Gary Gallagher: American Civil War, Slavery, Lincoln, Grant & Lee | Lex Fridman Podcast #499

0:00 You cannot control what a great military event can set loose.

0:05 More battle casualties than US forces had suffered in every

0:09 war combined down to that point happened in two days.

0:12 Two and a half months after that, George B.

0:15 McClellan's army engaged with Lee's army in what came

0:17 to be called the Seven Days Battles at Richmond, 36,000 casualties.

0:21 So those two together just showed that this was

0:25 gonna be on a totally different scale.

0:28 He added a psychological twist.

0:30 What, what Grant envisioned his doing,

0:33 and Sheridan actually did it in the Shenandoah

0:35 Valley before Sherman did it in Georgia,

0:37 is go into an agriculturally productive area,

0:40 burn the mills, kill the livestock, destroy the crops,

0:44 lay waste to it so that it can't

0:47 be a logistical support of the Confederacy anymore.

0:49 Sheridan did it in the Shenandoah Valley, and then Sherman did it in Georgia.

0:53 But Sherman said, "But I'm also going to break them psychologically.

0:56 I'm gonna show them that my army can go

0:59 wherever it wants to go whenever it wants to go,

1:01 and there's nothing Jefferson Davis can do about it." The great forces are all

1:05 that matters and individuals don't really matter

1:07 notion of history I think is ridiculous.

1:09 Individuals really matter.

1:11 For the United States, Lincoln and Grant matter beyond calculation-...

1:17 in this war.

1:17 And on the Confederate side, if you take Lee out of the picture,

1:20 the war doesn't last nearly as long as it does.

1:22 In terms of causation, if you take slavery out of the picture,

1:25 there is no Civil War, period.

1:30 The following is a conversation with Gary Gallagher,

1:32 a historian of the American Civil War.

1:36 This is the Lex Fridman Podcast.

1:38 To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description

1:41 where you can also find links to contact me,

1:44 ask questions, give feedback, and so on.

1:47 And now, dear friends, here's Gary Gallagher.

1:51 The American Civil War broke out in 1861.

1:57 What were the causes of the Civil War?

2:00 Could it have been avoided, or was it inevitable?

2:04 I don't know if anything is inevitable in history,

2:06 but it's certainly safe to say that the conditions

2:09 were in place to make it possible-...

2:12 by the winter of 1860, '61, and the conditions that made it possible were

2:16 all related to the institution of slavery and its

2:20 effects both in the states where slavery was

2:22 allowed and the states where it was not allowed.

2:25 And there had been a series of tensions

2:27 that grew in the decade preceding the 1850s.

2:31 It's not that one side wants to get rid

2:34 of slavery and the other side wants to protect slavery.

2:36 I'm talking about the white people in the United

2:39 States now who would be making the political decisions.

2:43 It's a question of whether slavery was going

2:45 to be able to expand into federal territories.

2:47 That is what really created the starkest

2:52 difference between the two sections in the 1850s, even in the late 1840s.

2:58 The issues that came to most, uh,

3:02 perilous a point in the view of many people then had

3:04 to do with whether slavery would be allowed only where it already existed,

3:08 or would it be allowed to expand.

3:10 If it could expand, then it seemed that it might be conceivable

3:14 at some point even that the slaveholding states could end up with a majority.

3:19 They were in a minority by 1860,

3:21 '61 and feeling beleaguered, feeling threatened.

3:23 They'd long since lost the population race to the free states.

3:28 Early in the nation, the most powerful states were slaveholding states.

3:31 Virginia was by far the most important state.

3:34 Four of the first five presidents were from Virginia,

3:38 all slaveholders, all prominent members of the slaveholding class.

3:41 Those days were long gone by the late 1850s.

3:45 So that's an important thing to say.

3:47 It wasn't before the Civil War a discussion about abolishing slavery.

3:51 It's about whether slavery, the institution of slavery should be expanded.

3:56 Allowed to expand into federal territories.

3:58 There, there is a portion of the white population

4:02 that is adamantly in favor of getting rid of slavery immediately.

4:06 The abolitionists, they...

4:07 There was even a political party called the Liberty Party,

4:10 that ran a candidate in 1840 and they got a handful of thousand votes.

4:15 They reached their high point in 1844.

4:17 They got about two and a half percent of the vote.

4:20 The abolitionists are a tiny minority among the— even in the North,

4:24 tiny minority among the white people of the United States.

4:28 The African American population, nearly four million of them by 1860,

4:31 of course, would have embraced it instantly and yearned for it.

4:35 But in the white population, the abolitionists are a tiny minority.

4:39 They are much despised even across much of the North because they were seen

4:44 as agitators who roiled the Union and deepened

4:48 rifts that might bring a significant political break.

4:52 So how did this escalate to a civil war,

4:55 this almost policy discussion about the institution of slavery?

4:58 How did it actually escalate?

5:01 It escalated into a civil war because in the presidential election of 1860...

5:04 There'd been two party systems in the United States.

5:07 The first party system, the Republicans,

5:10 the Jeffersonian Republicans versus the Federalists.

5:14 After that, there was,

5:15 the two parties were the Whig Party against the Democratic Party.

5:18 The Democratic Party grew out of the Jeffersonian Republican Party.

5:22 It's the same party.

5:23 The Whig Party foundered to a significant degree on the issue of slavery.

5:29 How do you maintain a national party that has a wing in the Southern states

5:33 and has a wing in the Northern free states that can handle the issue of slavery?

5:39 The Democrats managed to do that.

5:40 The Whigs could not do it,

5:42 and so the Whig Party ran their last candidate in 1852,

5:46 presidential candidate, significant candidate.

5:47 And the Republican Party emerged in the mid-1850s,

5:50 took most of the old Whigs into the Republican ranks and one of the Republican,

5:56 the key Republican platform plank was

5:58 no expansion of slavery into the territories.

6:02 Not abolish slavery, no expansion.

6:03 That was the key in 1856 when they ran their first candidate.

6:08 In 1860, that is again the key plank in the Republican platform.

6:11 The Republican platform in 1860 says where slavery exists it will continue,

6:16 but it cannot expand into the territories.

6:20 When white Southerners saw that, that meant that they were

6:24 doomed to become an increasingly minority section in the nation,

6:28 and you would have a federal

6:31 government increasingly dominated by the free states

6:33 that could then do the one thing that the white South could not countenance,

6:37 and that is tamper with the institution of slavery in the South.

6:43 The presidential election of 1860 brought

6:45 the destruction of the last national party, which was the Democrats.

6:49 They couldn't even settle on a candidate,

6:52 so you end up with a Northern Democratic candidate running, Stephen A.

6:55 Douglas, and a Southern candidate running.

6:58 The convention fractured and John C.

7:00 Breckinridge ran on the, on the Southern Democrat platform.

7:03 You had a Unionist candidate running who just didn't wanna talk about slavery,

7:07 let's talk about the Union, and you had Lincoln running as a Republican.

7:11 When Lincoln won, the white South looked at Lincoln winning.

7:14 Here's a guy who has said that he doesn't think slavery would expand,

7:19 but he'd said more than that.

7:21 He scared the white South more because in 1858,

7:24 both Lincoln and William Henry Seward,

7:26 these are two prominent, prominent Republicans,

7:29 had said basically in separate speeches,

7:31 the House Divided Speech on Lincoln's part,

7:34 the Irrepressible Conflict Speech on Seward's part,

7:37 that the nation could not continue in the long term half slave and half free.

7:42 And everybody in the South knew which way they wanted it to be.

7:45 They would want it to be no slavery.

7:47 And so Lincoln's election scared the white South enough so that seven

7:53 of the 15 slave-holding states seceded in response to Lincoln's election.

7:58 They seceded between December 20th,

8:00 when South Carolina went out, and the end of February.

8:03 You had the deep South went out.

8:06 What was the general view amongst the populace towards slavery?

8:09 Let's kind of lay it out.

8:12 Let's you know, for the audience looking back,

8:16 let's put ourselves in the mind space of how people saw the world,

8:21 how people saw slavery, how people saw African Americans.

8:25 Well, the baseline among the white Americans, there were about 31,

8:29 shade more than 31 million Americans in 1860 for the census of 1860.

8:35 About four million of them were African Americans,

8:39 three and a half million of those enslaved in the South.

8:42 Anyway, among the white population, the average attitude toward Black people

8:49 is what we would call profoundly prejudiced.

8:51 Doesn't matter whether you...

8:52 A lot of people think this is a Southern white thing.

8:55 They're the only ones who were prejudiced.

8:57 By our standards, the overwhelming majority of people

9:00 in the free states were also deeply prejudiced.

9:04 It's important to keep in mind that attitudes

9:07 towards slavery and attitudes toward race do not,

9:10 they're not necessarily the same.

9:12 I mean, you could be against slavery

9:14 and still be prejudiced against Black people.

9:16 By our standards, many abolitionists were prejudiced against Black people.

9:20 They...

9:21 But the overwhelming majority of the white North, in the North,

9:26 often had a hard time getting

9:27 my students to understand the demographics in 1860.

9:30 The free states in 1860 were more than 98% white.

9:35 98% white.

9:36 African Americans are a tiny minority in the free states.

9:41 Black people lived in the 15 slaveholding states in 1860.

9:44 Most of the white North, by our standards, was very prejudiced.

9:48 They were against the expansion of slavery

9:51 into the territories because they thought

9:53 that would circumscribe white opportunities to make

9:56 an economic life in these federal territories,

10:01 and they didn't want that to happen.

10:03 About 45% of the people who lived in the free states were Democrats.

10:06 Most Democrats had no problem with slavery.

10:09 I mean, absolutely no problem with the institution of slavery.

10:12 There would be more problems among Republicans,

10:16 especially with extension of slavery,

10:18 although many Democrats, white Democrats in the North were against that as well.

10:23 The white South was overwhelmingly in favor of slavery.

10:27 You often read the argument,

10:29 the kind of neo-Confederate argument that they'll talk

10:32 about how most Confederate soldiers didn't own slaves.

10:34 That's true.

10:35 The a large majority of families in the South did not own a single slave.

10:39 But all white Southerners had a stake in slavery.

10:41 They had a stake in it as a form of labor control,

10:46 but more important than that, they had a stake

10:48 in it as a means of social control.

10:50 They knew, no matter what they said later in the Jim Crow

10:55 era of how happy Black people were in the institution of slavery,

10:58 they knew that Black people, of course, did not want to be enslaved,

11:02 and they were afraid of what would happen if they weren't enslaved anymore.

11:05 They had in the backs of their minds Haiti.

11:07 Is that what's gonna...

11:08 If you live in one of the coastal districts of South Carolina

11:11 where 90% of the residents are enslaved and you're a white person,

11:15 you probably don't sleep all that soundly

11:17 at night if you think there's any chance that the Black people are not gonna

11:21 remain under the control of the white people.

11:23 So all white people in the South had a stake in slavery, not just some.

11:28 All of them did, and there were all kinds

11:30 of ways that it would go back and forth.

11:33 If you were a modest farmer and grew a little bit of cotton,

11:36 you didn't have your own cotton gin, you...

11:39 but your more wealthy neighbor had a gin, could gin your cotton there,

11:42 and then you would take your turn on the slave patrol, the slave patrols.

11:46 So there's a reciprocity in that regard.

11:50 This is perhaps a bit outside the scope of what we'll talk about today,

11:54 but just to lay out the context on slavery in general in human history,

11:58 we should say that slavery was ubiquitous.

12:02 It existed in virtually every major civilization in the history of humans.

12:08 Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, China, the Islamic world,

12:13 Africa, the Americas, North and South America.

12:16 We should also say something that, as I

12:18 was looking into this, another big topic, which is the Atlantic slave trade.

12:23 And it was surprising to me, the stat I wasn't aware of, I would

12:28 venture to say most Americans probably don't know,

12:30 that only 4% of African slaves were brought to North America,

12:35 to the United States.

12:37 Brazil is the main destination.

12:40 Brazil, the Caribbean was over 90%,

12:42 4.9 million in Brazil, 4 million in the Caribbean,

12:46 and it was also the last of the Americas to abolish the slave trade.

12:49 So only 4% of the Atlantic slave trade went to the United States.

12:55 So there's— the story of human slavery is one that reaches deep into our history

13:03 and geographically is much larger than we often

13:07 study in the context of the United States.

13:10 One thing the war, the Civil War,

13:11 which I'll just call the war for the rest of our discussion,

13:14 I mean, one thing it did was end slavery in four years in the United States.

13:22 Whereas in the absence of that war, it might have gone on for decades.

13:25 I think the United States would have had the ignominious

13:28 distinction of being the last place to get rid of slavery,

13:31 would have been after Brazil, would have been after Spanish Cuba,

13:34 because it was thriving in the United States in 1860.

13:37 It was making the transition from cash crop agriculture-...

13:42 to other, to industrial applications and other

13:45 applications growing of non— not growing,

13:49 growing just cotton and rice and sugar.

13:52 It was— There was a time in the literature

13:56 when people argued that the war was needless,

13:58 the Civil War was needless because slavery was on its way out.

14:01 That's absolutely wrong.

14:02 It was not on its way out.

14:04 It was thriving.

14:04 Lincoln said at one point he thought it might have lasted another fifty years,

14:08 and I don't know how many years it would have lasted,

14:11 but I think it would have lasted longer than

14:12 it did in either Cuba or Brazil if it hadn't, if the war hadn't taken place.

14:17 So slavery was flourishing in the United States from-- Flourishing.

14:22 from an economics perspective-...

14:23 especially.

14:24 The wealthiest part...

14:25 The 1860 census is our friend, and it tells us that the people who controlled

14:31 the most wealth in the United States were slaveholders,

14:34 and their property in slaves alone,

14:36 not their other holdings, not their land holdings,

14:39 just property in slaves were valued at about three billion dollars.

14:44 The value of all industries, all railroads,

14:47 all of that put together, fewer than two point five billion dollars.

14:52 So the people who controlled the most wealth,

14:55 by far, were the slaveholding class.

14:59 So it was the most valuable industry in the United States,

15:02 and perhaps it is the reason,

15:05 Again, a bit out of scope, but maybe it helps lay out the land.

15:10 Let's look at the nineteenth century.

15:12 So most slave-owning societies of the era were able to abolish

15:17 slavery without people dying at the mass scale that we'll discuss.

15:21 So Britain freed eight hundred thousand slaves in 1833-...

15:26 By buying their freedom.

15:28 Russia freed twenty-three million serfs in 1861 with a decree, so legally.

15:35 Brazil, which imported more than ten times

15:38 as many enslaved Africans as the United States,

15:41 abolished slavery in 1888 through basic ordinary legislation.

15:46 No violence.

15:47 Why did the US have a civil war with an estimated

15:51 seven hundred and fifty thousand people dead in order to abolish slavery?

15:55 Yes.

15:56 That's— Let's talk just for a second about the seven

15:58 hundred and fifty thousand dead soldiers we're talking about.

16:01 The number for years was six hundred and eighteen thousand,

16:06 and that's been revised lately.

16:09 I think we're probably certainly more than seven hundred thousand.

16:11 By far the bloodiest war in, in our history

16:14 as a percentage of the population off the charts, by far the bloodiest.

16:18 I think there's a big difference between Great

16:21 Britain doing it and the United States doing it,

16:23 is Great Britain did it in other places.

16:25 There weren't millions of enslaved people in Great Britain at the time.

16:31 It's— I think, for them, it might have been a little bit easier to free

16:35 enslaved people who don't live among you than it...

16:38 In the United States, the ante is up for the Confederacy because they,

16:41 the enslaved people lived here, and I think they were,

16:43 a lot of them were afraid of them

16:44 and what would happen if they weren't enslaved anymore.

16:47 The war goes from...

16:49 It doesn't begin as a war to end slavery.

16:52 There's a major shift in the war,

16:54 begins in the summer of 1862, where you add to the war.

16:58 The war aim for the United States initially is to suppress the rebellion,

17:02 which is what they called this.

17:04 They didn't call it the Civil War for the most part during the war.

17:08 It's the War of the Rebellion.

17:10 That's the goal initially.

17:12 As the war goes on and becomes costlier and more all-encompassing,

17:15 they decide that they're not gonna be able

17:18 to suppress the rebellion unless they also strike at slavery,

17:21 because slavery underpins the Confederate war-making capacity.

17:26 You have enslaved labor that keeps the economy going and allows the Confederacy

17:30 to mobilize between eighty-five and ninety

17:32 percent of all their white military-aged males.

17:35 It's an astonishing mobilization.

17:36 It's only possible because enslaved labor keeps the economy going.

17:40 If you take that enslaved labor away,

17:42 it deals a significant blow to the Confederate economy and, and by extension,

17:48 to its ability to wage a nineteenth century war.

17:51 So the Emancipation Proclamation was in part a military strategy.

17:57 Abraham Lincoln based it entirely on his war-making

18:01 power as commander-in-chief in a time of open rebellion.

18:04 His inclination, there's no— He's often been criticized for not including

18:09 the soaring language he was capable of in the Emancipation Proclamation.

