Lex Fridman PodcastGary Gallagher: American Civil War, Slavery, Lincoln, Grant & Lee | Lex Fridman Podcast #499
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,000 words- 0:00 – 1:29
Episode highlight
- GGGary Gallagher
You cannot control what a great military event can set loose. More battle casualties than US forces had suffered in every war combined down to that point happened in two days. Two and a half months after that, George B. McClellan's army engaged with Lee's army in what came to be called the Seven Days Battles at Richmond, 36,000 casualties. So those two together just showed that this was gonna be on a totally different scale. He added a psychological twist. What, what Grant envisioned his doing, and, and Sheridan actually did it in the Shenandoah Valley before Sherman did it in Georgia, is go into a, a, an agriculturally productive area, burn the mills, kill the livestock, destroy the crops, lay waste to it so that it can't be a logistical support of the Confederacy anymore. Sheridan did it in the Shenandoah Valley, and then Sherman did it in Georgia. But Sherman said, "But I'm also going to break them psychologically. I'm gonna show them that my army can go wherever it wants to go, whenever it wants to go, and there's nothing Jefferson Davis can do about it." The great forces are all that matters and individuals don't really matter notion of history I think is ridiculous. Individuals really matter. For the United States, Lincoln and Grant matter beyond calculation-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm
- GGGary Gallagher
... in, in, in this, in this war. And on the Confederate side, if you take Lee out of the picture, the war doesn't last nearly as long as it does. In terms of causation, if you take slavery out of the picture, there is no Civil War, period.
- 1:29 – 1:52
Introduction
- LFLex Fridman
The following is a conversation with Gary Gallagher, a historian of the American Civil War. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback and so on. And now, dear friends, here's Gary Gallagher.
- 1:52 – 11:49
What caused the Civil War?
- LFLex Fridman
The American Civil War broke out in 1861. What were the causes of the Civil War? Could it have been avoided or was it inevitable?
- GGGary Gallagher
I don't know if anything is inevitable in history, but it's certainly safe to say that the conditions were in place to make it possible-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm
- GGGary Gallagher
... by the winter of 1860, '61 and the conditions that made it possible were all related to the institution of slavery and its effects both in the states where slavery was allowed and the states where it was not allowed. And there had been a series of tensions that grew in the decade preceding the 1850s. It's not that one side wants to get rid of slavery and the other side wants to protect slavery. I'm talking about the, the white people in the United States now who would be making the political decisions. It's a question of whether slavery was gonna be able to expand into federal territories. That is what really created the, the starkest difference between the two sections in the 1850s, even in the late 1840s. The issues that came to most, uh, perilous a point in the view of many people then had to do with whether slavery would be allowed only where it already existed or would it be allowed to expand. If it could expand, then it seemed that it might be conceivable at some point even that the slaveholding states could end up with a majority. They were in a minority by 1860, '61 and feeling beleaguered, feeling threatened. They'd long since lost the population race to the free states. Uh, early in the nation, the most powerful states were slaveholding states. Virginia was by far the most important state. Uh, four of the first five presidents were from Virginia, all slaveholders, all prominent members of the slaveholding class. Those days were long gone by the late 1850s.
- LFLex Fridman
So that's an important thing to say. It wasn't, uh, before the Civil War a discussion about abolishing slavery. It's about whether slavery, the institution of slavery should be expanded.
- GGGary Gallagher
Allowed to expand into federal territories. There, there is a, a portion of the white population that is adamantly in favor of getting rid of slavery immediately, the abolitionists. They... There was even a political party called the Liberty Party, uh, that ran a candidate in 1840 and they got a handful of thousand votes. They reached their high point in 1844. They got about two and a half percent of the vote. The abolitionists are a tiny minority among the wh- even in the North, tiny minority among the, the white people of the United States. The African American population, nearly four million of them by 1860 of course, would have embraced it instantly and yearned for it. But in the white population, the abolitionists are a tiny minority. They are much despised even across much of the North because they were seen as agitators who roiled the Union and deepened rifts that might bring a significant political break.
- LFLex Fridman
So how did this escalate to a civil war, this almost policy discussion about the institution of slavery? How did it actually escalate?
- GGGary Gallagher
It escalated into a civil war because in the presidential election of 1860... There'd been, there'd been two party s-systems in the United States. The first party system, the Republicans, the Jeffersonian Republicans versus the Federalists. After that, there was... The two parties were the Whig Party, uh, against the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party grew out of the Jeffersonian Republican Party. It's the same party. The Whig Party foundered to a significant degree on the issue of slavery. How do you maintain a national party that has a wing in the Southern states and has a wing in the Northern free states that can handle the issue of slavery? The Democrats managed to do that. The Whigs could not do it and so the Whig Party ran their last candidate in 1852, presidential candidate, significant candidate. And the Republican Party emerged in the mid-1850s, took most of the old Whigs into the Republican ranks and one of the Republican, the key Republican platform plank was no expansion of slavery into the territories. Not abolish slavery, no expansion. That was the key in 1856 when they ran their first candidate. In 1860, that is again the key plank in the Republican platform. The Republican platform in 1860 says where slavery exists It will continue, but it cannot expand into the territories. When white Southerners saw that, that meant that they were be- they were doomed to become an increasingly minority section in the nation, and you would have a federal government increasingly dominated by the free states that could then do the one thing that the white South could not countenance, and that is tamper with the institution of slavery in the South. The presidential election of 1860 brought the destruction of the last national party, which were the Democrats. They couldn't even settle on a candidate, so you end up with a Northern Democratic candidate running, Stephen A. Douglas, and a Southern candidate running. The convention fractured, and John C. Breckinridge ran on the, on the Southern Democrat platform. You had a Unionist candidate running who just didn't wanna talk about slavery, let's talk about the Union, and you had Lincoln running as a Republican. When Lincoln won, the white South looked at Lincoln winning. Here's a guy who has said that he doesn't think slavery would expand, but he'd said more than that. He scared the white South more because in 1858, both Lincoln and William Henry Seward, these are the, these are two prominent, prominent Republicans, had said basically in separate speeches, the House Divided Speech on Lincoln's part, the Irrepressible Conflict Speech on Seward's part, that the nation could not continue in the long term half slave and half free. And everybody in the South knew which way they wanted it to be. They would want it to be no slavery, and so Lincoln's election scared the white South enough so that seven of the 15 slaveholding states seceded in response to Lincoln's election. They seceded between December 20th, when South Carolina went out, and the end of February. You had the, the, the Deep South went out.
- LFLex Fridman
What was the general view amongst the populace towards slavery? Let's kind of lay it out. Let's, uh, you know, for the audience looking back, let's put ourselves in the mind space of how people saw the world, how people saw slavery, how people saw African Americans.
- GGGary Gallagher
Well, th- the baseline among the white Americans, there were about 31, shade more than 31 million Americans in 1860 for the census of 1860. About four million of them were African Americans, three and a half million of those enslaved i- in the South. A- anyway, among the white population, the average attitude toward Black people is what we would call profoundly prejudiced. Doesn't matter whether you... A lot of people think this is a Southern white thing. They're the only ones who were prejudiced. By our standards, the overwhelming majority of people in the free states were also deeply prejudiced. It's, it's important to keep in mind that attitudes towards slavery and attitudes toward race do not ne- they're not necessarily the same. I mean, you could be against slavery and still be prejudiced against Black people. By our standards, many abolitionists were prejudiced against Black people. They... But the overwhelming majority of the white North, and the North often had a hard time getting my students to understand the demographics in 1860. The free states in 1860 were more than 98% white. 98% white. African Americans are a tiny minority in the free states. Black people lived in the 15 slaveholding states in 1860. Most of the white North, by our standards, was very prejudiced. They were against the expansion of slavery into the territories because they thought that would circumscribe white opportunities to make an economic life in these federal territories, and they didn't want that to happen. About 45% of the people who lived in the free states were Democrats. Most Democrats had no problem with slavery, I mean, absolutely no problem with the, with the institution of slavery. There would be more problems among Republicans, especially with extension of slavery, although many Democrats, white Democrats in the North were against that as well. The white South was overwhelmingly in favor of slavery. You often read the argument, the, the kind of neo-Confederate argument that they'll talk about how most Confederate soldiers didn't own slaves. That's true. The, a large majority of families in the South did not own a single slave. But all white Southerners had a stake in slavery. They had a stake in it as a form of labor control, but more important than that, they had a stake in it as a means of social control. They knew, no matter what they said later in the Jim Crow era of how happy Black people were in the institution of slavery, they knew that Black people, of course, did not wanna be enslaved, and they were afraid of what would happen if they weren't enslaved anymore. They had in the backs of their minds Haiti. Is that what's gonna... If you live in one of the, the coastal districts of South Carolina where 90% of the residents are enslaved and you're a white person, you probably don't sleep all that soundly at night if you think there's any chance that the Black people are not gonna remain under the control of the white people. So all white people in the South had a stake in slavery, not just some. All of them did, and there were all kinds of ways that it would go back and forth. If you were a, a, a, a modest farmer and grew a little bit of cotton, you, you didn't have your own cotton gin, you... but your more wealthy neighbor had a gin, could gin your cotton there, and then you would take your turn on the slave patrol, the slave patrols. So there's a reciprocity, uh, in that
- 11:49 – 39:23
Slavery
- GGGary Gallagher
regard.
