Gary Gallagher: American Civil War, Slavery, Lincoln, Grant & Lee | Lex Fridman Podcast #499
In a Nutshell
Lincoln argues that slavery was thriving in 1860 and the war was not inevitable, but once it began it expanded from a war to restore the Union to one that destroyed slavery as well. Union soldiers fought primarily to save the republic and its democratic promise, while Confederates fought to preserve slavery as both an economic system and a means of social control. The war's outcome hinged on leaders like Lincoln and Grant who took decisive risks, and on the North's ability to sustain the fight until Confederate morale collapsed.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
Two days of fighting produced more battle casualties than US forces had suffered in every war combined down to that point. Two and a half months after that, George B. McClellan's army engaged with Lee's army in the Seven Days Battles at Richmond, resulting in 36,000 casualties. Those two battles together showed the war was going to be on a totally different scale.
Grant envisioned and Sheridan actually implemented a strategy in the Shenandoah Valley before Sherman did it in Georgia. The approach involved going into an agriculturally productive area, burning the mills, killing the livestock, destroying the crops, and laying waste to it so that it could no longer serve as logistical support for the Confederacy. Sheridan carried this out in the Shenandoah Valley, and then Sherman did it in Georgia.
Sherman added a psychological dimension, stating he was going to show them that his army could go wherever it wanted to go whenever it wanted to go, and there was nothing Jefferson Davis could do about it.
The notion that great forces are all that matters and individuals don't really matter in history is considered ridiculous. Individuals really matter. For the United States, Lincoln and Grant matter beyond calculation in this war. On the Confederate side, if you take Lee out of the picture, the war doesn't last nearly as long as it does.
The American Civil War broke out in 1861. The conditions were in place by the winter of 1860-61 to make the war possible. 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.
There had been a series of tensions that grew in the decade preceding the 1850s. The issue was not that one side wanted to get rid of slavery and the other side wanted to protect slavery. The question was whether slavery was going to be able to expand into federal territories. That created the starkest difference between the two sections in the 1850s, even in the late 1840s.
The issues that came to a perilous point 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 that the slaveholding states could end up with a majority. They were in a minority by 1860-61 and feeling beleaguered and threatened.
The slaveholding states had 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, with four of the first five presidents being from Virginia, all slaveholders and prominent members of the slaveholding class. Those days were long gone by the late 1850s.
There was a portion of the white population that was 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 got a handful of thousand votes. They reached their high point in 1844, getting about two and a half percent of the vote. The abolitionists were a tiny minority among white people in the United States.
The African American population, nearly four million by 1860, would have embraced abolition instantly and yearned for it. But in the white population, the abolitionists were a tiny minority. They were 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.
The escalation to civil war occurred because in the presidential election of 1860, the two-party system broke down over slavery. The first party system was the Republicans (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.
The Whig Party foundered to a significant degree on the issue of slavery - how to 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, so the Whig Party ran their last significant presidential candidate in 1852.
The Republican Party emerged in the mid-1850s, taking most of the old Whigs into the Republican ranks. The key Republican platform plank was no expansion of slavery into the territories - not abolish slavery, but no expansion. That was the key in 1856 when they ran their first candidate. In 1860, that was again the key plank in the Republican platform.
The Republican platform in 1860 said where slavery exists it will continue, but it cannot expand into the territories. When white Southerners saw that, it meant they were doomed to become an increasingly minority section in the nation, and they would have a federal government increasingly dominated by the free states that could then 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 there was a Northern Democratic candidate running (Stephen A. Douglas) and a Southern candidate running (John C. Breckinridge). The convention fractured. There was also a Unionist candidate running who didn't want to talk about slavery, and Lincoln running as a Republican.
When Lincoln won, the white South looked at Lincoln winning. Lincoln had said he didn't think slavery would expand, but he'd said more than that. In 1858, both Lincoln and William Henry Seward had said 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.
Lincoln's election scared the white South enough so that seven of the 15 slave-holding states seceded in response to Lincoln's election. They seceded between December 20th, when South Carolina went out, and the end of February. The deep South went out.
In 1860, there were about 31 million Americans. About four million of them were African Americans, three and a half million of those enslaved in the South. Among the white population, the average attitude toward Black people was profoundly prejudiced. By the standards of the time, the overwhelming majority of people in the free states were also deeply prejudiced.
Attitudes towards slavery and attitudes toward race are not necessarily the same. You could be against slavery and still be prejudiced against Black people. By modern standards, many abolitionists were prejudiced against Black people.
The free states in 1860 were more than 98% white. African Americans were a tiny minority in the free states. Black people lived in the 15 slaveholding states in 1860. Most of the white North was very prejudiced by modern standards.
The white North was 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 as an institution.
There would be more problems among Republicans, especially with extension of slavery, although many Democrats, white Democrats in the North were against that as well. The white South was overwhelmingly in favor of slavery.
Most Confederate soldiers didn't own slaves. The large majority of families in the South did not own a single slave. But all white Southerners had a stake in slavery - not just as a form of labor control, but more important, as a means of social control. They knew that Black people 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. 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 soundly at night if you think there's any chance that the Black people are not going to remain under the control of the white people.
All white people in the South had a stake in slavery. 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 where you could gin your cotton, and then you would take your turn on the slave patrols.
Slavery was ubiquitous in human history, existing in virtually every major civilization - Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, China, the Islamic world, Africa, and the Americas. The Atlantic slave trade brought only 4% of African slaves to North America, to the United States. Brazil was the main destination. Brazil received 4.9 million enslaved Africans, the Caribbean received 4 million, and Brazil was also the last of the Americas to abolish the slave trade.
The Civil War ended slavery in four years in the United States. In the absence of that war, it might have gone on for decades. The United States would have had the ignominious distinction of being the last place to get rid of slavery, after Brazil and after Spanish Cuba, because slavery was thriving in the United States in 1860.
Slavery was making the transition from cash crop agriculture to industrial applications and other applications beyond growing cotton, rice, and sugar. The argument that the Civil War was needless because slavery was on its way out is absolutely wrong. Slavery was not on its way out - it was thriving.
Lincoln said at one point he thought slavery might have lasted another fifty years. It would have lasted longer than it did in either Cuba or Brazil if the war hadn't taken place.
The 1860 census shows that the people who controlled the most wealth in the United States were slaveholders. Their property in slaves alone, not their other holdings, not their land holdings, just property in slaves, was valued at about three billion dollars. The value of all industries, all railroads, all of that put together, was fewer than two point five billion dollars. So the people who controlled the most wealth, by far, were the slaveholding class.
Most slave-owning societies of the era were able to abolish slavery without mass deaths. Britain freed eight hundred thousand slaves in 1833 by buying their freedom. Russia freed twenty-three million serfs in 1861 with a decree. Brazil, which imported more than ten times as many enslaved Africans as the United States, abolished slavery in 1888 through ordinary legislation with no violence.
The US had a civil war with an estimated seven hundred and fifty thousand people dead. The number for years was six hundred and eighteen thousand, and that's been revised to probably more than seven hundred thousand. By far the bloodiest war in US history as a percentage of the population.
There's a big difference between Great Britain abolishing slavery and the United States doing it. Great Britain did it in other places - there weren't millions of enslaved people in Great Britain at the time. For them, it might have been easier to free enslaved people who don't live among you than it was in the United States.
In the United States, the ante was up for the Confederacy because the enslaved people lived there, and many white Southerners were afraid of them and what would happen if they weren't enslaved anymore.
The war doesn't begin as a war to end slavery. There's a major shift in the war beginning in the summer of 1862, where the war aim for the United States initially is to suppress the rebellion, which is what they called it. 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 going to be able to suppress the rebellion unless they also strike at slavery, because slavery underpins the Confederate war-making capacity. Enslaved labor 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 that'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.
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. 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.
Lincoln did that on purpose because he doesn't have the power to strike at slavery in the absence of a war. The president doesn't have that power. 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 Democrats might accept emancipation is as a tool to help achieve union. 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 and alienated many Democrats who said he was changing what the war was about.
The Emancipation Proclamation is even more complicated than it appears. 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, Lincoln said it is in essence United States territory now. He couldn't free enslaved people there because he didn't have the power.
He could only free them where the United States was not in control. 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.
At the time he signed it, he didn't free anybody because he's only saying he can free them where the United States is not in control. The United States has to be in control for this to have effect and for this to have power.
Congress had already passed what was called the Second Confiscation Act 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.
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, 800,000-900,000 in the Confederacy.
Causation and motivation are often conflated. In terms of causation, if you take slavery out of the picture, there is no Civil War, period. That's not a long conversation needed.