18:12 One historian likened it to a bill of lading.

18:15 It had all the soaring language of a bill of lading.

18:18 He did that on purpose.

18:20 He did it because he,

18:23 he doesn't have the power to strike at slavery in the absence of a war.

18:27 The president doesn't.

18:28 And he did it because he knows that he

18:31 can't win the war with only Republicans in the army.

18:33 He needs to keep Democrats on board with the war as well.

18:36 They're not in favor of emancipation.

18:38 The one way that they might accept it is as a tool to help achieve union,

18:44 and to do that we've got to strike at the rebels this way, strike at slavery.

18:49 That will hurt their war effort,

18:50 and it will also punish the people who brought on the war,

18:53 and that would make...

18:54 So Lincoln hoped that by basing it strictly on his war power,

18:58 it might be more widely accepted across all parts

19:02 of the loyal states and not as controversial as it was.

19:06 It was still intensely controversial.

19:08 It alienated many Democrats when he issued it,

19:11 who said, "You're changing what this war is about.

19:14 We're willing to shed our blood and maybe risk

19:16 our lives to restore the union of the founders.

19:19 I'm not gonna risk my life to free a Black person." That's a very,

19:23 very common attitude among Democrats.

19:26 So what did the Emancipation Proclamation actually do?

19:29 It emphasized the freeing of slaves in the South.

19:36 It's even more complicated than that.

19:37 The only place that Lincoln said he had the power as the war leader

19:42 to strike at slavery is where the rebels

19:45 were actually still in rebellion and in control.

19:48 So any place where the US Army was in control,

19:51 any place— He said that it is in essence United States territory now.

19:55 I can't free them there because I don't have the power.

19:58 I can only free them where we don't have the power.

20:01 So he exempted parts of states and areas in the South

20:04 that it didn't apply to as of the moment he signed it.

20:08 Going forward, any place that the United States

20:12 Army went where it hadn't been on January 1st,

20:14 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation applied and enslaved

20:18 people would be freed by it.

20:21 At the, literally at the time he signed it,

20:23 he didn't free anybody because he's only saying,

20:25 "I can free them where we're not in control.

20:27 We have to be in control for this to have

20:29 effect and for this to have power."- So in part,

20:33 this is why the army was the boundary which the freeing was happening.

20:39 It's, it's, it's absolutely the boundary,

20:41 and Congress had already passed what was called the Second Confiscation Act.

20:45 It passed this in July of 1862 that announced

20:49 that all enslaved people belonging to rebels were free.

20:54 It didn't apply to people who could prove they

20:57 were unionists living in the South and owned slaves.

21:00 Lincoln didn't make that distinction in the Emancipation Proclamation.

21:03 His proclamation is broader than the Second Confiscation Act was.

21:08 Okay.

21:08 There's so many tangents we can take, but let's zoom out once again.

21:12 There's a difference between cause,

21:14 as you've talked about, cause and motivation.

21:17 Absolutely.

21:17 Quite a large number of people volunteered to fight.

21:21 In fact, a majority of all the soldiers who

21:24 fought on both sides were volunteers during the Civil War.

21:27 About 3 million served, 2.2 million in the United States,

21:32 800, 900,000 in the Confederacy.

21:36 It's, again, I talk about things that are hard to get students to understand.

21:38 This is one of them.

21:39 They have to separate...

21:41 The causation and motivation are often conflated,

21:44 and not just by students but also by lots of talking heads

21:47 on newscasts in the United States who

21:49 don't know anything about United States history-...

21:52 but know what they know.

21:54 In terms of causation, if you take slavery out of the picture,

21:57 there is no Civil War, period.

21:59 That's not a long conversation you need.

22:01 You ask the question.

22:02 That's the answer.

22:03 Let's go to the next question.

22:04 The next question is, okay, so were most white people motivated to put

22:09 on blue uniforms because they wanted to kill slavery?

22:12 The answer to that is no, they were not.

22:15 They were motivated to put on blue uniforms to salvage the Union,

22:19 which they saw as a unique gift that the founding generation,

22:24 based on the bloodshed in the American Revolution,

22:27 had bequeathed the successive generations.

22:28 And the two key parts of what the Union meant for them was, number one,

22:35 you had a voice in your own government, and someone will always say now to me,

22:39 "Well, but women couldn't vote." That's right.

22:42 The people who could vote by our standards were limited in the 19th century,

22:46 but within the context of the Western world in 1860,

22:50 the United States had by far the broadest franchise, by far.

22:53 And so they argued that's one thing the Union gives us,

22:56 and it also gives us the chance to rise economically.

23:00 Doesn't guarantee that you can succeed,

23:01 but it means you're not doomed to be what your father was.

23:06 And those are worth fighting for.

23:07 And so I will put on a uniform so the slave-holding aristocrats and oligarchs,

23:11 which is what they called them, of the South, they said they're not...

23:15 They don't really believe in democracy.

23:17 It's an oligarchy-...

23:18 in the South.

23:19 It's a slavery-based oligarchy, and we know which way Europe's going, they said.

23:24 The revolutions of the 1840s failed in Europe.

23:26 Europe's going the wrong way.

23:28 They're going toward more aristocracy, more oligarchy, more...

23:33 And we are the last hope.

23:35 When Lincoln spoke of the last best hope of Earth,

23:38 which he did in one of his most memorable phrases,

23:41 he's meaning that the United States is a beacon of small D

23:46 democracy in a Western world that seems to be turning the other way.

23:50 And those soldiers, it meant, it meant it was that important to them.

23:54 They are citizens in a republic that people shed blood to establish,

23:59 and we can't let it go.

24:01 Part of the compact is I'm a citizen.

24:03 I derive these benefits from this republic, from the Union.

24:08 I can have a voice in government.

24:10 I can rise economically or have the chance to.

24:12 I owe my service to that republic.

24:14 That's what most of them would've said if

24:17 you'd pressed them on why they're doing it.

24:18 Doesn't mean everybody was on fire with ideology that way.

24:21 Some guys would say, "Well, you know what?

24:23 I'm broke, and I'm gonna get fed and clothed

24:26 in the army." But this sense of exceptionalism,

24:30 exceptionalism's unpopular now in the United States,

24:33 but Americans had a sense of themselves as a truly

24:36 exceptionalist society within the context of the Western world.

24:40 And as a small aside terminology-wise,

24:44 blue is the Union or what we think of as the United States,

24:48 and red is the Confederacy.

24:50 Yes.

24:50 On the maps, the Confederate units are red blocks.

24:52 And the United States units are blue blocks.

24:55 That's right.

24:56 And, uh- That is correct.

24:58 And the North and the South is another way we'll refer to it just to clarify.

25:03 And let me have a very brief rant on North and South.

25:06 I prefer to see this as a war between two mid-19th-century republics,

25:12 One of which didn't last very long and spent

25:14 its whole life in the midst of a great war.

25:17 There were 15 slaveholding states in 1860.

25:20 Only 11 of them seceded from the United States.

25:23 Even though there's 13 stars.

25:24 We'll talk about that.

25:26 We'll talk about that demented notion of things

25:28 in just a minute, but only 11 leave.

25:30 So there are four slaveholding states in the United States: Kentucky,

25:33 and Missouri, and Maryland, and Delaware remain in the United States.

25:37 So it's not just North versus South.

25:39 Those states are all part of the South.

25:41 It's the United States versus the Confederacy.

25:44 But see how you referred to it as the United States.

25:46 So the Union is also referred to as the United States- That's correct.

25:51 Yes, yes- But the Confederacy was, as you write about,

25:55 a set of people who also had a sense of nationalism,

25:58 pride- Well, and took their founding document.

26:01 I mean, it took the whole summer of 1787 in Philadelphia,

26:05 that hot, steamy, humid summer of 1787 to come up with the Constitution.

26:10 The Confederates did it quickly 'cause

26:12 they basically had the US Constitution here, a blank piece of paper over here...

26:16 copied most of the Constitution over here,

26:18 just changed the parts that they needed to make sure slavery was protected,

26:22 and you didn't have the wrong kind of tariffs and so forth.

26:25 That's one reason they could do it so quickly.

26:27 It's absolutely based on the government they've been thriving under,

26:32 which is under the United States Constitution.

26:34 Both sides claimed they were

26:36 the true inheritors of the revolutionary generation.

26:38 That was one of their...

26:40 They all...

26:41 Jefferson Davis loved the Declaration of Independence.

26:43 The Declaration is Abraham Lincoln's favorite document.

26:46 They just liked different parts of it- So we

26:49 should think of this as two republics- I argue that.

26:53 That makes many people very angry- I will make many people angry today-

26:58 They say that I am conferring legitimacy

27:00 on the Confederacy that they don't deserve,

27:03 and my response to that is they have a national government.

27:06 They have a Senate.

27:07 They have a Congress.

27:08 They have an army.

27:09 They have a navy.

27:10 They have departments.

27:11 They...

27:11 It's...

27:11 It walks like a duck.

27:13 It quacks like a duck.

27:15 In the end, it's a slaughtered duck faster than it would've been because

27:18 the United States military forces crushed it-

27:22 We should say that you are respected,

27:25 admired, loved by most people on both sides in, from a perspective sense.

27:32 You're deeply respected by historians of Civil

27:35 War and just historians of American history.

27:38 But of course, when you do your job well

27:41 on a controversial topic in a controversial period of human history-...

27:46 you're going to get, hopefully an equal amount of critics on both sides.

27:52 And that's when you do your job well.

27:54 So sometimes when we speak today, some of the controversial, quote-unquote,

28:00 controversial things that you express are controversial from that small

28:04 minority of folks on both sides for different reasons- Yes.

28:07 I won't be...

28:08 One of my favorite pieces of hate mail I

28:10 got was an email where this guy, I had...

28:12 He was upset that I referred

28:14 to the Confederacy as a slave-holding republic that was...

28:16 And he said that he hoped I would

28:19 develop virulent pancreatic cancer and die a horrible death.

28:24 Not just regular pancreatic cancer.

28:26 He wanted virulent pancreatic cancer And then he signed his name and said

28:30 he'd be happy to talk to me anytime I wanted to- Yeah.

28:33 I'm sure that would be a wonderful

28:36 conversation But there's also really strong senses throughout,

28:40 throughout the United States,

28:42 the United States, of the, this diversity of opinion

28:48 of what is the United States- Of course.

28:52 Yes- And that's where the passion is really rooted- Both sides claim...

28:57 In the election of 1860, Douglas talked about how much he loved the Union.

29:03 Lincoln talked about how much he loved the Union.

29:05 Breckinridge talked about how much he loved the Union.

29:08 They're all...

29:09 And John Bell, who's the Unionist,

29:11 the Constitutional Union- That's all he talked about.

29:14 They just had different versions of what the Union

29:17 was- And that's why I love this country.

29:19 I think it's the greatest country on Earth,

29:21 and it has a bunch of people that very strongly disagree with each other.

29:26 Of course, hopefully never again escalating to the degree

29:31 that it did during this period of time.

29:33 So we talked about the blue people on the map and the red people on the map.

29:38 It may be a silly thing to ask, but sticking with the motivation,

29:45 why would, let's say, a farm boy in Ohio-...

29:50 want to die for the Union?

29:53 That is the most important, and I didn't even ask you to ask that question.

29:56 That's the, that's the hardest thing-- Let's be honest.

29:59 You paid me a lot of money to ask that question, yeah.

30:00 I didn't think it was so much.

30:03 Okay.

30:03 I'm sorry.

30:03 Go ahead.

30:04 I won't distract.

30:04 No.

30:04 The, I tell my students at the beginning of my Civil

30:06 War class that if they couldn't explain, I didn't use Ohio.

30:09 I said, "If you can't explain why a farmer from Vermont-...

30:13 would put on a blue uniform and pick up a musket

30:16 to make South Carolina come back in, why didn't he just say, 'Great.

30:19 South Carolina's gone.

30:20 I never liked them anyway.

30:21 This is a better union.' If you can't explain that, then you can't

30:26 understand the Civil War." And the key to that, I'll come back to it,

30:29 is union because he would've said, "If we allow South Carolina to go That means

30:34 that other places could go and you could dismantle.

30:37 And the only reason they're going is

30:39 because they didn't like who was elected president.

30:41 They didn't say that Lincoln was corrupt.

30:43 They didn't say Republicans bought the election.

30:45 They just didn't like who won the election.

30:47 And so if the republic is so fragile that it can't have

30:51 an election without having the people who didn't like who won leave,

30:55 then the founders had wasted their time,

30:57 the revolution was for nothing, all that bloodshed meant nothing.

31:01 You had to step up and save this precious republic that had put in place

31:08 by the revolutionary generation and gave its

31:11 citizens the benefits that I've already talked about.

31:13 That's why they would put on a uniform and risk their life,

31:17 because they believed a citizen...

31:19 These are citizen soldiers.

31:22 We don't know what that means so much now.

31:25 because we have a professional military establishment now.

31:28 Not— I mean, even when I was younger,

31:31 there was still a draft, and but that's gone now.

31:35 And so we don't understand what the concept of citizen soldier was,

31:38 that you owe something back to the republic

31:41 that has conveyed these things to you,

31:44 and that's why the guy from Vermont or New Hampshire

31:47 or Ohio would put on a uniform and go into military service.

31:52 Is it possible for us to understand that level

31:54 of love of nation and believe in nation?

31:58 Is this, is this very distant from what America is today?

32:02 I actually think many people probably still feel that way,

32:05 but they're not the ones who are on television-...

32:08 most of the time.

32:09 Republicans in the midst of the war commented about the fact that even

32:13 with this gigantic conflict going on, immigration continued at a high level.

32:19 People coming into a nation that was in the middle of a great war.

32:23 And they said, "This is a testament to the promise

32:27 of the United States." And I think that promise continues.

32:31 I mean, we've argued about...

32:32 As with so many things, Americans have no sense of history.

32:36 They believe we've never argued about immigration before.

32:38 We've always argued about immigration,

32:39 with some people always saying, "Shut the door.

32:42 They're ruining us.

32:43 The Italians are ruining us.

32:44 The Irish are Catholics.

32:45 They're ruining us.

32:46 God, the Southern Europeans are even worse than,

32:50 than the Irish were." It's— The people change,

32:54 the arguments stay very much the same,

32:56 and I think it's really telling that in the midst of the war,

33:00 people would say, "Look at our republic.

33:02 It is— It offers so much to people that even in the midst of this great war,

33:06 they're still coming-...

33:07 to the United States."- And like you said,

33:11 both sides, both these republics claimed, for example, George Washington.

33:16 Yes.

33:16 They both claim...

33:17 I'll leave it at that.

33:18 They both claim George Washington.

33:19 They wanted to be right with the man, which is what George Washington was.

33:24 He's the indispensable man, no question.

33:26 Both sides wanted him on their side.

33:28 They both quoted Thomas Jefferson,

33:31 although Confederates were a little more leery

33:34 of Jefferson 'cause he's too complicated for them sometimes.

33:37 But no, they wanted to be right with the founders

33:40 and claimed to be right with the founders.

33:42 The Confederates would say, "The Constitution allowed slavery.

33:45 What are you talking about we're out of step with the Constitution?

33:47 We're in step with the Con- You're the ones who are out

33:50 of step with the Constitution."- What about the topic of states' rights?

33:53 At the very least-- I love state rights.

33:55 State rights...

33:56 I mean, I love the way people use it with the Civil War.

34:00 They associate it solely with Southern states-...

34:02 of course.

34:03 State rights is always available in United States history for somebody

34:06 who's not happy with what the federal government is doing.

34:10 During the War of 1812, it was New England that most often talked-...

34:14 about resorting to state rights.

34:15 They had a convention where they sort of wandered

34:17 over towards secession territory in the Hartford Convention.

34:21 We think of it as state rights because as you lead up to the Civil War,

34:25 you hear con- white Southerners talking about it all the time.

34:29 "We need our state rights." I always love to ask

34:33 people who say that, "What are all the state rights?

34:35 Give me— List the state rights that the white South is concerned." You know,

34:39 "Give me the top three.

34:40 No, really, just give me the top two." There's only one.

34:43 The state right that they're worried about is

34:45 the right of their state to interpose its power between

34:48 a federal government that might try to interfere with slavery

34:51 and a state government that wants to maintain it.

34:53 That's the state right that matters then.

34:55 Northern states also resorted to state rights

34:58 during this, the ramp-up to the Civil War,

35:01 with what were called personal liberty laws.

35:04 They tried to interpose their state power in between a federal

35:07 government that would use its power to to force escaped,

35:11 enslaved people back into slavery.

35:14 It's whoever's unhappy with the federal government,

35:16 the concept of state rights is available, and both sides used it.

35:21 And of course, the beautiful, dark,

35:25 ironic hypocrisy was illustrated by the Confederacy when they were

35:29 the first to pass a national draft in American history.

35:35 Like, irony is wonderful-...

35:37 in history.