- LFLex Fridman
This is perhaps a bit outside the scope of what we'll talk about today, but just to lay out the context on slavery in general in human history, we should say that slavery was ubiquitous. It existed in virtually every major civilization in the history of humans. Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, China, the Islamic world, Africa, the Americas, North and South America. We should also say something that, as I was looking into this, another big topic, which is the Atlantic slave trade And it was surprising to me, the stat I wasn't aware of, I would venture to say most Americans probably don't know, that only 4% of African slaves were brought to North America, to the United States.
- GGGary Gallagher
Brazil is the main destination.
- LFLex Fridman
Brazil, the Caribbean was over 90%, 4.9 million in Brazil, 4 million in the Caribbean, and it was also the last of the Americas to abolish the slave trade. So only 4% of the Atlantic slave trade went to the United States. So there's... The story of human slavery is one that reaches deep into our history and geographically is much larger than we often study in the context of the United States.
- GGGary Gallagher
One thing the war, the Civil War, which I'll just call the war for the rest of our discussion, I mean, one thing it did was end slavery in four years in the United States. Whereas in the absence of that war, it might have gone on for decades. I think that the United States would have had the ignominious distinction of being the last place to get rid of slavery, would have been after Brazil, would have been after Spanish Cuba, because it was thriving in the United States in 1860. It was making the transition from cash crop agriculture-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm
- GGGary Gallagher
... to other, to industrial applications and other applications growing of non, uh, not growing, growing just cotton and rice and sugar. Uh, it was... There was a time in the literature when people argued that the war was needless, Civil War was needless because slavery was on its way out. That's absolutely wrong. It was not on its way out. It was thriving. Lincoln said at one point he thought it might have lasted another 50 years, and I, I, I don't know how many years it would have lasted, but I think it would have lasted longer than it did in either Cuba or Brazil if it hadn't, if the war hadn't taken place.
- LFLex Fridman
So slavery was flourishing in the United States from-
- GGGary Gallagher
Flourishing
- LFLex Fridman
... from an, uh, economics perspective-
- GGGary Gallagher
Yes
- LFLex Fridman
... especially.
- GGGary Gallagher
The wealthiest part... The, the 1860 census is our friend, and it tells us that the people who controlled the most wealth in the United States were slaveholders, and their property in slaves alone, not their, their other holdings, not their land holdings, just property and slaves were valued at about $3 billion. The value of all industries, all railroads, all of that put together, fewer than $2.5 billion. So the people who controlled the most wealth, by far, were the slaveholding class.
- LFLex Fridman
So it was the most valuable industry in the United States, and perhaps it is the reason, uh, again, a bit out of scope, but maybe it helps lay out the land. Let's look at the 19th century. So most slave-owning societies of the era were able to abolish slavery without people dying at the mass scale that we'll discuss. Uh, so Britain freed 800,000 slaves in 1833-
- GGGary Gallagher
Right
- LFLex Fridman
... uh, by buying their freedom. Russia freed 23 million serfs in 1861 with a decree, so legally. Brazil, which imported more than 10 times as many enslaved Africans as the United States, abolished slavery in 1888 through basic ordinary legislation. No violence. Why did US have a civil war with, uh, an estimated 750,000 people dead in order to abolish slavery?
- GGGary Gallagher
Yes. That's... The... Let's talk just for a second about the 750,000 dead soldiers we're talking about. The, the number for years was 618,000, and that's been revised lately. I think we're probably certainly more than 700,000. By far the bloodiest war in, in our history as a percentage of the population off the, off the charts, by far the bloodiest. I think one... I think there's a big difference between Great Britain doing it and the United States doing it, is Great Britain did it in pla- in other places. There weren't-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm
- GGGary Gallagher
... millions of enslaved people in Great Britain at the time. It's... I think it's, for them, it might have been a little bit easier to free enslaved people who don't live among you than in the United States, the ante is up for the Confederacy because they, the enslaved people lived here, and I think they were, a lot of them were afraid of them and what would happen if they weren't enslaved anymore. It, the war goes from... It doesn't begin as a war to end slavery. There's a major shift in the war, begins in the summer of 1862, where you add to the war. The, the war aim for the United States initially is to suppress the rebellion, which is what they called this. The, they, they didn't call it the Civil War for the most part during the war. It's the War of the Rebellion. That's the goal initially. As the war goes on and becomes costlier and more all-encompassing, they decide that they're not gonna be able to suppress the rebellion unless they also strike at slavery, because slavery underpins the Confederate war-making capacity. You have enslaved labor that keeps the economy going and allows the Confederacy to mobilize between 85 and 90% of all their white military age males. It's an astonishing mobilization. It's only possible because enslaved labor keeps the economy going. If you take that enslaved labor away, it deals a significant blow to the Confederate economy and, and by extension to its ability to wage a 19th century war.
- LFLex Fridman
So, uh, the Emancipation Proclamation was in part a military strategy.
- GGGary Gallagher
Abraham Lincoln based it entirely on his war-making power as commander-in-chief in a time of open rebellion. His inclination, there's no... He's often been criticized for not including soa- the soaring language he was capable of in the Emancipation Proclamation. One historian likened it to a bill of lading. It had all the soaring language of a bill of lading. He did that on purpose. He did it because he, he, he doesn't have the power to strike at slavery in the absence of a war. The president doesn't. And He did it because he knows that he can't win the war with only Republicans in the army. He needs to keep Democrats on board with the war as well. They're not in favor of emancipation. The one way that they might accept it is as a tool to help achieve union, and to do that we've got to strike at the rebels this way, strike at slavery. That will hurt their war effort, and it will also punish the people who brought on the war, and that would make... So Lincoln hoped that by m- basing it strictly on his war power, it might be more widely accepted across all parts of the loyal states, uh, and not as controversial as it was. It was still intensely controversial. It alienated many Democrats when he issued it, who said, "You're changing what this war is about. We're willing to, to shed our blood and maybe risk our lives to restore the Union of the Founders. I'm not going to risk my life to free a Black person." That's a very, very common attitude among Democrats.
- LFLex Fridman
So what did the Em- the Emancipation Proclamation actually do? It emphasized the freeing of slaves in the South.
- GGGary Gallagher
It's even more complicated than that. The only place that Lincoln said he had the power as the war leader to strike at slavery is where the rebels were actually still in rebellion and in control. So any place where the US Army was in control, any pla- He said that is, is in essence United States territory now. I can't free them there because I don't have the power. I can only free them where we don't have the power. So he exempted parts of states and areas in the South that it didn't apply to as of the moment he signed it. Going forward, any place that the United States Army went where it hadn't been on January 1st, 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation applied and enslaved people would be freed by it. At the, at literally at the time he signed it, he didn't free anybody because he's only saying, "I can free them where we're not in control. We have to be in control for this to have effect and for this to have power."
- LFLex Fridman
So in part, this is why the army was the boundary which the freeing was happening.
- GGGary Gallagher
It's, it's absolutely the boundary, and Congress had already passed what was called the Second Confiscation Act. It passed this in, in, uh, July of 1862, that announced that all enslaved people belonging to rebels were free. It, it didn't apply to people who could prove they were Unionists living in the South and owned slaves. Lincoln didn't make that distinction in the Emancipation Proclamation. His proclamation is broader than the Second Confiscation Act was.
- LFLex Fridman
Okay, there's so many tangents we, we can take, but let's zoom out once again. There's a difference between cause, as you've talked about, cause and motivation.
- GGGary Gallagher
Absolutely.
- LFLex Fridman
Quite a large number of people volunteered to fight.