The next question is: were most white people motivated to put on blue uniforms because they wanted to kill slavery? The answer to that is no. 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 to successive generations.
The two key parts of what the Union meant for Northern soldiers were: number one, you had a voice in your own government. Within the context of the Western world in 1860, the United States had by far the broadest franchise. And it also gives the chance to rise economically. It doesn't guarantee that you can succeed, but it means you're not doomed to be what your father was.
Those were worth fighting for. Northern soldiers would put on a uniform so the slave-holding aristocrats and oligarchs of the South, who they said didn't really believe in democracy, wouldn't prevail. They saw the South as an oligarchy, a slavery-based oligarchy.
They knew which way Europe was going. The revolutions of the 1840s failed in Europe. Europe was going the wrong way - toward more aristocracy, more oligarchy. The United States was the last hope. When Lincoln spoke of the last best hope of Earth, 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.
Those soldiers felt it was that important to them. They are citizens in a republic that people shed blood to establish, and they can't let it go. Part of the compact is that as a citizen, you derive benefits from this republic, from the Union. You can have a voice in government. You can rise economically or have the chance to. You owe your service to that republic.
That's what most of them would have said if pressed on why they're doing it. Doesn't mean everybody was on fire with ideology that way. Some guys would say they're broke and they're going to get fed and clothed in the army. But this sense of exceptionalism was strong - Americans had a sense of themselves as a truly exceptionalist society within the context of the Western world.
On the maps, the Confederate units are red blocks and the United States units are blue blocks. The preferred terminology is 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. There are four slaveholding states in the United States: Kentucky, Missouri, 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.
The Union is also referred to as the United States.
The Confederacy created their founding document quickly by copying the US Constitution and making only the changes needed to protect slavery and adjust tariffs. The entire process took much less time than the summer of 1787 because they started with the existing framework. Both sides claimed to be the true inheritors of the revolutionary generation, with Jefferson Davis loving the Declaration of Independence just as Abraham Lincoln did, though each side emphasized different parts.
Gallagher argues that the Confederacy constituted two republics, a view that angers some who believe it confers undeserved legitimacy. His response is that the Confederacy had a national government, Senate, Congress, army, navy, and departments - it walked and quacked like a duck, though it was ultimately crushed by United States military forces.
When speaking on controversial topics in controversial historical periods, equal criticism from both sides indicates the job was done well. Gallagher shares hate mail from someone upset about referring to the Confederacy as a slave-holding republic, who wished him virulent pancreatic cancer and a horrible death, then signed his name offering to talk anytime.
In the 1860 election, Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, John C. Breckinridge, and John Bell all expressed love for the Union, but each held different versions of what that Union meant. Gallagher loves that America allows strong disagreement among citizens, hoping such disagreements never again escalate to Civil War levels.
The most important question for understanding the Civil War is why a farmer from Vermont would put on a blue uniform and pick up a musket to force South Carolina back into the Union. The answer lies in the concept of union - if South Carolina could leave because they disliked the election results, then the republic becomes so fragile that any election could trigger secession. This would mean the founders wasted their time and the revolution meant nothing. Northern soldiers fought as citizen soldiers who believed they owed service to the republic that had given them its benefits.
Even during the massive Civil War, immigration continued at high levels, which contemporaries saw as a testament to the promise of the United States. Americans have always argued about immigration, with each generation claiming new arrivals were ruining the country - first the Irish, then Southern Europeans. The arguments remain remarkably consistent despite changing populations.
Both sides claimed George Washington as their own. Confederates were more leery of Thomas Jefferson because he was too complicated for their purposes. The Confederates argued they were following the Constitution since it allowed slavery, claiming Northerners were the ones out of step.
State rights have always been available in American history for those unhappy with federal government actions. During the War of 1812, New England states most often invoked state rights and held the Hartford Convention that moved toward secession. The only state right that mattered to white Southerners was the right of states to interpose power between federal attempts to interfere with slavery and state governments wanting to maintain it. Northern states used personal liberty laws to interpose state power between federal enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act.
The Confederacy passed the first national draft in American history in spring 1862. The Confederate central government became the most intrusive in American history until the 20th century, passing national conscription, a graduated income tax, and a tax-in-kind taking percentages of crops. They impressed horses, mules, and enslaved labor. These intrusions outraged true state rights advocates within the Confederacy.
The Confederacy avoided political parties, claiming the founders opposed them, but Jefferson Davis's wing supported giving the central government necessary powers. Alexander Stephens argued states should retain more power. The war lasted as long as it did because the central government took unprecedented actions. Davis suspended habeas corpus in selected situations, as did Lincoln.
Confederate soldiers initially enlisted for one year in spring 1861, expecting the war to end quickly. When a year passed and significant numbers were due for discharge, Congress passed conscription making all liable for three-year service, extending original one-year volunteers by two additional years. Later, when three-year terms expired, Congress declared service for the duration of the war. Once in uniform, Confederate soldiers could not leave because rules kept changing. National conscription was seen as a fundamental abridgment of individual rights by many who believed citizens should volunteer service.
The United States waited until spring 1863 to implement conscription and always respected original terms of enlistment, never extending service for the duration as the Confederacy did.
The major figures of the Civil War include Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, Frederick Douglass, George B. McClellan, and John Brown.
Lincoln remains one of the few historical figures whose estimation continues to rise with age. Coming from extreme poverty with virtually no formal schooling, he became America's most eloquent president, surpassing even Jefferson in distilling complex ideas into fewest possible words. Lincoln possessed an ego but had the gift of setting it aside to focus relentlessly on suppressing rebellion, restoring the Union, and eventually adding slavery's destruction to Union war aims.
Lincoln surrounded himself with capable cabinet members who had been his rivals, including William Henry Seward and Salmon P. Chase, despite their superior educations and different backgrounds. He never pretended to speak differently than his rural accent, despite knowing others sneered at it. Lincoln could listen to those he believed knew more, admit when wrong, and change his mind. He tolerated obnoxious behavior from those who might deliver results, exemplified by his handling of George B. McClellan.
Lincoln carried deep depression throughout his life. Despite lacking administrative experience beyond a small law office, having only a two-year House term, and minimal military service in the Black Hawk War, he proved a remarkable commander-in-chief compared to Jefferson Davis's extensive credentials as West Point graduate, Mexican War commander, Senate Military Affairs Committee chair, and Secretary of War.
In 1861, Lincoln and Seward visited McClellan's house to discuss matters. When McClellan returned home, he went upstairs without seeing them and sent word that he would talk to the president some other time. Lincoln left without protest, filed the incident away, and never returned to McClellan's house, demonstrating his ability to overlook personal affronts if he believed someone could win the war.
Rather than calling for retribution against the defeated Confederacy, Lincoln's second inaugural told the audience what they did not want to hear: that slavery caused the war and all Americans were implicated in it. The speech, lasting eight or nine minutes, paid tribute to citizen soldiers at both beginning and end, stating that everything depended on what soldiers accomplished - saving the Union and killing slavery.
"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."
Lincoln's Gettysburg Address contains approximately 200 words beginning "Four score and seven years ago, our fathers..."
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.
It's about freedom.
Lincoln returns to the word "people" when most readers focus on the prepositions "of the people, by the people, for the people." He referred to the war as a people's contest. He delivered the address at Gettysburg before most people knew he had started, and almost nobody heard him speak. The one prediction he made that proved wrong was that the world would little note or long remember what was said there.
Grant had known failure at farming, business, and his role in the peacetime army. When the war came, it revealed a genius. He had learned to deal with setbacks. He maintained a strong family life with his wife that served as his foundation. During the war, he showed an absolute willingness to break rules, take risks, and take responsibility for his actions whether successful or not. He was not cast down by failures. When something didn't work, he would say "Okay, that didn't work. Now let's do this." When he took command of the Army of the Potomac in Virginia in 1864, subordinates worried about what Lee might do. Grant replied that they should stop worrying about what Lee was going to do and let Lee worry about what they were going to do. He was unflappable under stress.
Grant gained a reputation as a butcher, a label attached by former Confederates and some Northern Democrats. His total casualties in all great battles before meeting Lee were 37,000, while Lee's were over 98,000 in the same period. The bloodiest general in US history in terms of casualties inflicted on his own men was Robert E. Lee. A demographic study of Lee's army showed that a soldier in Lee's army had a 73% chance of becoming a casualty. Grant's casualties rose when he faced Lee, as did everyone's. The butcher label was completely unfair.
Grant also had a reputation as a drunk. The point is that alcohol never interfered with his wartime performance. He delivered victories when the United States needed them, and Lincoln recognized this. In March 1864, Congress revived the rank of lieutenant general, which only George Washington had held, and awarded it to Grant. He would also become the first four-star general in the United States Army.