35:38 Another thing that I love to teach is

35:42 that the most intrusive central government in American history,

35:46 by far, until deep into the 20th century,

35:49 was the Confederate central government,

35:51 because it had to do things to keep the war going that it couldn't have done

35:55 unless the central government stepped in, such as passing

35:58 the first national conscription law in American history.

36:01 The government, the US government never forced

36:03 people into uniform before the Civil War.

36:05 The Confederates did it first.

36:07 They did it in the spring of 1862.

36:09 They passed a national graduated income tax.

36:11 And when taxing didn't work, when their money became so devalued,

36:15 they then passed what they called the tax in kind.

36:18 They would take a percentage of your crop.

36:20 They allowed the government to impress horses

36:22 and mules and enslaved labor to work on All

36:26 of these were intrusions from the central government

36:28 that drove true state rights people crazy in the Confederacy.

36:33 Confederates didn't have political parties because

36:35 they said the founders didn't want them, so we won't have them.

36:38 But what they did have was a sort of nationalist,

36:41 "We're gonna let the central government do whatever it

36:43 needs to do." That's Jefferson Davis' wing, and Robert E.

36:46 Lee's over there, too.

36:47 And the people like the vice president, Alexander Stephens, who said,

36:50 "You can't do all this stuff because the states

36:53 should have more power." The only reason the war lasted

36:56 as long as it did is because the central government

36:59 did things no one ever would have believed they would do.

37:01 He also got rid of habeas corpus

37:03 just like Abraham Lincoln did in selected situations.

37:07 And of course, we should really emphasize that on both sides, those volunteers,

37:12 the on the Confederacy,

37:13 there's a very large number of people percentage-wise that volunteered to fight.

37:18 And then I believe the volunteer period was one year,

37:23 and then there's all kind of funky stuff that the that the government started

37:27 doing to trap those people into then

37:29 serving and-- Here's what the Confederacy did.

37:34 They...

37:34 Nobody thinks the war's gonna last a long time-...

37:37 in the spring of 1861.

37:38 So if you enlist for a year-...

37:40 that's probably plenty of time to finish this war.

37:42 Well, a year goes by and a significant percentage

37:44 of the Confederate men under arms are due to get out.

37:47 So what the Confederate Congress did was pass conscription.

37:50 We're gonna put every- make everybody liable to three-year service.

37:54 And in the midst of doing that, all you guys who

37:57 volunteered for one year are now in for two more years.

38:01 Well, that outraged...

38:01 I mean, "That's, you're breaking faith with us," they said.

38:04 They didn't stop there.

38:07 Later they revised it when the war kept going

38:09 on and then the three years guys were gonna get out,

38:11 then the Congress stepped in and said,

38:13 "You're in for the duration." The bottom line is,

38:15 the Confederacy ever gets you in uniform,

38:17 you don't get out because they keep changing the rules on you.

38:22 And that was considered, national conscription was considered a fundamental

38:26 abridgment of individual rights by many people.

38:28 That's something the government should never force a citizen into uniform.

38:32 A citizen should volunteer their service.

38:35 The US government waited a year, then it did it in the spring of 1863,

38:39 although it always respected original terms of enlistment.

38:44 Never made it the war for the duration the way the Confederacy did.

38:48 Quick pause for a bathroom break if it's okay.

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38:55 It really is the best way to support this podcast.

38:57 Go to lexfridman.com/sponsors.

38:59 And now, dear friends, back to my conversation with Gary Gallagher.

39:07 All right, we're back.

39:08 There's so many different directions we can go, but I am somebody who believes

39:12 that individuals can steer the direction of history.

39:14 So one angle to look at here is,

39:18 some of the legendary historical figures from this time.

39:24 Let's talk about some of the key figures of the Civil War.

39:27 We have Abraham Lincoln, of course,

39:28 the President of the United States who held the Union together

39:31 and turned the war into a fight for a new birth of freedom.

39:35 Jefferson Davis, who you mentioned, President of the Confederacy.

39:38 Ulysses S.

39:40 Grant, somebody we'll talk about quite a bit,

39:43 General in Chief of the Union armies.

39:46 Robert E.

39:46 Lee on the other side, the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia,

39:52 somebody who you have studied for decades now.

39:54 We'll talk a lot about him.

39:57 There's Sherman, there's Stonewall Jackson, there's Frederick Douglass,

40:02 there is McClellan, there is John Brown, a militant abolitionist.

40:08 Many more figures, but let's look at three at first.

40:13 Let's look at Lincoln, Grant, and Lee.

40:17 Lincoln first.

40:18 So Abraham Lincoln, we have this backwoods lawyer

40:23 with a single year of schooling who somehow

40:26 outgrew every polished man around him and became

40:29 one of the most consequential leaders in human history.

40:32 So what do we need to understand?

40:34 What can we possibly understand at a 10,000-foot level,

40:39 About Lincoln that made it all possible?

40:42 What was it about Lincoln's mind that made this man do what he did?

40:48 Almost nobody continues to go up in my estimation as I get older and older,

40:52 but Lincoln is one of the people who does.

40:54 And Lincoln is quite frankly a mystery to me.

40:58 I don't see how you get Abraham Lincoln out

41:00 of someone who came from his very poor background.

41:04 You said he had a year of schooling.

41:06 You're being very generous to him there.

41:08 He didn't even really have a year of formal schooling.

41:10 And you end up with a person who is the most eloquent president we've

41:16 ever had by a very wide margin and I think even more eloquent than Jefferson,

41:21 and who is able to distill into the fewest

41:25 possible words the most complex ideas and topics

41:29 imaginable and just have them ring in a way that almost no one is able to do.

41:36 He is someone...

41:37 He had an ego, but I think one of his real gifts was

41:41 the ability to put his ego aside and keep his eye on the goal.

41:46 He was able to really focus, and he focused relentlessly on, number one,

41:53 suppressing the rebellion and restoring the Union, but also getting...

41:57 He hated the institution of slavery.

41:59 He's not an abolitionist, but he hated the institution of slavery and he

42:02 was very happy to see that slavery was

42:05 added to the roster of what the United States

42:08 would insist on at the end of the war.

42:12 He's able to let all the other things go.

42:14 He can pay attention to many things, but he never loses his...

42:18 his principal focus was,

42:19 "How do I maintain this great war?" And it's an all en- it's

42:24 really hard to get people to understand the scope of the Civil War.

42:29 There are 31 million people in the United States then.

42:31 About a shade more than 3 million put on uniforms.

42:34 It would be as if we had 35 to 40 million people under arms now.

42:40 For the Confederates, it would be like having more like 55 million people-...

42:44 under arms as a percentage of the population.

42:47 The dead would be between 6 million and 7.5 million,

42:51 depending on how you count it.

42:53 The scope is just...

42:54 During the Gulf Wars, The New York Times put a picture

42:57 of every United States service person who was killed,

42:59 put a picture in the paper over the scope of those wars,

43:04 and that is about as many people as were shot in a few hours at Antietam.

43:09 It's just very different to get students now to understand the different scale,

43:13 and that's what Lincoln's dealing with.

43:15 How do I keep the focus on a war

43:19 that is becoming far more costly than anyone imagined,

43:25 and eating up our young manpower at a rate that no one...

43:28 There's never been anything in our history

43:30 to prepare the United States for this.

43:32 The Winfield Scott captured Mexico City with an army

43:35 of fewer than 15,000 during the war with Mexico.

43:40 U.S.

43:40 Grant has 120,000.

43:41 I mean, the whole scale is just so different

43:43 that it's hard to come to terms with it.

43:45 And that's what Lincoln was dealing with.

43:47 I think the fact that he was willing

43:50 to surround himself with really able counselors is important.

43:53 Who does he put in his cabinet?

43:55 He puts his main rivals in the cabinet.

43:58 He put William Henry Seward in his cabinet,

44:01 who's the most famous Republican in the country.

44:03 He puts Salmon P.

44:04 Chase, who's a very smart and effective

44:07 and ambitious person from Ohio, in his cabinet.

44:11 He surrounds himself with people who are

44:15 capable and energetic and have their own ambitions,

44:18 he's not afraid to do that, all of whom had far better educations

44:21 than he had and didn't have a rural backwoods accent like he did.

44:25 It's also a measure of how confident he was.

44:27 He didn't pretend to talk a way he, uh, to talk in a fashion that he-...

44:30 didn't actually talk.

44:31 He would've pronounced words in ways that anybody

44:33 who went to Harvard would just sneer at.

44:36 He didn't, and he knew they sneered, and he didn't care.

44:39 Because eventually, all of them, except the ones with only a 20-watt bulb,

44:43 figured out that Lincoln was actually probably smarter than they were and had

44:48 a better grasp of things than they did and brought them around.

44:51 He really brought Seward around, which is very impressive.

44:56 Yeah, there's so many fascinating things about Lincoln.

44:58 So backwoods of Kentucky, and Kentucky is a very important state in this story.

45:04 And the right words, the right speeches,

45:09 the right debates at this moment in history.

45:12 It really does make me wonder, you know, if Lincoln didn't exist,

45:19 if certain humans in history didn't exist,

45:24 that everything could have turned out very differently.

45:27 The great forces are all that matters and individuals

45:29 don't really matter notion of history I think is ridiculous.

45:33 Individuals really matter.

45:35 For the United States, Lincoln and Grant matter beyond calculation—...

45:40 in this, in this war.

45:41 And on the Confederate side, if you take Lee out of the picture,

45:43 the war doesn't last nearly as long as it does.

45:46 In fact, we'll talk about this later probably, I think it could have ended early

45:50 in the summer of 1862 with slavery still intact.

45:53 I mean, in a perverse way,

45:56 Lee furthers the cause of emancipation because he— extends

46:00 the war long enough that the United States says, "We have to do this.

46:04 We've gotta get rid of slavery to defeat the rebels."- So,

46:08 and also on the psychological side,

46:11 Lincoln is a, this is a fascinating study because he,

46:14 he carried deep depression all his life.

46:16 He had black, black moods in his life, yes, he did.

46:20 And so for somebody that has to go through an all-encompassing war,

46:26 to be able to sort of survive through

46:29 that, to think through that, without an education,

46:34 without any acquired skill that enables him

46:38 to be a commander-in-chief during a time of war.

46:43 He's got nothing in the toolbox, and yet he steps up.

46:47 If you looked at his resume and Jefferson Davis's—...

46:51 in 1860 and said, "Okay,

46:52 here are the two guys who are gonna be your respective commanders-in-chief.

46:54 Who do you want on your team?" Lincoln had

46:58 no administrative experience beyond running a little law office.

47:01 He had one two-year term in the House

47:04 of Representatives in terms of national government.

47:07 He had no military service to speak of, a little while

47:11 in the Black Hawk War as a junior officer in the Black Hawk War.

47:17 Didn't check any of the education boxes, as you said.

47:19 Jefferson Davis was a graduate of West Point.

47:21 He'd commanded more men in the war with Mexico than

47:24 most of the men who commanded armies during the Civil War.

47:27 He'd chaired the Senate Committee on Military Affairs.

47:30 He'd been Secretary of War, a lot of administrative experience.

47:34 He checked every box.

47:35 Lincoln checked none of the boxes,

47:36 and yet you got Lincoln as a commander-in-chief.

47:40 It's really quite remarkable.

47:41 He could listen to people that he thought knew more about something than he did.

47:47 That's a quality that all of our presidents, to put it mildly, have not had.

47:52 Lincoln did have that.

47:53 He could listen.

47:53 He could admit when he was wrong and change his mind about things,

47:58 and he could put up with obnoxious behavior on the part

48:02 of people that he thought might deliver the goods.

48:06 And a perfect example of this is George Brinton McClellan,

48:09 whom we'll talk about later, his young...

48:11 who was general-in-chief for a while, commanded the Army of the Potomac.

48:15 In 1861, Lincoln and his Secretary of State,

48:18 William Henry Seward, went to McClellan's house to talk to McClellan.

48:22 Went to McClellan's house.

48:23 The commander-in-chief goes to McClellan's house.

48:25 McClellan wasn't there.

48:27 The butler or somebody put them in a side room.

48:29 McClellan came home, was told Lincoln was there.

48:32 He went upstairs and then told the person who worked for him to go

48:36 tell the president that he'd be happy to talk to him some other time.

48:39 And so Lincoln just left.

48:41 He never went back to see McClellan again, didn't pitch a fit, filed that away.

48:46 Okay, McClellan's an ass, but I think he might win the war.

48:49 I mean, he had that ability to do that, to put aside that kind

48:53 of behavior on the part of someone if he thought they would deliver.

48:59 He just has a number of qualities, I think,

49:02 that are very unusual to find in someone.

49:04 And as you say, he did have depressive moments,

49:07 and he— we talk about how, what bad days presidents have.

49:11 Now, Lincoln would have said,

49:12 I'll take that president's worst day every day rather

49:15 than the days that I get, for the most part.

49:18 I mean, he— it's hard to imagine the burdens that he carried.

49:22 And at the right time was just a handful

49:25 of words expressed something that no military could possibly do.

49:30 Explain what the war was about, why it was worth fighting,

49:34 what it meant, his second inaugural address.

49:37 I mean, people went— when people went to hear the president

49:40 give his second inaugural address on that cold day in 1865,

49:44 what they wanted to hear,

49:46 they finally beat the rebel scum from their point of view.

49:49 Let's have some retribution here.

49:50 What are we going to do to them?

49:52 How are we going to make these people who brought this great war pay for this?

49:56 And what does Lincoln tell them?

49:58 He tells them slavery caused it.

50:00 Everybody knows that somehow that's the truth, and we're all implicated in it.

50:04 I mean, he didn't tell them anything that they wanted to hear that day.

50:09 And it was— and it took great courage, I think,

50:12 to do that at that moment, to tell an audience what they didn't want to hear.

50:16 And he did it in the most eloquent language

50:19 that any president's— that's the greatest speech in American history,

50:22 the second inaugural, in my view.

50:25 With malice toward none, with charity for all,

50:28 with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right,

50:32 let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds,

50:38 to care for him who shall have borne

50:41 the battle and for his widow and his orphan,

50:45 to do all which may achieve and cherish a just

50:50 and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

50:54 And we're all complicit in this because we all countenanced slavery.

50:58 I mean, that's all in that one speech.

51:00 And it's a short speech.

51:02 The whole speech probably only lasted eight or nine minutes.

51:06 And he also pays tribute to the citizen

51:08 soldiers at the beginning of it because he says

51:10 that the war is going well and we all

51:13 know that everything depends on what our soldiers do.

51:16 And by that he meant saving the union, killing slavery, it all depends on them.

51:21 And then he comes back and finishes with his tribute to the soldiers at the end.

51:26 And I have to say the Gettysburg Address.

51:28 Oh, no, it's you can't.

51:31 If I may, it's only maybe 200 words.

51:35 Four score and seven years ago,

51:38 our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation,

51:43 conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition

51:46 that all men are created equal.

51:48 Now we are engaged in a great civil war,

51:52 testing whether that nation or any nation

51:56 so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.

51:59 We are met on a great battlefield of that war.

52:04 We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final

52:09 resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.

52:15 It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

52:20 But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate,

52:23 we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground.

52:26 The brave men living and dead who struggled here have

52:31 consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract.

52:36 The world will little note nor long remember what we say here,

52:40 but it can never forget what they did here.

52:44 It is for us the living, rather,

52:46 to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which

52:49 they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.

52:53 It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us,

52:58 that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause

53:04 for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion,

53:08 that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain,

53:14 that this nation, under God,

53:16 shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people,

53:21 by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.

53:27 That's a big statement about what this country is about.

53:30 It's about freedom.

53:31 And he comes back to, when most people read that, the very last part of it,

53:37 they emphasize the prepositions of the people, by the people, for the people.

53:47 Lincoln, it's not about the prepositions.

53:49 It's about the people.

53:51 He earlier in the war referred to this as a people's contest.

53:55 It's the people that are the key, the people who make up the republic,

53:58 the people who will derive the freedoms and liberties that the— I mean,

54:04 it's an amazing— and it probably took you two minutes to read that.

54:08 He was finished before most people knew he had started at Gettysburg.

54:11 Almost nobody heard him say that.

54:13 The one thing wrong about it is when he said

54:15 no one would remember very long what he said there.

54:17 It's been remembered pretty well.

54:20 And let's talk about the two other figures

54:22 which we'll return to time and time again.

54:24 Ulysses S.

54:25 Grant and Robert E.

54:26 Lee.

54:27 So who was Grant?

54:29 So this is a man who failed at farming.

54:32 Failed at business, failed at his role in the peacetime army.

54:38 Then when the war came, the war revealed a genius.

54:43 So he'd known a lot of failure, he'd known a lot of setbacks,

54:47 and his wartime record shows that he'd learned to deal with those things.

54:50 He had a great, tremendous relationship with his wife,

54:53 a very strong family life, a family he loved.

54:55 I think that was the rock for him.

54:57 But during the war, what he exhibited

54:59 was an absolute willingness to break rules,

55:04 to take risks, to take responsibility for what he was doing,

55:08 whether it was a success or a failure,

55:10 and not to be cast down by things that didn't work.

