Growth...............................

     The unceasing pressure for federal jobs that confronted Grant at every step mirrored a far larger phenomenon:  the vast transformation of American government wrought by the war.  Federal power had expanded immeasurably, testing the president's ability to manage the change.  The National Bank Acts, the Homestead Act, the Morrill Act setting up land-grant universities—such wartime measures dramatically broadened Washington's authority.  Boasting fifty-three thousand employees, the federal government ranked as the nation's foremost employer.  Before the war, it had touched citizens' lives mostly through the postal system.  Now it taxed citizens directly, conscripted them into the army, oversaw a national currency, and managed a giant nation debt.  As James M. McPherson has pointed out, eleven of the first twelve amendments to the Constitution constrained governmental power: starting with the Thirteenth Amendment, six of the next seven enlarged it.  The war also centralized power, welding states closer together and forging a new sense of nationhood.  As Grant told a relative, "Since the late civil war the feeling of nationality had become stronger than it had ever been before."  When the first transcontinental railroad, aided by land grants and government bonds, was completed two months after Grant took office, it heralded a new geographic unity in American life.

-Ron Chernow,  Grant