- GGGary Gallagher
In fact, a majority of all the soldiers who fought on both sides were volunteers during the Civil War. About 3 million served, 2.2 million in the United States, 800, 900,000 in the Confederacy. It's... Again, I talk about things that are hard to get students to understand. This is one of them. They have to separate the... Causation and motivation are often conflated, and not just by students, but also by lots of talking heads on newscasts in the United States who don't know anything about United States history-
- LFLex Fridman
[laughs]
- 39:23 – 54:19
Lincoln
- LFLex Fridman
Let's talk about some of the key figures of the Civil War. We have Abraham Lincoln, of course, the President of the United States, who held the Union together and turned the war into a fight for a new birth of freedom. Jefferson Davis, who you mentioned, President of the Confederacy. Uh, Ulysses S. Grant, somebody we'll talk about quite a bit, General-in-Chief of the Union armies. Uh, Robert E. Lee on the other side, the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, somebody who you have studied for decades now. We'll talk a lot about him. There's, uh, Sherman, there's Stonewall Jackson, there's Frederick Douglass, there is, uh, McClellan, there is John Brown, a militant abolitionist. Many more figures, but let's look at three at first. Let's look at Lincoln, Grant, and Lee. Lincoln first. So, uh, Abraham Lincoln, we have this backwoods lawyer with a single year of schooling who somehow outgrew every polished man around him and became one of the most consequential leaders in human history. So what do we need to understand? What can we possibly understand at a 10,000-foot level, uh, about Lincoln that made it all possible? What was it about Lincoln's mind that made this man do what he did?
- GGGary Gallagher
Almost nobody continues to go up in my estimation as I get older and older, but Lincoln is one of the people who does. And, uh, Lincoln is quite frankly a mystery to me. I don't see how you get Abraham Lincoln out of someone who came from his very poor background. You g-you said he had a year of schooling. You're being very generous to him there. He didn't even really have a year of formal schooling. And you end up with a person who is the most eloquent president we've ever had by a very wide margin, and, and I, I think even more eloquent than Jefferson, and who is able to distill into the fewest possible words the most complex ideas and topics imaginable and just have them ring in a way that almost no one is able to do. He, he is someone-- He had an ego, but I think one of his real gifts was the ability to put his ego aside and keep his eye on the goal. He was able to really focus, and he focused relentlessly on, number one, suppressing the rebellion and restoring the Union, but also getting-- He hated the institution of slavery. He's not an abolitionist, but he hated the institution of slavery, and he was very happy to see that slavery was added to the roster of what the United States would, uh, insist on at the end of the war. He's able to, to let all the other things go. He can pay attention to many things, but he never loses his, his principal focus, was, "How do I maintain this great war?" And it's an all en-- It's, it's really hard to get people to understand the s-the, the scope- Of the Civil War. There are 31 million people in the United States then. About a shade more than 3 million put on uniforms. It would be as if we had 35 to 40 million people under arms now. For the Confederates, it would be like having more like 55 million people-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah
- GGGary Gallagher
... under arms as a percentage of the population. The dead would be between 6 million and 7.5 million, depending on how you count it. The scope is just... During the Gulf Wars, New York Times put a picture of every United States service person who was killed, put a picture in the paper over the scope of those wars, and that, that is about as many people as were shot in a few hours at Antietam. It's just very different to get students now to understand the different scale, and that's what Lincoln's dealing with. How do I keep the focus on a war that is becoming far more costly than anyone imagined and eating up our young manpower at a rate that no one... There's never been anything in our history to prepare the United States for this. The, the, the Winfield Scott captured Mexico City with an army of fewer than 15,000 during the war with Mexico. US Grant has 120,000. I mean, the whole scale is just so different that it's hard to come to terms with.
- LFLex Fridman
Yes.
- GGGary Gallagher
And that's what Lincoln was dealing with. I think the fact that he was willing to surround himself with really able counselors is important. Who does he put in his cabinet? He puts his main rivals in the cabinet. He put William Henry Seward in his cabinet, who's the most famous Republican in the country. He puts Salmon P. Chase, who's a very smart and effective and ambitious person from Ohio, in his cabinet. He surrounds himself with people who are capable and energetic and have their own ambitions, he's not afraid to do that, all of whom had far better educations than he had and didn't have a rural backwoods accent like he did.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- GGGary Gallagher
It's also a measure of how confident he was. He didn't pretend to talk a way he di- uh, to talk in a fashion-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm
- GGGary Gallagher
... that he didn't actually talk.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- GGGary Gallagher
He would've s- pronounced words in ways that anybody who went to Harvard would just sneer at. He didn't, and he knew they sneered, and he didn't care because eventually all of them, except the ones with only a 20-watt bulb, figured out that Lincoln was actually probably smarter than they were and had a better grasp of things than they did and brought them around. He really brought Seward around, which is very impressive.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah, there's so many fascinating things about, about Lincoln. So backwoods of Kentucky, and Kentucky is a very important state in this story. And the right words, the right speeches, the right debates at this moment in history, it, it really does make me wonder, you know, if Lincoln didn't exist, if s- c- certain humans in history didn't exist, that everything could have turned out very differently.
- GGGary Gallagher
The great forces are all that matters and individuals don't really matter notion of history I think is ridiculous. Individuals really matter. For the United States, Lincoln and Grant matter beyond calculation-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm
- GGGary Gallagher
... in, in, in this, in this war. And on the Confederate side, if you take Lee out of the picture, the war doesn't last nearly as long as it does. In fact, we'll talk about this later probably, I think it could have ended early in the summer of 1862 with slavery still intact. I mean, i- in a perverse way, Lee furthers the cause of emancipation because he s- extends the war long enough that the n- the United States says, "We have to do this. We've gotta get rid of slavery to defeat the rebels."
- LFLex Fridman
So, and also on the psychological side, uh, uh, Lincoln is a, this is a fascinating study because he, he carried deep depression all his life.
- GGGary Gallagher
He had black, black moods in his life. Yes, he did.
- LFLex Fridman
And so for somebody that has to go through an all-encompassing war, to be able to sort of survive through that, to think through that without an education, without any acquired skill that, uh, enables him to be a commander-in-chief during a time of war. He's got nothing in the toolbox, and yet he steps up.
- GGGary Gallagher
If you looked at his resume and Jefferson Davis' in 1860 and said, "Okay, here, here are the two guys who are gonna be your respective commanders-in-chief. Who do you want on your team?"
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- GGGary Gallagher
Lincoln had no administrative experience beyond running a little law office. He had one two-year term in the House of Representatives in terms of, of national government. He had no military s- service to speak of, a, a, a little while in the Black Hawk War as a, as a junior officer in the Black Hawk War. Didn't check any of the education boxes, as you said. Jefferson Davis was a graduate of West Point. He'd commanded more men in the war with Mexico than most of the men who commanded armies during the Civil War. He'd chaired the Senate Committee on, on Military Affairs. He'd been Secretary of War, a lot of administrative experience. He checked every box. Lincoln checked none of the boxes, and yet you got Lincoln as a commander-in-chief. It's really quite remarkable. He could listen to people that he thought knew more about something than he did. That's a quality that all of our presidents, to put it mildly, have not had. Lincoln did have that. He could listen. He could admit when he was wrong and change his mind about things, and he could put up with obnoxious behavior on the part of people that he thought might deliver the goods. A, and a perfect example of this is George Brinton McClellan, whom we'll talk about later, his young... who was general-in-chief for a while, commanded the Army of the Potomac. In 1861, Lincoln and his Secretary of State, William Henry Seward, went to McClellan's house to talk to McClellan. Went to McClellan's house. The commander-in-chief goes to McClellan's house. McClellan wasn't there. The butler or somebody put them in a side room. McClellan came home Was told Lincoln was there. He went upstairs and then told the person who worked for him to go tell the president that he'd be happy to talk to him some other time. And so Lincoln just left. He never went back to see McClellan again, didn't pitch a fit, filed that away. "Okay, McClellan's an ass, but I think he might win the war." I mean, he had that ability to do that, to, to put aside that kind of behavior on the part of someone if he thought they would deliver. He just has a number of qualities, I think, that are very unusual to find in someone. And as you say, he did have depressive moments, and he... We talk about how, what bad days presidents have. Now, Lincoln would've said, "I'll take that president's worst day every day rather than the days that I get for the most part." I mean, he, it's hard to imagine the burdens that he carried.
- LFLex Fridman
And at the right time, with just a handful of words-
- GGGary Gallagher
Oh
- LFLex Fridman
... expressed something that no military could possibly do.
- GGGary Gallagher
Explained what the war was about, why it was worth fighting, what it meant. His second inaugural address, I mean, people went... When people went to hear the president give his second inaugural address on that cold day in 1865, what they wanted to hear, they finally beat the rebel scum from their point of view. "Let's have some retribution here. What are we gonna do to them? How are we gonna make these people who brought this great war pay for this?" And what does Lincoln tell them? He tells them, "Slavery caused it. Everybody knows that somehow that's the truth, and we're all implicated in it." I mean, he didn't tell them anything that they wanted to hear that day, and it was... And it took great courage, I think, to do that at that moment, to tell an audience what they didn't wanna hear. And, and he did it in, in the most eloquent language that any president's... That's the greatest speech in American history, the second inaugural, in my view.
- LFLex Fridman
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan. To do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
- GGGary Gallagher
And we're all complicit in this because we all countenanced slavery. I mean, that's all in that one speech, and it's a short speech. [laughs] The whole speech probably only lasted eight or nine minutes. And he also pays tribute to the citizen soldiers at the beginning of it, because he says that the war's going well, and we all know that everything depends on what our soldiers do. That, and by that he meant saving the Union, killing slavery. It all depends on them, and then he comes back and finishes with his tribute to the soldiers at the end.