The butcher label originated from the Overland Campaign. Grant was general in chief managing the entire war effort, including Sherman's, Sheridan's, and Nathaniel Banks's operations. Lee was only an army commander who could recommend actions to Jefferson Davis but never commanded more than one army. Very late in the war, Lee was made general in chief when it was too late to matter.
In April 1861, Lee was offered command of the Union Army and chose Virginia instead. Lee came from an aristocratic family at the top of Virginia aristocracy. Two of his uncles signed the Declaration of Independence. His father was a famous commander under George Washington who said Washington was first in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen. Lee idolized Washington and patterned himself after him. He almost undid the work Washington established during the American Revolution.
Lee resigned his commission in the United States Army to go to Virginia, which was not yet in the Confederacy, to become head of state forces in Virginia. When Virginia joined the Confederacy, he took a Confederate commission and became the third-ranking officer in Confederate service. His loyalty was to Virginia, meaning his family and slavery. He was devoted to the slave-holding South as well as to Virginia. Earlier in his career, he had been an ardent US nationalist and a successful military officer. Winfield Scott thought Lee was the greatest soldier in the army.
Thaddeus Stevens was one of the most radical of the radical Republicans, a congressman from Pennsylvania who eviscerated opponents. He was an ardent abolitionist and supported equal rights for women. He had a line about an opponent slinking across the floor of the House and adhering to his seat by his own slime. Women used to ask for locks of hair from famous people. Stevens was completely bald and wore a full wig. When a woman stopped him on the Capitol steps asking for a lock of his hair, he took off his whole wig and said "Madam, have them all." He is the character Stoneman in Birth of a Nation, the evil radical Republican.
The Deep South states led the secession movement, with South Carolina as ground central. The Democrats held their national convention in Charleston in 1860. South Carolina was the first state to secede, followed by Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, and Texas, making seven states. They gathered in Montgomery, Alabama, to establish a new government with Montgomery as the capital. Texas was the last of the first seven to secede.
Eight slaveholding states had not seceded: Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, Delaware, and one other. Virginia was the most important among those remaining. The crisis focused on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. Jefferson Davis believed he could not allow the federal installation to remain in what he viewed as Confederate territory. Lincoln decided to resupply the fort rather than reinforce it. The Confederates fired the first shots on Fort Sumter.
Lincoln's call for volunteers to suppress the rebellion triggered four more states to secede: Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina, creating an 11-state Confederacy. Virginia had 40% of all industrial capacity in the Confederacy, was the most populous state, had the largest slave population and largest white population, and supplied the most important military leaders. The Confederate capital moved from Montgomery to Richmond.
The key states that remained in the Union were Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri. Delaware also stayed but was less significant. Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia sent the most men into the Confederate Army. Three of these four came in the second wave of secessions.
A secession convention in Virginia voted twice against secession and only reconsidered after Fort Sumter. Even then, it remained so divided that a big chunk of Virginia became West Virginia, which essentially seceded from Virginia during the Civil War. Virginia was critical because of its manpower, industrial capacity, food production, and because it provided Lee, Jackson, Jeb Stuart, and the most soldiers of any Confederate state. It also brought ties to the revolutionary generation, including Washington's home state and connections to Jefferson and Madison.
The Civil War was not inevitable. Things happen in sequence: Lincoln's election, South Carolina's secession, other states seceding, and eventually war. The decision to resupply Fort Sumter was a critical choice. If Lincoln had allowed the Confederates to take Fort Sumter without resistance, the departure of the upper South states might not have occurred, changing the entire equation.
Over 700,000 people died in the war. The Confederacy lost between four and a half and five and a half percent of its entire population, more than Great Britain, France, Germany, or Russia during World War I. The United States lost about 1.8% of its population. In World War II, the United States lost three-tenths of one percent of its population. The Confederacy lost more than 30% of its entire white military-age males, equivalent to about 18 million Americans being killed in a war today.
As the war progressed and losses mounted, hatred toward the enemy increased on both sides. The notion that soldiers were all brothers not really mad at each other does not hold up. While soldiers sometimes fraternized and traded tobacco for coffee, bitterness grew as the war became more all-encompassing and affected civilians. About 15% of Confederate soldiers deserted and about 12% of United States soldiers deserted. There was war-weariness, but most white Southerners would have chosen to continue the war with Jefferson Davis rather than return to the United States under Lincoln without slavery.
At Appomattox, Grant's terms reflected a meeting with Lincoln shortly before the surrender, attended by Sherman, one top naval officer, Grant, and Lincoln. Lincoln specified the kind of peace he wanted: the whole point of the war was to put the nation back together. If it was just a rebellion, traitors and rebels would be hanged. The United States treated Confederates as prisoners of war during the conflict. Lincoln wanted soldiers to sign a parole, accept the end of slavery and their return to the Union, then go home and resume their lives without imprisonment or execution.
The Union decision not to punish Confederates or execute their leaders represented a partial nod toward forgiveness, though real forgiveness was absent. Hard feelings persisted on both sides, and Lincoln's assassination intensified tensions for a period afterward.
Reunion refers to literally putting the nation back together, which occurred. Reconciliation—true reconciliation—was much tougher and did not come anytime soon for millions of people on both sides.
The Civil War was a profoundly disruptive event that strikes at the heart of what the republic means, with nothing comparable in U.S. history. Residual aftermath and effects lingered for decades and remain present in some ways.
The Appomattox Syndrome refers to the retrospective view that war was inevitable, the United States would win, and slavery would be destroyed, then working backward to explain how events led to that outcome. In reality, most Americans in 1859 were simply living their lives without anticipating war.
People in Iowa in 1857 were not primarily thinking about hating the South. They attended to their farms and businesses. No one knew they were living in the "antebellum era" about to end.
Significant events during the 1850s included a major gold rush in Colorado that attracted more people than the California Gold Rush for a period. Technological changes created a remarkable shrinking of time and space through railroad and telegraph expansion.
Events that periodically refocused sectional differences included the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Dred Scott decision, the caning of Charles Sumner on the Senate floor, and the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin, which prompted people to rethink their views on slavery without necessarily creating abolitionists.
Nuclear weapons and potential pathogen use represent threats that did not exist in the mid-19th century. The Civil War demonstrates the resiliency of the republic, which has weathered much tougher times than the present.
The Civil War tested whether the late 18th-century republic could adjust to the profoundly disruptive issue of slavery and continue forward. The answer was yes, though the war brought slaughter on an unimaginable scale and social disruption in former slave-holding states, including the end of slavery, Confederate defeat, and the death of approximately one-third of military-age white men.
From a nation as racially prejudiced as the United States was, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments emerged—an outcome that seemed impossible when secession began in 1861.
Great military events set loose consequences that cannot be controlled or predicted. The expansion of central power during the Civil War occurred in ways no one anticipated, and such developments cannot be undone.
The federal budget grew from $63 million in 1860 to $1.2 billion in 1865. Including Confederate expenditures, total spending exceeded $2 billion. Federal expenditures for 1860 would have lasted approximately 11 days in 1865. Education legislation creating land-grant colleges and universities also emerged from the war.
The long arc of U.S. history represents an expansion of freedoms and liberties, though with problematic periods along the way. The founding documents proved resilient, adaptable, and changeable.
History cannot be reduced to 30-second versions or simple good-versus-bad narratives. The more one studies history, the more complexity emerges. People are not simple—they are complicated, and there is no 20-second version of anything in the past.
As a system, increasing levels of freedom—including freedom of speech—create messy but functional dynamics for addressing problems and generating progress over the long arc of history.
Grant scored high on humility, while McClellan's first thought each day concerned whether others would appreciate his greatness.
A common misconception holds that Union victory was inevitable due to the North's 22 million people versus the Confederacy's 5.5 million white people and 3.5 million enslaved people, along with the North's superior economy, army, and navy. This view is incorrect.
The Confederacy had compensating advantages. It needed only to convince the loyal states' civilian population that the cost of forcing rebel states back into the Union was too high—a tie would count as victory. Lee and Jefferson Davis understood this dynamic.
The Confederacy's sheer size presented enormous logistical challenges for Union forces, comparable to the problems the British faced during the American Revolution and War of 1812. The Confederacy was as large as all of Western Europe.
Confederate soldiers fought to defend their homes, which provided stronger motivation than the Union's objective of imposing its will on others.
The U.S. Army had only 15,000 men in 1860. The Navy had fewer than 50 vessels, most stationed overseas, with only three available to blockade the Confederacy's 3,600-mile coastline.