55:13 If something didn't work, he'd say, "Okay, that didn't work.

55:16 Now let's do this." He very famously,

55:17 when he got to Virginia in 1864 and took over the Army of the Potomac,

55:22 he had all these subordinates who were saying,

55:24 "Well, what if General Lee does this?

55:26 What if General Lee does that?" He finally said,

55:28 "Why don't we start worrying— let's— not

55:30 worrying about what General Lee is gonna do

55:32 and let General Lee worry about what we're going to do?" I mean, he just had...

55:36 He was unflappable under stress.

55:40 He was the perfect person to end up heading the Union armies,

55:44 and he and Lincoln— And Lincoln realized that, and he proved indispensable.

55:50 But he has this reputation as a butcher, Grant the Butcher.

55:54 That's something that former Confederates and some

55:56 Democrats in the North fastened on him.

55:59 His preferred way of fighting wasn't just kind of slug it out.

56:02 It's really interesting to compare his record

56:05 in the war and Lee's record in the war before they wound up opposing each other

56:10 in Virginia in a really bloody overland campaign.

56:13 Grant's total casualties in all his great battles before they met were 37,000.

56:18 Lee's were over 98,000—...

56:20 in the same period.

56:21 The bloodiest general in US history by far in terms

56:24 of how many of his men get shot is Robert E.

56:27 Lee.

56:27 The most careful demographic study of any Civil War army is

56:31 one done of Lee's army by a scholar named Joe Glatthaar,

56:34 and Joe figured out that if you were a soldier in Robert E.

56:38 Lee's army, you had a 73% chance of becoming a casualty.

56:42 73%.

56:43 Grant's casualties get high when he runs into Robert E.

56:47 Lee, just like everybody else.

56:48 So the butcher tag is completely unfair about Grant.

56:51 He's also known as a drunk,

56:54 and people have gone back and forth on that, whether he just had a weakness,

56:58 couldn't hold his alcohol very well or was okay as long as his wife

57:05 was around and he had a key staff officer to help him.

57:07 The point is, alcohol never got in the way of anything Grant did during the war,

57:12 and he had a superlative record of delivering

57:16 victories when the United States needed them, and Lincoln figured that out.

57:21 And the absolute proof of his stature because

57:24 of this is that in the March of 1864,

57:28 Congress decided to dust off the rank of three-star general,

57:32 lieutenant general, and give it to Grant.

57:35 The only person who'd ever had that rank was George Washington, the man, Jorge.

57:39 I mean, he is the man.

57:41 And so they are saying, "Okay, Grant,

57:44 you get the rank the man had," and that shows

57:47 there's never been anyone else who got it.

57:49 You're the first.

57:49 And then he would also be the first

57:51 to get a four-star rank in the United States Army.

57:54 That...

57:54 There couldn't be a better indication

57:57 of his stature than that he got Washington's rank.

58:01 Winfield Scott had had it by brevet.

58:04 Grant got the actual rank.

58:06 So in part, the Grant the Butcher label was from the Overland

58:10 Campaign that we'll talk about-- It is from the Overland Campaign-...

58:13 as the military decisions made there.

58:14 Yep.

58:15 Uh, many would argue that those are

58:17 critically important for the success of the war.

58:20 Yes.

58:21 He and Lee are often compared, but for the last year of the war,

58:26 they're operating on it's not apples to apples because Grant

58:30 is general in chief and is managing the entire war effort.

58:33 He's managing what Sherman's doing and what

58:35 Sheridan's doing and what Nathaniel Bank...

58:37 Lee is an army commander.

58:39 He can recommend things to Jefferson Davis,

58:41 but he never commands more than an army,

58:43 and so he never operates at the level that Grant did.

58:46 Very late in the war,

58:47 he was made general in chief when it was so late that it didn't matter.

58:51 So who was Robert E.

58:53 Lee?

58:54 In April 1861, Lee was offered command of the Union Army-- He was-...

58:59 and chose Virginia instead.

59:01 He did.

59:02 What was he actually choosing in that decision?

59:04 Was he choosing home?

59:05 Was he choosing honor?

59:07 Was he choosing slavery?

59:08 And maybe just zooming out,

59:10 what do we need to understand in the early steps about Robert E.

59:14 Lee?

59:14 Who was the man?

59:16 Well, Lee is sort of the antithesis of Grant in some ways.

59:18 Lee is from an aristocratic family.

59:20 Grant was from a solidly middle-class family.

59:23 Lee's from an aristocratic family at the very top of the Virginia aristocracy.

59:28 The Lees are all...

59:29 He has uncles who were prominent, two signed the Declaration of Independence.

59:34 His father was a famous commander under George Washington.

59:37 His father's the one who said that Washington was first in war,

59:40 first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen.

59:42 That's Lee's father, who was later a prominent Virginia politician.

59:46 Lee's idol is George Washington.

59:49 He patterns himself on Washington.

59:51 He differs from him in some ways, but he patterns himself on Washington.

59:56 He considered Washington the most admirable person in United States history.

1:00:00 And then, of course, he almost undoes the work that George

1:00:03 Washington put in place during the American Revolution.

1:00:06 He chose Virginia.

1:00:08 He didn't leave...

1:00:09 He didn't resign his commission in the United

1:00:11 States Army to go with the Confederacy.

1:00:13 He resigned his commission in the United States Army to, to go to Virginia,

1:00:17 which wasn't in the Confederacy yet,

1:00:19 become the head of state forces in Virginia.

1:00:21 But then when Virginia went into the Confederacy,

1:00:24 he took his Confederate commission and ended

1:00:27 up as the third-ranking officer in Confederate service,

1:00:32 and he makes an easy transition to A Confederate loyalty.

1:00:37 I think it's his loyalty to Virginia and what that means.

1:00:41 That means his family, and of course that means slavery.

1:00:43 That's part of what that loyalty is.

1:00:45 He's devoted to the slave-holding South as well as to Virginia.

1:00:49 Virginia's a subset of that.

1:00:50 All of that is in one bundle with Lee.

1:00:54 It's all...

1:00:54 But th- he also had been an ardent US nationalist earlier in his career,

1:01:00 and a very successful military officer.

1:01:02 Winfield Scott thought he was the greatest soldier in the army,

1:01:05 and Scott, he probably really thought, "Except for me." But Scott is a great

1:01:09 soldier that people don't remember that way

1:01:11 because he became a kinda Jabba the Hutt figure by the time of the Civil War.

1:01:15 He's enormous, weighs 350 pounds, has to be winched onto his horse.

1:01:19 But he was a very smart guy and he thought very highly of Lee.

1:01:24 Lee was a superb soldier, as he would show during the war,

1:01:28 but he's on the wrong side.

1:01:30 Maybe just to throw in a few more characters,

1:01:32 I do think the folks on both sides that are

1:01:36 the, of the more radical persuasion are quite interesting.

1:01:39 Somebody you spoke about, I'm not sure where,

1:01:42 think it might've been in your lecture series about Thaddeus Stevens.

1:01:47 Yes, the Thaddeus Stevens.

1:01:48 Thaddeus Stevens was one of the most radical of the radical Republicans.

1:01:51 He's a congressman from Pennsylvania who...

1:01:55 People think people say harsh things now in Congress.

1:01:58 Thaddeus Stevens just eviscerated people.

1:01:59 And he was way out...

1:02:01 I mean, he was an ardent abolitionist and for equal rights for women

1:02:06 in many ways and, and he picked up a number of causes and championed them.

1:02:11 I think in your lecture you mentioned

1:02:13 this thing which I just love, the slime line.

1:02:17 He had a— This is his kind of line.

1:02:19 He's sitting in the House of Representatives and one of his opponents-...

1:02:24 and he's speaking, and one of his opponents starts

1:02:26 to come down to the floor and he says, and this is a paraphrase,

1:02:30 "I'm gonna pause while my colleague," from wherever he was from, "slinks across

1:02:34 the floor of this House and adheres to his seat by his own slime."- Yeah.

1:02:38 Beautiful.

1:02:39 That's a great line.

1:02:41 Impromptu.

1:02:41 He had a...

1:02:42 Women used to ask for locks of hair as, from famous people,

1:02:46 and he was completely bald and wore a full wig.

1:02:48 He had a woman stop him on the steps

1:02:51 to the Capitol and ask for a lock of his hair,

1:02:53 took his whole wig off and said, "Madam,

1:02:55 have them all." And c-- Which is brilliant- no, it's very good.

1:03:00 But of the radical persuasion.

1:03:02 Oh, absolutely.

1:03:02 Yes, he defined it.

1:03:03 He is the character in Birth of a Nation Stoneman, the character of Stoneman,

1:03:08 the evil radical Republican named Stoneman, is patterned on Thaddeus Stevens.

1:03:14 All right.

1:03:14 If we can, let's talk about the buildup to the war.

1:03:19 All right.

1:03:19 What were the key states on both sides that were debating?

1:03:23 What are the ones that were certainly going

1:03:26 to be firmly on one side or the other?

1:03:29 And maybe what are the ones that were critical at the, at the borderline?

1:03:34 The states that were in the forefront

1:03:35 of the secession movement were the Deep South states,

1:03:37 and South Carolina was kind of ground central for what was going on there.

1:03:42 It just so happened that the Democrats

1:03:44 had their national convention in Charleston in 1860,

1:03:47 which is the worst place in the world

1:03:50 they could've had it if they wanted a quiet, rational discussion of anything.

1:03:56 South Carolina is the first state to secede, and then is quickly followed.

1:03:59 You can just go the tier across Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, Texas.

1:04:04 That's the...

1:04:05 It's seven states.

1:04:06 The Deep South states go out in that initial...

1:04:09 But there's a long period then, and they gather in Montgomery, Alabama,

1:04:13 to establish a new government with Montgomery as the capital of the Confederacy.

1:04:18 Delegates from those states do.

1:04:20 And they set up a provisional government that's gonna last

1:04:23 a year and call for the first national elections in 1861.

1:04:26 There are only seven states there,

1:04:28 and really only six for a lot of it 'cause Texas got there late.

1:04:31 It was the last of the first seven to secede.

1:04:33 But the states that haven't seceded yet are the ones with the most people.

1:04:38 Virginia, which is the most populous,

1:04:40 North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri.

1:04:43 Eight states have not gone out.

1:04:46 Eight slaveholding states have not gone out.

1:04:48 The most important one is Virginia among those that-...

1:04:51 that have not gone out.

1:04:53 The question is, can they find some resolution to all

1:04:57 of this, or is it gonna get more serious, and are those states gonna go?

1:05:01 And it came to focus, once again, on Charleston,

1:05:03 South Carolina, and a federal installation in Charleston Harbor, Fort Sumter.

1:05:09 Much United States property and illic- and installations

1:05:13 had been just given over to the Confederates.

1:05:17 And the question is, can we do it with this one as well?

1:05:20 This is a very difficult decision to make,

1:05:22 and it comes down to what's gonna happen in Charleston Harbor.

1:05:26 And in the end, I mean,

1:05:28 Jefferson Davis believed that he couldn't allow it to remain a federal

1:05:32 installation 'cause it's actually in the Confederacy from their point of view.

1:05:36 And Lincoln, who's not conceding the right of states to secede.

1:05:39 They're, they're temporarily out of our power, but we have to maintain...

1:05:43 He decided in the end to maintain power there,

1:05:46 not to reinforce it, but to resupply it, needed supplies.

1:05:51 And that's what triggers it.

1:05:53 Then, then the ball's in Jefferson Davis' court.

1:05:55 "Okay, they're gonna resupply it.

1:05:56 What do we do?" And they decided we need to insist that it surrender,

1:06:00 and if it won't surrender, we need to fire on it.

1:06:03 And the Confederates fired the first shots.

1:06:05 They would've said, "We were forced to fire the first shots by what

1:06:08 Lincoln did." Nobody wanted to be the ones who fired the first shots.

1:06:11 But in the end, it's the Confederates who fired the first shots.

1:06:15 And once that is fired, the key thing,

1:06:18 the key thing is not the firing on Sumter in the end,

1:06:22 but that sets up the key thing,

1:06:24 which is Lincoln's call for volunteers to suppress the rebellion,

1:06:28 and he is gonna ask each state to supply people.

1:06:32 And the Upper South states, most of them have said,

1:06:34 "We're not gonna secede, but you can't...

1:06:36 But, but the states that are gone had the right to secede-...

1:06:40 and you can't do anything to make them come back."

1:06:43 Lincoln is seeming to make them do things to come back.

1:06:46 And so four more states went out.

1:06:49 Virginia went out.

1:06:50 Arkansas went out.

1:06:52 Tennessee went out.

1:06:53 Then North Carolina went out.

1:06:55 And now you have an 11-state Confederacy rather than seven.

1:06:58 But more than that, you have Virginia.

1:07:02 The city of Richmond has 40% of all

1:07:04 the industrial capacity in the entire Confederacy, what became the Confederacy.

1:07:07 Virginia is the most populous state,

1:07:09 has the largest slave population, the largest white population.

1:07:13 It supplies the most important military leaders.

1:07:16 And the capital ends up in Richmond.

1:07:19 They move from Montgomery to Richmond

1:07:22 in acknowledgment of how important Richmond is, that this is the key state.

1:07:26 The key states that didn't go out were Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri.

1:07:30 Delaware didn't either, but who cares?

1:07:32 The other three didn't go out,

1:07:33 and that really mattered because they were more populous.

1:07:36 But 11 are gone.

1:07:38 Four remain in the Union.

1:07:40 And to lay out some more context, going to Perplexity here,

1:07:44 by total enslaved population on the eve of the Civil War,

1:07:49 we have looking at the top five states, Virginia,

1:07:53 as you said, with the most number of slaves, 490,000.

1:07:57 Then Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina,

1:08:00 all with over 400,000 slaves.

1:08:04 Yes.

1:08:04 And Mississippi and South Carolina have the highest

1:08:07 proportion of enslaved people of any of the states.

1:08:10 And this is an interesting little fact from the 1860 census.

1:08:13 When you're talking about white people in the United States,

1:08:16 those are the two wealthiest states per capita in the United States,

1:08:19 are South Carolina and Mississippi in 1860.

1:08:23 Boy, the complicated history of this great nation of ours.

1:08:27 It's hard to overstate the resources.

1:08:29 The states that sent the most men into the Confederate Army are Virginia,

1:08:34 Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia.

1:08:36 Three of those come in this second wave of secessions.

1:08:39 Three of them, three of the four.

1:08:41 Only Georgia among the original ones was in those top four states.

1:08:44 And so you would have had a much,

1:08:46 much smaller pool of manpower for that earlier version of the Confederacy.

1:08:51 It's inconceivable to me that you would have

1:08:54 had the war we had with just that version.

1:08:56 So it does feel, just to linger on it, like there was a lot on the balance here.

1:09:02 Like there was a lot of different decisions that could have been made,

1:09:08 even on the political side, that could have turned the tides.

1:09:12 For example, there's a secession convention in Virginia.

1:09:16 It goes in...

1:09:17 It votes twice against secession.

1:09:20 Twice.

1:09:21 It's only after Sumter that they come back for another vote.

1:09:24 I mean, it's a Unionist vote in that convention in Virginia.

1:09:29 And it's only after Fort Sumter.

1:09:32 Wow.

1:09:32 And then it's still so divided that a big

1:09:34 chunk of Virginia decide that's how you get West Virginia.

1:09:38 West Virginia essentially secedes from Virginia-...

1:09:40 in the course of the Civil War.

1:09:43 And given the industrial capacity of Virginia, that was a critical state.

1:09:45 So it could have been...

1:09:47 Virginia could have changed.

1:09:48 We could have avoided the Civil War with Virginia alone.

1:09:52 It would have really changed.

1:09:53 I mean, Virginia is the key.

1:09:55 Virginia is the key because of the manpower, the industrial capacity,

1:09:59 the food production, and Virginia gives you Lee, Jackson, Jeb Stuart.

1:10:04 I mean, it, and the most soldiers of any state in the Confederacy.

1:10:08 It's just, it's a real game changer to get Virginia.

1:10:13 Plus, it also gives you these unbelievable ties to the revolutionary generation.

1:10:18 Hey, it's George's home state.

1:10:20 It is now in the Confederacy with his big

1:10:23 statue on the Capitol grounds of George Washington.

1:10:25 I mean, gives you, you get Washington,

1:10:27 the ties to Jefferson, the ties to Madison.

1:10:29 All of this comes in with Virginia.

1:10:32 So I think a lot of historians have said that the Civil War was inevitable.

1:10:37 It...

1:10:37 You're really painting a picture here where it perhaps was not inevitable.

1:10:42 I don't think it's inevitable.

1:10:43 Things happen in a sequence.

1:10:44 I was at a conf- academic conference once when they

1:10:47 were trying to decide what important dates were, and one...

1:10:50 And they concluded that no dates are, dates are an artificial construction.

1:10:54 No date is more important than any other.

1:10:57 That is so obviously preposterous.

1:10:59 I mean, things happen in a sequence.

1:11:02 They don't just sort of happen.