- LFLex Fridman
And I have to say the Gettysburg Address.
- GGGary Gallagher
Oh, no, it's... You can't. [laughs]
- 54:19 – 1:03:13
Grant vs Lee
- GGGary Gallagher
well.
- LFLex Fridman
And let's talk about the two other figures which we'll return to time and time again, Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee. So who was Grant? So this is a man who failed at farming Failed a business, failed [laughs] at his role in the peacetime army. Then, uh, when the war came, the war revealed a genius.
- GGGary Gallagher
So he'd known a lot of failure, he'd known a lot of setbacks, and his wartime record shows that he'd learned to deal with those things. He had a great, tremendous relationship with his wife, a very strong family life, a family he loved. I think that was the rock for him. But during the war, what he exhibited was an absolute willingness to break rules, to take risks, to take responsibility for what he was doing, whether it was a success or a failure, and not to be cast down by things that didn't work. If something didn't work, he'd say, "Okay, that didn't work. Now let's do this." He very famously, when he got to Virginia in 1864 and took over the Army of the Potomac, he had all these subordinates who were saying, "Well, what if General Lee does this? What if General Lee does that?" He finally said, "Why don't we start worry- let's not worrying about what General Lee is gonna do and let General Lee worry about what we're going to do?"
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- GGGary Gallagher
I mean, he just had... He was unflappable under stress. He was the perfect person to end up heading the Union armies, and he and Lincoln, and Lincoln realized that, and he proved indispensable. But he has this reputation as a butcher, Grant the Butcher. That's something that former Confederates and some Democrats in the North fastened on him. His preferred way of fighting wasn't just kind of slug it out. It's really interesting to compare his record in the war and Lee's record in the war before they wound up opposing each other in Virginia in a really bloody Overland Campaign. Grant's total casualties in all his great battles before they met were 37,000. Lee's were over 98,000-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm
- GGGary Gallagher
... in the same period. The bloodiest general in US history by far in terms of how many of his men get shot is Robert E. Lee.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- GGGary Gallagher
The most careful demographic study of any Civil War army is one done of Lee's army by a scholar named Joe Glattar, and Joe figured out that if you were a soldier in Robert E. Lee's army, you had a 73% chance of becoming a casualty. 73%. Grant's casualties get high when he runs into Robert E. Lee, just like everybody else. So the Butcher tag is completely unfair about Grant. He's also known as a drunk, and people have gone back and forth on that, whether he just had a weakness, couldn't hold his alcohol very well or, or, uh, was okay as long as his wife was around and he had a key staff officer to help him. The point is, alcohol never got in the way of anything Grant did during the war, and he had a superlative record of delivering victories when the United States needed them, and Lincoln figured that out. And the, the, the absolute proof of his stature because of this is that in the March of 1864, Congress decided to dust off the rank of three-star general, lieutenant general, and give it to Grant. The only person who'd ever had that rank was George Washington, the man, Jorge. I mean, he is the man. And so they are saying, "Okay, Grant, you get the rank the man had," and that shows there's never been anyone else who got it. You're the first. And then he would also be the first to get a four-star rank in the United States Army. That, that, there couldn't be a better indication of his stature than that he got r- Washington's rank. Winfield Scott had had it by brevet. Grant got the actual rank.
- LFLex Fridman
So in part, the Grant the Butcher label was from the Overland Campaign that we'll talk about-
- GGGary Gallagher
It is from the Overland Campaign
- LFLex Fridman
... as the military decisions made there.
- GGGary Gallagher
Yep.
- LFLex Fridman
Uh, many would argue that those are critically important for the, for the success of the war.
- GGGary Gallagher
Yes. He, he and Lee are often compared, but for the last year of the war, they're operating on it's not apples to apples because Grant is general in chief and is managing the entire war effort. He's managing what Sherman's doing and what Sheridan's doing and what Nathaniel Bank... Lee is an army commander.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- GGGary Gallagher
He can recommend things to Jefferson Davis, but he never commands more than an army, and so he never operates at the level that Grant did. Very late in the war, he was made general in chief when it was so late that it d- didn't matter.
- LFLex Fridman
So who was Robert E. Lee? In, uh, April 1861, Lee was offered command of the Union Army.
- GGGary Gallagher
He was.
- LFLex Fridman
And chose Virginia instead.
- GGGary Gallagher
He did.
- LFLex Fridman
What was he actually choosing in that decision? Uh, was he choosing home? Was he choosing honor? Was he choosing slavery? And maybe just zooming out, what do we need to understand in the early steps about Robert E. Lee? Who was the man?
- GGGary Gallagher
Well, Lee is sort of the antithesis of Grant in some ways. Lee is from an aristocratic family. Grant was from a solidly middle-class family. Lee's from an aristocratic family at the very top of the Virginia aristocracy. The Lees are all... He has uncles who were prominent, two signed the, the Declaration of Independence. His father was a famous commander under George Washington. He's... His father's the one who said that Washington was first in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen. That's Lee's father, who was later a prominent Virginia politician. Lee's idol is George Washington. He patterns himself on Washington. He differs from him in some ways, but he's, he patterns himself on Washington. He considered Washington the most admirable person in United States history, and then of course, he almost undoes the work that George Washington put in place during the American Revolution. He chose Virginia. He didn't leave, he didn't resign his commission in the United States Army to go with the Confederacy. He resigned his commission in the United States Army to, to go to Virginia, which wasn't in the Confederacy yet, become the head of state forces in Virginia. But then when Virginia went into the Confederacy, he took his Confederate commission and ended up, uh, as the third-ranking officer in Confederate service, and he makes an easy transition to ... a Confederate loyalty. I think it's his loyalty to Virginia and, and what that means. That means his family, and of course that means slavery. That's part of what that loyalty is. He's, he's devoted to the slave-holding South as well as to Virginia. Virginia's a subset of that. All of that is in one bundle with Lee. It's all ... But th- he, he also had been an ardent US nationalist earlier in his career, and a very successful military officer. Winfield Scott thought he was the greatest soldier in the army, and Scott, he probably really thought except for me. But Scott is a great soldier that people don't remember that way because he became a kinda Jabba the Hutt figure by the time of the Civil War. He's enormous, weighs 350 pounds, has to be winched onto his horse. But he was a very smart guy and he thought very highly of Lee. Lee was a superb soldier, as he would show during the war, but he's on the wrong side.
- LFLex Fridman
Maybe just to throw in a few more characters, I do think, uh, the, the folks on both sides that are the m- of the more radical persuasion are quite interesting. Somebody you spoke about, I'm not sure where, think it might've been in your lecture series about Thaddeus Stevens.
- GGGary Gallagher
[laughs]
- LFLex Fridman
Uh [laughs]
- GGGary Gallagher
Thaddeus Stevens.
- LFLex Fridman
He's a-
- GGGary Gallagher
Thaddeus Stevens is one of the most radical of the radical Republicans.
- LFLex Fridman
He is.
- 1:03:13 – 1:12:39
Could the Civil War have been avoided?
- GGGary Gallagher
Stevens.
- LFLex Fridman
All right. If we can, let's talk about the buildup to the war.
- GGGary Gallagher
All right.
- LFLex Fridman
What were the key states on both sides that were debating? What are the ones that were certainly going to be, uh, firmly on one side or the other? And may- maybe what are the ones that were critical at, at the borderline?
