You cannot control what a great military event can set loose. More battle casualties than US forces had suffered in every war combined down to that point happened in two days. Two and a half months after that, George B. McClellan's army engaged with Lee's army in what came to be called the Seven Days Battles at Richmond, 36,000 casualties. So those two together just showed that this was gonna be on a totally different scale. He added a psychological twist. What Grant envisioned his doing, and Sheridan actually did it in the Shenandoah Valley before Sherman did it in Georgia, is go into an agriculturally productive area, burn the mills, kill the livestock, destroy the crops, lay waste to it so that it can't be a logistical support of the Confederacy anymore. Sheridan did it in the Shenandoah Valley, and then Sherman did it in Georgia. But Sherman said, 'But I'm also going to break them psychologically. I'm gonna show them that my army can go wherever it wants to go whenever it wants to go, and there's nothing Jefferson Davis can do about it.' The great forces are all that matters and individuals don't really matter notion of history I think is ridiculous. Individuals really matter. For the United States, Lincoln and Grant matter beyond calculation in this war. And on the Confederate side, if you take Lee out of the picture, the war doesn't last nearly as long as it does. In terms of causation, if you take slavery out of the picture, there is no Civil War, period.
The following is a conversation with Gary Gallagher, a historian of the American Civil War. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so on. And now, dear friends, here's Gary Gallagher. The American Civil War broke out in 1861. What were the causes of the Civil War? Could it have been avoided, or was it inevitable?
I don't know if anything is inevitable in history, but it's certainly safe to say that the conditions were in place to make it possible by the winter of 1860, '61, and the conditions that made it possible were all related to the institution of slavery and its effects both in the states where slavery was allowed and the states where it was not allowed. And there had been a series of tensions that grew in the decade preceding the 1850s. It's not that one side wants to get rid of slavery and the other side wants to protect slavery. I'm talking about the white people in the United States now who would be making the political decisions. It's a question of whether slavery was going to be able to expand into federal territories. That is what really created the starkest difference between the two sections in the 1850s, even in the late 1840s. The issues that came to most perilous a point in the view of many people then had to do with whether slavery would be allowed only where it already existed, or would it be allowed to expand. If it could expand, then it seemed that it might be conceivable at some point even that the slaveholding states could end up with a majority. They were in a minority by 1860, '61 and feeling beleaguered, feeling threatened. They'd long since lost the population race to the free states. Early in the nation, the most powerful states were slaveholding states. Virginia was by far the most important state. Four of the first five presidents were from Virginia, all slaveholders, all prominent members of the slaveholding class. Those days were long gone by the late 1850s.
So that's an important thing to say. It wasn't before the Civil War a discussion about abolishing slavery. It's about whether slavery, the institution of slavery should be expanded.
Allowed to expand into federal territories. There is a portion of the white population that is adamantly in favor of getting rid of slavery immediately. The abolitionists, there was even a political party called the Liberty Party, that ran a candidate in 1840 and they got a handful of thousand votes. They reached their high point in 1844. They got about two and a half percent of the vote. The abolitionists are a tiny minority even in the North, tiny minority among the white people of the United States. The African American population, nearly four million of them by 1860, of course, would have embraced it instantly and yearned for it. But in the white population, the abolitionists are a tiny minority. They are much despised even across much of the North because they were seen as agitators who roiled the Union and deepened rifts that might bring a significant political break.
So how did this escalate to a civil war, this almost policy discussion about the institution of slavery? How did it actually escalate?
It escalated into a civil war because in the presidential election of 1860, there'd been two party systems in the United States. The first party system, the Republicans, the Jeffersonian Republicans versus the Federalists. After that, the two parties were the Whig Party against the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party grew out of the Jeffersonian Republican Party. It's the same party. The Whig Party foundered to a significant degree on the issue of slavery. How do you maintain a national party that has a wing in the Southern states and has a wing in the Northern free states that can handle the issue of slavery? The Democrats managed to do that. The Whigs could not do it, and so the Whig Party ran their last candidate in 1852, presidential candidate, significant candidate. And the Republican Party emerged in the mid-1850s, took most of the old Whigs into the Republican ranks and one of the key Republican platform plank was no expansion of slavery into the territories. Not abolish slavery, no expansion. That was the key in 1856 when they ran their first candidate. In 1860, that is again the key plank in the Republican platform. The Republican platform in 1860 says where slavery exists it will continue, but it cannot expand into the territories. When white Southerners saw that, that meant that they were doomed to become an increasingly minority section in the nation, and you would have a federal government increasingly dominated by the free states that could then do the one thing that the white South could not countenance, and that is tamper with the institution of slavery in the South. The presidential election of 1860 brought the destruction of the last national party, which was the Democrats. They couldn't even settle on a candidate, so you end up with a Northern Democratic candidate running, Stephen A. Douglas, and a Southern candidate running. The convention fractured and John C. Breckinridge ran on the Southern Democrat platform. You had a Unionist candidate running who just didn't wanna talk about slavery, let's talk about the Union, and you had Lincoln running as a Republican. When Lincoln won, the white South looked at Lincoln winning. Here's a guy who has said that he doesn't think slavery would expand, but he'd said more than that. He scared the white South more because in 1858, both Lincoln and William Henry Seward, these are two prominent Republicans, had said basically in separate speeches, the House Divided Speech on Lincoln's part, the Irrepressible Conflict Speech on Seward's part, that the nation could not continue in the long term half slave and half free. And everybody in the South knew which way they wanted it to be. They would want it to be no slavery. And so Lincoln's election scared the white South enough so that seven of the 15 slaveholding states seceded in response to Lincoln's election. They seceded between December 20th, when South Carolina went out, and the end of February. You had the deep South went out.
What was the general view amongst the populace towards slavery? Let's kind of lay it out. Let's, you know, for the audience looking back, let's put ourselves in the mind space of how people saw the world, how people saw slavery, how people saw African Americans.
Well, the baseline among the white Americans, there were about 31, a shade more than 31 million Americans in 1860 for the census of 1860. About four million of them were African Americans, three and a half million of those enslaved in the South. Anyway, among the white population, the average attitude toward Black people is what we would call profoundly prejudiced. Doesn't matter whether you... A lot of people think this is a Southern white thing. They're the only ones who were prejudiced. By our standards, the overwhelming majority of people in the free states were also deeply prejudiced. It's important to keep in mind that attitudes towards slavery and attitudes toward race are not necessarily the same. I mean, you could be against slavery and still be prejudiced against Black people. By our standards, many abolitionists were prejudiced against Black people. But the overwhelming majority of the white North, in the North, often had a hard time getting my students to understand the demographics in 1860. The free states in 1860 were more than 98% white. 98% white. African Americans are a tiny minority in the free states. Black people lived in the 15 slaveholding states in 1860. Most of the white North, by our standards, was very prejudiced. They were against the expansion of slavery into the territories because they thought that would circumscribe white opportunities to make an economic life in these federal territories, and they didn't want that to happen. About 45% of the people who lived in the free states were Democrats. Most Democrats had no problem with slavery. I mean, absolutely no problem with the institution of slavery. There would be more problems among Republicans, especially with extension of slavery, although many white Democrats in the North were against that as well. The white South was overwhelmingly in favor of slavery. You often read the argument, the kind of neo-Confederate argument that they'll talk about how most Confederate soldiers didn't own slaves. That's true. A large majority of families in the South did not own a single slave. But all white Southerners had a stake in slavery. They had a stake in it as a form of labor control, but more important than that, they had a stake in it as a means of social control. They knew, no matter what they said later in the Jim Crow era of how happy Black people were in the institution of slavery, they knew that Black people, of course, did not want to be enslaved, and they were afraid of what would happen if they weren't enslaved anymore. They had in the backs of their minds Haiti. Is that what's gonna... If you live in one of the coastal districts of South Carolina where 90% of the residents are enslaved and you're a white person, you probably don't sleep all that soundly at night if you think there's any chance that the Black people are not gonna remain under the control of the white people. So all white people in the South had a stake in slavery, not just some. All of them did, and there were all kinds of ways that it would go back and forth. If you were a modest farmer and grew a little bit of cotton, you didn't have your own cotton gin, but your more wealthy neighbor had a gin, could gin your cotton there, and then you would take your turn on the slave patrol. So there's a reciprocity in that regard.
This is perhaps a bit outside the scope of what we'll talk about today, but just to lay out the context on slavery in general in human history, we should say that slavery was ubiquitous. It existed in virtually every major civilization in the history of humans. Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, China, the Islamic world, Africa, the Americas, North and South America. We should also say something that, as I was looking into this, another big topic, which is the Atlantic slave trade. And it was surprising to me, the stat I wasn't aware of, I would venture to say most Americans probably don't know, that only 4% of African slaves were brought to North America, to the United States.
Brazil is the main destination.
Brazil, the Caribbean was over 90%, 4.9 million in Brazil, 4 million in the Caribbean, and it was also the last of the Americas to abolish the slave trade. So only 4% of the Atlantic slave trade went to the United States. So there's the story of human slavery is one that reaches deep into our history and geographically is much larger than we often study in the context of the United States.
One thing the war, the Civil War, which I'll just call the war for the rest of our discussion, I mean, one thing it did was end slavery in four years in the United States. Whereas in the absence of that war, it might have gone on for decades. I think the United States would have had the ignominious distinction of being the last place to get rid of slavery, would have been after Brazil, would have been after Spanish Cuba, because it was thriving in the United States in 1860. It was making the transition from cash crop agriculture to other, to industrial applications and other applications, not growing just cotton and rice and sugar. There was a time in the literature when people argued that the war was needless, the Civil War was needless because slavery was on its way out. That's absolutely wrong. It was not on its way out. It was thriving. Lincoln said at one point he thought it might have lasted another fifty years, and I don't know how many years it would have lasted, but I think it would have lasted longer than it did in either Cuba or Brazil if the war hadn't taken place.
So slavery was flourishing in the United States from an economics perspective, especially.
The wealthiest part... The 1860 census is our friend, and it tells us that the people who controlled the most wealth in the United States were slaveholders, and their property in slaves alone, not their other holdings, not their land holdings, just property in slaves were valued at about three billion dollars. The value of all industries, all railroads, all of that put together, fewer than two point five billion dollars. So the people who controlled the most wealth, by far, were the slaveholding class.
So it was the most valuable industry in the United States, and perhaps it is the reason. Again, a bit out of scope, but maybe it helps lay out the land. Let's look at the nineteenth century. So most slave-owning societies of the era were able to abolish slavery without people dying at the mass scale that we'll discuss. So Britain freed eight hundred thousand slaves in 1833 by buying their freedom. Russia freed twenty-three million serfs in 1861 with a decree, so legally. Brazil, which imported more than ten times as many enslaved Africans as the United States, abolished slavery in 1888 through basic ordinary legislation. No violence. Why did the US have a civil war with an estimated seven hundred and fifty thousand people dead in order to abolish slavery?
