The American Civil War with Historian Gary Gallagher

I do have gray hair, so that works. All right.

Happy to be here.

Well, I can be very specific about that. I was born in Los Angeles, but my family moved to Colorado when I was young. I grew up on a farm in southern Colorado, and one of my grandmothers gave me a subscription to National Geographic magazine, and that magazine had an article anticipating the Civil War Centennial in 1961. And it was that copy of National Geographic that first put the Civil War on my radar screen. But what really did it—so I was interested enough in that that I bought a copy of the American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War, which has a text by Bruce Catton, which came out in 1960. Bought a copy of that. It cost $19.95 and wiped out my life savings at that point. But I got that book. Absolutely, I was lost to the Civil War after I got that book. I devoured it, began buying other Civil War books, and got Catton's other books, his Army of the Potomac Trilogy. I had one grandmother who early on figured out the easiest thing to buy for me was Civil War books. And she started when I was 11. For birthdays and Christmas, I had Douglas Southall Freeman's Lee's Lieutenants. Anyway, I had about 200 books by the time I got to high school—200 Civil War books.

David Green's picture maps of the battlefields. They were just—there's never been, there's nothing else like them even now. I know we've moved on, probably they're hopelessly retro for young people now, but they were magical to me, those maps. Just incredible. Just incredible.

Well, in my part of Colorado, I can say that there wasn't a great deal of interest in the Civil War. There was one lawyer in town who was interested, and he kind of took me under his wing at one point, and we would talk about the Civil War. The nearest battlefield was Glorieta Pass, which was about three hours away outside Santa Fe. So my heart was in Virginia, and that's what my real interest was. That's what I read about all the time. That's what I would—I mean, it was certainly my world growing up, but it wasn't anybody else's I was growing up around. My high school American history teacher used to put special sections on the exams at the bottom. It would say 'for Gallagher only,' and I would have to answer. He had me teach about the Civil War when I was a junior in high school. I thought about the Civil War. So that's the path I was on. But I didn't know what I would—I mean, I didn't imagine when I was young that I would end up making my living the way that I ended up making my living.

No, just Gary. Gary is fine.

You and Bruce Catton share that Michigan background.

It does. He sets the scene. He just had a way of setting the scene for things and for dealing with things. The way he deals with the Gettysburg Address—he narrates it. He doesn't quote from the address. Just, Lincoln stands up and starts to talk.

The way he handles Appomattox from the soldiers' point of view, he just had an absolute gift for evoking a time and place. He really did. And I think his works hold up for things that were basically written between 1949 and 1953. Yeah, they hold up amazingly well. They're a little anachronistic in some ways, but for the most part, they're well worth reading now and way better than most of the stuff that's being written now about the war. You really can't go wrong with Catton still, I think.

There wasn't even—I mean, the common soldier literature at the time Bruce Catton was writing was Bill Wiley's Life of Johnny Reb, Life of Billy Yank hadn't even come out yet until the very end of the Army of the Potomac project. So it was—but they were both—I mean, Freeman had a PhD from Johns Hopkins and was trained more rigorously that way than Catton, but both of them could write well. They wrote very differently. Catton didn't start sentences with adverbs the way that Freeman loved to do. But both could really write and just pulled you into the war.

Entirely. Entirely.

When I was young, I thought—because everything I read told me it was so—that Gettysburg was the great turning point of the war, and I quit thinking that a long time ago. Okay. Grant has levitated up and up and up in my estimation as I've gotten older. I mean, I knew Grant was a good soldier when I was young and just starting out, but I didn't really appreciate a lot of the dimensions of Grant as a leader—how perceptive he was, how resolute he was, how unflappable he was. I mean, Grant—there aren't many people who've consistently become more attractive and more impressive figures to me as I've gotten older. Lincoln is one. Grant is another one. So, and I mean, I've changed my mind on almost everything. I mean, the main thing I've learned as a historian over all these years is that however much I thought I knew about something and however complicated I thought something was, once I really dig into it, it's more complicated than I thought it was and probably different than I thought it was. And that's not how we like our history in the United States now. We like it really simple. Who are the good guys? Who are the bad guys? Who should I like? Who should I hate? Give me the 30-second soundbite version of everything. And that's just not what history's like.

