John Sherman, the Ohio Icicle: Greenbacks, Gold, and the Antitrust Act

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John Sherman was born in Ohio in 1823, the eighth of 11 children, and was six when his father, a state Supreme Court justice, died and the family was split up. His brother William Tecumseh Sherman became the Union general. Expelled from school for punching a teacher, John became a junior surveyor at 14 and lost the job in 1838 when a Democratic governor cleared out Whig appointees. He studied law with his brother Charles in Mansfield, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 drew him into Congress. He co-wrote a 1,188 page report on Bleeding Kansas, then lost a two month race for Speaker in 1859 after endorsing Hinton Rowan Helper's book The Impending Crisis of the South, which he had not read.

Made chairman of Ways and Means in 1860 and then a senator in 1861, Sherman championed the Legal Tender Act that created greenbacks and the National Banking Act of 1863, backed by a 10 percent tax on state bank notes. He then pushed the Coinage Act of 1873, which critics called the Crime of 73, and as Rutherford B. Hayes's Treasury Secretary built the gold reserve that let greenbacks reach parity in 1879. He sought the Republican presidential nomination in 1880, 1884 and 1888, helped shape the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, and wrote the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. He served over 42 years in federal office and died in 1900.

• By the end of 1861 the Union was spending about $2 million a day.
• He opposed the Chinese Exclusion Act, blaming corporate labor contracts rather than immigrants for low wages.
• His brother William warned him early that the Civil War would be long and costly.
• William McKinley made him Secretary of State at 73 in 1897, opening a Senate seat for Mark Hanna.
• His will set aside $10,000 to pay a competent writer for his biography.