Yes. Let's talk just for a second about the seven hundred and fifty thousand dead soldiers we're talking about. The number for years was six hundred and eighteen thousand, and that's been revised lately. I think we're probably certainly more than seven hundred thousand. By far the bloodiest war in our history as a percentage of the population, off the charts, by far the bloodiest. I think there's a big difference between Great Britain doing it and the United States doing it, is Great Britain did it in other places. There weren't millions of enslaved people in Great Britain at the time. I think, for them, it might have been a little bit easier to free enslaved people who don't live among you than it... In the United States, the ante is up for the Confederacy because the enslaved people lived here, and I think a lot of them were afraid of them and what would happen if they weren't enslaved anymore. The war goes from... It doesn't begin as a war to end slavery. There's a major shift in the war, begins in the summer of 1862, where you add to the war. The war aim for the United States initially is to suppress the rebellion, which is what they called this. They didn't call it the Civil War for the most part during the war. It's the War of the Rebellion. That's the goal initially. As the war goes on and becomes costlier and more all-encompassing, they decide that they're not gonna be able to suppress the rebellion unless they also strike at slavery, because slavery underpins the Confederate war-making capacity. You have enslaved labor that keeps the economy going and allows the Confederacy to mobilize between eighty-five and ninety percent of all their white military-aged males. It's an astonishing mobilization. It's only possible because enslaved labor keeps the economy going. If you take that enslaved labor away, it deals a significant blow to the Confederate economy and, by extension, to its ability to wage a nineteenth century war.
So the Emancipation Proclamation was in part a military strategy.
Abraham Lincoln based it entirely on his war-making power as commander-in-chief in a time of open rebellion. His inclination... He's often been criticized for not including the soaring language he was capable of in the Emancipation Proclamation. One historian likened it to a bill of lading. It had all the soaring language of a bill of lading. He did that on purpose. He did it because he doesn't have the power to strike at slavery in the absence of a war. The president doesn't. And he did it because he knows that he can't win the war with only Republicans in the army. He needs to keep Democrats on board with the war as well. They're not in favor of emancipation. The one way that they might accept it is as a tool to help achieve union, and to do that we've got to strike at the rebels this way, strike at slavery. That will hurt their war effort, and it will also punish the people who brought on the war. So Lincoln hoped that by basing it strictly on his war power, it might be more widely accepted across all parts of the loyal states and not as controversial as it was. It was still intensely controversial. It alienated many Democrats when he issued it, who said, 'You're changing what this war is about. We're willing to shed our blood and maybe risk our lives to restore the union of the founders. I'm not gonna risk my life to free a Black person.' That's a very, very common attitude among Democrats.
So what did the Emancipation Proclamation actually do? It emphasized the freeing of slaves in the South.
It's even more complicated than that. The only place that Lincoln said he had the power as the war leader to strike at slavery is where the rebels were actually still in rebellion and in control. So any place where the US Army was in control... He said that it is in essence United States territory now. I can't free them there because I don't have the power. I can only free them where we don't have the power. So he exempted parts of states and areas in the South that it didn't apply to as of the moment he signed it. Going forward, any place that the United States Army went where it hadn't been on January 1st, 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation applied and enslaved people would be freed by it. Literally at the time he signed it, he didn't free anybody because he's only saying, 'I can free them where we're not in control. We have to be in control for this to have effect and for this to have power.'
So in part, this is why the army was the boundary which the freeing was happening.
It's absolutely the boundary, and Congress had already passed what was called the Second Confiscation Act. It passed this in July of 1862 that announced that all enslaved people belonging to rebels were free. It didn't apply to people who could prove they were unionists living in the South and owned slaves. Lincoln didn't make that distinction in the Emancipation Proclamation. His proclamation is broader than the Second Confiscation Act was.
Okay. There's so many tangents we can take, but let's zoom out once again. There's a difference between cause, as you've talked about, cause and motivation. Quite a large number of people volunteered to fight.
In fact, a majority of all the soldiers who fought on both sides were volunteers during the Civil War. About 3 million served, 2.2 million in the United States, 800, 900,000 in the Confederacy. Again, I talk about things that are hard to get students to understand. This is one of them. They have to separate... The causation and motivation are often conflated, and not just by students but also by lots of talking heads on newscasts in the United States who don't know anything about United States history but know what they know. In terms of causation, if you take slavery out of the picture, there is no Civil War, period. That's not a long conversation you need. You ask the question. That's the answer. Let's go to the next question. The next question is, okay, so were most white people motivated to put on blue uniforms because they wanted to kill slavery? The answer to that is no, they were not. They were motivated to put on blue uniforms to salvage the Union, which they saw as a unique gift that the founding generation, based on the bloodshed in the American Revolution, had bequeathed the successive generations. And the two key parts of what the Union meant for them was, number one, you had a voice in your own government, and someone will always say now to me, 'Well, but women couldn't vote.' That's right. The people who could vote by our standards were limited in the 19th century, but within the context of the Western world in 1860, the United States had by far the broadest franchise, by far. And so they argued that's one thing the Union gives us, and it also gives us the chance to rise economically. Doesn't guarantee that you can succeed, but it means you're not doomed to be what your father was. And those are worth fighting for. And so I will put on a uniform so the slaveholding aristocrats and oligarchs, which is what they called them, of the South, they said they don't really believe in democracy. It's an oligarchy in the South. It's a slavery-based oligarchy, and we know which way Europe's going, they said. The revolutions of the 1840s failed in Europe. Europe's going the wrong way. They're going toward more aristocracy, more oligarchy. And we are the last hope. When Lincoln spoke of the last best hope of Earth, which he did in one of his most memorable phrases, he's meaning that the United States is a beacon of small D democracy in a Western world that seems to be turning the other way. And those soldiers, it meant it was that important to them. They are citizens in a republic that people shed blood to establish, and we can't let it go. Part of the compact is I'm a citizen. I derive these benefits from this republic, from the Union. I can have a voice in government. I can rise economically or have the chance to. I owe my service to that republic. That's what most of them would've said if you'd pressed them on why they're doing it. Doesn't mean everybody was on fire with ideology that way. Some guys would say, 'Well, you know what? I'm broke, and I'm gonna get fed and clothed in the army.' But this sense of exceptionalism, exceptionalism's unpopular now in the United States, but Americans had a sense of themselves as a truly exceptionalist society within the context of the Western world.
And as a small aside terminology-wise, blue is the Union or what we think of as the United States, and red is the Confederacy.
Yes. On the maps, the Confederate units are red blocks. And the United States units are blue blocks. That's right.
And the North and the South is another way we'll refer to it just to clarify.
And let me have a very brief rant on North and South. I prefer to see this as a war between two mid-19th-century republics, one of which didn't last very long and spent its whole life in the midst of a great war. There were 15 slaveholding states in 1860. Only 11 of them seceded from the United States.
Even though there's 13 stars. We'll talk about that.
We'll talk about that demented notion of things in just a minute, but only 11 leave. So there are four slaveholding states in the United States: Kentucky, and Missouri, and Maryland, and Delaware remain in the United States. So it's not just North versus South. Those states are all part of the South. It's the United States versus the Confederacy.
But see how you referred to it as the United States. So the Union is also referred to as the United States.
That's correct. Yes, yes.
But the Confederacy was, as you write about, a set of people who also had a sense of nationalism, pride.
Well, and took their founding document. I mean, it took the whole summer of 1787 in Philadelphia, that hot, steamy, humid summer of 1787 to come up with the Constitution. The Confederates did it quickly 'cause they basically had the US Constitution here, a blank piece of paper over here, copied most of the Constitution over here, just changed the parts that they needed to make sure slavery was protected, and you didn't have the wrong kind of tariffs and so forth. That's one reason they could do it so quickly. It's absolutely based on the government they've been thriving under, which is under the United States Constitution. Both sides claimed they were the true inheritors of the revolutionary generation. Jefferson Davis loved the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration is Abraham Lincoln's favorite document. They just liked different parts of it.
So we should think of this as two republics.
I argue that. That makes many people very angry.
I will make many people angry today.
They say that I am conferring legitimacy on the Confederacy that they don't deserve, and my response to that is they have a national government. They have a Senate. They have a Congress. They have an army. They have a navy. They have departments. It walks like a duck. It quacks like a duck. In the end, it's a slaughtered duck faster than it would've been because the United States military forces crushed it.
We should say that you are respected, admired, loved by most people on both sides in, from a perspective sense. You're deeply respected by historians of Civil War and just historians of American history. But of course, when you do your job well on a controversial topic in a controversial period of human history, you're going to get, hopefully an equal amount of critics on both sides. And that's when you do your job well. So sometimes when we speak today, some of the controversial, quote-unquote, controversial things that you express are controversial from that small minority of folks on both sides for different reasons.
Yes. One of my favorite pieces of hate mail I got was an email where this guy, he was upset that I referred to the Confederacy as a slaveholding republic, and he said that he hoped I would develop virulent pancreatic cancer and die a horrible death. Not just regular pancreatic cancer. He wanted virulent pancreatic cancer. And then he signed his name and said he'd be happy to talk to me anytime I wanted to.
Yeah. I'm sure that would be a wonderful conversation. But there's also really strong senses throughout the United States of this diversity of opinion of what is the United States.
And that's where the passion is really rooted.
Both sides claim... In the election of 1860, Douglas talked about how much he loved the Union. Lincoln talked about how much he loved the Union. Breckinridge talked about how much he loved the Union. And John Bell, who's the Unionist, the Constitutional Union, that's all he talked about. They just had different versions of what the Union was.
And that's why I love this country. I think it's the greatest country on Earth, and it has a bunch of people that very strongly disagree with each other. Of course, hopefully never again escalating to the degree that it did during this period of time. So we talked about the blue people on the map and the red people on the map. It may be a silly thing to ask, but sticking with the motivation, why would, let's say, a farm boy in Ohio want to die for the Union?
That is the most important, and I didn't even ask you to ask that question. That's the hardest thing.
Let's be honest. You paid me a lot of money to ask that question, yeah.
I didn't think it was so much.
Okay. I'm sorry. Go ahead. I won't distract.
No. I tell my students at the beginning of my Civil War class that if they couldn't explain, I didn't use Ohio. I said, 'If you can't explain why a farmer from Vermont would put on a blue uniform and pick up a musket to make South Carolina come back in, why didn't he just say, Great. South Carolina's gone. I never liked them anyway. This is a better union.' If you can't explain that, then you can't understand the Civil War.' And the key to that, I'll come back to it, is union because he would've said, 'If we allow South Carolina to go, that means that other places could go and you could dismantle. And the only reason they're going is because they didn't like who was elected president. They didn't say that Lincoln was corrupt. They didn't say Republicans bought the election. They just didn't like who won the election. And so if the republic is so fragile that it can't have an election without having the people who didn't like who won leave, then the founders had wasted their time, the revolution was for nothing, all that bloodshed meant nothing. You had to step up and save this precious republic that had been put in place by the revolutionary generation and gave its citizens the benefits that I've already talked about.' That's why they would put on a uniform and risk their life, because they believed a citizen... These are citizen soldiers. We don't know what that means so much now because we have a professional military establishment now. I mean, even when I was younger, there was still a draft, but that's gone now. And so we don't understand what the concept of citizen soldier was, that you owe something back to the republic that has conveyed these things to you, and that's why the guy from Vermont or New Hampshire or Ohio would put on a uniform and go into military service.
Is it possible for us to understand that level of love of nation and believe in nation? Is this very distant from what America is today?
I actually think many people probably still feel that way, but they're not the ones who are on television most of the time. Republicans in the midst of the war commented about the fact that even with this gigantic conflict going on, immigration continued at a high level. People coming into a nation that was in the middle of a great war. And they said, 'This is a testament to the promise of the United States.' And I think that promise continues. I mean, we've argued about... As with so many things, Americans have no sense of history. They believe we've never argued about immigration before. We've always argued about immigration, with some people always saying, 'Shut the door. They're ruining us. The Italians are ruining us. The Irish are Catholics. They're ruining us. God, the Southern Europeans are even worse than the Irish were.' The people change, the arguments stay very much the same, and I think it's really telling that in the midst of the war, people would say, 'Look at our republic. It offers so much to people that even in the midst of this great war, they're still coming to the United States.'