West Point graduates commanded both armies. Officers who had been lieutenants and captains during the Mexican-American War under Winfield Scott or Zachary Taylor now led armies and corps. They shared the same training, textbooks, and doctrine, making inherent leadership advantages unlikely.
The Union ultimately found four effective army commanders: Grant, Sherman, Philip Henry Sheridan, and George H. Thomas. The Confederacy found only one: Lee. Having more than one army but only one capable commander created a disadvantage for the Confederacy.
Both sides used the same weapons: muzzle-loading single-shot rifle muskets that inflicted 85-90% of casualties, and comparable artillery pieces. The United States could have used repeating weapons but declined to do so. The Confederacy lacked industrial capacity to produce them.
Both sides organized armies identically, drew officers the same way, and used railroads and telegraphs. The Union Navy was larger, but armies decided the war's outcome.
Linear, shoulder-to-shoulder formations maintained unit integrity but produced high casualties. By 1864, field entrenchments became standard. Both armies entrenched nightly, requiring approximately a 3-to-1 numerical advantage for successful attacks against entrenched positions.
Union soldiers received better and more regular supplies of food and clothing. Confederate uniforms had a more varied appearance, but Confederate defeats did not result from shortages of shoes or powder.
Two out of every three soldiers who died succumbed to disease rather than battle wounds. The Irish Brigade reversed this pattern, with two battle deaths for every disease death. Total casualties—killed, wounded, and prisoners of war—reached approximately 1.5 million.
In the loyal states' military-age white population in 1860, approximately one-third were foreign-born, but foreign-born soldiers comprised about one-quarter of the Union Army. Foreign-born soldiers were underrepresented in Union forces and slightly overrepresented in Confederate forces.
The largest group of foreign-born soldiers were Germans, followed by Irish soldiers. Anti-Irish prejudice was intense and intertwined with anti-Catholic sentiment. Cartoons depicted Irish people as simian figures often holding whiskey jugs. Germans, called "Dutch" by soldiers, also faced ethnic prejudice.
Both sides used Christianity to justify their cause, citing biblical examples of justified warfare. Setbacks could be interpreted as divine tests requiring greater effort rather than surrender.
Confederate leaders Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jeb Stuart were more overtly religious than Union leaders Grant, Sherman, and Philip Sheridan. Lee's official reports and correspondence contained frequent religious allusions.
Approximately 200,000 Black men served in United States Colored Troops (USCT) units on the Union side. Claims of 100,000 Black men serving in the Confederate Army lack credible supporting evidence and represent preposterous nonsense.
Black men served in Confederate armies primarily as enslaved laborers performing non-military duties to free white men for combat roles. The Union side saw approximately 200,000 Black men join military service during the war, serving in both the Navy and Army. Black sailors had always been present in the US Navy with integrated crews, though segregation existed in some aspects. The Army represented a significant departure, as arming Black men was considered unacceptable by Confederates, viewed as inciting widespread slave rebellion.
Black regiments on the Union side enraged Confederates, with these units overwhelmingly led by white officers. The symbolic power of formerly enslaved men in uniform carrying muskets was profoundly jarring to Confederate society. African Americans fighting for the Union understood their participation as establishing an unimpeachable claim to citizenship, recognizing that risking their lives as citizen-soldiers created moral authority to demand voting rights afterward.
Frederick Douglass and others recognized that abolishing slavery was the first step toward equal rights, not the end goal. However, the vast majority of white Northerners did not envision full equal rights for Black people as part of their war aims. Their priorities were saving the Union and ending slavery, with equal rights not on their agenda. White soldiers who had served were eager to return home after Confederate surrender rather than remain to enforce equal rights in the South.
Abolishing slavery marked the beginning of a journey toward equal rights that often took at least 100 years to achieve. The passage of the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, and Fair Housing Act addressed legal aspects, but changing attitudes in people's minds proved a longer, more frustrating process that remains vulnerable to exploitation.
Before the war, white Northerners viewed white Southerners as lazy, violent, and prone to physical confrontation rather than dialogue, attributing this to their familiarity with slavery's brutality. White Southerners saw Northerners as materialistic, caring only about money and lacking family values. These perceptions mattered more than reality, though both sides shared common language, religion, history, and founding documents. Protestant churches divided over slavery.
The war featured three main theaters. The Eastern Theater centered on Washington and Richmond, played out primarily in Virginia with some action in Maryland and Pennsylvania, featuring the Army of Northern Virginia against the Army of the Potomac. This theater gained the most attention due to the presence of Lee and later Grant. The Western Theater stretched from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River, extending from the Gulf to the Ohio River, encompassing Tennessee and surrounding areas. The Trans-Mississippi Theater, including parts of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas, was the least significant in terms of resource commitment and outcome.
The Western Theater proved crucial for Union victory, producing the soldiers who won the war: Grant, Sherman, Philip Sheridan, and George Thomas. Grant emerged from this theater as the decisive commander.
At the First Battle of Manassas (also called Bull Run) in July 1861, spectators from Washington arrived with carriages and picnics to observe the battle from ridges, demonstrating both the belief that the war would be brief and a fundamental misunderstanding of its seriousness. Lincoln initially requested 90-day volunteers to suppress the rebellion. William Tecumseh Sherman recognized the inadequacy of this approach, comparing it to attempting to extinguish a fire with a squirt gun.
The First Battle of Bull Run brought reality to Northern expectations. The battle revealed that the conflict would require more men and greater resources. Throughout summer 1861, hundreds of thousands entered uniform. The Battle of Wilson's Creek in Missouri represented one significant engagement in 1861, but major fighting began in spring 1862.
Two battles demonstrated the war's unprecedented scale: Shiloh in early April 1862 saw upwards of 25,000 casualties in two days, exceeding all previous U.S. war casualties combined. Two and a half months later, the Seven Days Battles around Richmond produced 36,000 casualties. These engagements revealed the conflict would operate on an entirely different scale.
Guerrilla warfare proved most brutal in Missouri and Kentucky, involving perhaps 50,000 men out of the 3 million total participants. Guerrilla bands typically numbered dozens to a few hundred members, engaging in bushwhacking, ambushing, terrorizing civilians, killing livestock, and executing prisoners. Quantrill's raid on Lawrence, Kansas, burned parts of the town and executed more than 150 men. Guerrilla activity correlated with mountainous or hilly terrain, appearing in East Tennessee, western North Carolina, southwestern Virginia, and parts of Texas. The lack of rules in guerrilla warfare prompted Henry Halleck to advocate for codified rules of war distinguishing civilians from combatants.
Most fighting followed rules of war, reflecting that this was a conflict between mid-19th century nation-states with professional armies understanding limits on warfare conduct. While limits expanded as the war progressed, it never reached indiscriminate civilian killing. The war's totality came from wide-scale targeting of economic infrastructure supporting the war effort, which intensified under Grant's command as general-in-chief.
The spring and early summer of 1862 marked a quantum leap in the war's scale. The Army of the Potomac exceeded 100,000 men, unprecedented in U.S. history. Soldier letters and diaries provide extensive testimony about the hardening process as men confronted military reality. Soldiers discussed food, clothing, and disliked officers extensively but rarely attempted to explain battle experiences to those at home, recognizing the impossibility of conveying combat to civilians.
George B. McClellan commanded the Army of the Potomac and advanced to within five miles of Richmond. Joseph E. Johnston, his Confederate opponent, preferred retreat. Johnston's wounding at Seven Pines led to Robert E. Lee's appointment. McClellan initially viewed Lee as too timid to be effective. During the Seven Days Battles, McClellan was pushed away from Richmond, a Confederate victory that enhanced Lee's reputation. Lee followed this with victory at Second Bull Run in late August 1862, then invaded Maryland with approximately 50,000 men.
At Antietam in western Maryland, Lee commanded only about 35,000 soldiers due to straggling and desertion, facing McClellan's approximately 80,000 men. McClellan had captured Lee's Special Orders Number 191 detailing the entire campaign but failed to move decisively. The battle produced 23,000 casualties in a single day, the bloodiest day in U.S. history. Lee held the field by the narrowest margin, remained another day, then retreated across the Potomac. Confederates considered the campaign successful: Richmond was saved, the war was reoriented to northern Virginia, and Lee's reputation soared.
Lincoln removed McClellan from command the day after November 1862 elections, replacing him with Ambrose Burnside. McClellan's popularity among Democrats influenced Lincoln's timing.
McClellan demonstrated brilliance building the Army of the Potomac, creating an unprecedented bond with his troops. However, he lacked the moral courage to risk everything when moments of opportunity arose. He failed to capture Richmond when positioned to do so and failed to destroy Lee's army at Antietam, where he never committed 20,000 of his men to battle. Grant and Lee possessed the willingness to risk failure that McClellan lacked.