1:11:04 Lincoln's elected, then South Carolina secedes,

1:11:06 then other states secede, then...

1:11:07 I mean, things happen as a consequence of what happened before,

1:11:10 and you have these various things that have

1:11:13 to happen before the next thing does.

1:11:15 And then we end up with a war that seems to be inevitable, but it's not...

1:11:20 It's just the way things played out.

1:11:22 All of these factors are in motion, and you end up with the sequence that gets

1:11:25 you to where people start shooting each other.

1:11:28 Yeah.

1:11:28 When you read history and look back, it seems inevitable.

1:11:30 But if we were to place ourselves in that moment of time,

1:11:33 do you think there's decisions that could have been made?

1:11:37 The decision to not let Fort Sumter, I mean, that's a big decision to make.

1:11:41 If they had just, if Lincoln had just said,

1:11:43 "Go ahead and take Fort Sumter," okay, then maybe...

1:11:46 Then what would it have taken to trigger

1:11:49 the departure of those upper South states?

1:11:51 That would have changed that whole equation.

1:11:54 But Lincoln decided you just can't keep giving them everything that they want

1:11:58 if you don't concede that they have the right to do what they did.

1:12:02 Yeah, there would be a continued heated political debates,

1:12:06 intense political debates about the expansion of slavery,

1:12:09 but it would not cause rebellion to then escalate into a full-on hot war.

1:12:16 I think that's conceivable.

1:12:17 I don't think the war was inevitable.

1:12:19 I think it But I think the conditions were present for it to happen, obviously.

1:12:24 I mean, that's stating...

1:12:25 'Cause it did happen.

1:12:26 But I think it's very tricky to just say that it was inevitable.

1:12:31 That's kind of starting at the end of the story and just saying,

1:12:34 "Let's look at the factors that got us here.

1:12:36 We know it was gonna happen,

1:12:37 and these are the things that pointed this direction."- Can

1:12:40 we just actually linger on this, on the nature of war?

1:12:43 Over 700,000 people dead.

1:12:45 How do we make sense of our capacity as, in that context, Americans?

1:12:52 To kill sometimes literally our brothers- Yes,

1:12:56 sometimes literally our brothers- How is that even possible?

1:12:59 Well, one thing, it tells me things are pretty important to people

1:13:01 on both sides if you're gonna continue for a war that long.

1:13:04 I mean, there was a period in the literature,

1:13:07 in the scholarly literature in the 1980s and into the 1990s

1:13:11 where they argued that the Confederacy wasn't a nation,

1:13:13 and the proof was that they didn't try very hard, that they...

1:13:16 If they'd really thought of themselves as a nation,

1:13:18 they would have tried harder and fought longer.

1:13:20 Well, they lost between four and a half

1:13:22 and five and a half percent of their entire population,

1:13:25 which is more than Great Britain, France, Germany, or Russia during World War I.

1:13:32 They had a higher percentage loss than any of the powers in World War I.

1:13:37 The US lost about 1.8% of its population from the war.

1:13:40 US, in World War II, three-tenths of 1% of its population...

1:13:44 That seems...

1:13:44 They lost more than 30% of their entire white military-age males in the war.

1:13:49 It'd be the equivalent of about 18 million Americans being killed now in a war.

1:13:53 That seems to me that they're pretty serious about something there.

1:13:58 It means that's one of the largest percentages of loss.

1:14:02 That's...

1:14:03 If that's a measure of dedication-- If that's your measure of dedication, yes,

1:14:06 and it seems to me that it should be one

1:14:09 of the metrics that you bring to play that, that it's...

1:14:12 They just keep at it.

1:14:13 They didn't give up easily.

1:14:15 What can we say about the motivation?

1:14:18 On the psychological side,

1:14:19 did the members of the Confederacy hate the members of the Union?

1:14:25 Well, that escalated on both sides during the war.

1:14:27 As more and more loss came, you...

1:14:29 They did.

1:14:29 There was more hatred directed toward the enemy more and more.

1:14:33 This notion that it's they're all brothers

1:14:34 and not really mad at each other and...

1:14:37 That just doesn't hold up.

1:14:38 There are places where the soldiers fraternized with one another

1:14:42 and traded tobacco for coffee and that kind of stuff,

1:14:45 but no, the bitterness as the war went

1:14:47 on, and there was greater loss on the home front,

1:14:49 and as the war became more all-encompassing and really went after the entire,

1:14:55 The civilian side of the Confederacy was not shielded from it,

1:14:58 the bitterness increased and increased and increased.

1:15:01 And there's a lot of unhappiness

1:15:04 with the war behind the lines in the Confederacy,

1:15:06 absolutely, unhappiness with the government.

1:15:09 There's desertion.

1:15:12 About 15% of Confederate soldiers deserted.

1:15:16 About 12% of United States soldiers deserted.

1:15:18 So there's desertion on both sides.

1:15:21 There's war-weariness, but the war goes on because I think if you had been

1:15:26 able to poll most white Southerners even late in the war and say,

1:15:29 "Okay, here are your choices.

1:15:32 You either have Jefferson Davis in the government

1:15:34 and the war goes on, or you're going back

1:15:36 into the United States and the Lincoln government

1:15:38 will be in charge and you won't have slavery.

1:15:40 Which one do you pick?" They're gonna pick the first one,

1:15:43 and that's why the war went on as long as it did.

1:15:46 But at the same time, to fast-forward,

1:15:50 and that maybe teaches you something about the nature of war,

1:15:54 but after the war, maybe some of the decisions that Grant made,

1:15:59 people were able to rediscover the brotherhood.

1:16:02 You mean at Appomattox you're talking about-- Appomattox-...

1:16:04 the terms at Appomattox.

1:16:05 Yes.

1:16:05 Yes, the...

1:16:06 And those were...

1:16:06 And he didn't just reach up in the air and say, "I've got some terms." The...

1:16:11 Lincoln very specifically...

1:16:12 He met with Lincoln shortly before Appomattox.

1:16:15 Sherman was there.

1:16:16 One top naval officer was there, Grant and Lincoln,

1:16:19 and Lincoln said, "This is what I want.

1:16:21 This is the kind of peace I want." "The whole

1:16:22 point of this war is to put the nation back together,

1:16:25 and a good start on that is..." I mean,

1:16:29 if it's just a rebellion, what do you do with traitors and rebels?

1:16:32 You hang them.

1:16:33 You don't bring them back.

1:16:34 You don't treat them as prisoners of war,

1:16:36 which the United States did during this.

1:16:38 You, he...

1:16:38 But the goal is to put the nation back together,

1:16:41 and Lincoln said, "This is a good start.

1:16:43 Make them sign a parole.

1:16:45 Make them accept the end of slavery and the fact that they're back in the Union.

1:16:49 If they do that, they get to go home and resume

1:16:51 their lives." Hadn't been decided yet whether they'll get to vote,

1:16:55 but let them go home.

1:16:57 Don't imprison them.

1:16:58 Don't execute them.

1:16:59 Don't execute their leaders.

1:17:00 That's the decision.

1:17:02 From the perspective of the Union,

1:17:03 what do you think about that kind of forgiveness?

1:17:06 Well, I think that it was sort of a nod toward the direction of forgiveness,

1:17:09 but I don't think the real...

1:17:11 I don't think real forgiveness was there.

1:17:13 It was still extremely hard feelings on both sides,

1:17:16 and Lincoln's assassination upped the ante on that, especially for a while,

1:17:21 in the United States.

1:17:23 The, the forgiveness...

1:17:27 Two things in terms of the aftermath of the war,

1:17:30 two words that often come into play are reunion and reconciliation.

1:17:35 Those are two other things that are often conflated.

1:17:38 Reunion is literally putting the nation back together.

1:17:41 That happened.

1:17:42 Reconcile, true reconciliation, that's much, much, much tougher,

1:17:46 and that didn't come anytime soon on the part

1:17:49 of millions of people on both sides, I think.

1:17:52 And we'll probably maybe talk about in multiple ways

1:17:56 how maybe that is something that's still going on.

1:17:59 Oh, there are echoes of the Civil War all over the place.

1:18:02 It's not still being fought,

1:18:03 but you can see resonances of the Civil War because it's such a profoundly

1:18:08 disruptive event that gets right at the heart of what the republic means.

1:18:13 I mean, and so it's...

1:18:14 There's nothing else like it in US history, and it's a great moment of truth,

1:18:20 the residual aftermath and effects of which lingered for decades

1:18:24 and are still present in some ways, I think.

1:18:28 So in 1859, most Americans were just living their life.

1:18:34 Did they have a sense what was on the horizon?

1:18:39 It's what I like to call the Appomattox Syndrome,

1:18:41 which starts at the end of the story And says,

1:18:44 "Of course there was gonna be a war because the war was inevitable,

1:18:47 and of course the United States was gonna win

1:18:49 and slavery was gonna be destroyed," because they were.

1:18:52 So let's find out how we got right here.

1:18:54 But no, most people didn't wake up in Iowa in 1857 and their first thought was,

1:18:59 "Boy, I hate the South." "Those slaveholders, they're really..." No.

1:19:02 People got on with their quotidian lives and they got

1:19:05 to the farm or they went to their business and they did...

1:19:08 They weren't...

1:19:09 Nobody knew that they were living in the antebellum era,

1:19:12 and that those great antebellum years were about to come to an end.

1:19:17 They...

1:19:17 That is something that it's hard to get people not...

1:19:21 To just put it out of your mind that that's all anybody is thinking about.

1:19:24 They're thinking, "There's a lot of other stuff

1:19:27 going on." There's a big gold rush in Colorado.

1:19:30 More people go to Colorado than went to California for a while.

1:19:33 There is...

1:19:34 And you have these tremendous changes coming about,

1:19:40 technological changes of the 1850s where

1:19:42 you have the real expansion of railroads, the real expansion of the telegraph.

1:19:46 There's a shrinking of time and space that's remarkable for people at the time.

1:19:51 It seemed dizzying to them at the time.

1:19:53 There are a lot of things to think about other

1:19:55 than how much I hate Yankees if I'm in South Carolina,

1:19:58 or I hate slaveholders if I live in New Hampshire.

1:20:01 But periodically, there are these events that pop

1:20:04 up that refocus on the differences between the sections.

1:20:09 And you have the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

1:20:12 You have Dred Scott.

1:20:13 You have the caning of Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate.

1:20:18 You have Uncle Tom's Cabin earlier in the decade in 18— and what...

1:20:22 And the impact that that had on attitudes towards slavery.

1:20:25 Doesn't create a bunch of abolitionists,

1:20:26 but it creates a bunch of people who rethink their thoughts about slavery.

1:20:32 Sorry to ask the big question about history.

1:20:36 But, you know, we're living today, 2026,

1:20:43 and there's the sense that every day you wake up,

1:20:47 the possibilities before us are endless, for the good,

1:20:52 for the bad, for the truly destructive.

1:20:54 There's a an eerie sense that the possibility

1:20:57 of a world war in different kinds of ways,

1:21:00 whether it's sparked in the Middle East or sparked in China and Taiwan,

1:21:06 or sparked in Ukraine-Russia, or elsewhere totally surprising in the world,

1:21:12 may be related to nuclear weapons or not.

1:21:14 There's a sense that everything is possible.

1:21:17 And of course, when history is written about the 21st century,

1:21:21 it will all be obvious.

1:21:23 It's always obvious in retrospect.

1:21:24 That's right.

1:21:26 What can we learn about...

1:21:28 from the Civil War about how history unfolds itself,

1:21:33 I suppose, for the modern day?

1:21:35 Well, I think that the potential threats now are

1:21:38 different from the potential threats in the mid-19th century.

1:21:41 The nuclear dimension, some kind of really brutal use of pathogens.

1:21:47 I mean, there are lots of things

1:21:49 that could happen now that couldn't happen then,

1:21:51 at least not because humans were making them happen.

1:21:55 But I mean, to, to me, one of the things to take away from the Civil

1:22:01 War is really the resiliency of this republic,

1:22:05 which I still think it's a resilient republic.

1:22:08 We're living in a sort of wacky time.

1:22:10 Uh, but I believe that the...

1:22:13 I think that...

1:22:14 I have a great faith in the resiliency of the nation,

1:22:17 I really do, of the United States.

1:22:19 I think it's been through much tougher times than we're in now,

1:22:23 and I think that we will weather

1:22:25 this, although everybody will have some scar tissue.

1:22:28 There might even come a time when our leadership class actually leads,

1:22:33 and which would be interesting.

1:22:35 And I'm saying, you know, I'm talking about both sides of the fence here.

1:22:40 But it is...

1:22:41 That, to me, this is, this is the supreme test of a republic that had

1:22:46 been put in place in the late 18th century.

1:22:49 Can that late 18th century republic adjust,

1:22:51 including adjusting to deal with the profoundly disruptive issue of slavery,

1:22:56 in a way that allows it to go forward?

1:22:59 And the answer is yes.

1:23:00 In a war that brings slaughter on an unimaginable scale

1:23:03 and brings social disruption in the former

1:23:06 slave-holding states on an unimaginable...

1:23:08 It just couldn't be more profoundly disruptive if you're a Confederate.

1:23:12 There's not slavery anymore, and we lost the war,

1:23:15 and a third of our military-age white men are dead.

1:23:18 Wow, that's a bad four years for our team.

1:23:21 What's gonna happen here?

1:23:22 The Republic emerged from that and worked it out, and I think it is...

1:23:26 It goes back to, to me,

1:23:29 the intelligence of the founding generation that put in place documents

1:23:33 that actually allowed the Republic to deal with something like this.

1:23:36 And it's sort of a miracle to me that from a nation that was as prejudiced,

1:23:43 racially prejudiced as the United States was,

1:23:46 you get the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments out of this.

1:23:50 It's just kind of mind-boggling that that happens.

1:23:57 Yeah, I think resilience and adaptive innovation

1:24:02 often looks like chaos in the moment.

1:24:05 It absolutely does.

1:24:06 It absolutely does.

1:24:07 But then when you really get to the end of that story, you look,

1:24:11 and there you are, and oh, it's okay, the nation is still intact.

1:24:14 And the 13th Amendment is in place.

1:24:18 Wow, we didn't think-...

1:24:20 that was gonna happen in 1861-...

1:24:23 when secession started.

1:24:23 I mean, it really...

1:24:25 One, another lesson is that you cannot control

1:24:27 what a great military event can set loose.

1:24:32 I mean, no, things that nobody imagined would happen,

1:24:35 including expansion of central power in ways that no one would have imagined.

1:24:40 You don't get to ratchet that back and say,

1:24:42 "Well, that'll never happen again." No, you know what?

1:24:44 It happened, and maybe it will happen again because we've seen it happen.

1:24:47 Nobody imagined that.

1:24:48 The federal budget in 1860 was $63 million.

1:24:52 That was the entire federal budget.

1:24:55 The federal budget in 1865 was $1.2 billion,

1:24:58 and if you throw in the Confederate side of that, it gets you over $2 billion,

1:25:02 which means federal expenditures in 1860 would've lasted about 11 days in 1865.

1:25:09 Nobody foresaw that.

1:25:11 Absolutely nobody foresaw that.

1:25:13 And education legislation that would create the great

1:25:18 land grant colleges and universities and no- it's...

1:25:22 The war brought a lot- And I think most of the things

1:25:28 that have happened through the hard periods of our country's history,

1:25:32 nobody could have really f- foreseen, and then we somehow figure it out,

1:25:36 and that gives me a lot of hope.

1:25:39 We-- That this kinda like extreme division, the arguments,

1:25:44 the people basically speaking in the harshest of ways against each other,

1:25:50 that is like the engine of, brainstorming and figuring problems

1:25:56 out that in the long arc of history create progress.

1:26:02 But in the short term, it feels like a dumpster fire.

1:26:07 It does.

1:26:08 And to me, the arc of US history has been,

1:26:14 and Lincoln talked about this too, it's an expansion of freedoms and liberties.

1:26:17 That's the, that's the long arc, with very problematical places along the way.

1:26:23 But again, the documents allow for that, and the process allows for that, and I

1:26:30 think that's one of the remarkable things

1:26:31 about Philadelphia in the summer of 1787.

1:26:36 I mean, those guys, a lot of whom own slaves,

1:26:41 put together something that's proved

1:26:43 to be resilient and adaptable and changeable,

1:26:45 and it has evolved in a way that is in the right direction,

1:26:48 although there are always problems.

1:26:52 I love this country.

1:26:53 I will never stop saying how much I love this country.

1:26:57 It's an incredible experiment.

1:26:59 I'm...

1:27:00 we're this year celebrating its 250th birthday.

1:27:03 I can't wait for the next 250 years.

1:27:08 This is such a fascinating study of human civilization.

1:27:13 And it is complicated.

1:27:14 What we want now is a sort of cartoon version of what we Americans,

1:27:20 as you watch popular culture, we want a 30-second view of whatever.

1:27:24 Well, who should I like?

1:27:25 Who are the good guys?

1:27:26 Who are the bad guys?

1:27:28 I want a 30-second version of the Civil War.