And like you said, both sides, both these republics claimed, for example, George Washington.
Yes. They both claim... I'll leave it at that. They both claim George Washington. They wanted to be right with the man, which is what George Washington was. He's the indispensable man, no question. Both sides wanted him on their side. They both quoted Thomas Jefferson, although Confederates were a little more leery of Jefferson 'cause he's too complicated for them sometimes. But no, they wanted to be right with the founders and claimed to be right with the founders. The Confederates would say, 'The Constitution allowed slavery. What are you talking about we're out of step with the Constitution? We're in step with the Constitution. You're the ones who are out of step with the Constitution.'
What about the topic of states' rights? At the very least...
I love state rights. State rights... I mean, I love the way people use it with the Civil War. They associate it solely with Southern states, of course. State rights is always available in United States history for somebody who's not happy with what the federal government is doing. During the War of 1812, it was New England that most often talked about resorting to state rights. They had a convention where they sort of wandered over towards secession territory in the Hartford Convention. We think of it as state rights because as you lead up to the Civil War, you hear white Southerners talking about it all the time. 'We need our state rights.' I always love to ask people who say that, 'What are all the state rights? Give me... List the state rights that the white South is concerned.' You know, 'Give me the top three. No, really, just give me the top two.' There's only one. The state right that they're worried about is the right of their state to interpose its power between a federal government that might try to interfere with slavery and a state government that wants to maintain it. That's the state right that matters then. Northern states also resorted to state rights during the ramp-up to the Civil War, with what were called personal liberty laws. They tried to interpose their state power in between a federal government that would use its power to force escaped, enslaved people back into slavery. It's whoever's unhappy with the federal government, the concept of state rights is available, and both sides used it.
And of course, the beautiful, dark, ironic hypocrisy was illustrated by the Confederacy when they were the first to pass a national draft in American history.
Like, irony is wonderful in history. Another thing that I love to teach is that the most intrusive central government in American history, by far, until deep into the 20th century, was the Confederate central government, because it had to do things to keep the war going that it couldn't have done unless the central government stepped in, such as passing the first national conscription law in American history. The US government never forced people into uniform before the Civil War. The Confederates did it first. They did it in the spring of 1862. They passed a national graduated income tax. And when taxing didn't work, when their money became so devalued, they then passed what they called the tax in kind. They would take a percentage of your crop. They allowed the government to impress horses and mules and enslaved labor to work on... All of these were intrusions from the central government that drove true state rights people crazy in the Confederacy. Confederates didn't have political parties because they said the founders didn't want them, so we won't have them. But what they did have was a sort of nationalist, 'We're gonna let the central government do whatever it needs to do.' That's Jefferson Davis' wing, and Robert E. Lee's over there, too. And the people like the vice president, Alexander Stephens, who said, 'You can't do all this stuff because the states should have more power.' The only reason the war lasted as long as it did is because the central government did things no one ever would have believed they would do. He also got rid of habeas corpus just like Abraham Lincoln did in selected situations.
And of course, we should really emphasize that on both sides, those volunteers, on the Confederacy, there's a very large number of people percentage-wise that volunteered to fight. And then I believe the volunteer period was one year, and then there's all kind of funky stuff that the government started doing to trap those people into then serving and...
Here's what the Confederacy did. Nobody thinks the war's gonna last a long time in the spring of 1861. So if you enlist for a year, that's probably plenty of time to finish this war. Well, a year goes by and a significant percentage of the Confederate men under arms are due to get out. So what the Confederate Congress did was pass conscription. We're gonna make everybody liable to three-year service. And in the midst of doing that, all you guys who volunteered for one year are now in for two more years. Well, that outraged... I mean, 'You're breaking faith with us,' they said. They didn't stop there. Later they revised it when the war kept going on and then the three years guys were gonna get out, then the Congress stepped in and said, 'You're in for the duration.' The bottom line is, the Confederacy ever gets you in uniform, you don't get out because they keep changing the rules on you. And that was considered, national conscription was considered a fundamental abridgment of individual rights by many people. That's something the government should never force a citizen into uniform. A citizen should volunteer their service. The US government waited a year, then it did it in the spring of 1863, although it always respected original terms of enlistment. Never made it the war for the duration the way the Confederacy did.
Quick pause for a bathroom break if it's okay. Quick 10-second shout-out to our sponsors. Check them out in the description. It really is the best way to support this podcast. Go to lexfridman.com/sponsors. And now, dear friends, back to my conversation with Gary Gallagher. All right, we're back. There's so many different directions we can go, but I am somebody who believes that individuals can steer the direction of history. So one angle to look at here is some of the legendary historical figures from this time. Let's talk about some of the key figures of the Civil War. We have Abraham Lincoln, of course, the President of the United States who held the Union together and turned the war into a fight for a new birth of freedom. Jefferson Davis, who you mentioned, President of the Confederacy. Ulysses S. Grant, somebody we'll talk about quite a bit, General in Chief of the Union armies. Robert E. Lee on the other side, the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, somebody who you have studied for decades now. We'll talk a lot about him. There's Sherman, there's Stonewall Jackson, there's Frederick Douglass, there is McClellan, there is John Brown, a militant abolitionist. Many more figures, but let's look at three at first. Let's look at Lincoln, Grant, and Lee. Lincoln first. So Abraham Lincoln, we have this backwoods lawyer with a single year of schooling who somehow outgrew every polished man around him and became one of the most consequential leaders in human history. So what do we need to understand? What can we possibly understand at a 10,000-foot level about Lincoln that made it all possible? What was it about Lincoln's mind that made this man do what he did?
Almost nobody continues to go up in my estimation as I get older and older, but Lincoln is one of the people who does. And Lincoln is quite frankly a mystery to me. I don't see how you get Abraham Lincoln out of someone who came from his very poor background. You said he had a year of schooling. You're being very generous to him there. He didn't even really have a year of formal schooling. And you end up with a person who is the most eloquent president we've ever had by a very wide margin and I think even more eloquent than Jefferson, and who is able to distill into the fewest possible words the most complex ideas and topics imaginable and just have them ring in a way that almost no one is able to do. He had an ego, but I think one of his real gifts was the ability to put his ego aside and keep his eye on the goal. He was able to really focus, and he focused relentlessly on, number one, suppressing the rebellion and restoring the Union, but also getting... He hated the institution of slavery. He's not an abolitionist, but he hated the institution of slavery and he was very happy to see that slavery was added to the roster of what the United States would insist on at the end of the war. He's able to let all the other things go. He can pay attention to many things, but he never loses his... his principal focus was, 'How do I maintain this great war?' And it's really hard to get people to understand the scope of the Civil War. There are 31 million people in the United States then. About a shade more than 3 million put on uniforms. It would be as if we had 35 to 40 million people under arms now. For the Confederates, it would be like having more like 55 million people under arms as a percentage of the population. The dead would be between 6 million and 7.5 million, depending on how you count it. The scope is just... During the Gulf Wars, The New York Times put a picture of every United States service person who was killed, put a picture in the paper over the scope of those wars, and that is about as many people as were shot in a few hours at Antietam. It's just very different to get students now to understand the different scale, and that's what Lincoln's dealing with. How do I keep the focus on a war that is becoming far more costly than anyone imagined, and eating up our young manpower at a rate that no one... There's never been anything in our history to prepare the United States for this. Winfield Scott captured Mexico City with an army of fewer than 15,000 during the war with Mexico. U.S. Grant has 120,000. I mean, the whole scale is just so different that it's hard to come to terms with it. And that's what Lincoln was dealing with. I think the fact that he was willing to surround himself with really able counselors is important. Who does he put in his cabinet? He puts his main rivals in the cabinet. He put William Henry Seward in his cabinet, who's the most famous Republican in the country. He puts Salmon P. Chase, who's a very smart and effective and ambitious person from Ohio, in his cabinet. He surrounds himself with people who are capable and energetic and have their own ambitions, he's not afraid to do that, all of whom had far better educations than he had and didn't have a rural backwoods accent like he did. It's also a measure of how confident he was. He didn't pretend to talk in a fashion that he didn't actually talk. He would've pronounced words in ways that anybody who went to Harvard would just sneer at. He didn't, and he knew they sneered, and he didn't care. Because eventually, all of them, except the ones with only a 20-watt bulb, figured out that Lincoln was actually probably smarter than they were and had a better grasp of things than they did and brought them around. He really brought Seward around, which is very impressive.
Yeah, there's so many fascinating things about Lincoln. So backwoods of Kentucky, and Kentucky is a very important state in this story. And the right words, the right speeches, the right debates at this moment in history. It really does make me wonder, you know, if Lincoln didn't exist, if certain humans in history didn't exist, that everything could have turned out very differently.
The great forces are all that matters and individuals don't really matter notion of history I think is ridiculous. Individuals really matter. For the United States, Lincoln and Grant matter beyond calculation in this war. And on the Confederate side, if you take Lee out of the picture, the war doesn't last nearly as long as it does. In fact, we'll talk about this later probably, I think it could have ended early in the summer of 1862 with slavery still intact. I mean, in a perverse way, Lee furthers the cause of emancipation because he extends the war long enough that the United States says, 'We have to do this. We've gotta get rid of slavery to defeat the rebels.'
So, and also on the psychological side, Lincoln is a... this is a fascinating study because he carried deep depression all his life.
He had black moods in his life, yes, he did.
And so for somebody that has to go through an all-encompassing war, to be able to sort of survive through that, to think through that, without an education, without any acquired skill that enables him to be a commander-in-chief during a time of war. He's got nothing in the toolbox, and yet he steps up.
If you looked at his resume and Jefferson Davis's in 1860 and said, 'Okay, here are the two guys who are gonna be your respective commanders-in-chief. Who do you want on your team?' Lincoln had no administrative experience beyond running a little law office. He had one two-year term in the House of Representatives in terms of national government. He had no military service to speak of, a little while in the Black Hawk War as a junior officer in the Black Hawk War. Didn't check any of the education boxes, as you said. Jefferson Davis was a graduate of West Point. He'd commanded more men in the war with Mexico than most of the men who commanded armies during the Civil War. He'd chaired the Senate Committee on Military Affairs. He'd been Secretary of War, a lot of administrative experience. He checked every box. Lincoln checked none of the boxes, and yet you got Lincoln as a commander-in-chief. It's really quite remarkable. He could listen to people that he thought knew more about something than he did. That's a quality that all of our presidents, to put it mildly, have not had. Lincoln did have that. He could listen. He could admit when he was wrong and change his mind about things, and he could put up with obnoxious behavior on the part of people that he thought might deliver the goods. And a perfect example of this is George Brinton McClellan, whom we'll talk about later, who was general-in-chief for a while, commanded the Army of the Potomac. In 1861, Lincoln and his Secretary of State, William Henry Seward, went to McClellan's house to talk to McClellan. The commander-in-chief goes to McClellan's house. McClellan wasn't there. The butler or somebody put them in a side room. McClellan came home, was told Lincoln was there. He went upstairs and then told the person who worked for him to go tell the president that he'd be happy to talk to him some other time. And so Lincoln just left. He never went back to see McClellan again, didn't pitch a fit, filed that away. Okay, McClellan's an ass, but I think he might win the war. I mean, he had that ability to do that, to put aside that kind of behavior on the part of someone if he thought they would deliver. He just has a number of qualities, I think, that are very unusual to find in someone. And as you say, he did have depressive moments, and we talk about what bad days presidents have. Now, Lincoln would have said, I'll take that president's worst day every day rather than the days that I get, for the most part. I mean, it's hard to imagine the burdens that he carried.