McClellan's defeat in the Seven Days Battles convinced both Congress and Lincoln that slavery must be addressed. The Second Confiscation Act passed in late July 1862, striking at slavery. Lincoln decided to issue an emancipation proclamation but waited for a victory to announce it. Antietam provided that occasion, and Lincoln issued his preliminary proclamation five days after the battle on September 22, 1862.
By late May 1862, the Confederacy faced catastrophic losses in the Western Theater: New Orleans had fallen in April, the Confederacy's largest city and most important port; Nashville was lost; Memphis fell in June; Tennessee was effectively lost except for mountainous East Tennessee; a Union army of 100,000 men occupied northern Mississippi. McClellan's army stood five miles from Richmond. The failure to capture Richmond convinced Northerners that the war would last longer and require greater measures, including emancipation.
By the summer of 1862, European powers (specifically France and England) were the key factor in Confederate calculations. The Confederacy needed European recognition and support to survive, and they determined that only more extreme measures would secure it. The most significant extreme measure was to strike directly at slavery as a war measure. This was not primarily about the ethics or morality of slavery. It was a strategic attack on the economic infrastructure that allowed the Confederacy to maintain its largest possible army in the field.
Abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass and Charles Sumner, recognized early that a longer war would increase the likelihood of emancipation being placed on the table. After the Union defeat at First Bull Run in 1861, Sumner observed that while losing was bad, the longer the war continued, the more likely slavery could be addressed. McClellan's failure to aggressively pursue the Confederates at Richmond in 1862 handed abolitionists this opportunity.
Only a tiny minority of Americans were true abolitionists at the time—estimated at approximately 3% of the population. These were individuals who wanted to destroy slavery immediately and completely, with no compensation for slave owners and no exceptions for border states like Kentucky, Missouri, or Maryland. While these abolitionists are now venerated and mythologized, they represented a very small percentage of the population.
Lincoln personally hated slavery but as president had to balance this with the practical requirements of winning the war. He needed Democratic support beyond just Republicans and was constrained by the Constitution, which still protected slavery in Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, and Delaware—all states that remained in the Union. By the end of June, Congress had abolished slavery in the only two places where it had authority: the federal territories and the District of Columbia. The territories had no compensation since there were hardly any enslaved people there, while the District of Columbia provided some compensation.
In summer 1862, Lincoln met with Black leaders to advocate for colonization—the policy that freed enslaved people would be relocated outside the United States, which is why Liberia was established. Lincoln genuinely believed that white people would never accept Black people as equals, telling the leaders that this was simply reality. This represents the least attractive element of his thinking on race, stemming from his upbringing in Kentucky and Southern Indiana and Illinois, where he was never exposed to environments where white people accepted Black people as fully equal.
Lincoln demonstrated significant evolution in his thinking during the war years. Without his assassination, he likely would have arrived at a very different worldview. Lincoln was smarter, more adaptable, and more politically adept than Andrew Johnson, suggesting the post-war period would have looked significantly different under his leadership.
Andrew Johnson was considered among the worst presidents in American history (second only to James Buchanan) because he was extremely prejudiced with lifelong grievances. He carried the poor white man's grievance from growing up in a slaveholding society, initially hated slaveholders as his enemies, then embraced them after the war. He was inflexible and could not move beyond his profound lifelong prejudices.
James Buchanan was considered the worst president in American history—a political hack who advanced through party loyalty and doing what was expected as a party operative. When faced with the secession crisis, his approach was essentially to hide and hope the crisis would resolve before he left office.
Effective leadership requires backbone—the willingness to take risks and stand behind political savvy with principles. It also requires the ability to change positions when persuaded by events and good counsel that previous positions were wrong. Lincoln exemplified this by being willing to row against the tide when necessary, as illustrated by an apocryphal story where he took a cabinet vote, received unanimous opposition, and declared "six nos and one yes—mine, the ayes have it," demonstrating his willingness to take unpopular action when he believed it was right.
Washington and Lincoln are neck and neck as America's greatest presidents. Without Washington, there would be no United States. He set crucial precedents, particularly by giving away power—stepping down after the Revolution and after two terms as president, which Europeans found incomprehensible. Washington embodied the concept of citizen-soldier and Cincinnatus, coming forward in crisis, doing his duty, then returning to private life. He demonstrated that he was not Caesar, Cromwell, or Napoleon.
Washington was surrounded by a freakishly talented group including Madison, Hamilton, Jefferson, and Franklin—people who were likely smarter and had read more Greek and Latin than Washington. Yet nobody questioned who the leader was. Washington could take responsibility and was aware he was setting precedents as the first president of the new republic with nearly every action.
Sherman acknowledged that while he was smarter than Grant and knew more about strategy, tactics, and supply, Grant's unique quality was that he "don't give a damn what the enemy is doing out of his sight," focusing completely on his objective. Grant liberated Sherman to become a great general by taking responsibility above him.
America has been fortunate in its leaders during crises, including FDR during World War II. However, the full variety of leadership—including the worst presidents—is part of the ongoing story.
Union meant something fundamentally different to the Civil War generation than it does today. It was composed of individual states that engendered loyalties, but the parts made a greater whole. People tied this concept to the Revolution and to earlier sacrifices, seeing the United States as a bulwark for small-D democracy against the oligarchy, aristocracy, and monarchy they observed in Europe following the failed revolutionary fervor of the 1840s.
Lincoln articulated the concept of union perfectly and repeatedly, talking about giving people a chance to rise and describing the United States as the "last best hope of Earth." He reaffirmed things people already knew in ways that were eloquent and memorable.
Fredericksburg was another Confederate victory under Lee, who held a strong position on high ground across the Rappahannock River from Union forces. The Union commander was Ambrose Everett Burnside, an affable but not particularly bright politician who gave his name to sideburns (originally called "burnsides"). Burnside launched frontal assaults one brigade at a time against strongly entrenched Confederates, resulting in approximately 12,500 Union casualties versus about 5,500 Confederate casualties. Lincoln was deeply affected by this defeat.
After Fredericksburg, Burnside attempted another march in late January 1863 to get around Lee's flank, but his army became stuck in the mud during horrible weather—the failed effort was lampooned as the "Mud March," leading to his removal from command. Joseph Hooker replaced him, creating a pattern of no continuity at the top of the Army of the Potomac, while the Army of Northern Virginia enjoyed complete continuity under Lee—a significant advantage.
While watching the slaughter at Fredericksburg, Robert E. Lee said, "It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it." He was observing his soldiers butchering Union troops from a very strong position with artillery support, unlike McClellan, Lee was willing to risk piling up casualties in every battle.
Chancellorsville is often described as Lee's most successful battle, fought against Joseph Hooker and representing the last battle where Lee and Stonewall Jackson fought as a team. Hooker had replaced Burnside after making statements about the nation needing a dictator. Lincoln wrote Hooker one of the best presidential letters to a military commander, acknowledging Hooker's statements but stating that the only way to become a dictator was through victories, and that he was willing to risk a dictatorship to get them.
Hooker built an army of about 135,000 men, reorganized the medical service, and did everything necessary to prepare an army. His plan was to leave part of his force to hold Lee's attention at Fredericksburg while moving the rest up the Rappahannock and Rapidan rivers to get behind Lee, forcing him to either retreat to Richmond or fight on unfavorable ground.
Hooker's campaign began well in late April 1863, but on May 1st, Lee instead of retreating left part of his army at Fredericksburg and turned to meet Hooker near Chancellorsville. Hooker lost his nerve, pulled into a defensive position, and after Lee and Jackson executed a successful flank attack, Hooker retreated. Lee won despite being outnumbered two to one (135,000 to about 64,000), in a battle he never should have won.
At the end of April, Robert E. Lee decided to divide his army, leaving 10,000 men to watch 40,000 Federals at Fredericksburg while he and Stonewall Jackson headed back toward Chancellorsville to meet Joseph Hooker. They met on May 1st, and fighting started that day. Everybody was upbeat in the Army of the Potomac. They had gotten around Lee's flank and knew they were behind him. Hooker said, "This is it. We've done it. We've done exactly what I wanted to do." The fighting started on May 1st as they marched toward Zoan Church, just east of Chancellorsville. They collided about 11:00 in the morning, and at 2:00 that afternoon, Hooker ordered a retreat. Everybody retreated back into the wilderness, a kind of cut-over, woodsy area with very few roads, and Hooker hunkered down around Chancellorsville, handing the initiative to Lee.