Well, I think that a lot of the—I mean, when I first started to teach at Penn State, most of the students in my Civil War class were men. When I first started to teach at UVA, I would say that two-thirds or three-quarters of the students were men. And the classes were always big and they always filled up. But over the course of just a few years in each instance, they came to be about half and half men and women. And at the end at Virginia, a majority were women. I think a lot of the men who initially came to these classes probably were introduced to the war the same way I was. They read about generals. They read about battles, and the other side of the war is something they needed to learn about. A lot of the women who came would have been more interested in non-military things in the beginning, and part of my job was always to get them to understand that you have to bring those two things together or you can't understand the Civil War. I mean, the academic Civil War still is overwhelmingly non-military. Most academics do not like military history. They don't really respect military history, and you can take a course on the Civil War at a lot of colleges and basically never go to a battle, never hear a shot fired, no gunpowder—they're interested in everything but military things. And most of the kind of lay readers in the Civil War, I think, still come to it mainly through military things and aren't really that interested in non-military things. So I think it's been one of my main goals through my whole career to try to bridge that gap and get those two different groups to appreciate the other side as you go along. And, you know, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

Well, I haven't seen it reversed in many decades, and I think there's been a little bit of movement on the academic side. And academics, of course, will always say, 'Of course we appreciate the military history side,' and I would just say, 'Well, no, you don't.' I mean, look at the journals. Look what's written about in the journals. Now, the common soldiers have gotten a lot more attention than they used to. There's a big common soldier literature now that has developed. It really took off in the late '80s and '90s and has continued to be very vigorous, I think. But for the most part, I don't think those two worlds have come together yet. And I don't know. And if they don't, they don't. You can lead a perfectly full life being interested in the Civil War and only looking at one side or the other side. I just think if your goal is to really understand the war, you have to bring them together or you can't understand the war.

Oh, I think there are a number of fairly basic and very widely held misconceptions. One is that Gettysburg was the turning point. I mean, that's a little one, a specific one. I've done a lot of work with high school teachers and, to a lesser degree, middle school teachers. I've taught hundreds and hundreds of them over the years, and there are state standards that have that as a question: 'What's the turning point of the Civil War?' And the answer is the Battle of Gettysburg. And they ask me how to deal with that. And I tell them to tell their students, 'Here's a life lesson for you. Here's the question. Here's the answer that will help you, but it's not the correct answer. You just need to know it's not the correct answer. Go ahead and give the incorrect answer because it will help you going forward. Just be aware that it isn't.' I think one of the most widely held misconceptions of the war is that United States victory was inevitable and that emancipation was inevitable. And of course, neither one of those things is true. I think it's part of what I call the Appomattox syndrome, which is starting at the end of the story and knowing everything we know about the end of the story. And then, so of course the United States won, slavery was killed—those things were obviously inevitable. They happened. Now let's go back and see what points toward those things and sort of construct our narrative in that way. And it's always been interesting to me that a lot of the people who are very interested in emancipation, in effect, link arms with the Lost Cause people there, because the Lost Cause guys after the war said, 'Well, we never could—we lost because we never could have won that war. Yankees had too much of everything.' That's not what they were saying during the war, but it's what they said after the war. So I think that is a very common misconception about the war. Emancipation's inevitability is another one. There's also one moving into the early postwar years: the notion that somehow the white loyal citizenry stepped away from a commitment that they had made to full equal rights for freed people. I think that's another major misconception. I don't think there was ever a commitment to that. I think for the loyal citizenry, it was always mainly a war about union—became a war about union and emancipation. That's two things. The end of the war: check, check. We did both. There's not a third thing on their list. Save the Union, kill slavery, make sure black people get full equal rights. That third one was never there. And I think once you come to terms with that—we wish it had been otherwise, but it wasn't—coming to terms with that makes Reconstruction intelligible. I think there's no lost moment of potential racial equality. I think because what it would have taken to achieve that simply wasn't there—a sense that something was left undone and a willingness to deploy military forces over the long term in the former Confederacy to make certain that you got that. That wasn't there either.

There's some—I and I don't know what percentage, let's be generous and say 10% of the white North—I think that's too high—would have really cared yet that black men should get the vote and so forth. I mean, even the states in the North weren't allowing black men to vote, so that sort of tells us they weren't that concerned about it. Only five states let black men vote at the beginning of the Civil War—five of the New England states—and a bunch of other states voted it down over the next few years. So if you understand that, Reconstruction doesn't become a lost moment. It becomes, to me, it becomes this sort of amazing moment where a population—an overwhelmingly white population that doesn't really care about black people—nonetheless gives us the 14th and 15th Amendments, which down the road really make a difference. So it's just a different way to look at it, I think.

Relatively. Yes.

Sure.