And at the right time was just a handful of words expressed something that no military could possibly do.
Explain what the war was about, why it was worth fighting, what it meant, his second inaugural address. I mean, when people went to hear the president give his second inaugural address on that cold day in 1865, what they wanted to hear, they finally beat the rebel scum from their point of view. Let's have some retribution here. What are we going to do to them? How are we going to make these people who brought this great war pay for this? And what does Lincoln tell them? He tells them slavery caused it. Everybody knows that somehow that's the truth, and we're all implicated in it. I mean, he didn't tell them anything that they wanted to hear that day. And it took great courage, I think, to do that at that moment, to tell an audience what they didn't want to hear. And he did it in the most eloquent language that any president's... that's the greatest speech in American history, the second inaugural, in my view.
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
And we're all complicit in this because we all countenanced slavery. I mean, that's all in that one speech. And it's a short speech. The whole speech probably only lasted eight or nine minutes. And he also pays tribute to the citizen soldiers at the beginning of it because he says that the war is going well and we all know that everything depends on what our soldiers do. And by that he meant saving the union, killing slavery, it all depends on them. And then he comes back and finishes with his tribute to the soldiers at the end.
And I have to say the Gettysburg Address. If I may, it's only maybe 200 words. Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth. That's a big statement about what this country is about. It's about freedom.
And he comes back to, when most people read that, the very last part of it, they emphasize the prepositions of the people, by the people, for the people. Lincoln, it's not about the prepositions. It's about the people. He earlier in the war referred to this as a people's contest. It's the people that are the key, the people who make up the republic, the people who will derive the freedoms and liberties that the... I mean, it's an amazing... and it probably took you two minutes to read that. He was finished before most people knew he had started at Gettysburg. Almost nobody heard him say that. The one thing wrong about it is when he said no one would remember very long what he said there. It's been remembered pretty well.
And let's talk about the two other figures which we'll return to time and time again. Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee. So who was Grant? So this is a man who failed at farming. Failed at business, failed at his role in the peacetime army. Then when the war came, the war revealed a genius.
So he'd known a lot of failure, he'd known a lot of setbacks, and his wartime record shows that he'd learned to deal with those things. He had a great, tremendous relationship with his wife, a very strong family life, a family he loved. I think that was the rock for him. But during the war, what he exhibited was an absolute willingness to break rules, to take risks, to take responsibility for what he was doing, whether it was a success or a failure, and not to be cast down by things that didn't work. If something didn't work, he'd say, 'Okay, that didn't work. Now let's do this.' He very famously, when he got to Virginia in 1864 and took over the Army of the Potomac, he had all these subordinates who were saying, 'Well, what if General Lee does this? What if General Lee does that?' He finally said, 'Why don't we start worrying... let's not worry about what General Lee is gonna do and let General Lee worry about what we're going to do?' I mean, he just had... He was unflappable under stress. He was the perfect person to end up heading the Union armies, and he and Lincoln... And Lincoln realized that, and he proved indispensable. But he has this reputation as a butcher, Grant the Butcher. That's something that former Confederates and some Democrats in the North fastened on him. His preferred way of fighting wasn't just kind of slug it out. It's really interesting to compare his record in the war and Lee's record in the war before they wound up opposing each other in Virginia in a really bloody overland campaign. Grant's total casualties in all his great battles before they met were 37,000. Lee's were over 98,000 in the same period. The bloodiest general in US history by far in terms of how many of his men get shot is Robert E. Lee. The most careful demographic study of any Civil War army is one done of Lee's army by a scholar named Joe Glatthaar, and Joe figured out that if you were a soldier in Robert E. Lee's army, you had a 73% chance of becoming a casualty. 73%. Grant's casualties get high when he runs into Robert E. Lee, just like everybody else. So the butcher tag is completely unfair about Grant. He's also known as a drunk, and people have gone back and forth on that, whether he just had a weakness, couldn't hold his alcohol very well or was okay as long as his wife was around and he had a key staff officer to help him. The point is, alcohol never got in the way of anything Grant did during the war, and he had a superlative record of delivering victories when the United States needed them, and Lincoln figured that out. And the absolute proof of his stature because of this is that in the March of 1864, Congress decided to dust off the rank of three-star general, lieutenant general, and give it to Grant. The only person who'd ever had that rank was George Washington, the man, Jorge. I mean, he is the man. And so they are saying, 'Okay, Grant, you get the rank the man had,' and that shows there's never been anyone else who got it. You're the first. And then he would also be the first to get a four-star rank in the United States Army. There couldn't be a better indication of his stature than that he got Washington's rank. Winfield Scott had had it by brevet. Grant got the actual rank.
So in part, the Grant the Butcher...
The label was from the Overland Campaign that we'll talk about...
It is from the Overland Campaign... as the military decisions made there.
Yep.
Many would argue that those are critically important for the success of the war.
Yes. He and Lee are often compared, but for the last year of the war, they're operating on... it's not apples to apples because Grant is general in chief and is managing the entire war effort. He's managing what Sherman's doing and what Sheridan's doing and what Nathaniel Banks... Lee is an army commander. He can recommend things to Jefferson Davis, but he never commands more than an army, and so he never operates at the level that Grant did. Very late in the war, he was made general in chief when it was so late that it didn't matter.
So who was Robert E. Lee? In April 1861, Lee was offered command of the Union Army...
...and chose Virginia instead.
What was he actually choosing in that decision? Was he choosing home? Was he choosing honor? Was he choosing slavery? And maybe just zooming out, what do we need to understand in the early steps about Robert E. Lee? Who was the man?
Well, Lee is sort of the antithesis of Grant in some ways. Lee is from an aristocratic family. Grant was from a solidly middle-class family. Lee's from an aristocratic family at the very top of the Virginia aristocracy. The Lees are all... He has uncles who were prominent, two signed the Declaration of Independence. His father was a famous commander under George Washington. His father's the one who said that Washington was first in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen. That's Lee's father, who was later a prominent Virginia politician. Lee's idol is George Washington. He patterns himself on Washington. He differs from him in some ways, but he patterns himself on Washington. He considered Washington the most admirable person in United States history. And then, of course, he almost undoes the work that George Washington put in place during the American Revolution. He chose Virginia. He didn't leave... He didn't resign his commission in the United States Army to go with the Confederacy. He resigned his commission in the United States Army to go to Virginia, which wasn't in the Confederacy yet, become the head of state forces in Virginia. But then when Virginia went into the Confederacy, he took his Confederate commission and ended up as the third-ranking officer in Confederate service, and he makes an easy transition to a Confederate loyalty. I think it's his loyalty to Virginia and what that means. That means his family, and of course that means slavery. That's part of what that loyalty is. He's devoted to the slave-holding South as well as to Virginia. Virginia's a subset of that. All of that is in one bundle with Lee. It's all... But he also had been an ardent U.S. nationalist earlier in his career, and a very successful military officer. Winfield Scott thought he was the greatest soldier in the army, and Scott, he probably really thought, 'Except for me.' But Scott is a great soldier that people don't remember that way because he became a kinda Jabba the Hutt figure by the time of the Civil War. He's enormous, weighs 350 pounds, has to be winched onto his horse. But he was a very smart guy and he thought very highly of Lee. Lee was a superb soldier, as he would show during the war, but he's on the wrong side.
Maybe just to throw in a few more characters, I do think the folks on both sides that are of the more radical persuasion are quite interesting. Somebody you spoke about, I'm not sure where, I think it might've been in your lecture series about Thaddeus Stevens.
Yes, Thaddeus Stevens. Thaddeus Stevens was one of the most radical of the radical Republicans. He's a congressman from Pennsylvania who... People think people say harsh things now in Congress. Thaddeus Stevens just eviscerated people. And he was way out... I mean, he was an ardent abolitionist and for equal rights for women in many ways, and he picked up a number of causes and championed them.
I think in your lecture you mentioned this thing which I just love, the slime line.
He had a... This is his kind of line. He's sitting in the House of Representatives and one of his opponents... and he's speaking, and one of his opponents starts to come down to the floor and he says, and this is a paraphrase, 'I'm gonna pause while my colleague,' from wherever he was from, 'slinks across the floor of this House and adheres to his seat by his own slime.'
That's a great line. Impromptu. He had a... Women used to ask for locks of hair from famous people, and he was completely bald and wore a full wig. He had a woman stop him on the steps to the Capitol and ask for a lock of his hair, took his whole wig off and said, 'Madam, have them all.' And...
But of the radical persuasion.
Oh, absolutely. Yes, he defined it. He is the character in Birth of a Nation, Stoneman, the character of Stoneman, the evil radical Republican named Stoneman, is patterned on Thaddeus Stevens.
All right. If we can, let's talk about the buildup to the war.
What were the key states on both sides that were debating? What are the ones that were certainly going to be firmly on one side or the other? And maybe what are the ones that were critical at the borderline?
The states that were in the forefront of the secession movement were the Deep South states, and South Carolina was kind of ground central for what was going on there. It just so happened that the Democrats had their national convention in Charleston in 1860, which is the worst place in the world they could've had it if they wanted a quiet, rational discussion of anything. South Carolina is the first state to secede, and then is quickly followed. You can just go the tier across Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, Texas. That's the... It's seven states. The Deep South states go out in that initial... But there's a long period then, and they gather in Montgomery, Alabama, to establish a new government with Montgomery as the capital of the Confederacy. Delegates from those states do. And they set up a provisional government that's gonna last a year and call for the first national elections in 1861. There are only seven states there, and really only six for a lot of it 'cause Texas got there late. It was the last of the first seven to secede. But the states that haven't seceded yet are the ones with the most people. Virginia, which is the most populous, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri. Eight states have not gone out. Eight slaveholding states have not gone out. The most important one is Virginia among those that have not gone out. The question is, can they find some resolution to all of this, or is it gonna get more serious, and are those states gonna go? And it came to focus, once again, on Charleston, South Carolina, and a federal installation in Charleston Harbor, Fort Sumter. Much United States property and installations had been just given over to the Confederates. And the question is, can we do it with this one as well? This is a very difficult decision to make, and it comes down to what's gonna happen in Charleston Harbor. And in the end, I mean, Jefferson Davis believed that he couldn't allow it to remain a federal installation 'cause it's actually in the Confederacy from their point of view. And Lincoln, who's not conceding the right of states to secede. They're temporarily out of our power, but we have to maintain... He decided in the end to maintain power there, not to reinforce it, but to resupply it, needed supplies. And that's what triggers it. Then the ball's in Jefferson Davis' court. 'Okay, they're gonna resupply it. What do we do?' And they decided we need to insist that it surrender, and if it won't surrender, we need to fire on it. And the Confederates fired the first shots. They would've said, 'We were forced to fire the first shots by what Lincoln did.' Nobody wanted to be the ones who fired the first shots. But in the end, it's the Confederates who fired the first shots. And once that is fired, the key thing is not the firing on Sumter in the end, but that sets up the key thing, which is Lincoln's call for volunteers to suppress the rebellion, and he is gonna ask each state to supply people. And the Upper South states, most of them have said, 'We're not gonna secede, but you can't... But the states that are gone had the right to secede, and you can't do anything to make them come back.' Lincoln is seeming to make them do things to come back. And so four more states went out. Virginia went out. Arkansas went out. Tennessee went out. Then North Carolina went out. And now you have an 11-state Confederacy rather than seven. But more than that, you have Virginia. The city of Richmond has 40% of all the industrial capacity in the entire Confederacy, what became the Confederacy. Virginia is the most populous state, has the largest slave population, the largest white population. It supplies the most important military leaders. And the capital ends up in Richmond. They move from Montgomery to Richmond in acknowledgment of how important Richmond is, that this is the key state. The key states that didn't go out were Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri. Delaware didn't either, but who cares? The other three didn't go out, and that really mattered because they were more populous. But 11 are gone. Four remain in the Union.
