Revisiting Inflation in the American Civil War: Alternative Explanations Beyond Money Supply Growth
Abstract
The greenback inflation of the American Civil War is conventionally read as a straightforward consequence of money supply growth. This paper revisits that account and examines explanations beyond the quantity of money, drawing on a transcription of the price, wage and money stock series in Wesley C. Mitchell's A History of the Greenbacks (1903) together with the Friedman–Schwartz–Mitchell estimates in Historical Statistics of the United States.
The underlying data were transcribed from page images rather than OCR and are published openly, so the empirical basis of the argument can be inspected and reused independently of the argument itself.
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Related
- The greenbacks, 1859–1866 — the open dataset underlying this paper, released under CC0
- Data and code on GitHub — full transcription repository with CSVs and verification notes