Well, I will speak on that. There was this notion that Reconstruction was just a continuation of the war by other means. I don't buy that either. It's on such a different scale. There's a lot of postwar violence, especially race-related violence. There are really ugly episodes in Memphis and in New Orleans. There's a tremendous amount of voter intimidation of black potential voters and white unionists. All of that's true, but when you compare it to the level of violence during the war, it just—to me—doesn't make sense to pretend that this is still just the war being carried on by other means. It just isn't. The goals are different. The white South, if they'd had their way, they would have kept slavery and they would have been a nation. Well, they know they're not going to get slavery back. They know they're not going to be a nation. So they scale back their goals, and what they want to do is maintain white supremacy, and they do end up doing that. And Jim Crow is sort of the most obvious evidence of how they succeeded long term. It wasn't even clear they'd succeed in that. They did succeed in that in the long term, but that's so different from the goal of establishing a slaveholding republic. The whole thing has changed in the aftermath. And I just think it's a mistake to pretend the war just keeps going on. The level of violence is so different. People lose sight of the fact, I think, that for most of the loyal white citizenry, the goal is to put the Union created by the founders back together. And that only is going to happen if you let the former Confederate states back in. Doesn't mean you have to love all of them. The fact that the white South acted badly in the summer of 1865, with a big assist from Andrew Johnson in the White House, explains, I think, why the white North went as far as it did. It's why we got a 14th Amendment. It's why we got a 15th Amendment. Because the white South was acting like they didn't lose, and that was something the loyal citizenry wouldn't put up with. You lost. You need to behave like you lost. And we don't really care about black people. We'll let you order your race relations, but you're not going to do some of these other things that you're doing because you lost the war.

The southern people made a series of very bad miscalculations from 1860 to 1866. Nobody's made a—I mean, what bigger irony is there in United States history than the irony of what happened with these guys who said, you know, 'Let's get out of the Union to protect slavery,' which would have lasted probably 40 years, 50 years if there hadn't been a war, and in four years it's dead, and 30% of their white military-age males are dead, and their economy's in a shambles. I mean, talk about a gamble that went wrong. 'We want to protect slavery.' Oops. We lost it in four years when we would have had it. I mean, Lincoln said 50 years. I don't think it's unreasonable—I think we would have gotten rid of it. We would have been later than Brazil. We would have been later than Spanish Cuba because it was thriving here in the 1860s.

Yeah, I get asked that a lot. I don't really have a favorite battlefield. I've spent tons of time on so many of them. I mean, I love Antietam because there's few modern intrusions there. On Antietam, my favorite part of the tours I would give there is when I would walk groups into the West Woods and then through the West Woods to the 15th Massachusetts monument, that rampant lion monument that overlooks the old Hagerstown Pike, and talk there, use that monument and the very high number of killed and mortally wounded. I have good quotations about how one of the men who was killed there was buried and how his father came back and couldn't find where he was buried. That's one of my favorite parts of any battlefield. But I mean, I love taking students to Chancellorsville and to all kinds of other groups. Gettysburg. Gettysburg is irresistible. It's a wonderful place and a hideous place in my view. I mean, there's no schlock that is not for sale in Gettysburg. It's overrun by people who want to go on ghost tours, for God's sake. That's a dumb thing that wasn't there when I first went to Gettysburg. But there are also places on Gettysburg I love to take—in my version of the walk to do the Pickett-Pettigrew assault, I like to walk them up the Spangler Lane so they'll get some sense of how far down the right flank of the Confederates were, then all back along the ridge to Porter Alexander's guns. And I mean, I love to do that. That's fun to make people think about Pickett's Charge as not just going from the Virginia monument to the me equestrian...

monument, but it's so much more complicated than that. I take my tours. I start down the Spangler Lane, too. And I always start a group from the Virginia monument and then I start a group from the Spangler Lane. And it's interesting that, you know, the charge only lasted about 18 to 20 minutes.

You know, well, they can't even see. I mean, if you're down there by Spangler, you can't even see the road. You can't see Cemetery Ridge. You can't see any of that. I mean, it's so totally different than it is for the North Carolinians who were over beyond the Spangler Woods, where as soon as they march 50 yards to their front, they're looking right at Cemetery Ridge and realize what they're going to have to do. It's so different on the right. Just completely different.

Yeah.

But, well, fire away. If we've already covered it, we'll tell you we've covered it and ask for another question.

Yes, exactly. I'd love to have a $10 bill for every time someone has asked. I really want to take you all to dinner at a really fancy restaurant and have a lot of money left over.