- GGGary Gallagher
The states that were in the forefront of the secession movement were the Deep South states, and South Carolina was kind of ground central for what was going on there. It just so happened that the Democrats had their national convention in Charleston in 1860, which is the worst place in the world they could have had it if they wanted a quiet, rational discussion of anything.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- GGGary Gallagher
South Carolina is the first state to secede, and then is quickly followed. You can just go the tier across Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, Texas. That's the re- It's seven states. The Deep South states go out in that initial. But there's a long period then, and they gather in Montgomery, Alabama, to establish a new government with Montgomery as the capital of the Confederacy.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- GGGary Gallagher
Delegates from those states do. And they set up a provisional government that's gonna last a year and call for the first national elections in 1861. There are only seven states there, and really only six for a lot of it 'cause Texas got there late. It was the last of the first seven to secede. But the states that haven't seceded yet are the ones with the most people. Virginia, which is the most populous, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri. Eight states have not gone out. Eight slave-holding states have not gone out. The most important one is Virginia among those that-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm
- GGGary Gallagher
... that have not gone out. The question is can they find some resolution to all of this, or is it gonna get more serious, and are those states gonna go? And it came to focus once again on Charleston, South Carolina, and a federal installation in Charleston Harbor, Fort Sumter. Much United States property and illic- and installations had been just given over to the Confederates.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- GGGary Gallagher
And the question is can we do it with this one as well? This is a very difficult decision to make, and it comes down to what's gonna happen in Charleston Harbor. And in the end, I mean, Jefferson Davis believed that he couldn't allow it to remain a federal installation 'cause it's actually in the Confederacy from their point of view. And Lincoln, who's not conceding the right of states to secede, they're, they're temporarily out of our power, but we have to maintain ... He decided in the end to maintain power there, not to reinforce it but to resupply it, needed supplies. And that's what triggers it. Then, then the ball's in Jefferson Davis' court. Okay, they're gonna resupply it. What do we do? And they decided we need to insist that it surrender, and if it won't surrender, we need to fire on it. And the Confederates fired the first shots. They would have said, "We were forced to fire the first shots by what Lincoln did." N- nobody wanted to be the ones who fired the first shots. But in the end, it's the Confederates who fired the first shots. And once that is fired, the key thing, the key thing is not the firing on Sumter in the end, but that sets up the key thing, which is Lincoln's call for volunteers to suppress the rebellion, and he is going to ask each state to supply people. And the Upper South states, most of them have said, "We're not gonna secede, but you can't ... But, but the states that are gone had the right to secede-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm
- GGGary Gallagher
... and you can't do anything to make them come back." Lincoln is seeming to make them do things to come back. And so four more states went out. Virginia went out, Arkansas went out, Tennessee went out, then North Carolina went out, and now you have an 11-state Confederacy rather than seven. But more than that, you have Virginia. The city of Richmond has 40% of all the industrial capacity in the entire Confederacy, what became the Confederacy. Virginia is the most populous state, has the largest slave population, the largest white population. It supplies the most important military leaders, and the capital ends up in Richmond. They move from Montgomery to Richmond in acknowledgment of how important Richmond is, that this is the key state. The key states that didn't go out were Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri. Delaware didn't either, but who cares? Uh, the other three didn't go out, and that really mattered because they were more populous. But 11 are gone. Four remain in the Union.
- LFLex Fridman
And, uh, to lay out some more context, going to Perplexity here, by total enslaved population on the eve of the Civil War, we have, uh, looking at the top five states, Virginia, as you said, with the most number of slaves, 490,000.
- GGGary Gallagher
Yep.
- LFLex Fridman
Then Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, all with over 400,000 slaves.
- GGGary Gallagher
Yes. And Mississippi and South Carolina have the highest proportion of enslaved people of any of the, uh, any of the states. And this is an interesting little fact from the 1860 census. When you're talking about white people in the United States, those are the two wealthiest states per capita in the United States, are South Carolina and Mississippi in 1860.
- LFLex Fridman
Boy, the complicated history of this great nation of ours.
- GGGary Gallagher
It, it's hard to overstate the resources. The states that sent the most men into the Confederate Army are Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia. Three of those come in this second wave of secessions. Three of them, three of the four. Only Georgia among the original ones was in those top four states. And so you would have had a much, much smaller pool of manpower for that earlier version of the Confederacy. It's inconceivable to me that you would have had the war we had with just that version.
- LFLex Fridman
So it does feel, just to linger on it, like there was a lot on the balance here. Like there was a, a lot of different decisions that could have been made, even on the political side, that could have turned the tides.
- GGGary Gallagher
For example, there's a secession convention in Virginia. It goes in... It votes twice against secession. Twice. It's only after Sumter that they come back for another vote. I mean, it's a Unionist vote in that convention in, in Virginia, and it's only after Fort Sumter.
- LFLex Fridman
Wow.
- GGGary Gallagher
And then it's still so divided that a big chunk of Virginia decide... That's how you get West Virginia. West Virginia essentially secedes from Virginia-
- LFLex Fridman
Wow
- GGGary Gallagher
... in the course of the Civil War.
- LFLex Fridman
And given the industrial capacity of Virginia, that was a critical state, so it could have been... Virginia could have, could have changed. We could have avoided the Civil War with Virginia alone.
- GGGary Gallagher
It would have really changed. I mean, Virginia is the key. Virginia is the key because of the manpower, the industrial capacity, the food production, and Virginia gives you Lee, Jackson, Jeb Stuart. I mean, it, and, and the most soldiers of any state in the Confederacy. It's just, it's, it's a real game changer to get Virginia. Plus, it also gives you these unbelievable ties to the revolutionary generation. Hey, it's George's home state. It is now in the Confederacy with his big statue on the Capitol grounds, uh, of George Washington. I mean, give, you get Washington, the ties to Jefferson, the ties to Madison. All of this comes in with Virginia.
- LFLex Fridman
So I think a lot of historians have said that, uh, the Civil War was inevitable. It, you're really painting a picture here where it perhaps was not inevitable.
- 1:12:39 – 1:29:47
The bloodiest war in US history
- LFLex Fridman
Can we just actually linger on this, on the nature of war? Over 700,000 people dead. How do we make sense of our capacity as, in that context, Americans? To kill sometimes literally our brothers
- GGGary Gallagher
Yes, sometimes literally our brothers
- LFLex Fridman
How is that even possible?
- GGGary Gallagher
Well, one thing, it tells me things are pretty important to people on both sides [laughs] if you're gonna continue for a war that long. I mean, there was a, a period in the literature, in the scholarly literature in the 1980s and into the 1990s where they argued that the Confederacy wasn't a nation, and the proof was that they didn't try very hard, that they, if they'd really thought of themselves as a nation, they would have tried harder and fought longer. Well, they lost between 4.5 and 5.5% of their entire population, which is more than Great Britain, France, Germany, or Russia during World War I. They had a higher percentage lost than any of the powers in World War I. The US lost about 1.8% of its population from the war. US, in World War II, 0.3% of its popul- ... That seems... They lost more than 30% of their entire white military-age males in the war. It'd be the equivalent of about 18 million Americans being killed now in a war. That seems to me that they're pretty serious about something there.
- LFLex Fridman
It means that's one of the largest percentages of loss. That's, if that's a measure of dedication.
- GGGary Gallagher
If that's your measure of dedication, yes, and it, it seems to me that it should be one of the metrics that you bring to play, uh, that, that it's... They're, they just keep at it. They didn't give up easily.
- LFLex Fridman
What, what can we say about the motivation? On the psychological side, did the members of the Confederacy hate the members of the Union?
- GGGary Gallagher
Well, that escalated on both sides during the war. As more and more loss came, you, they, they did. There was more hatred directed toward the enemy more and more. This notion that it's, they're all brothers and not really mad at each other and... That just doesn't hold up. There are places where the soldiers fraternized with one another and traded tobacco for coffee and that kind of stuff, but no, the bitterness as the war went on and there was greater loss on the home front and as the war became more all-encompassing and really went after the entire, uh, the civilian side of the Confederacy was not shielded from it, the bitterness increased and increased and increased. And there's a lot of unhappiness with the war behind the lines in the Confederacy, absolutely, unhappiness with the d- with the government. There's desertion. About 15% of Confederate soldiers deserted. About 12% of United States soldiers deserted. So there's desertion on both sides. There's war weariness, but the war goes on because I think if you had been able to poll most white Southerners even late in the war and say, "Okay, here are your choices. You either have Jefferson Davis in the government and the war goes on, or you're going back into the United States and the Lincoln government will be in charge and you won't have slavery. Which one do you pick?" They're gonna pick the first one, and that's why the war went on as long as it did.
- LFLex Fridman
But at the same time, to fast-forward, and that maybe, uh, teaches you something about the nature of war, but after the war, maybe some of the decisions that Grant made, people were able to rediscover the brotherhood.
- GGGary Gallagher
You mean at Appomattox, you're talking about-
- LFLex Fridman
Appomattox
- GGGary Gallagher
... the terms at Appomattox.
- LFLex Fridman
Yes.
- GGGary Gallagher
Yes, the... And those were... And he didn't just reach up in the air and say, "I've got some terms." The, Lincoln very specifically, he met with Lincoln shortly before Appomattox. Sherman was there. One top naval officer was there, Grant and Lincoln, and Lincoln said, "This is what I want. This is the kind of peace I want."
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- GGGary Gallagher
"The whole point of this war is to put the nation back together, and a good start on that is..." I mean, if it's just a rebellion, what do you do with traitors and rebels? You hang them.
- LFLex Fridman
Hmm.
- GGGary Gallagher
You don't bring them back. You don't treat them as prisoners of war, which the United States did during this. You, he, but the goal is to put the nation back together, and Lincoln said, "This is a good start. Make them sign a parole. Make them accept the end of slavery and the fact that they're back in the Union. If they do that, they get to go home and resume their lives." Th- Hadn't been decided yet whether they'll get to vote, but let them go home. Don't imprison them. Don't execute them. Don't execute their leaders. That's the decision.