And to lay out some more context, going to Perplexity here, by total enslaved population on the eve of the Civil War, we have looking at the top five states, Virginia, as you said, with the most number of slaves, 490,000. Then Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, all with over 400,000 slaves.
Yes. And Mississippi and South Carolina have the highest proportion of enslaved people of any of the states. And this is an interesting little fact from the 1860 census. When you're talking about white people in the United States, those are the two wealthiest states per capita in the United States, are South Carolina and Mississippi in 1860.
Boy, the complicated history of this great nation of ours.
It's hard to overstate the resources. The states that sent the most men into the Confederate Army are Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia. Three of those come in this second wave of secessions. Three of them, three of the four. Only Georgia among the original ones was in those top four states. And so you would have had a much, much smaller pool of manpower for that earlier version of the Confederacy. It's inconceivable to me that you would have had the war we had with just that version.
So it does feel, just to linger on it, like there was a lot on the balance here. Like there was a lot of different decisions that could have been made, even on the political side, that could have turned the tides.
For example, there's a secession convention in Virginia. It votes twice against secession. Twice. It's only after Sumter that they come back for another vote. I mean, it's a Unionist vote in that convention in Virginia. And it's only after Fort Sumter.
And then it's still so divided that a big chunk of Virginia decide that's how you get West Virginia. West Virginia essentially secedes from Virginia in the course of the Civil War.
And given the industrial capacity of Virginia, that was a critical state. So it could have been... Virginia could have changed. We could have avoided the Civil War with Virginia alone.
It would have really changed. I mean, Virginia is the key. Virginia is the key because of the manpower, the industrial capacity, the food production, and Virginia gives you Lee, Jackson, Jeb Stuart. I mean, it, and the most soldiers of any state in the Confederacy. It's just, it's a real game changer to get Virginia. Plus, it also gives you these unbelievable ties to the revolutionary generation. Hey, it's George's home state. It is now in the Confederacy with his big statue on the Capitol grounds of George Washington. I mean, gives you, you get Washington, the ties to Jefferson, the ties to Madison. All of this comes in with Virginia.
So I think a lot of historians have said that the Civil War was inevitable. It... You're really painting a picture here where it perhaps was not inevitable.
I don't think it's inevitable. Things happen in a sequence. I was at an academic conference once when they were trying to decide what important dates were, and they concluded that no dates are... dates are an artificial construction. No date is more important than any other. That is so obviously preposterous. I mean, things happen in a sequence. They don't just sort of happen. Lincoln's elected, then South Carolina secedes, then other states secede, then... I mean, things happen as a consequence of what happened before, and you have these various things that have to happen before the next thing does. And then we end up with a war that seems to be inevitable, but it's not... It's just the way things played out. All of these factors are in motion, and you end up with the sequence that gets you to where people start shooting each other.
Yeah. When you read history and look back, it seems inevitable. But if we were to place ourselves in that moment of time, do you think there's decisions that could have been made?
The decision to not let Fort Sumter, I mean, that's a big decision to make. If they had just, if Lincoln had just said, 'Go ahead and take Fort Sumter,' okay, then maybe... Then what would it have taken to trigger the departure of those upper South states? That would have changed that whole equation. But Lincoln decided you just can't keep giving them everything that they want if you don't concede that they have the right to do what they did.
Yeah, there would be continued heated political debates, intense political debates about the expansion of slavery, but it would not cause rebellion to then escalate into a full-on hot war.
I think that's conceivable. I don't think the war was inevitable. I think it... But I think the conditions were present for it to happen, obviously. I mean, that's stating... 'Cause it did happen. But I think it's very tricky to just say that it was inevitable. That's kind of starting at the end of the story and just saying, 'Let's look at the factors that got us here. We know it was gonna happen, and these are the things that pointed this direction.'
Can we just actually linger on this, on the nature of war? Over 700,000 people dead. How do we make sense of our capacity as, in that context, Americans? To kill sometimes literally our brothers...
Yes, sometimes literally our brothers.
How is that even possible?
Well, one thing, it tells me things are pretty important to people on both sides if you're gonna continue for a war that long. I mean, there was a period in the literature, in the scholarly literature in the 1980s and into the 1990s where they argued that the Confederacy wasn't a nation, and the proof was that they didn't try very hard, that they... If they'd really thought of themselves as a nation, they would have tried harder and fought longer. Well, they lost between four and a half and five and a half percent of their entire population, which is more than Great Britain, France, Germany, or Russia during World War I. They had a higher percentage loss than any of the powers in World War I. The U.S. lost about 1.8% of its population from the war. U.S. in World War II, three-tenths of 1% of its population... That seems... They lost more than 30% of their entire white military-age males in the war. It'd be the equivalent of about 18 million Americans being killed now in a war. That seems to me that they're pretty serious about something there.
It means that's one of the largest percentages of loss. That's... If that's a measure of dedication...
If that's your measure of dedication, yes, and it seems to me that it should be one of the metrics that you bring to play that, that it's... They just keep at it. They didn't give up easily.
What can we say about the motivation? On the psychological side, did the members of the Confederacy hate the members of the Union?
Well, that escalated on both sides during the war. As more and more loss came, you... They did. There was more hatred directed toward the enemy more and more. This notion that it's they're all brothers and not really mad at each other and... That just doesn't hold up. There are places where the soldiers fraternized with one another and traded tobacco for coffee and that kind of stuff, but no, the bitterness as the war went on, and there was greater loss on the home front, and as the war became more all-encompassing and really went after the entire... The civilian side of the Confederacy was not shielded from it, the bitterness increased and increased and increased. And there's a lot of unhappiness with the war behind the lines in the Confederacy, absolutely, unhappiness with the government. There's desertion. About 15% of Confederate soldiers deserted. About 12% of United States soldiers deserted. So there's desertion on both sides. There's war-weariness, but the war goes on because I think if you had been able to poll most white Southerners even late in the war and say, 'Okay, here are your choices. You either have Jefferson Davis in the government and the war goes on, or you're going back into the United States and the Lincoln government will be in charge and you won't have slavery. Which one do you pick?' They're gonna pick the first one, and that's why the war went on as long as it did.
But at the same time, to fast-forward, and that maybe teaches you something about the nature of war, but after the war, maybe some of the decisions that Grant made, people were able to rediscover the brotherhood.
You mean at Appomattox you're talking about...
...the terms at Appomattox.
Yes, the... And those were... And he didn't just reach up in the air and say, 'I've got some terms.' The... Lincoln very specifically... He met with Lincoln shortly before Appomattox. Sherman was there. One top naval officer was there, Grant and Lincoln, and Lincoln said, 'This is what I want. This is the kind of peace I want. The whole point of this war is to put the nation back together, and a good start on that is...' I mean, if it's just a rebellion, what do you do with traitors and rebels? You hang them. You don't bring them back. You don't treat them as prisoners of war, which the United States did during this. You, he... But the goal is to put the nation back together, and Lincoln said, 'This is a good start. Make them sign a parole. Make them accept the end of slavery and the fact that they're back in the Union. If they do that, they get to go home and resume their lives.' Hadn't been decided yet whether they'll get to vote, but let them go home. Don't imprison them. Don't execute them. Don't execute their leaders. That's the decision.
From the perspective of the Union, what do you think about that kind of forgiveness?
Well, I think that it was sort of a nod toward the direction of forgiveness, but I don't think the real... I don't think real forgiveness was there. It was still extremely hard feelings on both sides, and Lincoln's assassination upped the ante on that, especially for a while, in the United States. The, the forgiveness... Two things in terms of the aftermath of the war, two words that often come into play are reunion and reconciliation. Those are two other things that are often conflated. Reunion is literally putting the nation back together. That happened. Reconcile, true reconciliation, that's much, much, much tougher, and that didn't come anytime soon on the part of millions of people on both sides, I think.
And we'll probably maybe talk about in multiple ways how maybe that is something that's still going on.
Oh, there are echoes of the Civil War all over the place. It's not still being fought, but you can see resonances of the Civil War because it's such a profoundly disruptive event that gets right at the heart of what the republic means. I mean, and so it's... There's nothing else like it in U.S. history, and it's a great moment of truth, the residual aftermath and effects of which lingered for decades and are still present in some ways, I think.
So in 1859, most Americans were just living their life. Did they have a sense what was on the horizon?
It's what I like to call the Appomattox Syndrome, which starts at the end of the story and says, 'Of course there was gonna be a war because the war was inevitable, and of course the United States was gonna win and slavery was gonna be destroyed,' because they were. So let's find out how we got right here. But no, most people didn't wake up in Iowa in 1857 and their first thought was, 'Boy, I hate the South. Those slaveholders, they're really...' No. People got on with their quotidian lives and they got to the farm or they went to their business and they did... They weren't... Nobody knew that they were living in the antebellum era, and that those great antebellum years were about to come to an end. They... That is something that it's hard to get people not... To just put it out of your mind that that's all anybody is thinking about. They're thinking, 'There's a lot of other stuff going on.' There's a big gold rush in Colorado. More people go to Colorado than went to California for a while. There is... And you have these tremendous changes coming about, technological changes of the 1850s where you have the real expansion of railroads, the real expansion of the telegraph. There's a shrinking of time and space that's remarkable for people at the time. It seemed dizzying to them at the time. There are a lot of things to think about other than how much I hate Yankees if I'm in South Carolina, or I hate slaveholders if I live in New Hampshire. But periodically, there are these events that pop up that refocus on the differences between the sections. And you have the Kansas-Nebraska Act. You have Dred Scott. You have the caning of Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate. You have Uncle Tom's Cabin earlier in the decade in 18... and what... And the impact that that had on attitudes towards slavery. Doesn't create a bunch of abolitionists, but it creates a bunch of people who rethink their thoughts about slavery.
Sorry to ask the big question about history. But, you know, we're living today, 2026, and there's the sense that every day you wake up, the possibilities before us are endless, for the good, for the bad, for the truly destructive. There's an eerie sense that the possibility of a world war in different kinds of ways, whether it's sparked in the Middle East or sparked in China and Taiwan, or sparked in Ukraine-Russia, or elsewhere totally surprising in the world, may be related to nuclear weapons or not. There's a sense that everything is possible. And of course, when history is written about the 21st century, it will all be obvious.
It's always obvious in retrospect. That's right.
What can we learn about... from the Civil War about how history unfolds itself, I suppose, for the modern day?
Well, I think that the potential threats now are different from the potential threats in the mid-19th century. The nuclear dimension, some kind of really brutal use of pathogens. I mean, there are lots of things that could happen now that couldn't happen then, at least not because humans were making them happen. But I mean, to me, one of the things to take away from the Civil War is really the resiliency of this republic, which I still think it's a resilient republic. We're living in a sort of wacky time. Uh, but I believe that the... I think that... I have a great faith in the resiliency of the nation, I really do, of the United States. I think it's been through much tougher times than we're in now, and I think that we will weather this, although everybody will have some scar tissue. There might even come a time when our leadership class actually leads, and which would be interesting. And I'm saying, you know, I'm talking about both sides of the fence here. But it is... That, to me, this is, this is the supreme test of a republic that had been put in place in the late 18th century. Can that late 18th century republic adjust, including adjusting to deal with the profoundly disruptive issue of slavery, in a way that allows it to go forward? And the answer is yes. In a war that brings slaughter on an unimaginable scale and brings social disruption in the former slave-holding states on an unimaginable... It just couldn't be more profoundly disruptive if you're a Confederate. There's not slavery anymore, and we lost the war, and a third of our military-age white men are dead. Wow, that's a bad four years for our team. What's gonna happen here? The Republic emerged from that and worked it out, and I think it is... It goes back to, to me, the intelligence of the founding generation that put in place documents that actually allowed the Republic to deal with something like this. And it's sort of a miracle to me that from a nation that was as prejudiced, racially prejudiced as the United States was, you get the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments out of this. It's just kind of mind-boggling that that happens.