1:27:30 What do I...

1:27:31 History is not that way.

1:27:33 I've spent my whole life studying history,

1:27:36 and the maybe the main thing I've learned is however complicated

1:27:39 I thought something was when I really started to explore it,

1:27:42 it's more complicated than I thought it was.

1:27:45 People aren't simple.

1:27:46 They're complicated.

1:27:46 And you have to at least appreciate, you don't have to embrace the complexity.

1:27:54 I guess you can't make people do that, but you

1:27:56 have to at least concede that things are...

1:27:58 they're just...

1:27:59 There's not a 20-second version of anything in the past.

1:28:02 The past is complicated, because humanoids are involved in it.

1:28:06 They're complicated.

1:28:07 Yeah, the...

1:28:07 when you look at the system as a whole.

1:28:09 But as individual humans,

1:28:10 we like to do the black and white thing where-- Of course.

1:28:14 we just see the good, everything as good and evil, and then we bicker.

1:28:16 'Cause it's easier.

1:28:17 And then we get together at Thanksgiving dinner,

1:28:19 and we yell at each other, and then people lose their shit,

1:28:21 and they stop talking to each other for a year, and then they,

1:28:25 they make up and all this 'cause

1:28:26 this is just how humans interact with each other.

1:28:28 And, but as a system, especially with the increasing levels of freedom,

1:28:32 with the freedoms of speech and be able to speak out about your feelings,

1:28:37 even when they're intense feelings, that somehow works as a system.

1:28:41 And it's very messy.

1:28:42 Yeah, yeah.

1:28:43 The more freedom, the messier it is.

1:28:44 Really, the messier it is.

1:28:46 And your job as a historian is a difficult job, and as you said,

1:28:51 because the more you learn, the more you come to understand,

1:28:54 the more complicated the picture appears.

1:28:57 Yep, and the more you learn,

1:28:58 the more you learn that you don't know as much as you thought you did.

1:29:02 So some humility will take you a long way.

1:29:06 Yes, you want more of Grant, than McClellan in that, on that humility score.

1:29:11 Grant would score high on humility.

1:29:13 McClellan, every day, every day the first thought was,

1:29:17 "What about me?" "Who is gonna not appreciate

1:29:21 how wonderful I am today?" thought George B.

1:29:23 McClellan.

1:29:23 That's the thought that nagged at him.

1:29:25 "Somebody might not know how great I am." That's an aside.

1:29:29 Reminds me of somebody.

1:29:30 But anyway.

1:29:32 Quick ten-second shout-out to our sponsors.

1:29:34 Check them out in the description.

1:29:36 It really is the best way to support this podcast.

1:29:39 Go to lexfridman.com/sponsors.

1:29:40 And now, dear friends, back to my conversation with Gary Gallagher.

1:29:48 Okay, let's at the start, first shots fired at Fort Sumter,

1:29:53 as you mentioned, and this thing starts

1:29:57 brewing and escalating towards a full-on war.

1:30:01 What are the different advantages of each side from a military perspective?

1:30:07 Here is one of the great misconceptions about the Civil War.

1:30:09 Among the people who know anything about it,

1:30:11 which in the US is a very small percentage,

1:30:14 but if they know anything, they know United States' victory was inevitable.

1:30:19 Because the United States had 22 million people.

1:30:22 The Confederacy had five and a half million white people-...

1:30:25 and three and a half million enslaved people.

1:30:27 The United States' economy was infinitely

1:30:30 more powerful than the Confederate economy.

1:30:33 The United States had the United States Army.

1:30:35 The United States had the United States Navy.

1:30:39 Really, who's gonna win this war?

1:30:41 The US, it's inevitable, next question.

1:30:43 It's not true at all.

1:30:44 The US did have those advantages,

1:30:46 but the Confederacy had compensating advantages.

1:30:50 And one of those advantages was it had a much lower bar to cross for success.

1:30:55 It didn't have to invade the United States, didn't have to capture Washington.

1:30:59 It didn't have to project its military power into New England.

1:31:03 All it had to do was convince a majority of the civilian population of the loyal

1:31:09 states that it wasn't worth the cost to make

1:31:12 these rebel states come back into the Union.

1:31:14 These are two democratic republics at war,

1:31:17 and in the end, the civilian sector decides.

1:31:20 Somebody my age can...

1:31:22 We have the perfect example, Vietnam.

1:31:24 The United States was not defeated militarily in Vietnam, and it didn't matter.

1:31:29 'Cause when the people said,

1:31:30 "We're not gonna support this war anymore," the war's gonna come to an end.

1:31:34 The smart people in the Confederacy understood this.

1:31:36 They understood it at the time.

1:31:38 Lee understood it.

1:31:39 Jefferson Davis understood it.

1:31:41 You had key people at the time saying,

1:31:43 "There's no way that a nation as large as ours and a population

1:31:49 as large as ours has ever been subjected in a war like this.

1:31:53 A tie is as good as a win for the Confederacy."

1:31:55 And they came very close to that in the summer of 1864.

1:31:58 The other thing is the sheer size

1:32:01 of the Confederacy is a huge advantage to them.

1:32:04 It's huge, with a very poor

1:32:07 transportation and communication infrastructure in many ways.

1:32:10 And to move a large army deep into the Confederacy is a huge logistical problem.

1:32:16 The same thing had happened to the British both

1:32:18 during the American Revolution and the War of 1812.

1:32:20 They confront this...

1:32:21 The Confederacy's as big as all of Western Europe.

1:32:27 That's a problem.

1:32:28 It's also a problem that the Confederates are fighting,

1:32:30 literally fighting to defend their homes.

1:32:32 That's always, almost always a stronger factor than

1:32:36 trying to impose your will on somebody else.

1:32:39 All of these factors help the Confederacy.

1:32:42 The US did have an army.

1:32:44 The army had 15,000 men in it in 1860, 15,000.

1:32:47 The Navy had fewer than 50 vessels, most of them on overseas stations.

1:32:54 There were exactly three vessels available to blockade

1:32:57 the Confederacy at the beginning of the war.

1:33:00 The Confederate coastline's 3,600 miles long.

1:33:02 Probably not gonna be able to shut down a lot there.

1:33:05 So the point is that there are factors that help both sides.

1:33:11 To me, the conditions for victory are

1:33:14 the most important factor that favors the Confederacy.

1:33:17 We just have to make it painful enough

1:33:20 to the United States that they're gonna say, "Let them go.

1:33:24 We never liked South Carolina anyway.

1:33:26 Just let them go.

1:33:27 We're not...

1:33:27 It's not worth it.

1:33:28 It's killing too many of our boys.

1:33:30 It's costing too much money,

1:33:31 and we don't have to worry about slavery in the territories if they're gone,

1:33:34 'cause they'll be gone.

1:33:35 And our territories will be free of slavery."- So again,

1:33:39 the Union is the invading force.

1:33:41 Yes.

1:33:42 Geography comes into play, as you mentioned.

1:33:44 Immediately, yes.

1:33:45 Vast land.

1:33:46 And so in some sense, it's a miracle that the war lasted as long as it did,

1:33:51 and then there was as much motivation-- Yes, that they stuck to it-...

1:33:56 because again, victory for the Confederacy was stop the war.

1:33:59 Stop the war.

1:34:00 Neither side has an advantage in terms of its leadership.

1:34:03 The generals all come...

1:34:05 You often used to read frequently Confederates had better generals than the...

1:34:09 And, but this is the first war where West— where West Pointers are in charge.

1:34:14 They were subalterns in Mexico.

1:34:16 The West Point is the United States Military

1:34:19 Academy where the professional officer corps gets its training.

1:34:23 It was established under Jefferson.

1:34:24 It's the premier engineering school in the United States.

1:34:27 And I mean, West Point-trained engineers are very,

1:34:29 very prominent when they get out of the army and even when they're in the army.

1:34:34 But by the time of the Civil War,

1:34:36 it is West Pointers who were lieutenants and captains in the war

1:34:41 with Mexico are now gonna be the people in charge.

1:34:44 Almost every army commander, almost every corps commander,

1:34:47 which is the next level, are West Point graduates.

1:34:51 They took the same classes from the same professors, read the same textbooks,

1:34:55 served under either Winfield Scott or Zachary Taylor in Mexico.

1:34:59 They bring the same background and body of doctrine and training to the table.

1:35:05 It would've been weird if one side

1:35:07 or the other had an inherent advantage in leadership.

1:35:10 The one place where the US ends up

1:35:12 with an advantage is that over the course of the war,

1:35:15 it found, in my view, four men who could command armies effectively:

1:35:20 Grant, Sherman, Philip Henry Sheridan, and George H.

1:35:23 Thomas.

1:35:23 The Confederacy only ever found one, and that's Lee.

1:35:26 And they had more than one army, so that's a problem.

1:35:29 If you have more than one army but only one really good army commander,

1:35:32 that puts you at a disadvantage.

1:35:35 In what ways were the two sides balanced militarily, Equal militarily?

1:35:40 So the, the passion, like we mentioned,

1:35:44 of the fighting force, the soldiers, the dedication to the fighting.

1:35:49 Both brought the same notions of how to fight

1:35:51 a war to the table because the officer corps had been,

1:35:54 on both sides, had been trained in the same way.

1:35:58 Neither side has a real advantage in terms of technology.

1:36:02 Both sides use the railroad.

1:36:04 Both sides use the telegraph.

1:36:06 The United States could have used repeating weapons but decided not to.

1:36:09 The Confederacy didn't have the industrial capacity to produce.

1:36:13 So the war is fought by infantrymen,

1:36:15 for the most part, carrying muzzle-loading single-shot muskets, rifle muskets.

1:36:20 That's the weapon that inflicts 85 to 90% of the casualties-...

1:36:25 in the Civil War, and they both have exactly the same thing.

1:36:28 And they have the same kinds of artillery pieces.

1:36:31 The United States Navy's much bigger, but it's...

1:36:34 And the Navy is important,

1:36:37 but armies really decide the war, and the armies are...

1:36:40 They're organized exactly the same way.

1:36:43 They are— They get officers the same way.

1:36:46 They're very similar.

1:36:47 So what was the actual fighting like?

1:36:49 Like you mentioned, most of it was with muskets.

1:36:51 What was the experience of it like?

1:36:54 It's linear formations,

1:36:56 shoulder-to-shoulder kinds of formations that would allow

1:36:59 you to maintain unit integrity on a battlefield,

1:37:02 which is one reason casualties were high.

1:37:04 They'd line up and fight each other.

1:37:07 As the war went on, they resorted more and more.

1:37:09 One of the developments was the field entrenchments became very common by 1864.

1:37:14 And both armies, if they would stop for the night, they would entrench.

1:37:18 They'd throw up field works—...

1:37:20 which gave the defenders a much greater power vis-a-vis the attacking force.

1:37:25 They came to decide that you needed about a three-to-one advantage

1:37:28 in numbers to have a successful attack once field entrenchments were in place.

1:37:33 But it is...

1:37:34 It's an infantryman's war overwhelmingly,

1:37:38 and the infantryman's experience on both sides.

1:37:41 The United States side was a little better supplied.

1:37:45 Union soldiers ate a little better for the most part.

1:37:49 They got regular issues of clothing

1:37:51 a little more regularly than the Confederates did.

1:37:53 Their uniforms all kind of looked the same.

1:37:55 The Confederates would have had a more motley look.

1:37:58 But the Confederates didn't lose any

1:38:00 battles because they didn't have enough shoes,

1:38:02 and they didn't lose any battles 'cause they didn't have enough powder.

1:38:05 They never had a problem with that.

1:38:07 So it's a war where each side looks like

1:38:10 the other side in terms of what the armies actually...

1:38:13 If we had wandered through the armies and, or watched them in battle,

1:38:16 they would have looked the same to us.

1:38:19 But it wasn't just about bullets.

1:38:21 There was also dysentery and disease.

1:38:23 Two out of every three soldiers who died, died of disease.

1:38:27 It depends on what unit you're in.

1:38:29 If you're in the Irish Brigade, ah, God love them.

1:38:32 You know, just point us towards something

1:38:34 and let us indulge in self-immolation, for God's sake.

1:38:37 The Irish Brigade had the reverse.

1:38:40 They had two men who died from battle

1:38:42 wounds for every man who died from disease.

1:38:45 But overall, it's one man died from battle wounds and two died from disease.

1:38:52 Overall casualties, killed, wounded, prisoners of war,

1:38:55 about a million and a half—...

1:38:57 casualties in the Civil War.

1:38:59 There— You know, there's this idea that a big

1:39:02 part of the American spirit is the Scots-Irish spirit, the fighting spirit.

1:39:05 You think there's some truth to that?

1:39:08 Well, the songs are Irish songs that both sides sing with different words,

1:39:12 and I mean, there are a lot of Irish soldiers in the Union Army.

1:39:17 But in the entire military-age white population of the loyal states in 1860,

1:39:22 just about a third were born somewhere other than the United States.

1:39:27 And they made up about a quarter of all the soldiers.

1:39:30 So they're actually underrepresented in the United States Army.

1:39:34 Far lower percentage of foreign-born soldiers in the Confederate Army,

1:39:37 but there they're a little bit overrepresented.

1:39:40 So there are lots of foreign-born soldiers in the army.

1:39:43 The largest group are not Irish.

1:39:45 They're the second largest group.

1:39:46 The largest group are Germans, On the US side.

1:39:49 The Irish are second, and then you'd go way down the line for yet others.

1:39:53 So we talked pretty thoroughly about slavery.

1:39:55 Can we talk about immigration?

1:39:57 What was the view at the time of immigrants?

1:40:03 Well, I think you know the answer to that.

1:40:06 We need to have all that stuff done,

1:40:08 but we don't especially like the people doing it.

1:40:11 That's basically the...

1:40:12 Well, I mean, the—- Oh, America- ...the anti-Irish,

1:40:16 and a lot of it is bound up with anti-Catholic sentiment.

1:40:19 The— 'Cause the Irish are changing the nature of the country.

1:40:23 The country's a Protestant, British country, and here come all these Irishmen.

1:40:28 And especially in the '40s and '50s, the— My Gallaghers came in the late '50s.

1:40:33 They are changing the nature, and they take over.

1:40:36 Look at them.

1:40:36 They don't know their place.

1:40:38 They're—...

1:40:39 pretty soon they're taking over cities, and they all cheat when they vote.

1:40:42 We know that.

1:40:42 You can buy an Irish vote for one drink.

1:40:45 This all sounds familiar, right?

1:40:47 The cartoons were brutal on depicting African American characters,

1:40:50 but they also depicted the Irish as sort of simian characters,

1:40:53 often with a jug of whiskey in one hand.

1:40:55 I mean, it's very...

1:40:57 There's profound prejudice.

1:40:58 And prejudice against the Germans, whom they called the Dutch.

1:41:01 That was what the soldiers would call the German regiments, Dutch regiments.

1:41:06 And yeah, there's a lot of ethnic prejudice.

1:41:10 So to mention, you mentioned Protestants,

1:41:12 so both sides were primarily Protestant Christians.

1:41:16 Overwhelmingly.

1:41:17 At that time, it was a very religious country.

1:41:20 Yes, yes.

1:41:20 So the religious sentiment was pretty strong.

1:41:23 Units had chaplains, and there were Catholic priests with Catholic units.

1:41:27 Yes, a very big presence.

1:41:29 Was Christianity used to justify—- Of course it was.

1:41:32 Both sides used it, yes.

1:41:34 I don't mean to jump on your question, but yes, they did.

1:41:37 I mean, how was it used to justify fighting for a nation?

1:41:42 Yeah, there's a lot of fighting in the Bible,

1:41:44 a lot of people killing other people in the Bible—

1:41:46 As long as you're doing it for the right reasons—- Right.

1:41:48 ...you can...

1:41:49 And you could use it different ways.

1:41:50 I mean, you can deal with setbacks by saying, "Well, God tests us.

1:41:54 We're being tested." What do you do when God tests you?

1:41:57 You don't give up when God tests you.

1:41:59 You try harder when God tests you.

1:42:01 The very top leaders...

1:42:02 This is interesting.

1:42:03 The top leaders on the Confederate side,

1:42:06 the most famous ones, Lee, Stonewall Jackson,

1:42:10 Jeb Stuart, they were much more overtly religious than people like Grant,

1:42:16 Sherman, Philip Sheridan.

1:42:18 I mean, much, much more.

1:42:20 Lee, was an Episcopalian.

1:42:23 Jackson was a Presbyterian.

1:42:25 But they talked— I mean, their official reports, their correspondence,

1:42:29 it's filled with allusions to religion much more than Grant's or Sherman's.

1:42:35 What about African Americans in the army?

1:42:39 African Americans made up...

1:42:40 There were about 200,000 Black men served in what

1:42:43 were called United States Colored Troops units, USCT.

1:42:46 It was on the Union side.

1:42:48 On the U- Yes.

1:42:49 Okay, let's just dispense with the hallucination that there

1:42:52 were a lot of Black men in the Confederate Army.

1:42:55 That is such total- Ridiculous nonsense-...