On the next day, Jackson and Lee decided to send Jackson all the way around the right flank. They struck Oliver Otis Howard's exposed Union corps, crushing the 11th Corps, which had a very high German element. The day ended with Lee actually in worse shape than before, with two divisions under Anderson and McLaws not even in touch with Jackson's corps. Jackson was wounded that night by his own men and carried from the field. He would die a few days later. Hooker was still in an ideal position between these two parts of Lee's army, but he was still thinking about defense.
On the morning of May 3rd, the two parts of Lee's army fought their way together around the Chancellorsville clearing, and Hooker then retreated toward the north. Hooker had been stunned by an artillery round that hit a pillar he was leaning against at Chancellorsville, giving him a concussion. He was vomiting and retreated to the rear. As Union troops retreated from the clearing near Chancellorsville, Lee's army fought itself together, and Lee rode into the middle of his troops. There was an amazing spontaneous outpouring of emotion from the Confederates. This was the moment when Lee and his men finished this period of bonding that was unmatched in the Civil War.
There was no way Lee should have won this battle. There was one more day of action farther to the east, but in the end, Hooker retreated. He never should have retreated because he was in an impregnable position. Lincoln was absolutely beside himself after this. Everybody knew the numbers - Lee had only half as many men as Hooker - yet the Army of the Potomac had been defeated by this smaller army once again.
Lee's legend grew in both North and South. He and his army became the most important national institution in the Confederacy. People looked to them to see whether independence was still possible. It was like Washington and the Continental Army during the Revolution - if they're still in the field, there's still a chance for victory. This cemented that position for Lee in the minds of Confederates and made him a kind of bugaboo to people in the North, who were thirsty for someone to defeat Lee and capture Richmond.
The North remembered Chancellorsville by not remembering it very much - they airbrushed it out of their memory of the war. The Confederates, in the iconography of the Lost Cause, saw Lee and Jackson's last meeting just before the fighting on May 2nd. A famous painting by artist Julio was reprinted as a lithograph that hung in innumerable homes, offices, and courthouses in the South. It showed Lee and Jackson at high tide, kind of - Gettysburg hadn't happened, never mind Appomattox. These were the two greatest Confederate soldiers at their greatest moment of success. It became hugely important in the Lost Cause telling of the war.
Stonewall Jackson was shot by his own men while out trying to reconnoiter and keep the battle going to exploit his successes. He was carried back to the rear and died on May 10th, eight days later. There was unbelievable mourning across the Confederacy about his death. Even some positive comments came from the North about how he'd been misguided but a very religious guy. However, there were also quiet sentiments that "That's really good news for the United States that Stonewall Jackson is dead, and really bad news for the Confederacy."
Regarding the practical impact of Jackson's death, Gary Gallagher doesn't think it changed the larger contours of the war, though people who love Stonewall Jackson would disagree. Jackson was a very good soldier at what he did, and Lee used him well - they were a good partnership - but Gallagher doesn't see how he would have changed the larger contours of the war.
Chancellorsville shows both why Lee was successful and why some of the reasons for his success opened the way for what should have been big defeats. Lee's personality was at heart aggressive - his first impulse was always to take the war to the opponent. He said, "They outnumber us. If we just sit and wait for them to come to us, they're gonna have all the advantages. We need to try to disrupt them and look for openings." This campaign showed his audacity - he divided his army three times in the face of a much more powerful opponent.
It also highlighted the overall culture Lee created in his army: a culture of risk-taking, of seeking to inflict the greatest possible harm on your opponent. This was the antithesis of the culture McClellan created in the Army of the Potomac - a culture of caution, of not taking risks, of not doing anything until everything is just right. Any adult knows everything is never just right, so if you're waiting for that, you'll never do anything. The two cultures are absolutely antithetical to one another.
In the end, it shows Lee and what he had accomplished - he had created an army that was willing to absorb casualties because it won all the time. They believed that was making it more likely their whole war effort would be successful. There are only a few times during the war where you get a scene like May 3rd, when this whole army sees the old man ride into their midst. The soldiers decided at that point that Lee was always going to win, and Lee looked at them and thought, "They can do whatever I ask them to do." If you want to understand Gettysburg, if you want to understand Pickett's Charge, you need to look back to May 3rd at Chancellorsville, when Lee just decided that his infantry could do anything he wanted them to do.
The letters from Lee's army show they absolutely didn't even contemplate losing to the Army of the Potomac. They didn't think they would lose to it. This was attributed to Lee and the fact that they won these victories under Lee, and that they took these chances, and everybody tried. They always knew they were outnumbered, and yet they were still winning. The closest the numbers had ever been was at the Seven Days when the armies were about the same size, but after that, Lee was always at a significant disadvantage in numbers, and yet he seemed to be victorious.
Lee's aggressiveness produced staggering casualties. He lost 13,000 men at Chancellorsville, and Hooker about 17,500. This was a much higher proportion of Lee's army than Hooker lost in his army. This should have been a disaster for Lee - Hooker should have crushed Lee, but he didn't.
There are two cases: Lee's audacity being the South's best hope of winning the war, but the other case is that he was actually bleeding the South dry. Historians have criticized Lee for not just being on the defensive all the time. Lee understood better than many of his critics that the key was Northern civilian opinion. He said more than once, "If we win victories, it will depress their morale. If their morale is depressed, the Democrats will do better. If the Democrats get into office, it's good for the Confederacy." He also knew it was a race between whether he was going to run out of men before they ran out of morale in the United States.
Lee was very perceptive in that regard. He understood how important politically what happened militarily was. He had a much better understanding of that than a lot of people had at the time, and better understanding than a lot of historians have now.
This was a horrible time for the US because behind the lines, Democrats were unhappy with the Emancipation Proclamation. Just two months before Chancellorsville, Congress passed the Conscription Act. Democrats were very unhappy about that, saying Lincoln was a tyrant forcing people into a war that wasn't the war they wanted to fight anyway. Union morale was very fragile. Desertions went up in the Army of the Potomac after the Emancipation Proclamation.
This is one of the more optimistic points for the Confederacy - in the late spring and early summer of 1863. If Robert E. Lee is correct that it's all about morale, then this feels very close to breaking the morale of the Union in the Eastern Theater. However, in the Western Theater, Grant was operating against Vicksburg at this point.
Vicksburg was the last major Confederate citadel on the Mississippi River. They had already lost New Orleans, so they had lost the river - it wasn't a Confederate river anymore. But they still had a strong point at Vicksburg and another one at Port Hudson in Northern Louisiana. Grant had been operating against Vicksburg since the winter of '62, and through a series of trial and errors and failures, he finally found a way he thought he could get to the city. He took great risks, crossing the Mississippi River after having the Union Navy run past all the batteries at Vicksburg, and he invested the city from the east.
Grant was laying siege to Vicksburg while getting his campaign started when Hooker was at Chancellorsville. In May, he invested the city and began a siege that would end just as the Battle of Gettysburg ended. Grant's campaign against Vicksburg is one of the most impressive campaigns in US military history. He cut loose from his supply lines. Nobody understood what he was doing - Sherman didn't get it, Lincoln didn't get it - and in the end they went, "Oh, that's what you were doing." It worked. He captured Vicksburg, which surrendered on July 4th, 1863. Religious people read divine intervention into catching that happening on July 4th, 1863 - the same day Lee retreated from Gettysburg.
After Chancellorsville, Hooker retreated across the Rappahannock. Lee was frustrated because he hadn't dealt more damage to Hooker, and he decided to move north for a second time. His army was strengthened to 75,000 men - this was his army at its absolute apogee as he got ready to go north. It was confident, well-supplied, well-led.
They headed north the second week in June. Lee's goals were to take the war out of Virginia so that the agricultural sector wasn't subject to the presence of the army, to let agriculture recover a little, and to provision his army off the rich Cumberland Valley in Pennsylvania, siphoning fodder and food and animals while north of the Potomac. He wanted to stay up there for a long time to keep the war out of Virginia. He had no idea of capturing Washington - he knew it was too strong.
Lee's cavalry under Jeb Stuart wasn't doing its job. Stuart fought the biggest cavalry battle of the war near Culpeper, Virginia at the Battle of Brandy Station on June 9th, and he almost lost. It hurt his feelings, and he decided to do something dramatic so the newspapers would love him again. He decided to ride all the way around the Army of the Potomac, which he had done when McClellan was in command. Just as he got east of the Army of the Potomac, the army started to move north, and Stuart was trapped and couldn't communicate with Lee. Lee didn't know what was going on because his cavalry wasn't doing its job.