Yeah, I think resilience and adaptive innovation often looks like chaos in the moment.
It absolutely does. It absolutely does. But then when you really get to the end of that story, you look, and there you are, and oh, it's okay, the nation is still intact. And the 13th Amendment is in place. Wow, we didn't think... that was gonna happen in 1861... when secession started. I mean, it really... One, another lesson is that you cannot control what a great military event can set loose. I mean, no, things that nobody imagined would happen, including expansion of central power in ways that no one would have imagined. You don't get to ratchet that back and say, 'Well, that'll never happen again.' No, you know what? It happened, and maybe it will happen again because we've seen it happen. Nobody imagined that. The federal budget in 1860 was $63 million. That was the entire federal budget. The federal budget in 1865 was $1.2 billion, and if you throw in the Confederate side of that, it gets you over $2 billion, which means federal expenditures in 1860 would've lasted about 11 days in 1865. Nobody foresaw that. Absolutely nobody foresaw that. And education legislation that would create the great land grant colleges and universities and no- it's... The war brought a lot...
And I think most of the things that have happened through the hard periods of our country's history, nobody could have really foreseen, and then we somehow figure it out, and that gives me a lot of hope.
That this kinda like extreme division, the arguments, the people basically speaking in the harshest of ways against each other, that is like the engine of brainstorming and figuring problems out that in the long arc of history create progress. But in the short term, it feels like a dumpster fire.
It does. And to me, the arc of U.S. history has been, and Lincoln talked about this too, it's an expansion of freedoms and liberties. That's the, that's the long arc, with very problematical places along the way. But again, the documents allow for that, and the process allows for that, and I think that's one of the remarkable things about Philadelphia in the summer of 1787. I mean, those guys, a lot of whom own slaves, put together something that's proved to be resilient and adaptable and changeable, and it has evolved in a way that is in the right direction, although there are always problems.
I love this country. I will never stop saying how much I love this country. It's an incredible experiment. I'm... we're this year celebrating its 250th birthday. I can't wait for the next 250 years. This is such a fascinating study of human civilization.
And it is complicated. What we want now is a sort of cartoon version of what we Americans, as you watch popular culture, we want a 30-second view of whatever. Well, who should I like? Who are the good guys? Who are the bad guys? I want a 30-second version of the Civil War. What do I... History is not that way. I've spent my whole life studying history, and the maybe the main thing I've learned is however complicated I thought something was when I really started to explore it, it's more complicated than I thought it was. People aren't simple. They're complicated. And you have to at least appreciate, you don't have to embrace the complexity. I guess you can't make people do that, but you have to at least concede that things are... they're just... There's not a 20-second version of anything in the past. The past is complicated, because humanoids are involved in it. They're complicated.
Yeah, the... when you look at the system as a whole. But as individual humans, we like to do the black and white thing where...
...we just see the good, everything as good and evil, and then we bicker.
And then we get together at Thanksgiving dinner, and we yell at each other, and then people lose their shit, and they stop talking to each other for a year, and then they, they make up and all this 'cause this is just how humans interact with each other. And, but as a system, especially with the increasing levels of freedom, with the freedoms of speech and be able to speak out about your feelings, even when they're intense feelings, that somehow works as a system.
The more freedom, the messier it is. Really, the messier it is.
And your job as a historian is a difficult job, and as you said, because the more you learn, the more you come to understand, the more complicated the picture appears.
Yep, and the more you learn, the more you learn that you don't know as much as you thought you did.
So some humility will take you a long way.
Yes, you want more of Grant than McClellan in that, on that humility score. Grant would score high on humility. McClellan, every day, every day the first thought was, 'What about me? Who is gonna not appreciate how wonderful I am today?' thought George B. McClellan. That's the thought that nagged at him. 'Somebody might not know how great I am.' That's an aside.
Reminds me of somebody. But anyway. Quick ten-second shout-out to our sponsors. Check them out in the description. It really is the best way to support this podcast. Go to lexfridman.com/sponsors. And now, dear friends, back to my conversation with Gary Gallagher. Okay, let's at the start, first shots fired at Fort Sumter, as you mentioned, and this thing starts brewing and escalating towards a full-on war. What are the different advantages of each side from a military perspective?
Here is one of the great misconceptions about the Civil War. Among the people who know anything about it, which in the U.S. is a very small percentage, but if they know anything, they know United States' victory was inevitable. Because the United States had 22 million people. The Confederacy had five and a half million white people... and three and a half million enslaved people. The United States' economy was infinitely more powerful than the Confederate economy. The United States had the United States Army. The United States had the United States Navy. Really, who's gonna win this war? The U.S., it's inevitable, next question. It's not true at all. The U.S. did have those advantages, but the Confederacy had compensating advantages. And one of those advantages was it had a much lower bar to cross for success. It didn't have to invade the United States, didn't have to capture Washington. It didn't have to project its military power into New England. All it had to do was convince a majority of the civilian population of the loyal states that it wasn't worth the cost to make these rebel states come back into the Union. These are two democratic republics at war, and in the end, the civilian sector decides. Somebody my age can... We have the perfect example, Vietnam. The United States was not defeated militarily in Vietnam, and it didn't matter. 'Cause when the people said, 'We're not gonna support this war anymore,' the war's gonna come to an end. The smart people in the Confederacy understood this. They understood it at the time. Lee understood it. Jefferson Davis understood it. You had key people at the time saying, 'There's no way that a nation as large as ours and a population as large as ours has ever been subjected in a war like this. A tie is as good as a win for the Confederacy.' And they came very close to that in the summer of 1864. The other thing is the sheer size of the Confederacy is a huge advantage to them. It's huge, with a very poor transportation and communication infrastructure in many ways. And to move a large army deep into the Confederacy is a huge logistical problem. The same thing had happened to the British both during the American Revolution and the War of 1812. They confront this... The Confederacy's as big as all of Western Europe. That's a problem. It's also a problem that the Confederates are fighting, literally fighting to defend their homes. That's always, almost always a stronger factor than trying to impose your will on somebody else. All of these factors help the Confederacy. The U.S. did have an army. The army had 15,000 men in it in 1860, 15,000. The Navy had fewer than 50 vessels, most of them on overseas stations. There were exactly three vessels available to blockade the Confederacy at the beginning of the war. The Confederate coastline's 3,600 miles long. Probably not gonna be able to shut down a lot there. So the point is that there are factors that help both sides. To me, the conditions for victory are the most important factor that favors the Confederacy. We just have to make it painful enough to the United States that they're gonna say, 'Let them go. We never liked South Carolina anyway. Just let them go. We're not... It's not worth it. It's killing too many of our boys. It's costing too much money, and we don't have to worry about slavery in the territories if they're gone, 'cause they'll be gone. And our territories will be free of slavery.'
So again, the Union is the invading force.
Geography comes into play, as you mentioned.
Vast land. And so in some sense, it's a miracle that the war lasted as long as it did, and then there was as much motivation...
Yes, that they stuck to it.
...because again, victory for the Confederacy was stop the war.
Stop the war. Neither side has an advantage in terms of its leadership. The generals all come... You often used to read frequently Confederates had better generals than the... And, but this is the first war where West... where West Pointers are in charge. They were subalterns in Mexico. The West Point is the United States Military Academy where the professional officer corps gets its training. It was established under Jefferson. It's the premier engineering school in the United States. And I mean, West Point-trained engineers are very, very prominent when they get out of the army and even when they're in the army. But by the time of the Civil War, it is West Pointers who were lieutenants and captains in the war with Mexico are now gonna be the people in charge. Almost every army commander, almost every corps commander, which is the next level, are West Point graduates. They took the same classes from the same professors, read the same textbooks, served under either Winfield Scott or Zachary Taylor in Mexico. They bring the same background and body of doctrine and training to the table. It would've been weird if one side or the other had an inherent advantage in leadership. The one place where the U.S. ends up with an advantage is that over the course of the war, it found, in my view, four men who could command armies effectively: Grant, Sherman, Philip Henry Sheridan, and George H. Thomas. The Confederacy only ever found one, and that's Lee. And they had more than one army, so that's a problem. If you have more than one army but only one really good army commander, that puts you at a disadvantage.
In what ways were the two sides balanced militarily, equal militarily? So the, the passion, like we mentioned, of the fighting force, the soldiers, the dedication to the fighting.
Both brought the same notions of how to fight a war to the table because the officer corps had been, on both sides, had been trained in the same way. Neither side has a real advantage in terms of technology. Both sides use the railroad. Both sides use the telegraph. The United States could have used repeating weapons but decided not to. The Confederacy didn't have the industrial capacity to produce. So the war is fought by infantrymen, for the most part, carrying muzzle-loading single-shot muskets, rifle muskets. That's the weapon that inflicts 85 to 90% of the casualties... in the Civil War, and they both have exactly the same thing. And they have the same kinds of artillery pieces. The United States Navy's much bigger, but it's... And the Navy is important, but armies really decide the war, and the armies are... They're organized exactly the same way. They are... They get officers the same way. They're very similar.
So what was the actual fighting like? Like you mentioned, most of it was with muskets. What was the experience of it like?
It's linear formations, shoulder-to-shoulder kinds of formations that would allow you to maintain unit integrity on a battlefield, which is one reason casualties were high. They'd line up and fight each other. As the war went on, they resorted more and more. One of the developments was the field entrenchments became very common by 1864. And both armies, if they would stop for the night, they would entrench. They'd throw up field works... which gave the defenders a much greater power vis-a-vis the attacking force. They came to decide that you needed about a three-to-one advantage in numbers to have a successful attack once field entrenchments were in place. But it is... It's an infantryman's war overwhelmingly, and the infantryman's experience on both sides. The United States side was a little better supplied. Union soldiers ate a little better for the most part. They got regular issues of clothing a little more regularly than the Confederates did. Their uniforms all kind of looked the same. The Confederates would have had a more motley look. But the Confederates didn't lose any battles because they didn't have enough shoes, and they didn't lose any battles 'cause they didn't have enough powder. They never had a problem with that. So it's a war where each side looks like the other side in terms of what the armies actually... If we had wandered through the armies and, or watched them in battle, they would have looked the same to us.
But it wasn't just about bullets. There was also dysentery and disease.
Two out of every three soldiers who died, died of disease. It depends on what unit you're in. If you're in the Irish Brigade, ah, God love them. You know, just point us towards something and let us indulge in self-immolation, for God's sake. The Irish Brigade had the reverse. They had two men who died from battle wounds for every man who died from disease. But overall, it's one man died from battle wounds and two died from disease. Overall casualties, killed, wounded, prisoners of war, about a million and a half... casualties in the Civil War.
There... You know, there's this idea that a big part of the American spirit is the Scots-Irish spirit, the fighting spirit. You think there's some truth to that?