- LFLex Fridman
From the perspective of the Union, what do you think about that kind of forgiveness?
- GGGary Gallagher
Well, I think that it was sort of a, a nod toward the direction of forgiveness, but I don't think the real, I don't think real forgiveness was there. There was still extremely hard feelings on both sides, and Lincoln's assassination upped the ante on that, especially for a while, uh, in the United States. The, the forgiveness... Two things in terms of the aftermath of the war, two words that often come into play are, are reunion and reconciliation. Those are two other things that are often conflated. Reunion is literally putting the nation back together. That happened. Reconciled, true reconciliation, that's much, much, much tougher, and that didn't come anytime soon on the part of millions of people on both sides, I think.
- LFLex Fridman
And we'll probably maybe talk about in multiple ways how m- maybe that is something that's still going on.
- GGGary Gallagher
Oh, there are echoes of the Civil War all over the place. It's not still being fought, but you can see resonances of the Civil War because it's such a profoundly disruptive event that gets right at the heart of what the Republic means. I mean, and, and so it's, there's nothing else like it in US history, and it's, uh, it's a great moment of truth, the residual aftermath and effects of which lingered for decades and are still present in some ways, I think.
- LFLex Fridman
So in 1859, most Americans were just living their life. Uh, did they have a sense what was on the horizon?
- GGGary Gallagher
It's what I like to call the Appomattox Syndrome, which starts at the end of the story And, and says, "Of course there was gonna be a war because the war was inevitable, and of course the United States was gonna win and slavery was gonna be destroyed," because they were. So let's find out how we got right here.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm.
- GGGary Gallagher
But no, most people didn't wake up in Iowa in 1857 and their first thought was, "Boy, I hate the South."
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- GGGary Gallagher
"Those slaveholders, they're really..." No. People got on with their quotidian lives and they, they got to the farm or they went to their business and they did... They, they weren't... Nobody knew that they were living in the antebellum era, and that those great antebellum years were about to come to an end.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- GGGary Gallagher
They... That is something that it's hard to get people not... To just put it out of your mind that that's all anybody is thinking about. They're thinking, "There's a lot of other stuff going on."
- 1:29:47 – 1:50:22
How the Confederate Army could've won
- LFLex Fridman
Okay, let's, let's, uh, at the start, first shots fired at Fort Sumter, as you mentioned, and this thing starts brewing and escalating towards a full-on war. What are the different advantages of each side from a military perspective?
- GGGary Gallagher
Here is one of the great misconceptions about the Civil War. Among the people who know anything about it, which in the US is a very small percentage, but if they know anything, they know United States' victory was inevitable.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- GGGary Gallagher
Because the United States had 22 million people.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- GGGary Gallagher
The Confederacy had five and a half million white people-
- LFLex Fridman
[laughs]
- GGGary Gallagher
... and three and a half million enslaved people. The United States' economy was infinitely more powerful than the Confederate economy. The United States had the United States Army. The United States had the United States Navy.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- GGGary Gallagher
Really, who's gonna win this war? The US, it's inevitable, next question. It's not true at all. The US did have those advantages, but the Confederacy had compensating advantages. And one of those advantages was it had a much lower bar to cross for success. It didn't have to invade the United States, didn't have to capture Washington. It didn't have to project its military power into New England. All it had to do was convince a majority of the civilian population of the loyal states that it wasn't worth the cost to make these rebel states come back into the Union. These are two democratic republics at war, and in the end, the civilian sector decides. Somebody my age can... We have the perfect example, Vietnam. The United States was not defeated militarily in Vietnam, and it didn't matter.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- GGGary Gallagher
'Cause when the people said, "We're not gonna support this war anymore," the war's gonna come to an end. The smart people in the Confederacy understood this. They understood it at the time. Lee understood it. Jefferson Davis understood it. You had key people at the time saying, "There's no way that a nation as large as ours and a populous as, a population as large as ours has ever been subjected in a war like this. A tie is as good as a win for the Confederacy" And they came very close to that in the summer of 1864. The other thing is the sheer size of the Confederacy is a huge advantage to them. It's huge, with a very poor transportation and communication infrastructure in many ways. And to move a large army deep into the Confederacy is a huge logistical problem.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- GGGary Gallagher
The same thing had happened to the British both during the American Revolution and the War of 1812. They confront this, this... The Confederacy's as big as all of Western Europe. That's a problem. It's also a problem that the Confederates are fighting, literally fighting to defend their homes. That's always, almost always a, a stronger factor than trying to impose your will on somebody else. All of these factors help the Confederacy. The US did have an army. The army had 15,000 men in it in 1860, 15,000. The Navy had fewer than 50 vessels, most of them on overseas stations. There were exactly three vessels available to blockade the Confederacy at the beginning of the war. The Confederate coastline's 3,600 miles long. Probably not gonna be able to shut down a lot there. So the point is that there are factors that help both sides. To me, the conditions for victory are the most important factor that favors the Confederacy. We just have to make it painful enough to the United States that they're gonna say, "Let them go. We never liked South Carolina anyway. Just let them go. We're not... It's not worth it. It's killing too many of our boys. It's costing too much money, and we don't have to worry about slavery in the territories if they're gone 'cause they'll be gone."
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- GGGary Gallagher
"And our territories will be free of slavery"
- LFLex Fridman
So again, the Union is the invading force.
- GGGary Gallagher
Yes.
- LFLex Fridman
Geography comes into play, as you mentioned.
- GGGary Gallagher
Immediately.
- LFLex Fridman
Vast land.
- GGGary Gallagher
Yes.
- LFLex Fridman
And so in some sense, it's a miracle that the war lasted as long as it did, and then there was as much motivation.
- GGGary Gallagher
Yes, that they stuck to it.
- LFLex Fridman
Because again, victory for the Confederacy was stop the war.
- GGGary Gallagher
Stop the war. Neither side has an advantage in terms of its leadership. The generals all come... You often used to read frequently Confederates had better generals than the... And, but this is the first war where West- where West Pointers are in charge. They were subalterns in Mexico. The West Point is the United States Military Academy where the professional officer corps gets its training. It was established under Jefferson. It's the premier engineering school in the United States, and I mean, West Point-trained engineers are very, very prominent, uh, when they get out of the Army and even when they're in the Army. But by the time of the Civil War, it is West Pointers who were lieutenants and captains in the war with Mexico are now gonna be the people in charge. Almost every army commander, almost every corps commander, which is the nest, next level, are West Point graduates. They took the same classes from the same professors, read the same textbooks, served under either Winfield Scott or Zachary Taylor in Mexico. They bring the same background and body of doctrine and training to the table. It would've been weird if one side or the other had an inherent advantage in leadership. The one place where the US ends up with an advantage is that over the course of the war, it found, in my view, four men who could command armies effectively: Grant, Sherman, Philip Henry Sheridan, and George H. Thomas. The Confederacy only ever found one, and that's Lee. And they had more than one army, so that's a problem. If you have more than one army but only one really good army commander, that's puts you at a disadvantage.
- LFLex Fridman
In what ways were the two sides balanced militarily? Uh, e- equal militarily. So the, the passion, like we mentioned, of the, of the fighting force, the soldiers, the dedication to the fighting.
- GGGary Gallagher
Both brought the same notions of how to fight a war to the table because the officer corps had been, on both sides, had been trained in, in the same way. Neither side has a real advantage in terms of technology. Both sides use the railroad. Both sides use the telegraph. The United States could have used repeating weapons but decided not to. The Confederacy didn't have the industrial capacity to produce. So the war is fought by infantrymen, for the most part, carrying muzzle-loading single-shot muskets, rifle muskets. That's the weapon that inflicts 85 to 90% of the casualties in the Civil War.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- GGGary Gallagher
And they both have exactly the same thing, and they have the same kinds of, of artillery pieces. The United States Navy's much bigger, but it's, it's... And the Navy is important, but armies really decide the war, and the armies are... They're organized exactly the same way. They are off- they get officers the same way. They're very similar.
- 1:50:22 – 2:13:23
Key battles of the Civil War
- LFLex Fridman
Uh, let's talk about the different theaters of the war, the Eastern Theater and the Western Theater. You mentioned the navies, the geography. How does geography come t- into play? What are the different parts here?
- GGGary Gallagher
There's three main theaters of the war. The Eastern Theater is the theater that features Washington and Richmond.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- GGGary Gallagher
Plays out in Virginia, a little bit of Maryland, and a little bit of Pennsylvania. That's... It's where the Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac fight for the most part. That's the Eastern Theater.
- LFLex Fridman
And that's the theater that maybe is most, uh, glorified and mythologized.
- GGGary Gallagher
It's by far the most famous of the theaters.
- LFLex Fridman
Famous.