1:43:01 utterly unsupported by any evidence that anyone would consider credible.

1:43:06 This whole notion of...

1:43:08 I mean, it's just, it's preposterous.

1:43:10 It's ridic- and I'm really managing my language right here.

1:43:16 I'm not saying what I really think it is.

1:43:18 So, so just...

1:43:19 I've seen estimates of as high as 100,000 Black men in the Confederate Army.

1:43:24 Not true.

1:43:25 Really, really, no.

1:43:26 No.

1:43:27 Were there Black men with the Confederate armies?

1:43:29 Yes.

1:43:29 There are enslaved Black men who are doing all kinds of non-military things

1:43:33 in the army to free more white men to shoulder muskets and shoot at Yankees.

1:43:38 That's what's going on in the Confederate Army.

1:43:40 There are a lot of Black men around

1:43:42 Union armies before they became soldiers as well.

1:43:45 But there are these...

1:43:48 200,000 Black men join the military service during the war.

1:43:50 They're in the Navy and in the Army.

1:43:52 They'd always been in the Navy.

1:43:54 The US Navy...

1:43:55 And they're not segregated in the Navy

1:43:57 in the, in the way that they can be in the Army.

1:43:59 They're just in Bl- you have integrated crews-...

1:44:02 on naval vessels, although they're separated in some ways,

1:44:05 but there've always been Black sailors in the Navy.

1:44:08 The Army, no.

1:44:09 That was a big, it's a big thing to put Black men in uniform.

1:44:13 And for a Confederate, it's bad enough if you announce emancipation,

1:44:17 but you, then you start arming Black men.

1:44:20 That, to Confederates, is urging a widespread slave rebellion, basically.

1:44:28 Black regiments on the Union side was enraging the Confederate side.

1:44:32 Yes.

1:44:33 And they have white officers overwhelmingly.

1:44:35 There are a few Black officers,

1:44:37 but overwhelmingly the USCT units have white officers leading them.

1:44:43 But symbolically, that is a really powerful thing, right?

1:44:45 Oh, it's hard for modern Americans to understand

1:44:48 just how jarring that would be to a Confederate,

1:44:52 that not only would you have enslaved people no longer enslaved,

1:44:56 but you would have the men in uniforms carrying muskets.

1:45:01 So you as a historian,

1:45:03 you've looked at every layer of this, including diaries and-- What,

1:45:07 what was motivating?

1:45:09 What was going through the minds of African

1:45:12 Americans who were fighting for the Union side?

1:45:15 I think what you would expect is going...

1:45:17 I mean, they would talk about Union occasionally,

1:45:18 but what that means to them, it's a union without slavery.

1:45:21 They have the most...

1:45:23 Of all the people who can have

1:45:25 a direct impact on what's going on versus slavery,

1:45:29 there's nothing more direct than picking up a musket

1:45:31 and firing at the people who are defending a slavery-based society.

1:45:35 It doesn't get...

1:45:36 And at the same time, you are not only doing that, you

1:45:39 are also establishing an unimpeachable claim to citizenship.

1:45:42 The whole point of a citizen soldier is that you

1:45:45 do your bit for the nation that's helping you,

1:45:48 and the nation does these things for you.

1:45:51 Well, okay, if I'm picking up and risking my life with a musket in my hand,

1:45:54 are you gonna tell me I can't vote after I do?

1:45:56 I thought that's the whole point of this, when I'm protecting

1:45:59 the right to vote by doing my citizen's role as a soldier.

1:46:03 And that was a big debate in Congress.

1:46:05 That really changed the equation of that debate as well.

1:46:07 How are you gonna treat people after they've served in United States units?

1:46:13 Can you tell them they can't vote?

1:46:14 You're not gonna give the vote to them?

1:46:16 How many people in the Black regiments, but also, you know,

1:46:19 folks like Frederick Douglass,

1:46:20 saw that Black Americans and white Americans should have equal rights?

1:46:25 Well, Douglass saw that, of course.

1:46:27 But even within their context, their notion of equal rights is that that doesn't

1:46:30 mean that Black women are gonna vote,

1:46:32 just like for white people, it didn't mean white women would vote.

1:46:35 But in terms of the context of the time,

1:46:37 yes, equal rights should come out of this.

1:46:40 Abolishing slavery is the first step of this.

1:46:42 It's not the end game.

1:46:43 The end game is equal rights for everybody.

1:46:46 Did many people see that?

1:46:47 No.

1:46:47 A tiny percentage of people saw that.

1:46:50 There's a notion that's very common that somehow the white

1:46:53 North turned its back on Black people after the war,

1:46:56 and it should've tried harder during Reconstruction to force

1:46:59 the white South to convey full equal rights to Black people.

1:47:03 The assumption there is simply flawed.

1:47:05 Most white people in the North didn't believe that...

1:47:09 They believed first save the Union, and yes, we'll need to kill slavery as well.

1:47:14 Those are the two things on the list.

1:47:16 Check, check, we've done those.

1:47:17 Full equal rights for Black people is not on their list.

1:47:20 That...

1:47:20 And they were not willing to do the things

1:47:22 that it would've taken to do that, including

1:47:24 the white soldiers in uniforms who wanted out

1:47:27 of the army after the Confederates surrendered and said,

1:47:30 "Well, now we need the army to make the white

1:47:32 South do the right thing vis-à-vis Black people." They would've said,

1:47:35 "What are you talking about?" "I signed on to do this.

1:47:39 We did it.

1:47:39 Send us home right now."- I think that's one of the lessons

1:47:43 you learn from human history across

1:47:45 the different places where slavery was abolished,

1:47:48 is abolishing slavery is not the end of a journey.

1:47:51 It's the beginning of a journey.

1:47:52 It's the beginning.

1:47:53 And it sometimes takes, quite often takes at least 100 years to go

1:47:58 from that to something you would identify as equal rights.

1:48:02 And then maybe even beyond that, there's

1:48:04 a complicated story about even outside of rights,

1:48:07 just how society sees the different people.

1:48:09 There's a difference between passing...

1:48:11 I mean, the Great Society passed most of the...

1:48:13 I mean, you got the Civil Rights Act,

1:48:15 the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act.

1:48:16 You got all of this legislation that does a lot of the legal stuff,

1:48:20 but it's what's in people's heads-...

1:48:22 that takes longer and is a, is a more frustrating process.

1:48:28 Remains, as has appeared in human history,

1:48:32 potential fuel for the division to rise up again.

1:48:36 Of course.

1:48:37 And then people can exploit that.

1:48:38 It's, it's waiting to be exploited, and people exploit it.

1:48:43 This is something we do as humans.

1:48:45 We like to otherize certain groups.

1:48:46 Good to have an enemy.

1:48:48 And the Civil War for our country is a story of this.

1:48:51 It's...

1:48:51 So understanding the Civil War is in part

1:48:54 extremely important for understanding the, the division,

1:48:59 maybe the dormant division that's there.

1:49:03 Yes.

1:49:03 And there, and even before the war,

1:49:05 there were- There were notions about the other side that sort—

1:49:10 for, for a lot of people in the free states looking South,

1:49:14 they said white Southerners are because of they're lazy,

1:49:18 they're violent, they, they don't wanna talk out a problem.

1:49:22 They'll do what Preston Brooks did to Charles Sumner.

1:49:24 They'll beat him over the head with a cane,

1:49:27 and they're used to this because they have slavery,

1:49:29 and they're used to brutalizing Black people.

1:49:31 That's just how they approach things.

1:49:33 And the white South would look North

1:49:35 and say they don't care anything about family.

1:49:37 They're all just lusting after money.

1:49:38 All they care about is material things.

1:49:40 They don't have any sense of kinship or family.

1:49:43 They're...

1:49:44 That's what Yankees are.

1:49:45 It doesn't even matter whether any of that is true, of course.

1:49:49 There was a sense perceptions are more important than reality with human beings,

1:49:53 and the perceptions on the eve of the Civil War were

1:49:56 that the other side was different in a lot of ways.

1:49:59 They also had profoundly profound commonalities.

1:50:01 They had a common language, a common religion,

1:50:04 a common history, these founding documents.

1:50:07 All of that would pull things, pull people together.

1:50:11 But they found ways to see differences and divided some of the churches.

1:50:16 I mean, Protestant churches divided over slavery.

1:50:19 And many of these themes continue to today.

1:50:23 Let's talk about the different theaters of the war,

1:50:25 the Eastern Theater and the Western Theater.

1:50:27 You mentioned the navies, the geography.

1:50:28 How does geography come into play?

1:50:30 What are the different parts here?

1:50:32 There's three main theaters of the war.

1:50:34 The Eastern Theater is the theater that features Washington and Richmond.

1:50:39 Plays out in Virginia, a little bit of Maryland,

1:50:41 and a little bit of Pennsylvania.

1:50:43 That's— it's where the Army of Northern Virginia

1:50:45 and the Army of the Potomac fight for the most part.

1:50:47 That's the Eastern Theater.

1:50:49 And that's the theater that maybe is most glorified and mythologized.

1:50:54 It's by far the most famous of the theaters.

1:50:56 There are famous battles in the other theaters, but that's the one,

1:50:59 and it's mainly because of the presence of Lee and then of Grant.

1:51:03 The Western Theater is a much larger one.

1:51:05 It goes from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River,

1:51:08 east to west, and would go from the Gulf to the Ohio River,

1:51:14 so it's huge and involves Tennessee and, and then

1:51:18 beyond the Mississippi River is the descriptively named Trans-Mississippi River,

1:51:23 part of Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, and so forth.

1:51:28 In terms of commitment of resources and effect on the outcome of the war,

1:51:33 it's by far the least important.

1:51:34 Some people get very upset when I say that, say that, that the Trans— you know,

1:51:38 it's basically who cares about what's going on out there.

1:51:41 But that's the third theater, the Trans-Mississippi,

1:51:44 the Western Theater, and the Eastern Theater.

1:51:47 But I think you've argued that the Western

1:51:49 Theater is really important for the war.

1:51:51 Very important, and it's where we get Grant.

1:51:54 The soldiers who won the war for the United

1:51:57 States all come out of the Western Theater.

1:52:00 Grant, he brings Sherman, Philip Sheridan, George Thomas.

1:52:04 Those are all in the Western Theater.

1:52:08 So at the very beginning, the first real battle,

1:52:11 at the First Manassas in July 1861,

1:52:14 I think one interesting aspect of that, as you've talked about,

1:52:19 is that people gathered for a picnic.

1:52:21 They came out to watch from Washington.

1:52:23 They brought the carriages out,

1:52:25 set up on a little ridge that let them look down over the battle.

1:52:29 So that kind of gives you a sense that people of the time, first of all,

1:52:33 didn't think this would— this is going to scale to the size

1:52:36 that it did or last as long as it did,

1:52:39 but also not understand the seriousness of the situation.

1:52:44 They're clueless about what's actually going on.

1:52:45 To even think that you should go observe

1:52:48 a battle like that is ridiculous, but they did.

1:52:51 And there was a strong belief, and Lincoln was part of this at the beginning,

1:52:56 that there's probably gonna be one battle.

1:52:57 It's not gonna last.

1:52:58 He asked for 90-day volunteers to suppress

1:53:02 the rebellion right after Fort Sumter.

1:53:05 William Tecumseh Sherman reacted to that by saying that you might

1:53:08 as well try to put out a fire with a squirt gun.

1:53:11 I mean, it's ridiculous.

1:53:12 They're not thinking about what this war could easily be.

1:53:16 Take years, take hundreds of thousands of men maybe, not one battle.

1:53:22 When did it, the dark cloud, the reality of the war, come in?

1:53:28 Well, First Bull Run and Star or Manassas, th- each side,

1:53:32 many battles have two names, one that the United States soldiers used and one...

1:53:36 And usually the Confederates would pick the nearest town,

1:53:40 and the United States often picked terrain features,

1:53:43 so you get Bull Run, which is a creek or stream.

1:53:46 That's what the Union soldiers called it.

1:53:48 Manassas is what the Confederates called it.

1:53:51 Antietam, a creek in Maryland, is what the Union.

1:53:55 Sharpsburg is what Confederates called it.

1:53:56 Anyway, there are several of those.

1:53:59 That brought a little sense of reality

1:54:01 to people in the United States especially.

1:54:03 They'd expected it to be over,

1:54:05 and it didn't go the way they thought it would go,

1:54:07 and so it's gonna take more men.

1:54:09 The summer of '61 was spent,

1:54:11 hundreds of thousands of men went into uniform in the summer of '61.

1:54:14 The whole supply situation became more evidently imperative,

1:54:20 but not much happened in the, for the rest of the war.

1:54:24 There's a pretty big battle called the Battle

1:54:26 of Wilson's Creek that takes place in Missouri,

1:54:28 but the rest of 1861 doesn't have...

1:54:30 The real fighting begins in the spring of '62,

1:54:34 and what really brought home in a way that no one had imagined what could

1:54:38 be in store was one battle in the East and one battle in the West.

1:54:42 The one in the West is Shiloh, which happened in early April.

1:54:45 U.S.

1:54:46 Grant on the, on the United States side

1:54:48 and a General Albert Sidney Johnston on the Confederate side.

1:54:51 But at Shiloh in two days, there were upwards of 25,000 casualties,

1:54:56 and that's more, more battle casualties than U.S.

1:55:00 forces had suffered in every war combined

1:55:02 down to that point happened in two days.

1:55:07 Two and a half months after that—George B.

1:55:09 McClellan's army engaged with Lee's army in what came

1:55:12 to be called the Seven Days Battles at Richmond, 36,000 casualties.

1:55:16 So those two together just showed that this was

1:55:20 gonna be on a totally different scale,

1:55:23 and it was gonna involve sacrifices and allocation

1:55:26 of resources that no one had imagined before.

1:55:30 Since you mentioned Missouri, you've talked about how that was

1:55:33 the most brutal guerrilla warfare of the conflict.

1:55:35 And maybe can you speak to what do you mean by guerrilla warfare?

1:55:39 What kind of war was that?

1:55:40 And then contrast with the structure,

1:55:44 the dynamics of battles elsewhere in the war.

1:55:48 Yes.

1:55:48 Guerrilla war is more of what I think most

1:55:51 Americans can sort of imagine what guerrilla war is.

1:55:53 It involves much, much smaller numbers of actors, obviously, on both sides.

1:55:59 Guerrilla bands might have a few dozen members.

1:56:02 They might have a few hundred at different times.

1:56:05 There are no real battles, battles between guerrillas.

1:56:09 There is a lot of bushwhacking, which is what they called it, ambushing people,

1:56:16 terrorizing civilians, killing livestock, killing some civilians,

1:56:21 killing prisoners after you've captured them, hanging some people.

1:56:25 There are a few semi-large scale ones.

1:56:28 There's a Confederate guerrilla named Quantrill

1:56:30 led a raid against Lawrence, Kansas, where they burned parts of the town,

1:56:35 executed more than 150 men in the town, and terrorized the place.

1:56:39 That is going on in the...

1:56:42 There's a relationship in many places between elevation and guerrilla activity.

1:56:47 The more mountainous or hilly, the more likely there'll be guerrillas operating.

1:56:51 They operate in the mountains, East Tennessee,

1:56:54 western North Carolina, southwestern Virginia, Central...

1:56:58 There's even some activity in parts of Texas,

1:57:01 but Missouri and Kentucky have the worst guerrilla warfare.

1:57:03 It's present through the whole war,

1:57:06 probably involves maybe 50,000 men out of the 3

1:57:10 million who were in action during the war, and was very nasty, no rules.

1:57:16 One reason that rules of war were codified was because Henry Halleck,

1:57:22 who was a Union general in Missouri,

1:57:24 was dealing with this guerrilla activity and he said,

1:57:26 "We need to get some rules about who's a civilian, who's not a civilian.

1:57:30 How do you deal with this kind of situation

1:57:32 and that kind of situation?"- What should we take away from the fact that most

1:57:37 of the fighting had the rules of war behind it?

1:57:40 So it was more structured,

1:57:41 it was-- I think what we take away from that supports my argument that this is

1:57:46 a war between two mid-19th century nation states

1:57:49 that have a sense of how you fight a war.

1:57:52 You fight a war with national armies who are led by professional soldiers

1:57:56 and who understand that there are limits to what you do in a war,

1:58:00 and all the war, the war's limits expand as it goes on, but it

1:58:05 doesn't reach the point where you have

1:58:06 indiscriminate killing of civilians and so forth.

1:58:08 You just don't...

1:58:09 I mean, there's an argument about whether it's a total war or not.

1:58:12 It all depends on how you define total war.

1:58:14 As you've mentioned, in terms of how encompassing it was,

1:58:17 as total a war as it gets because

1:58:19 the, the entirety of the society was involved in it.

1:58:24 When there's wide-scale targeting

1:58:25 of the economic infrastructure of your opponent

1:58:28 that can be used to support the war effort,

1:58:30 which is what you get increasingly as the war goes

1:58:32 on and officially when Grant is in charge as general-in-chief,

1:58:35 then certainly that's a total...