Well, the songs are Irish songs that both sides sing with different words, and I mean, there are a lot of Irish soldiers in the Union Army. But in the entire military-age white population of the loyal states in 1860, just about a third were born somewhere other than the United States. And they made up about a quarter of all the soldiers. So they're actually underrepresented in the United States Army. Far lower percentage of foreign-born soldiers in the Confederate Army, but there they're a little bit overrepresented. So there are lots of foreign-born soldiers in the army. The largest group are not Irish. They're the second largest group. The largest group are Germans, on the U.S. side. The Irish are second, and then you'd go way down the line for yet others.
So we talked pretty thoroughly about slavery. Can we talk about immigration? What was the view at the time of immigrants?
Well, I think you know the answer to that. We need to have all that stuff done, but we don't especially like the people doing it. That's basically the... Well, I mean, the...
...the anti-Irish, and a lot of it is bound up with anti-Catholic sentiment. The... 'Cause the Irish are changing the nature of the country. The country's a Protestant, British country, and here come all these Irishmen. And especially in the '40s and '50s, the... My Gallaghers came in the late '50s. They are changing the nature, and they take over. Look at them. They don't know their place. They're... pretty soon they're taking over cities, and they all cheat when they vote. We know that. You can buy an Irish vote for one drink.
This all sounds familiar, right?
The cartoons were brutal on depicting African American characters, but they also depicted the Irish as sort of simian characters, often with a jug of whiskey in one hand. I mean, it's very... There's profound prejudice. And prejudice against the Germans, whom they called the Dutch. That was what the soldiers would call the German regiments, Dutch regiments. And yeah, there's a lot of ethnic prejudice.
So to mention, you mentioned Protestants, so both sides were primarily Protestant Christians.
At that time, it was a very religious country.
So the religious sentiment was pretty strong.
Units had chaplains, and there were Catholic priests with Catholic units. Yes, a very big presence.
Was Christianity used to justify...
Of course it was. Both sides used it, yes. I don't mean to jump on your question, but yes, they did.
I mean, how was it used to justify fighting for a nation?
Yeah, there's a lot of fighting in the Bible, a lot of people killing other people in the Bible... As long as you're doing it for the right reasons...
...you can... And you could use it different ways. I mean, you can deal with setbacks by saying, 'Well, God tests us. We're being tested.' What do you do when God tests you? You don't give up when God tests you. You try harder when God tests you. The very top leaders... This is interesting. The top leaders on the Confederate side, the most famous ones, Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Jeb Stuart, they were much more overtly religious than people like Grant, Sherman, Philip Sheridan. I mean, much, much more. Lee was an Episcopalian. Jackson was a Presbyterian. But they talked... I mean, their official reports, their correspondence, it's filled with allusions to religion much more than Grant's or Sherman's.
What about African Americans in the army?
African Americans made up... There were about 200,000 Black men served in what were called United States Colored Troops units, USCT.
It was on the Union side.
On the U... Yes. Okay, let's just dispense with the hallucination that there were a lot of Black men in the Confederate Army. That is such total... Ridiculous nonsense... utterly unsupported by any evidence that anyone would consider credible. This whole notion of... I mean, it's just, it's preposterous. It's ridic... and I'm really managing my language right here. I'm not saying what I really think it is. So, so just... I've seen estimates of as high as 100,000 Black men in the Confederate Army.
Really, really, no. No. Were there Black men with the Confederate armies? Yes. There are enslaved Black men who are doing all kinds of non-military things in the army to free more white men to shoulder muskets and shoot at Yankees. That's what's going on in the Confederate Army. There are a lot of Black men around Union armies before they became soldiers as well. But there are these... 200,000 Black men join the military service during the war. They're in the Navy and in the Army. They'd always been in the Navy. The U.S. Navy... And they're not segregated in the Navy in the, in the way that they can be in the Army. They're just in... You have integrated crews... on naval vessels, although they're separated in some ways, but there've always been Black sailors in the Navy. The Army, no. That was a big, it's a big thing to put Black men in uniform. And for a Confederate, it's bad enough if you announce emancipation, but you, then you start arming Black men. That, to Confederates, is urging a widespread slave rebellion, basically.
Black regiments on the Union side was enraging the Confederate side.
Yes. And they have white officers overwhelmingly. There are a few Black officers, but overwhelmingly the USCT units have white officers leading them.
But symbolically, that is a really powerful thing, right?
Oh, it's hard for modern Americans to understand just how jarring that would be to a Confederate, that not only would you have enslaved people no longer enslaved, but you would have the men in uniforms carrying muskets.
So you as a historian, you've looked at every layer of this, including diaries and...
What, what was motivating? What was going through the minds of African Americans who were fighting for the Union side? I think what you would expect is going... I mean, they would talk about Union occasionally, but what that means to them, it's a union without slavery. They have the most... Of all the people who can have a direct impact on what's going on versus slavery, there's nothing more direct than picking up a musket and firing at the people who are defending a slavery-based society. It doesn't get... And at the same time, you are not only doing that, you are also establishing an unimpeachable claim to citizenship. The whole point of a citizen soldier is that you do your bit for the nation that's helping you, and the nation does these things for you. Well, okay, if I'm picking up and risking my life with a musket in my hand, are you gonna tell me I can't vote after I do? I thought that's the whole point of this, when I'm protecting the right to vote by doing my citizen's role as a soldier. And that was a big debate in Congress. That really changed the equation of that debate as well. How are you gonna treat people after they've served in United States units? Can you tell them they can't vote? You're not gonna give the vote to them?
How many people in the Black regiments, but also, you know, folks like Frederick Douglass, saw that Black Americans and white Americans should have equal rights?
Well, Douglass saw that, of course. But even within their context, their notion of equal rights is that that doesn't mean that Black women are gonna vote, just like for white people, it didn't mean white women would vote. But in terms of the context of the time, yes, equal rights should come out of this. Abolishing slavery is the first step of this. It's not the end game. The end game is equal rights for everybody.
Did many people see that?
No. A tiny percentage of people saw that. There's a notion that's very common that somehow the white North turned its back on Black people after the war, and it should've tried harder during Reconstruction to force the white South to convey full equal rights to Black people. The assumption there is simply flawed. Most white people in the North didn't believe that... They believed first save the Union, and yes, we'll need to kill slavery as well. Those are the two things on the list. Check, check, we've done those. Full equal rights for Black people is not on their list. That... And they were not willing to do the things that it would've taken to do that, including the white soldiers in uniforms who wanted out of the army after the Confederates surrendered and said, 'Well, now we need the army to make the white South do the right thing vis-à-vis Black people.' They would've said, 'What are you talking about? I signed on to do this. We did it. Send us home right now.'
I think that's one of the lessons you learn from human history across the different places where slavery was abolished, is abolishing slavery is not the end of a journey. It's the beginning of a journey.
And it sometimes takes, quite often takes at least 100 years to go from that to something you would identify as equal rights. And then maybe even beyond that, there's a complicated story about even outside of rights, just how society sees the different people.
There's a difference between passing... I mean, the Great Society passed most of the... I mean, you got the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act. You got all of this legislation that does a lot of the legal stuff, but it's what's in people's heads... that takes longer and is a, is a more frustrating process.
Remains, as has appeared in human history, potential fuel for the division to rise up again.
Of course. And then people can exploit that. It's, it's waiting to be exploited, and people exploit it.
This is something we do as humans. We like to otherize certain groups.
And the Civil War for our country is a story of this. It's... So understanding the Civil War is in part extremely important for understanding the, the division, maybe the dormant division that's there.
Yes. And there, and even before the war, there were... There were notions about the other side that sort... for, for a lot of people in the free states looking South, they said white Southerners are because of they're lazy, they're violent, they, they don't wanna talk out a problem. They'll do what Preston Brooks did to Charles Sumner. They'll beat him over the head with a cane, and they're used to this because they have slavery, and they're used to brutalizing Black people. That's just how they approach things. And the white South would look North and say they don't care anything about family. They're all just lusting after money. All they care about is material things. They don't have any sense of kinship or family. They're... That's what Yankees are. It doesn't even matter whether any of that is true, of course. There was a sense perceptions are more important than reality with human beings, and the perceptions on the eve of the Civil War were that the other side was different in a lot of ways. They also had profoundly profound commonalities. They had a common language, a common religion, a common history, these founding documents. All of that would pull things, pull people together. But they found ways to see differences and divided some of the churches. I mean, Protestant churches divided over slavery.
And many of these themes continue to today. Let's talk about the different theaters of the war, the Eastern Theater and the Western Theater. You mentioned the navies, the geography. How does geography come into play? What are the different parts here?
There's three main theaters of the war. The Eastern Theater is the theater that features Washington and Richmond. Plays out in Virginia, a little bit of Maryland, and a little bit of Pennsylvania. That's... it's where the Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac fight for the most part. That's the Eastern Theater.
And that's the theater that maybe is most glorified and mythologized.
It's by far the most famous of the theaters. There are famous battles in the other theaters, but that's the one, and it's mainly because of the presence of Lee and then of Grant. The Western Theater is a much larger one. It goes from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River, east to west, and would go from the Gulf to the Ohio River, so it's huge and involves Tennessee and, and then beyond the Mississippi River is the descriptively named Trans-Mississippi River, part of Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, and so forth. In terms of commitment of resources and effect on the outcome of the war, it's by far the least important. Some people get very upset when I say that, say that, that the Trans... you know, it's basically who cares about what's going on out there. But that's the third theater, the Trans-Mississippi, the Western Theater, and the Eastern Theater.
But I think you've argued that the Western Theater is really important for the war.
Very important, and it's where we get Grant. The soldiers who won the war for the United States all come out of the Western Theater. Grant, he brings Sherman, Philip Sheridan, George Thomas. Those are all in the Western Theater.
So at the very beginning, the first real battle, at the First Manassas in July 1861, I think one interesting aspect of that, as you've talked about, is that people gathered for a picnic.
They came out to watch from Washington. They brought the carriages out, set up on a little ridge that let them look down over the battle.
So that kind of gives you a sense that people of the time, first of all, didn't think this would... this is going to scale to the size that it did or last as long as it did, but also not understand the seriousness of the situation.
They're clueless about what's actually going on. To even think that you should go observe a battle like that is ridiculous, but they did. And there was a strong belief, and Lincoln was part of this at the beginning, that there's probably gonna be one battle. It's not gonna last. He asked for 90-day volunteers to suppress the rebellion right after Fort Sumter. William Tecumseh Sherman reacted to that by saying that you might as well try to put out a fire with a squirt gun. I mean, it's ridiculous. They're not thinking about what this war could easily be. Take years, take hundreds of thousands of men maybe, not one battle.
When did it, the dark cloud, the reality of the war, come in?
Well, First Bull Run and Star or Manassas, th... each side, many battles have two names, one that the United States soldiers used and one... And usually the Confederates would pick the nearest town, and the United States often picked terrain features, so you get Bull Run, which is a creek or stream. That's what the Union soldiers called it.
Manassas is what the Confederates called it. Antietam, a creek in Maryland, is what the Union called it. Sharpsburg is what the Confederates called it. Anyway, there are several of those. That brought a little sense of reality to people in the United States, especially. They'd expected it to be over, and it didn't go the way they thought it would go, and so it's going to take more men. The summer of '61 was spent—hundreds of thousands of men went into uniform in the summer of '61. The whole supply situation became more evidently imperative, but not much happened for the rest of the war. There's a pretty big battle called the Battle of Wilson's Creek that takes place in Missouri, but the rest of 1861 doesn't have... The real fighting begins in the spring of '62, and what really brought home, in a way that no one had imagined what could be in store, was one battle in the East and one battle in the West. The one in the West is Shiloh, which happened in early April. U.S. Grant on the United States side and a General Albert Sidney Johnston on the Confederate side. But at Shiloh, in two days, there were upwards of 25,000 casualties, and that's more battle casualties than U.S. forces had suffered in every war combined down to that point—happened in two days. Two and a half months after that, George B. McClellan's army engaged with Lee's army in what came to be called the Seven Days Battles at Richmond—36,000 casualties. So those two together just showed that this was going to be on a totally different scale, and it was going to involve sacrifices and allocation of resources that no one had imagined before.