Lee spread his army across southern Pennsylvania and then found out from a civilian spy named Harrison that the Army of the Potomac was actually following him and was much closer. At the end of June, Lee ordered his army to concentrate near Gettysburg and not to bring on a battle. They concentrated, and most of them came together. There was a little clash on June 30th, but on July 1st, the armies made contact to the west of Gettysburg in a meeting engagement, with more troops coming on each side. It built into the three-day biggest battle of the Civil War.
Lee took the tactical aggressive every day - he did the attacking, the Federals did the defending. Lee's army had 75,000 men, the other army about 85,000-88,000. Famous terrain included Little Round Top, Round Top, Devil's Den, and the Peach Orchard.
It ended on the third day. Lee came close on the second day, with a huge victory for the Confederates on the first day. On the third day, Lee was frustrated and decided to let his infantry take care of it, resulting in what most people call Pickett's Charge. Pickett was just a part of the charge - 12,500 infantry in a direct assault that failed completely. Lee retreated the next day.
You can draw a straight line between May 3rd at Chancellorsville when his infantry fought their way together and July 3rd at Gettysburg. Lee admitted it in letters to his wife and Jefferson Davis: "I asked too much of my infantry. No fault is on them. All the fault is on me." He was right - all the fault was on him. He and Grant were alike that way - they accepted responsibility.
The most perceptive Confederate soldier who wrote about the war was Edward Porter Alexander, the most gifted artillerist in Lee's army. He wrote after the war that Lee won a great victory on July 1st at Gettysburg, smashing two Union infantry corps and having a very strong position. He should have just hunkered down and said, "Okay, attack me. See what you can do." Lee almost certainly would have won the battle if he had done that, but his aggressiveness got him in trouble. He was pushing for a more aggressive, more decisive outcome right then.
Lee lost probably 25,000 men at Gettysburg, at least a third of his army. More than that, he went across the river with 52 generals in his army, and 17 of them became casualties. He lost a third of his entire corps of generals killed, wounded, or captured in the Gettysburg Campaign. It was a really bloody, costly campaign for him.
After the battle, Lee retreated back into Virginia. Lincoln was at first very happy about it, but then Meade let Lee get away without really harassing him, just like McClellan did after Antietam. Lincoln was beside himself with disappointment. He wrote a letter to Meade thanking him for his great victory and then saying, "You've let him get away. The war is gonna continue indefinitely," but he didn't send the letter to Meade. He got Halleck to tell Meade what was in it. Lincoln certainly did not think Gettysburg was the great turning point of the war. He probably thought it should have been, but it wasn't because Lee got away with his army intact.
After the battle, Lee said, "Well, you'll see. They lost a lot too, and they're gonna be... There's not gonna be another big battle. They'll be as quiet as a sucking dove for six months." In fact, it was 10 months before there was another big battle in the Eastern Theater, until Grant got there.
Gettysburg was a really important victory for the United States, but it wasn't as important as Vicksburg because Lee got away. Grant captured an entire rebel army at Vicksburg - Pemberton's whole army surrendered, the second time Grant had forced an army to surrender. He had forced one at Fort Donelson back in February of 1862. Grant's victory had no equivocations - it was a victory. The Mississippi was now all controlled by the United States Navy.
Grant won one more victory in the West after this - the Battle of Chattanooga in late 1863. That put him in position for Lincoln to decide that he not only should be in charge of everything in the West, he should be general-in-chief. In March '64, he became general-in-chief with the new rank of lieutenant general.
Grant was now planning for how the whole war was going to go. He envisioned five components, the two most important being that he was going to move against Lee. His plan was to lock up with Lee, inflict the greatest possible damage on Lee, prevent Lee from sending reinforcements anywhere else, and if all went well, Richmond would fall. But he wasn't mainly interested in Richmond - he was interested in Lee's army, which was what Lincoln had been trying to get his generals to be interested in the whole time. Destroy Lee's army, and of course Richmond falls.
Grant was thinking about the clash with Lee as confronting him directly. They were still near Fredericksburg on the Rappahannock River frontier. What they ended up with was a period of six weeks of continuous combat that began with the Battle of the Wilderness on May 5th and 6th. The old pattern in the Civil War was you fight a battle, one side retreats, and it might be weeks or months before you fight again.
What happened here is Lee and Grant fought the Battle of the Wilderness - 12,000 Confederate casualties, 18,000 Union casualties, 30,000 total casualties. They marched for one day and started another battle at Spotsylvania Courthouse - 12,000 more Confederate casualties, 18,000 more Union casualties. Now there had been 60,000 casualties in two battles with no interval. That continued through May. At Cold Harbor near Richmond in early June, Grant launched frontal assaults that came to nothing, with many of his men butchered.
The bottom line is that in the six-week campaign, Grant suffered 65,000 casualties, which was as big as Lee's whole army had been. Lee suffered 35,000 casualties, which was a higher percentage of his army than Grant lost. It was a kind of continuous campaign no one had seen before, and it shattered both armies. It eviscerated the officer corps in both armies. A lot of soldiers just broke down - they hadn't been used to something like this.
Grant's strategy involved continuous warfare that bled Lee's army while pushing it back toward Richmond, culminating in the siege at Petersburg, Virginia. This approach controlled communications into Richmond and placed Lee in exactly the position he feared most. However, Union morale dropped to its lowest point of the entire war in July and August 1864 due to the perception of endless casualties with no clear victories. While Sherman moved against Atlanta without capturing it, Richmond remained untaken, creating widespread despair.
Lincoln called his cabinet together in late August and had them sign the Blind Memorandum, which stated that they were not going to be reelected and would have to win the war before the Democrats came in, as Lincoln believed the Democrats would not pursue victory. McClellan became the Democratic nominee for president, running against Lincoln.
The Democratic platform called for negotiations, an armistice, and then negotiations. Many believed that once fighting stopped, it would not resume, potentially leading to a negotiated end that might yield a confederacy. McClellan stated he was not in favor of this approach and wanted to win the war first, then negotiate. The emancipation effort was at risk, as the 13th Amendment had passed through the Senate in April 1864 but the House voted against it, with passage not occurring until early 1865.
Grant did not reelect Lincoln through his campaign against Lee, but Sherman captured Atlanta in early September 1864, which changed everything. This represented a huge military turning point. Philip Sheridan then won a series of crushing victories in the Shenandoah Valley, with the last coming just before the election. Sherman and Sheridan were responsible for reelection Lincoln and securing huge Republican majorities in both the House and Senate in 1864.
Sherman's March involved 60,000 men crossing Georgia to the sea, burning infrastructure. Sherman stated he was going to make Georgia howl, adding a psychological dimension to the campaign. While Grant envisioned destroying logistical support by burning mills, killing livestock, and destroying crops, Sherman added the psychological element of demonstrating that his army could go wherever it wanted. He marched first to Savannah, then conducted his final campaign up through the Carolinas, going through South Carolina and into North Carolina.
Grant laid siege to Lee for nine months at Petersburg and Richmond. Grant finally broke Lee's lines on April 1st, 1865. Lee started a retreat, but Grant gave him no pause and ran him to ground at Appomattox after about a week, where Lee surrendered on April 9th, 1865. Lee's army began the retreat with about 60,000 men but only 28,000 surrendered at Appomattox after the army disintegrated during the week.
Grant and Lee had both served in the war with Mexico but not together. They had awkward small talk at Appomattox before getting down to business. Grant was very generous, giving 25,000 rations to Lee's army. Both men tended to be generous toward other opponents but pretended the other was not the best opponent they ever faced, though this was clearly not true.
Grant exemplified the necessity of taking risks and being stubborn in the face of opposition. At Vicksburg, Grant insisted on having the Union Navy run past Confederate batteries despite everyone, including the Navy and Sherman, advising against it. Grant proceeded anyway and it worked. This demonstrated the principle that sometimes great leaders must ignore conventional wisdom and take calculated risks.
Lee is often quoted as saying McClellan was the most talented general he ever faced, but the actual quote from Lee's nephew Fitzhugh Lee's book states Lee called McClellan the most intellectual general he ever faced. This was likely intended as a slight, suggesting McClellan thought about things extensively but never acted.
The election of 1864 drove the dagger into any hope of Confederate victory. Lincoln and Grant were determined to push the war to its conclusion without taking their foot off the pedal. Lee surrendered on April 9th, and Confederate troops laid down their arms on April 12th. While there were still tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers under arms elsewhere, Lee's surrender was considered the end of the war for virtually everyone on both sides.