1:58:38 If you're the farmer who experiences an army coming by and they, they take all,

1:58:45 take or kill all your livestock and destroy your crops, and that's,

1:58:49 that's pretty much like a total war, even if they don't kill you.

1:58:53 So the war escalates.

1:58:56 Yes, the war does escalate.

1:58:57 '62, it takes a quantum leap.

1:58:59 In the spring and early summer of 1862,

1:59:03 the signals are clear this is something that we had not counted on before.

1:59:07 And the armies are much, they're gonna be much bigger.

1:59:09 The Army of the Potomac's more than 100,000 men.

1:59:11 There's never been an army like that in US history, nothing like that.

1:59:15 What do we understand from the diaries of soldiers coming,

1:59:21 For the first time face to face with this scale of war?

1:59:25 We're talking about a year.

1:59:26 They've been volunteering for a year, like you mentioned, you know,

1:59:29 in the summer, in the spring and the summer of '62.

1:59:32 There's so many themes in soldier letters,

1:59:34 and it's an incredible gift to people such

1:59:38 as myself who study this, is that almost,

1:59:40 that a very large majority of the men on both sides were literate.

1:59:45 And so we have this mass of testimony.

1:59:47 And they, and they, they sent millions of letters

1:59:51 from the armies home and, and back to the armies, the, the on both sides.

1:59:56 So we have this, this trove of first-hand evidence and diaries too,

2:00:02 many, many, many, many, many diaries.

2:00:04 But so you can see in real time how attitudes are changing, hardening.

2:00:08 You can see the hardening process in soldiers who

2:00:11 they don't have any idea what being a soldier is,

2:00:14 then they do, and they don't like lots of things about it.

2:00:16 They don't...

2:00:16 They talk a lot about food, talk a lot about clothing,

2:00:19 talk a lot about officers they don't like.

2:00:21 They don't talk, what one thing, it's really fascinating,

2:00:25 the thing they don't try to do is explain

2:00:28 to people behind the lines exactly what it's like

2:00:31 to be in a battle because they understand

2:00:33 the people back home won't understand what they're talking about.

2:00:36 And so they'll say things like,

2:00:38 "It was awful," and, "Words just can't convey what it

2:00:41 was," and then maybe tell more about their individual experience.

2:00:44 But there's a real sense that what a veteran knows about being

2:00:49 in the military and what the people

2:00:51 back home will understand are two different things,

2:00:53 and you just can't explain it to them.

2:00:56 And so that takes us into the fall of the Battle of Antietam.

2:01:01 Can you walk me through what happened at the battle and why it mattered?

2:01:06 George B.

2:01:06 McClellan, whom I've already referred to dismissively

2:01:08 a couple of times- He was-...

2:01:12 he was in charge of the Army of the Potomac by this point.

2:01:15 He'd been general in chief for a brief

2:01:17 time and commanding the Army of the Potomac.

2:01:20 And he finally approached Richmond.

2:01:22 He got within, literally within five miles of Richmond.

2:01:25 He was opposing an officer named Joseph E.

2:01:27 Johnston, who just, his first thought every day was,

2:01:30 "What a great day to retreat.

2:01:31 Where could I go?

2:01:32 I could go that way,

2:01:33 or I could go that way." He and McClellan were a match made in heaven.

2:01:36 McClellan didn't wanna go anywhere, and Johnston only wanted to retreat.

2:01:40 Anyway, they finally ended up at Richmond.

2:01:44 Johnston got wounded,

2:01:45 got hit by a shell fragment outside Richmond in the Battle of Seven Pines,

2:01:50 and he's replaced by Robert E.

2:01:51 Lee.

2:01:52 And McClellan, in his usual perceptive way,

2:01:54 observed that this was great because he knew that Lee was

2:01:57 too timid to ever be an effective presence on the battlefield.

2:02:00 So he read him just exactly the way-...

2:02:02 that McClellan would.

2:02:03 He ends up fighting Lee, and he,

2:02:07 in the Seven Days' Battles, McClellan is pushed away from Richmond.

2:02:10 He shouldn't have been, but he was.

2:02:13 That was considered a great victory.

2:02:15 Lee's reputation goes up after that.

2:02:18 Then Lee follows that up with the campaign of Second Bull Run,

2:02:22 which reorients the war from Richmond to Manassas,

2:02:27 the old First Manassas battlefield in northern Virginia.

2:02:29 Stonewall Jackson plays a key role in it.

2:02:32 He wins the Battle of Second Bull Run in late August 1862,

2:02:35 and then invades the loyal states for the first time.

2:02:40 He crosses into Maryland in early September with an army

2:02:44 that is broken down in terms of supply.

2:02:47 He has tremendous straggling problems and desertion problems, Lee did, in...

2:02:52 He moved across the army with about 50,000 men.

2:02:54 When they finally came to battle at Antietam, which is in western Maryland,

2:02:59 he only had about 35,000 soldiers on the field.

2:03:02 McClellan had about 80,000 on the other side.

2:03:05 And McClellan had captured a copy of Lee's entire orders for the whole campaign,

2:03:10 Special Orders Number 191.

2:03:12 They had gone through an old Confederate camp-...

2:03:16 and found a copy of Lee's orders.

2:03:18 And still McClellan didn't move quickly.

2:03:20 I won't bash McClellan.

2:03:21 They fight.

2:03:22 The bloodiest single day in US history is Antietam,

2:03:25 the battle of 23,000 casualties in one day there.

2:03:29 Very close thing.

2:03:30 Lee hangs on by just the narrowest margin,

2:03:34 sits on the battlefield for another whole day, which he shouldn't have done.

2:03:37 He was being way too bold there,

2:03:39 and then retreated, got back across the Potomac River.

2:03:42 Confederates looked at this whole thing as a drama in three acts: save Richmond,

2:03:47 reorient the war to northern Virginia, cross into the United States,

2:03:51 and they saw it as a success.

2:03:53 Richmond's no longer threatened.

2:03:55 Lee's reputation has gone way up.

2:03:58 McClellan has frustrated Lincoln immeasurably,

2:04:02 and as a result, Lincoln removes McClellan from command.

2:04:05 He waits till the day after the elections

2:04:08 in November 'cause McClellan's popular among Democrats,

2:04:10 and Lincoln is an adept politician.

2:04:11 He fires him the day after the elections

2:04:14 and replaces him with a guy named Ambrose Burnside.

2:04:18 So what can you say about what makes a great

2:04:20 general and what makes a poor general in all of this?

2:04:23 Well, McClellan is a very smart guy,

2:04:27 and he was on Winfield Scott's staff in Mexico,

2:04:30 as was Lee, which is a sign that you're a pretty bright officer.

2:04:35 He built the Army of the Potomac.

2:04:36 He did a brilliant job building the Army of the Potomac.

2:04:39 The troops loved him.

2:04:40 There was never a bond with any other commander the way they had with McClellan.

2:04:44 But what he couldn't do when the moment came.

2:04:47 When the moment came, he couldn't risk things.

2:04:51 He was risk-averse.

2:04:52 He had a chance to capture Richmond against Lee.

2:04:56 He should have, and he didn't.

2:04:58 He withdrew.

2:04:58 He had a chance...

2:05:00 You almost never had a chance to destroy another army in the Civil War.

2:05:03 He had a chance to destroy Lee's army at Antietam, and he didn't.

2:05:07 He pulled back.

2:05:08 He didn't even use 20,000 of his men.

2:05:11 They never fired their muskets at Antietam.

2:05:13 If you're in Lee's army, you're gonna fire your musket.

2:05:16 If you're in McClellan's army, maybe, maybe not.

2:05:18 He didn't at Antietam.

2:05:19 He let Lee get away.

2:05:21 It frustrated Lincoln immensely, and Lincoln finally fired him because of that.

2:05:25 It was a flaw.

2:05:26 He lacked what they would've called in the mid-19th

2:05:29 century the moral courage to risk everything.

2:05:32 Grant had it.

2:05:34 Lee had it.

2:05:36 McClellan didn't have it.

2:05:38 One of the components of a great general is the willingness to risk it all,

2:05:42 Obviously with, with good advice, with intelligence, but—- Which he had.

2:05:48 risk failure.

2:05:49 The whole war changed in this arc between the Seven Days and Antietam,

2:05:53 and it changed in this way.

2:05:55 McClellan's defeat at the Seven Days.

2:05:58 This is in late June and the, and early July '62,

2:06:03 convinced both Congress and Lincoln that slavery was

2:06:06 gonna have to be put on the table.

2:06:09 The war's gonna be moral and con—

2:06:11 McClellan could've won the war with slavery intact.

2:06:14 He didn't, so Congress passed the Second Confiscation Act in late July,

2:06:18 which I mentioned earlier, which strikes at slavery.

2:06:22 And then Lincoln decided, he told his cabinet toward the end of July

2:06:26 that he was gonna issue a proclamation of emancipation,

2:06:29 and he was persuaded that he couldn't just do it then in the wake of a defeat.

2:06:33 He should wait until he had a victory.

2:06:35 He got another defeat at Second Bull Run.

2:06:37 He finally got a victory at Antietam because Lee retreated,

2:06:40 and then that's when he announced the preliminary proclamation.

2:06:43 The key battle here isn't Antietam.

2:06:45 The key battle is the Seven Days

2:06:47 and McClellan's defeat that persuades Lincoln to do this.

2:06:50 Antietam gives him the occasion to do it,

2:06:53 and he issued his preliminary proclamation five

2:06:56 days after the battle on September 22nd, 1862.

2:07:00 Can you elaborate why it became obvious that the slavery

2:07:03 has to be on the table as, as the motivation, as the driving motivation-...

2:07:07 for the war at that time?

2:07:08 Because people believed the...

2:07:10 And they were right.

2:07:11 The war was almost over at the end of May 1862.

2:07:14 It had been a catastrophe for the Confederacy in the Western Theater.

2:07:20 They had lost New Orleans.

2:07:21 New Orleans was surrender- the biggest city in the Confederacy by far,

2:07:25 160,000 people, four times bigger than

2:07:27 the next biggest con- the most important port.

2:07:30 The key to the Mississippi River Valley as a, as an economic artery.

2:07:34 If you don't control New Orleans,

2:07:36 the Mississippi isn't an economic river for you.

2:07:40 New Orleans was gone in April.

2:07:42 Nashville was gone, the key city and capital of Tennessee.

2:07:45 Memphis was gone in June.

2:07:47 The whole state of Tennessee, except the mountainous East Tennessee,

2:07:51 was basically not a Confederate state anymore by May 1862.

2:07:56 There was a Union army of 100,000 in northern Mississippi by the end of May.

2:08:03 Catastrophic.

2:08:04 And George B.

2:08:05 McClellan's army was in five miles of the national capital in Richmond.

2:08:11 I don't think the Confederacy could have

2:08:13 absorbed the loss of Richmond at that point.

2:08:16 I think it would've been over,

2:08:18 and emancipation was not on the table yet in an official way.

2:08:23 The fact that Richmond didn't fall convinced people in the North

2:08:26 that the war was gonna have to last a lot longer.

2:08:29 The Confederates were gonna be harder to beat,

2:08:31 convinced Europe of the same thing.

2:08:33 By Europe, I mean France and England.

2:08:35 That's what mattered.

2:08:36 And so they decided that they were gonna have to take more extreme measures,

2:08:41 and then the key, more extreme measure is strike at slavery.

2:08:44 Strike at it as a war measure directly.

2:08:48 And as a war measure, it what?

2:08:50 Attacks at the economic infrastructure of the Confederacy.

2:08:54 It attacks the, the economic infrastructure that enables the Confederacy

2:08:58 to maintain the largest possible army in the war.

2:09:01 So this is not about the, the ethics, the morality of slavery.

2:09:05 It's the-- It is for the abolitionists who see it,

2:09:08 and Frederick Douglass realized that this is good.

2:09:10 The abolitionists realized early on, even in 1861, some of them,

2:09:15 Charles Sumner, for example, saw the Union defeat at First Bull Run.

2:09:19 "Yes, it's bad that we lost, but the longer the war goes,

2:09:23 the more likely that we can get slavery on the table,

2:09:27 get emancipation on the table." Frederick Douglass believed the same thing.

2:09:31 A longer war made that more likely,

2:09:33 and McClellan handed them that gift by not being

2:09:36 as aggressive as he should've been at Richmond in 1862.

2:09:40 But we should say, and correct me if I'm wrong,

2:09:44 that only a tiny minority of Americans were abolitionists at that time.

2:09:49 We'll never know exactly.

2:09:50 I would say if you...

2:09:51 I think if you guessed 3% were- I mean,

2:09:54 really abolitionists, destroy it now, destroy it completely,

2:09:58 no compensation for rebel owners or any owners,

2:10:01 kill it in Kentucky, kill it in Missouri, kill it in Maryland.

2:10:04 Yes, I think 3% would be about the ballpark.

2:10:08 So of course, now we venerate those folks,

2:10:12 and we mythologize them, and so they become bigger in our minds.

2:10:16 But we should remember that they're a tiny percentage.

2:10:21 They're a tiny percentage, and there are other factors that are pushing

2:10:24 forward the process that leads to the 13th Amendment.

2:10:27 It's not just people who hate slavery so

2:10:29 much that they'll do anything to kill it.

2:10:31 The...

2:10:31 in fact, most of them aren't.

2:10:33 That's not what they are.

2:10:35 We wish they were, but they're not.

2:10:36 And Lincoln is in a tough position.

2:10:39 Lincoln hates slavery personally, but he's president trying to win a war,

2:10:43 and he can't win the war with just Republicans.

2:10:45 He has to try to keep Democrats on board, so he has to...

2:10:49 I mean, and the Constitution protects slavery.

2:10:52 In Kentucky and Missouri and Maryland and Delaware.

2:10:54 They're still in the nation.

2:10:56 The Constitution still applies.

2:10:58 Congress, by the time, by the end of June,

2:11:01 had already gotten rid of slavery in the only two places where it could.

2:11:04 And that is in the federal territories and the District of Columbia.

2:11:08 No compensation in the territories,

2:11:10 but there were hardly any enslaved people there,

2:11:12 and there was some compensation in the District of Columbia.

2:11:17 You said that Lincoln hates slavery.

2:11:20 Can we just take that tangent and from a perspective of some,

2:11:26 there's a hypocrisy there in pushing for a policy of colonization.

2:11:32 Colonization.

2:11:33 Yes, colonization.

2:11:34 In the summer of 1862, Lincoln met with a group of Black leaders

2:11:38 and tried to convince them to support colonization,

2:11:42 which colonization meant if you freed enslaved people,

2:11:45 then they would go somewhere else.

2:11:46 They'd go out of the United States.

2:11:49 It's why Liberia exists.

2:11:51 And Lincoln, that is probably the least

2:11:54 attractive element of his total thinking on...

2:11:57 He genuinely didn't believe that white people

2:11:59 would ever accept Black people as equals.

2:12:01 He told the leaders that when he met with them,

2:12:03 and he said, "You wouldn't want it that way.

2:12:05 I wouldn't either.

2:12:06 It's the way it is.

2:12:07 It's a reality."- Do we know he believed that, or is

2:12:11 this a pragmatic politician understanding the lay of the land?

2:12:14 I think for someone who was born in Kentucky

2:12:17 and reared in Southern Indiana and Southern Illinois,

2:12:20 he was never around anything but a level

2:12:23 of intensity on race that he probably didn't ever see,

2:12:27 wasn't ever around white people who he

2:12:29 could see accepting Black people as fully equal.

2:12:32 That's-...

2:12:32 I do believe that.

2:12:35 And still, it is a country that where the words

2:12:39 "All men are created equal" is on the page.

2:12:41 They're right there on the page, waiting for that to be made good on.

2:12:45 Yes, that's correct.

2:12:47 Well, it's true.

2:12:49 And Lincoln— I mean, Lincoln also was capable of growth.

2:12:54 Well, he seemed to have evolved quite a lot in the years of the war.

2:13:01 He did.

2:13:01 No, he did.

2:13:02 He did.

2:13:03 And it's very, very possible were he not assassinated,

2:13:06 he would've arrived at a very different worldview.

2:13:10 We'll never know, but we do know that he was a lot smarter

2:13:14 and a lot more adaptable and a lot more politically adept than Andrew Johnson,

2:13:18 and so it certainly would've looked different.

2:13:21 Well, it's true.

2:13:22 No, I just-- Yes, it is true.

2:13:24 I think I vaguely remember you saying somewhere that Andrew

2:13:26 Johnson is the second worst president in America's history.

2:13:32 Yeah, he's right.

2:13:33 He has...

2:13:34 the glory of being above James Buchanan.

2:13:36 I said that a few years ago, yes.

2:13:38 I think you said something about Buchanan.

2:13:41 is...

2:13:41 There's like a basement, there's like a basement below basement.

2:13:44 I think-- Sub-basement.

2:13:44 He's in the sub-basement.

2:13:46 He's in the sub-basement.

2:13:47 And this I put that in the category of the slime, uh-...

2:13:50 poetic commentary.