetary-institutional fundamentals. Our focus is not on their particular conclusions, but on how they thought about the problems of monetary institutional design. This represents a very different style of scholarship than macroeconomists and monetary economists currently practice. Unless scholars engage the research projects of Buchanan, Hayek, and Friedman, research in monetary economics will not be of much help in achieving lasting macroeconomic stability.

Chapter 3 addresses the most brazen instance of rogue diplomacy in the annals of U.S. statecraft: envoy Nicholas Trist's all but single-handed forging of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo after he had been fired - not once but twice - by President James K. Polk. Trist's epochal act of mutiny obtained all the territory Polk had initially authorized him to demand - California, New Mexico, and Texas as far south as the Rio Grande - and at half the envisioned price: $15 million as opposed to $30 million. It also, I contend, saved the United States from the ordeal of a long, debilitating, and expensive guerrilla war with Mexico that would have poisoned U.S.-Latin American relations for over a century. Although Trist was ultimately arrested for his defiance of the president and spent the rest of his life working dead-end jobs to provide for his children, he did more than any other individual to make Manifest Destiny a reality. Trist's triumph, I argue, was in great part a consequence of his personality, for which the term "rebellious" could have been invented. I dig deep into Trist's life and career(s), establishing a constant pattern of behavior: he could not defer to authority, no matter how essential submission was to worldly success. This character defect, which would seem fatal for a diplomat, ironically facilitated Trist's great work in the winter of 1847-48.

The early Virginia School of Economics builds upon the work of the British classical economists as extended by Knight at the University of Chicago. In opposition to the nascent economic orthodoxy's emphasis on efficiency, the Virginia School emphasized economic activity and policy as processes generated by discussion. One continuing controversy involves the status of group goals. Virginia's Vining defended the NBER against Koopmans’ criticism as atheoretic and thus inefficient. For Vining, the NBER attempted to discover hypotheses, an activity for which efficiency is undefined. Buchanan used the Knightian principle of government by discussion to argue that Arrow’s demonstration of an inefficient democracy assumed away the possibility of discovering one’s goals through discussion. Government by discussion has an unappreciated role in Buchanan’s development of Wicksell’s unanimity criterion into the view of politics as exchange. Who participates in the discussion? Only people who actually exist. That privileges the status quo and reduces the economist’s role to offering advice to fellow citizens as equals.