Grant treated the surrendering Confederates as Lincoln would have wanted. He sent rations and, upon learning that Confederate cavalrymen supplied their own horses, allowed them to take their horses home for planting. Grant did not demand Lee's sword or engage in humiliating gestures. This approach laid groundwork for long-term peace, avoiding the humiliation that could prevent reconciliation.
Lincoln was assassinated five days after Lee's surrender by John Wilkes Booth, the youngest of the famous acting family. Booth was an ardent pro-Confederate who was motivated by Lincoln's statement about possibly giving Black soldiers the vote. Booth had earlier plotted to kidnap Lincoln and hold him for ransom. His conspirators were supposed to kill Secretary of State Seward and Vice President Johnson, but the Johnson assassin chickened out and Seward survived the attack due to his neck brace.
Four conspirators were tried by military commission and hanged, including Mary Surratt who ran a boarding house where some stayed. The commandant of Andersonville Prison was also hanged. These executions helped take the edge off Northern calls for retribution.
Conspiracy theories emerged claiming Secretary of War Stanton and radical Republicans were involved, suggesting they wanted to remove Lincoln for not being harsh enough on the South. These theories cited questions about security lapses and Grant's absence from the theater, though answers existed for all such questions. The preference for conspiracy theories reflects a desire for larger meaning rather than accepting that random events can have catastrophic consequences.
Lincoln's assassination meant the nation lost his leadership during Reconstruction. The grand review in Washington featured Sherman's armies and the Army of the Potomac marching over two days, but soldiers noted that Lincoln was not there to witness the victory he had made possible.
There was never a true occupation of the former Confederacy, as there were never enough troops available. The maximum number of troops in the former Confederacy, which covered three quarters of a million square miles, was 30,000 men for a very short period. By 1870, only about 10,000 men remained. The Northern population was unwilling to pay for or maintain sufficient forces to enforce full equal rights for formerly enslaved Black people.
Despite these limitations, the 14th and 15th Amendments were passed, giving African American men the vote. The Confederates scaled back from wanting a slave-holding republic to accepting white supremacy and Jim Crow, which was a significant reduction from their original goals.
There were four main ways the generation that experienced the war remembered it. The Union Cause, held by most white Northerners, emphasized putting the nation back together as the greatest outcome, while acknowledging that killing slavery was also good. The Emancipation Cause memory emphasized that killing slavery was the most important outcome. The Confederate version, known as the Lost Cause, represented the defeated South's attempt to create meaning from their loss.
The Confederates found themselves in a difficult position trying to create a palatable narrative from their catastrophic decision of 1861. After fighting to save slavery, four years later slavery was dead and a third of all white military-age boys were dead. The Lost Cause narrative emerged with several key tenets: first, claiming the war was not about slavery but rather about high constitutional principles and states' rights versus central authority. Second, asserting they never could have won—it was a hopeless fight against long odds, making it a gallant effort in pursuit of constitutional rights. This approach removed any loss of honor from losing a battle they claimed they never could have won.
The architects of this memory chose to focus on Robert E. Lee, who won victories against the odds, rather than Jefferson Davis, whom they didn't even like during the war. Stonewall Jackson became the other primary figure discussed. This represents the short form of the Lost Cause.
A fourth way people remembered the war emerged later—the reconciliation cause, where white Northerners and white Southerners agreed not to talk about slavery or emancipation. Instead, they focused on shared American virtues of courage and other positive attributes. This approach persists today in how some view the Confederate flag.
Some historians argue for the "long Civil War"—the idea that the conflict never truly ended. While ramifications from the Civil War continue to reverberate today, the actual Civil War ended in early summer 1865 with the destruction of the Confederate government and the absolute dissolution of all Confederate military forces. People at the time recognized this as the war's end. Reconstruction represents a 12-year coda to the four-year war, working out difficulties of reuniting the nation.
The Confederate flag cannot be divorced from its historical associations. The rectangular St. Andrew's cross version commonly flown today is not the actual Confederate flag—it was square, and the real Confederate flag had three big bars with stars, resembling the United States flag. Every Ku Klux Klan group flew the St. Andrew's cross version, making it impossible to sanitize. While the flag has become a general "up yours" symbol of rebellion against institutions and authority in places like Britain and Ireland, in America it carries specific historical meaning that cannot be separated from its context.
The day before the 2017 Charlottesville events, Gallagher conducted a long interview with Katie Couric for a documentary about Confederate monuments. They spent two hours walking around the UVA campus discussing the monuments' presence. Couric, a former UVA student, hadn't even known they existed. The film crew filmed the violence at the Lee statue downtown the next day, though Gallagher did not attend.
Gallagher holds complicated views on Confederate monuments, emphasizing they are not all the same. The Silent Sam monument at UNC featured horrific rhetoric at its dedication. The Battle of Liberty Place monument in New Orleans was explicitly a white supremacist monument. He believes local places should decide monument issues through public hearings and established processes. Charlottesville actually held such hearings with scholars and local people participating, resulting in a commission vote to keep monuments in place but add contextual text and new monuments to previously ignored groups. The city council overrode this decision and removed all monuments, including the Lewis & Clark monument.
Monuments divide into distinct waves. The first wave, put up by Confederate veterans and women alive during the war, tended to be monuments to common soldiers—the lost generation of young men. A second wave came in the 1920s and 1930s from groups that weren't Confederate veterans. A third wave emerged in reaction to civil rights activities in the 1950s and early 1960s. A fourth wave appeared after the movie Gettysburg and Ken Burns' documentary series.
Charlottesville had five Confederate monuments. Two were put up by veterans, two were the Lee and Jackson statues erected by later groups, and two bronze plates on the Rotunda listed approximately 500 UVA graduates who died in Confederate service. Gallagher used these as teaching tools for years, explaining different strains of memory. The Lee statue's main tenor was reconciliationist—Lee wanted the nation reunited, reflecting his actions at Appomattox. While the people who erected these monuments supported white supremacy, statues weren't what enforced Jim Crow; police forces, state law, local law, and state troopers maintained white supremacy.
Gallagher argues against censoring books, advocating reading even difficult texts like Mein Kampf to understand historical moments. He notes that texts written at the time often contain language we wouldn't use now, which helps understand the period. He taught a graduate seminar on foundational 19th century texts that included Huckleberry Finn, though some students refused to read it due to its language. He believes the language should bother readers—that's the point of engaging with difficult history.
Gallagher observes that humans are capable of evil things and readily convince themselves they're doing good, which justifies any action. Reading history helps people think more critically about their actions and recognize that history is complicated with multiple forces at work. Individuals can turn tides of history, lead to progress, and stop evil when it occurs.
Even during the post-war period, many Union veterans opposed Confederate monuments. Frederick Douglass had problems with the Emancipation Monument in Emancipation Park on Capitol Hill, questioning the chosen imagery. Gallagher believes almost everything can be a teaching tool, and finds it troubling that books would be proscribed for containing bothersome language.
Gallagher does not believe America today is divided to the degree that would lead to another Civil War. While acknowledging significant divisions that resemble the 1850s—with people attributing worst characteristics to the other side and inflammatory rhetoric from various directions—he sees important differences. No physical assaults against members of Congress occur on the congressional floor. States threaten secession—Texas after Obama's election, California after Trump's—but neither called secession conventions with delegates. When Lincoln was elected, conventions met, voted to secede, and left the nation.
While states can still call conventions structurally, no serious movement toward secession exists. There's genuine cohesion and resilience to the Union despite discourse and bickering. People maintain a real love of nation, even if not often expressed explicitly—a sense of being in it together, like a family Thanksgiving dinner with passionate arguments but underlying family bonds.
America remains much what it was in the mid-19th century—a magnet for people from everywhere, far more diverse now than during the Civil War. People come from everywhere, though not everyone finds an easy road. Despite things wrong with the United States, it plays a unique role in the world with so many people from so many places managing to fit into the mosaic. Each group becomes part of the old mosaic when the next group arrives.
Gallagher reflects on Lincoln's humanity, evident in his appreciation for people facing long odds without advantages. Lincoln's ability to grow suggests he would have handled Barack Obama's presidency well—much better than many mid-19th century contemporaries. While Lincoln wouldn't check all modern boxes and held prejudices by contemporary standards, his genuine humanity shines through his writings.
Despite being a generally pessimistic person, Gallagher finds genuine optimism in the resiliency of the republic. Having witnessed what America has been through and how it emerged and moved forward, he sees the trajectory moving in the right direction, even with things one wishes were different. This belief drives his optimism about the country's future.
America continues flourishing as a beacon of hope and freedom, despite criticisms of militarism and hypocrisy in living up to its ideals. It remains a home for human diversity—the mess, drama, arguments, heated passion, chaos, and progress represent the greatest nation on Earth.
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