Since you mentioned Missouri, you've talked about how that was the most brutal guerrilla warfare of the conflict. And maybe can you speak to what do you mean by guerrilla warfare? What kind of war was that? And then contrast with the structure, the dynamics of battles elsewhere in the war.
Yes. Guerrilla war is more of what I think most Americans can sort of imagine what guerrilla war is. It involves much, much smaller numbers of actors, obviously, on both sides. Guerrilla bands might have a few dozen members. They might have a few hundred at different times. There are no real battles between guerrillas. There is a lot of bushwhacking, which is what they called it—ambushing people, terrorizing civilians, killing livestock, killing some civilians, killing prisoners after you've captured them, hanging some people. There are a few semi-large scale ones. There's a Confederate guerrilla named Quantrill who led a raid against Lawrence, Kansas, where they burned parts of the town, executed more than 150 men in the town, and terrorized the place. That is going on in the... There's a relationship in many places between elevation and guerrilla activity. The more mountainous or hilly, the more likely there'll be guerrillas operating. They operate in the mountains—East Tennessee, western North Carolina, southwestern Virginia, Central... There's even some activity in parts of Texas, but Missouri and Kentucky have the worst guerrilla warfare. It's present through the whole war, probably involves maybe 50,000 men out of the 3 million who were in action during the war, and was very nasty, no rules. One reason that rules of war were codified was because Henry Halleck, who was a Union general in Missouri, was dealing with this guerrilla activity and he said, 'We need to get some rules about who's a civilian, who's not a civilian. How do you deal with this kind of situation and that kind of situation?'
What should we take away from the fact that most of the fighting had the rules of war behind it? So it was more structured, it was—
I think what we take away from that supports my argument that this is a war between two mid-19th century nation states that have a sense of how you fight a war. You fight a war with national armies who are led by professional soldiers and who understand that there are limits to what you do in a war. And all the war—the war's limits expand as it goes on, but it doesn't reach the point where you have indiscriminate killing of civilians and so forth. You just don't... I mean, there's an argument about whether it's a total war or not. It all depends on how you define total war.
As you've mentioned, in terms of how encompassing it was, as total a war as it gets, because the entirety of the society was involved in it.
When there's wide-scale targeting of the economic infrastructure of your opponent that can be used to support the war effort, which is what you get increasingly as the war goes on, and officially when Grant is in charge as general-in-chief, then certainly that's a total... If you're the farmer who experiences an army coming by and they take all, take or kill all your livestock and destroy your crops, and that's pretty much like a total war, even if they don't kill you.
Yes, the war does escalate. '62, it takes a quantum leap. In the spring and early summer of 1862, the signals are clear this is something that we had not counted on before. And the armies are much—they're going to be much bigger. The Army of the Potomac's more than 100,000 men. There's never been an army like that in U.S. history, nothing like that.
What do we understand from the diaries of soldiers coming, for the first time face to face with this scale of war? We're talking about a year. They've been volunteering for a year, like you mentioned, you know, in the summer, in the spring and the summer of '62.
There's so many themes in soldier letters, and it's an incredible gift to people such as myself who study this, is that almost—that a very large majority of the men on both sides were literate. And so we have this mass of testimony. And they sent millions of letters from the armies home and back to the armies, on both sides. So we have this trove of first-hand evidence and diaries too—many, many, many, many diaries. But so you can see in real time how attitudes are changing, hardening. You can see the hardening process in soldiers who—they don't have any idea what being a soldier is, then they do, and they don't like lots of things about it. They don't... They talk a lot about food, talk a lot about clothing, talk a lot about officers they don't like. They don't talk—what one thing, it's really fascinating, the thing they don't try to do is explain to people behind the lines exactly what it's like to be in a battle because they understand the people back home won't understand what they're talking about. And so they'll say things like, 'It was awful,' and, 'Words just can't convey what it was,' and then maybe tell more about their individual experience. But there's a real sense that what a veteran knows about being in the military and what the people back home will understand are two different things, and you just can't explain it to them.
And so that takes us into the fall of the Battle of Antietam. Can you walk me through what happened at the battle and why it mattered?
George B. McClellan, whom I've already referred to dismissively a couple of times—he was in charge of the Army of the Potomac by this point. He'd been general in chief for a brief time and commanding the Army of the Potomac. And he finally approached Richmond. He got within, literally within five miles of Richmond. He was opposing an officer named Joseph E. Johnston, who just—his first thought every day was, 'What a great day to retreat. Where could I go? I could go that way, or I could go that way.' He and McClellan were a match made in heaven. McClellan didn't want to go anywhere, and Johnston only wanted to retreat. Anyway, they finally ended up at Richmond. Johnston got wounded, got hit by a shell fragment outside Richmond in the Battle of Seven Pines, and he's replaced by Robert E. Lee. And McClellan, in his usual perceptive way, observed that this was great because he knew that Lee was too timid to ever be an effective presence on the battlefield. So he read him just exactly the way that McClellan would. He ends up fighting Lee, and in the Seven Days' Battles, McClellan is pushed away from Richmond. He shouldn't have been, but he was. That was considered a great victory. Lee's reputation goes up after that. Then Lee follows that up with the campaign of Second Bull Run, which reorients the war from Richmond to Manassas, the old First Manassas battlefield in northern Virginia. Stonewall Jackson plays a key role in it. He wins the Battle of Second Bull Run in late August 1862, and then invades the loyal states for the first time. He crosses into Maryland in early September with an army that is broken down in terms of supply. He has tremendous straggling problems and desertion problems, Lee did. He moved across the army with about 50,000 men. When they finally came to battle at Antietam, which is in western Maryland, he only had about 35,000 soldiers on the field. McClellan had about 80,000 on the other side. And McClellan had captured a copy of Lee's entire orders for the whole campaign, Special Orders Number 191. They had gone through an old Confederate camp and found a copy of Lee's orders. And still McClellan didn't move quickly. I won't bash McClellan. They fight. The bloodiest single day in U.S. history is Antietam, the battle of 23,000 casualties in one day there. Very close thing. Lee hangs on by just the narrowest margin, sits on the battlefield for another whole day, which he shouldn't have done. He was being way too bold there, and then retreated, got back across the Potomac River. Confederates looked at this whole thing as a drama in three acts: save Richmond, reorient the war to northern Virginia, cross into the United States, and they saw it as a success. Richmond's no longer threatened. Lee's reputation has gone way up. McClellan has frustrated Lincoln immeasurably, and as a result, Lincoln removes McClellan from command. He waits till the day after the elections in November 'cause McClellan's popular among Democrats, and Lincoln is an adept politician. He fires him the day after the elections and replaces him with a guy named Ambrose Burnside.
So what can you say about what makes a great general and what makes a poor general in all of this?
Well, McClellan is a very smart guy, and he was on Winfield Scott's staff in Mexico, as was Lee, which is a sign that you're a pretty bright officer. He built the Army of the Potomac. He did a brilliant job building the Army of the Potomac. The troops loved him. There was never a bond with any other commander the way they had with McClellan. But what he couldn't do when the moment came. When the moment came, he couldn't risk things. He was risk-averse. He had a chance to capture Richmond against Lee. He should have, and he didn't. He withdrew. He had a chance... You almost never had a chance to destroy another army in the Civil War. He had a chance to destroy Lee's army at Antietam, and he didn't. He pulled back. He didn't even use 20,000 of his men. They never fired their muskets at Antietam. If you're in Lee's army, you're going to fire your musket. If you're in McClellan's army, maybe, maybe not. He didn't at Antietam. He let Lee get away. It frustrated Lincoln immensely, and Lincoln finally fired him because of that. It was a flaw. He lacked what they would've called in the mid-19th century the moral courage to risk everything. Grant had it. Lee had it. McClellan didn't have it.
One of the components of a great general is the willingness to risk it all, obviously with good advice, with intelligence, but—
The whole war changed in this arc between the Seven Days and Antietam, and it changed in this way. McClellan's defeat at the Seven Days—this is in late June and early July '62—convinced both Congress and Lincoln that slavery was going to have to be put on the table. The war's going to be moral and con—McClellan could've won the war with slavery intact. He didn't, so Congress passed the Second Confiscation Act in late July, which I mentioned earlier, which strikes at slavery. And then Lincoln decided, he told his cabinet toward the end of July that he was going to issue a proclamation of emancipation, and he was persuaded that he couldn't just do it then in the wake of a defeat. He should wait until he had a victory. He got another defeat at Second Bull Run. He finally got a victory at Antietam because Lee retreated, and then that's when he announced the preliminary proclamation. The key battle here isn't Antietam. The key battle is the Seven Days and McClellan's defeat that persuades Lincoln to do this. Antietam gives him the occasion to do it, and he issued his preliminary proclamation five days after the battle on September 22nd, 1862.
Can you elaborate why it became obvious that the slavery has to be on the table as the motivation, as the driving motivation for the war at that time?
Because people believed the... And they were right. The war was almost over at the end of May 1862. It had been a catastrophe for the Confederacy in the Western Theater. They had lost New Orleans. New Orleans was surrender—the biggest city in the Confederacy by far, 160,000 people, four times bigger than the next biggest con—the most important port. The key to the Mississippi River Valley as an economic artery. If you don't control New Orleans, the Mississippi isn't an economic river for you. New Orleans was gone in April. Nashville was gone, the key city and capital of Tennessee. Memphis was gone in June. The whole state of Tennessee, except the mountainous East Tennessee, was basically not a Confederate state anymore by May 1862. There was a Union army of 100,000 in northern Mississippi by the end of May. Catastrophic. And George B. McClellan's army was in five miles of the national capital in Richmond. I don't think the Confederacy could have absorbed the loss of Richmond at that point. I think it would've been over, and emancipation was not on the table yet in an official way. The fact that Richmond didn't fall convinced people in the North that the war was going to have to last a lot longer. The Confederates were going to be harder to beat, convinced Europe of the same thing. By Europe, I mean France and England. That's what mattered. And so they decided that they were going to have to take more extreme measures, and then the key, more extreme measure is strike at slavery. Strike at it as a war measure directly.
And as a war measure, it what? Attacks at the economic infrastructure of the Confederacy.
It attacks the economic infrastructure that enables the Confederacy to maintain the largest possible army in the war.
So this is not about the ethics, the morality of slavery. It's the—
It is for the abolitionists who see it, and Frederick Douglass realized that this is good. The abolitionists realized early on, even in 1861, some of them, Charles Sumner, for example, saw the Union defeat at First Bull Run. 'Yes, it's bad that we lost, but the longer the war goes, the more likely that we can get slavery on the table, get emancipation on the table.' Frederick Douglass believed the same thing. A longer war made that more likely, and McClellan handed them that gift by not being as aggressive as he should've been at Richmond in 1862.
But we should say, and correct me if I'm wrong, that only a tiny minority of Americans were abolitionists at that time.
We'll never know exactly. I would say if you... I think if you guessed 3% were—I mean, really abolitionists, destroy it now, destroy it completely, no compensation for rebel owners or any owners, kill it in Kentucky, kill it in Missouri, kill it in Maryland. Yes, I think 3% would be about the ballpark.