- GGGary Gallagher
There are famous battles in the other theaters, but that's the one, and it's mainly because of the presence of Lee and then of Grant. The Western Theater is a much larger one. It goes from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River, east to west, and would go from the Gulf to the Ohio River. So it's huge and involves Tennessee and, and, and then beyond the Mississippi River is the descriptively named Trans-Mississippi River, part of Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, and so forth. In terms of commitment of resources and effect on the outcome of the war, it's by far the least important. Some people get, uh, very upset when I said that, say that, that the Trans... You know, it's basically who cares about what's going on out there. But that's the third theater, the Trans-Mississippi, the Western Theater, and the Eastern Theater.
- LFLex Fridman
But, uh, I think you've argued that the Western Theater is really important for the war.
- GGGary Gallagher
Very important, and it, it's where we get Grant. The, the, the, the soldiers who won the war for the United States all come out of the Western Theater. Grant, he bring Sherman, Philip Sheridan, George Thomas. Those are all in the Western Theater.
- LFLex Fridman
So at the very beginning, the first real battle, uh, at the First Manassas in July 1861. I think one interesting aspect of that, as you've talked about, is that people gathered for a picnic.
- GGGary Gallagher
They came out to watch from Washington. They brought the carriages out, set up on a little ridge that let them look down over the battle.
- LFLex Fridman
So that kind of gives you a sense that people of the time, first of all, didn't think this would, this is going to scale to the size that it did or last as long as it did, but also did not understand the seriousness of the situation.
- GGGary Gallagher
They're clueless about what's actually going on. To, to even think that you should go observe a battle like that is ridiculous, but they did. And there was a strong belief, and Lincoln was, was part of this at the beginning, that there's probably gonna be one battle. It's not gonna last. He asked, he asked for 90-day volunteers to suppress the rebellion, uh, right after Fort Sumter. And William Tecumseh Sherman reacted to that by saying that you might as well try to put out a fire with a squirt gun. I mean, it's ridiculous. They're not thinking about what a, this war could easily be, take years, take hundreds of thousands of men maybe, not, not one battle.
- LFLex Fridman
When did it, the dark cloud, the reality of the war, uh, come in?
- GGGary Gallagher
Well, First Bull Run and Start- or Manassas, th- each side... Many battles have two names, one that the United States soldiers used and one... And usually the, the Confederates would pick the nearest town, and the, the United States often picked terrain features. So you get Bull Run, which is a creek or stream. That's what the Union soldiers called it. Manassas is what the Confederates called it. Antietam, a creek in Maryland, is what the Union. Sharpsburg is what Confederates called it. Anyway, there are several of those. That brought a little sense of reality to people in, in the United States especially. They'd expected it to be over, and it didn't go the way they thought it would go. And so it's gonna take more men. The summer of '61 was spent, hundreds of thousands of men went into uniform in the summer of '61. The whole supply situation became more evidently imperative, but not much happened in the, for the rest of the war. There's a pretty big battle called the Battle of Wilson's Creek that takes place in Missouri, but the rest of 1861 doesn't have... The, the real fighting begins in the spring of '62, and what really brought home in a way that no one had imagined what could be in store was one battle in the East and one battle in the West. The one in the West is Shiloh, which happened in early April. US Grant on the, on the United States side and a General Albert Sidney Johnston on the Confederate side. But at Shiloh in two days, there were upwards of 25,000 casualties, and that's more, more battle casualties than US forces had suffered in every war combined down to that point happened in two days. Two and a half months after that George B. McClellan's army engaged with Lee's army in what came to be called the Seven Days Battles at Richmond, 36,000 casualties. So those two together just showed that this was gonna be on a totally different scale, and it was gonna involve sacrifices and allocation of resources that no one had imagined before.
- LFLex Fridman
Since you mentioned Missouri, you've talked about how that was the most brutal guerrilla warfare of the conflict.
- GGGary Gallagher
It was.
- LFLex Fridman
And maybe can you speak to what do you mean by guerrilla warfare? What kind of war was that? And then contrast with the, the structure, the dynamics of m- of battles in elsewhere in the war.
- GGGary Gallagher
Yes. Guerrilla war is more of what I think most Americans can sort of imagine what guerrilla war is. It involves small, much, much smaller numbers of, of actors, obviously, on both sides. Guerrilla bands might have a few dozen members. They might have a few hundred at different times. There are no real battles, battles, battles between guerrillas. There's a, there is a lot of bushwhacking, which is what they called it, ambushing people, terrorizing civilians, killing livestock, uh, killing some civilians, killing prisoners after you've captured them, hanging some people. There are a few semi-large scale ones. There's a, a Confederate guerrilla named Quantrill led a raid against Lawrence, Kansas, where they burned parts of the town, executed more than 150 men in the town, and terrorized the place. Um, that is going on in the... Th- there's a relationship in many places between elevation and guerrilla activity. The, the more mountainous or hilly, the more likely there'll be guerrillas operating. They operate in the mountains, East Tennessee, western North Carolina, southwestern Virginia, um, central... There's even some activity in parts of Texas, but Missouri and Kentucky have the worst guerrilla warfare. It's present through the whole war, probably involves maybe 50,000 men out of the 3 million who were in action during the war, and was very nasty. No rules. One reason that, um, rules of war were codified was because Henry Halleck, who was a Union general in Missouri, was dealing with this guerrilla activity. He said, "We need to get some rules about who's a civilian, who's not a civilian. How do you deal with this kind of situation and that kind of situation?"
- LFLex Fridman
What, what should we take away from the fact that most of the fighting had the rules of war behind it? So it was more structured, it was-
- GGGary Gallagher
I think what we take away from that supports my argument that this is a war between two mid-19th century nation states that have a sense of how you fight a war. You fight a war with national armies who are led by professional soldiers and who understand that there are limits to what you do in a war, and all the war, the war's limits expand as it goes on, but it doesn't reach the point where you have indiscriminate killing of civilians and so forth. You just don't... I mean, there's an argument about whether it's a total war or not. It all depends on how you define total war.
- LFLex Fridman
As you've mentioned, in terms of how encompassing it was, as total a war as it gets, because the, the entirety of the society was involved in it.
- GGGary Gallagher
When there's wide-scale targeting of the economic infrastructure of your opponent that can be used to support the war effort, which is what you get increasingly as the war goes on, and officially when Grant is in charge as general-in-chief, then certainly that's a total... If you're the farmer who experiences an army coming by, and they, they take all, take or kill all your livestock and destroy your crops, and that's, that's pretty much like a total war, even if they don't kill you.
- LFLex Fridman
So the war escalates.
- GGGary Gallagher
Yes, the war does escalate. '62, it takes a quantum leap. In, in the spring and early summer of 1862, the signals are clear. This is something that we had not counted on before. And the armies are much, they're gonna be much bigger. The Army of the Potomac's more than 100,000 men. There's never been an army like that in US history, nothing like that.
- LFLex Fridman
What do we understand from the diaries of soldiers coming, uh, for the first time face to face with this scale of war? We're talking about a year. They've been volunteering for a year, like you mentioned, you know, in the summer, in the spring and the summer of '62.
- GGGary Gallagher
There's so many themes in soldier letters, and it's an incredible gift to people such as myself who study this, is that almost, that a very large majority of the men on both sides were literate. And so we have this mass of testimony. Th- and they, and they, they sent millions of letters from the armies home and, and back to the armies, the, the, uh, on both sides. So we have this, this trove of first-hand evidence and, and diaries too. Many, many, many, many, many diaries. But y- so you can see in real time how attitudes are changing, hardening. You can see the hardening process in soldiers who they don't have any idea what being a soldier is, then they do, and they don't like lots of things about it. They don't... They talk a lot about food, talk a lot about clothing, talk a lot about officers they don't like. They don't talk... What, one thing, it's really fascinating, the thing they don't try to do is explain to people behind the lines exactly what it's like to be in a battle, because they understand the people back home won't understand what they're talking about. And so they'll say things like, "It was awful," and, "Words just can't convey what it was," and, and then maybe tell more about their individual experience. But they, there's a real sense that what a veteran knows about being in the military and what the people back home will understand are two different things, and you just can't explain it to them.
- LFLex Fridman
And so that takes us into the fall of, uh, the Battle of Antietam. Uh, can you walk me through what happened at the battle and why it mattered?
- GGGary Gallagher
George B. McClellan, whom I've already referred to dismissively a couple of times.
- 2:13:23 – 2:27:23
Best and Worst Presidents
- LFLex Fridman
I just-
- GGGary Gallagher
[laughs] Yes, it is true
- LFLex Fridman
... I think I vaguely remember you saying somewhere that Andrew Johnson ... is the second worst president in America's history?
- GGGary Gallagher
Yeah, he's right. He, he has-
- LFLex Fridman
[laughs]
- GGGary Gallagher
... the, the glory of being above James Buchanan. I said that a few years ago, yes.
- LFLex Fridman
I think you said something about, uh, Buchanan is, is... There's like a basement, there's like a basement below basement. I think-
- GGGary Gallagher
Sub-basement. He's in the sub-basement
- LFLex Fridman
... He's in the sub-basement.
- GGGary Gallagher
[laughs]
- LFLex Fridman
And this, this, uh, I put that in the category of the slime, uh, poetic-
- GGGary Gallagher
Yes
- LFLex Fridman
... commentary. Um-
- GGGary Gallagher
He's in a little corner of the sub-basement all by himself with one candle. [laughs]
- LFLex Fridman
So, uh, can, can we take that tiny tangent of why they were terrible pr- uh, tangent on a tangent, why was Andrew Johnson such a terrible president, and Buchanan as well?
- GGGary Gallagher
I think he was a terrible president because he was, he was extremely prejudiced. He, he had all kinds of grievances stacked up. He had the, the poor white man's grievance from being in a slavehold. He hates... His slaveholders were part of his enemies when he was growing up, then he embraced them after the war.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- GGGary Gallagher
He was... He, he couldn't get beyond his most profound lifelong prejudices. He was, he was not malleable in any way. He, he thought what he thought, and that's what he was always gonna think.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- GGGary Gallagher
And he just was not the right be- person to be in place.
- LFLex Fridman
Well, why is Buchanan the worst president-
- GGGary Gallagher
[laughs]
- LFLex Fridman
... in America's history?
- GGGary Gallagher
If you had a dictionary that had the word hack in it, it should have a picture of James Buchanan by it.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- GGGary Gallagher
He was an absolute political hack-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm
- GGGary Gallagher
... who made his way up by staying alive and doing everything that you should do as a party hack as you went along. And then, "Oh, I ended up as president in 1856 because there's a... the person I'm running against is from a party. This is the first time they're running a candidate." His way of dealing with the secession crisis was basically g- hiding under his desk and hoping the roof didn't fall in before he got out of Washington. He's just, he's just horrible. [laughs]
- LFLex Fridman
I think from that I get a sense that what you admire in a leader and a president is a, is a kind of backbone, uh-
- GGGary Gallagher
Yes
- 2:27:23 – 2:46:56
Robert E. Lee
- LFLex Fridman
All right. So we were, uh, talking about, uh-
- GGGary Gallagher
Where are we?
- LFLex Fridman
... Antietam.
- GGGary Gallagher
Okay.
- LFLex Fridman
And how that was, uh, the moment when, uh, the Union realized-
- GGGary Gallagher
Preliminary proclamation
- LFLex Fridman
... preliminary pro- proclamation where it's like, okay, slavery has to be a thing as a central part-
- GGGary Gallagher
Yep
- LFLex Fridman
... of the Civil War. And so where does that take us? A- also very bloody battle. The generals, McClellan, is the end of the McClellan chapter, and that takes us to Fredericksburg. So what, uh, what happened at Fredericksburg?
- GGGary Gallagher
Fredericksburg was a... I- it's another victory for Lee. It's an easy victory for Lee. He has a very strong position on high ground across the Rappahannock River from the Union forces who are opposite Fredericksburg. His opponent is a guy named Ambrose Everett Burnside, who's a very affable guy, kind of a nice guy, who gave us the word sideburns. His- he wore his whiskers that came down and came up and made, and-
- LFLex Fridman
Nice
- GGGary Gallagher
... it wasn't a beard, and they were, they were called burnsides at the time.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- GGGary Gallagher
The burnside cut, which was transposed into sideburns. Everybody liked him. He just wasn't very bright in some ways. He became... He was a politician after the war, so he went into the right field. But he was-
- LFLex Fridman
[laughs]
- GGGary Gallagher
His idea at Fredericksburg-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah
- GGGary Gallagher
... was to, in the end... It wasn't his original plan, but he ended up launching frontal assaults one brigade at a time against very strongly entrenched Confederates, and it was a butchery for... And, and another horrible defeat for the Army of the Potomac. Lincoln was really cast down by it, and it just seemed that in this, in this Eastern theater, he could not get any good news. He's getting good news from the West. He's not getting any good news here, and he has this revolving door of commanders. Burnside tried another march in early, in late January 1863. He was gonna get around Lee's flank, but he had horrible weather. His army literally got stuck in the mud. It was c- Then it was lampooned as the Mud March, and he removed him from command. So now he has another commander in the Army of the Potomac. So you've had McClellan and Burnside, and now a guy named Joseph Hooker. You have no continuity at the top in that army. You have complete continuity at the top in the Army of Northern Virginia, which is a huge advantage to the Army of Northern Virginia.
- LFLex Fridman
So this is where the, the famous words of, uh, Robert E. Lee were... He was watching the slaughter.
- GGGary Gallagher
Yes.
- LFLex Fridman
He said that, uh, "It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it."
- GGGary Gallagher
Yep.
- LFLex Fridman
What did he mean by that?
- GGGary Gallagher
He was getting... I mean, he was watching his soldiers butcher Union soldiers and, I guess, kind of enjoying it. Uh, he's in a really strong position with really good artillery supporting his infantry, and the Union troops are just attacking them and not having any success. And, um, and so there he is. He's up there with James Longstreet and other people and watching it. And he, he, unlike McClellan, was willing to risk, obviously, piling up casualties in every battle. Didn't have that many at Fredericksburg. There were about 12,500 US casualties at Fredericksburg and about 5,500 Confederate casualties because they were so well-protected in their defensive lines.
- LFLex Fridman
So you are working on a manuscript on, uh, Chancellorsville.
- GGGary Gallagher
Yes.
- LFLex Fridman
It's a legendary battle for many reasons.
- GGGary Gallagher
It is.
- LFLex Fridman
Can you break down some of the military, uh, details of what made up that battle to give us a sense of, in general, what, what, what battles were like?
- GGGary Gallagher
This is often described as, as Lee's most successful battle. It's, it's him against Joseph Hooker. It's the last battle that Lee and Jackson fought as a team, Lee and Stonewall Jackson, with Stonewall Jackson as his principal subordinate. Hooker had replaced Burnside. Hooker had maneuvered to get rid of Burnside. He wanted to be in commander of the army. He, he had made a statement that he said what the nation needed was a dictator to make sure it won. And Lincoln, one of the best letters a president ever wrote To a military commander. Lincoln wrote to Hooker and he said basically, "I know everything you're saying. You're talking about all the things you're gonna do." And he said that, "The only way you get to be a dictator is if you have victories, and I'm willing to risk a dictatorship to get victories. And so I know I've got you figured out, Joe," he's saying, and he did. Hooker made a lot of blustery talk. He got a- he had a great start. He built the army into what he called the great- greatest army on the planet, about 135,000 men, beautifully supplied, reorganized the medical service in it. Uh, he, he did everything that you should do to get an army in shape, and then he started a campaign. His plan, Lee was still at Fredericksburg. He was gonna get around Lee's left flank, come in behind him, force Lee to either retreat to Richmond or fight him on unfavorable ground. Everything went well with Hooker. He got going in late April until the moment of truth came. The moment of truth came on May 1st, 1863, when Lee, instead of retreating, left part of his army to watch one part of Hooker's and turned around to meet Hooker head-on near a crossroads called Chancellorsville, a few miles, uh, west of Fredericksburg. And as soon as the fighting started, McClellan lost his nerve-
- 2:46:56 – 2:57:07
The most important battle of the Civil War
- LFLex Fridman
Can you speak to Vicksburg? This is '63.
- GGGary Gallagher
Yeah, this is '63, and Vicksburg is the last major Confederate citadel on the Mississippi River. They've already lost New Orleans. They've lost ... So they've lost the river. It's not a Confederate river anymore. But they still have a strong point at Vicksburg and another one at Port Hudson in Northern Louisiana. Grant has been operating against Vicksburg since the winter of '62, and he's finally, through a series of trial and errors and failures, he's finally found a way that he thinks he can get to the city. He takes great risks. He crosses the Mississippi River after r- having the Union Navy run past all the batteries, the artillery batteries there at Vicksburg, and he invests the city from the east. He's laying siege to Vicksburg while he's just getting his campaign to do that started when Hooker is at Chancellorsville. In May, he invests the city and begins a siege that will end just as the Battle of Gettysburg ends, and it's, it's, it's one of the most impressive campaigns in US military history, Grant's campaign against Vicksburg. Cuts loose from his supply lines. Nobody understands what he's doing. Sherman doesn't get what he's doing. Lincoln doesn't get what he's doing. And in the end they go, "Oh, that's what you were doing" and it worked. And in the end, he captures Vicksburg, which surrenders on July 4th, 1863.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm.
- GGGary Gallagher
And if you don't think that a kind of religious people didn't read divine intervention into catching, having that happen on July 4th, 1863, you would be incorrect.
Episode duration: 3:46:17
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