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 U.S. forces had suffered in every war combined down to that [0:10] point happened in two days. [0:12] Two and a half months after that, George B. McClellan's army engaged with Lee's army [0:17] in what came to be called the Seven Days Battles at Richmond, 36,000 casualties. [0:22] So those two together just showed that this was going to be on a totally different scale. [0:27] He added a psychological twist, what Grant envisioned his doing, and Sheridan actually [0:34] did it in the Shenandoah Valley before Sherman did it in Georgia, is go into an agriculturally [0:39] productive area, burn the mills, kill the livestock, destroy the crops, lay waste to it so that [0:46] it can't be a logistical support of the Confederacy anymore. [0:50] Sheridan did it in the Shenandoah Valley, and then Sherman did it in Georgia. [0:54] But Sherman said, but I'm also going to break them psychologically. [0:57] I'm going to show them that my army can go wherever it wants to go, whenever it wants [1:01] to go, and there's nothing Jefferson Davis can do about it. [1:04] The great forces are all that matters, and individuals don't really matter. [1:07] Notion of history, I think, is ridiculous. [1:10] Individuals really matter. [1:12] For the United States, Lincoln and Grant matter beyond calculation in this war. [1:18] And on the Confederate side, if you take Lee out of the picture, the war doesn't last [1:21] nearly as long as it does. [1:22] In terms of causation, if you take slavery out of the picture, there is no civil war. [1:26] Period. [1:29] The following is a conversation with Gary Gallagher, a historian of the American Civil War. [1:36] This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. [1:39] To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, where you can also find [1:43] links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so on. [1:47] And now, dear friends, here's Gary Gallagher. [1:52] The American Civil War broke out in 1861. [1:56] What were the causes of the Civil War? [2:00] Could it have been avoided, or was it inevitable? [2:03] I don't know if anything is inevitable in history, but it's certainly safe to say that [2:08] the conditions were in place to make it possible by the winter of 1860-61. [2:13] And the conditions that made it possible were all related to the institution of slavery and [2:19] its effects, both in the states where slavery was allowed and the states where it was not [2:24] allowed. [2:26] And there had been a series of tensions that grew in the decade preceding the 1850s. [2:31] It's not that one side wants to get rid of slavery and the other side wants to protect [2:36] slavery. [2:36] I'm talking about the white people in the United States now who would be making the political [2:41] decisions. [2:42] It's a question of whether slavery was going to be able to expand into federal territories. [2:48] That is what really created the starkest difference between the two sections in the 1850s, [2:56] even in the late 1840s. [2:57] The issues that came to most perilous a point in the view of many people then had to do with [3:05] whether slavery would be allowed only where it already existed, or would it be allowed to [3:09] expand? [3:10] And if it could expand, then it seemed that it might be conceivable at some point, even [3:15] that the slaveholding states could end up with a majority. [3:19] They were in a minority by 1860-61 and feeling beleaguered, feeling threatened. [3:24] 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, all slaveholders, all prominent [3:39] members of the slaveholding class. [3:42] Those days were long gone by the late 1850s. [3:45] So that's an important thing to say. [3:46] It wasn't before the Civil War a discussion about abolishing slavery. [3:52] It's about whether the institutional slavery should be expanded. [3:55] Allowed to expand into federal territories. [3:58] There is a portion of the white population that is adamantly in favor of getting rid of [4:05] slavery immediately. [4:06] The abolitionists, there was even a political party called the Liberty Party that ran a candidate [4:11] 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] But the abolitionists are a tiny minority among the, even in the North, tiny minority among [4:25] the white people of the United States. [4:28] The African-American population, nearly four million of them by 1860, of course, would [4:33] have embraced it instantly and yearned for it. [4:35] But in the white population, the abolitionists are a tiny minority. [4:40] They are much despised, even across much of the North, because they were seen as agitators [4:44] who roiled the Union and deepened rifts that might bring a significant political break. [4:52] So how did this escalate to a civil war, this almost policy discussion about the institutional [4:58] slavery? [4:59] How did it actually escalate? [5:00] It escalated into a civil war because in the presidential election of 1860, there'd [5:05] been two party systems in the United States. [5:08] The first party system, the Republicans, the Jeffersonian Republicans versus the Federalists. [5:12] After that, there was 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 founded 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 and has a wing [5:34] in the northern free states that can handle the issue of slavery? [5:39] The Democrats managed to do that. [5:41] The Whigs could not do it. [5:42] And so the Whig Party ran their last candidate in 1852, presidential candidate, significant [5:47] candidate. [5:48] And the Republican Party emerged in the mid-1850s, took most of the old Whigs into the Republican [5:54] ranks. [5:54] And one of the Republican, the key Republican platform plank was no expansion of slavery [6:00] into the territories. [6:02] Not abolish slavery, no expansion. [6:04] That was the key in 1856 when they ran their first candidate. [6:07] 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, but it cannot [6:18] expand into the territories. [6:20] When white southerners saw that, that meant that they were doomed to become an increasingly [6:26] minority section in the nation. [6:29] And you would have a federal government increasingly dominated by the free states that could then [6:34] do the one thing that the white South could not countenance, and that is tamper with the [6:39] institution of slavery in the South. [6:42] The presidential election of 1860 brought the destruction of the last national party, which [6:49] were the Democrats. [6:49] Democrats, they couldn't even settle on a candidate. [6:52] So you ended up with a Northern Democratic candidate running, Stephen A. Douglas, and a Southern [6:57] candidate running. [6:58] The convention fractured, and John C. Breckinridge ran on the Southern Democrat platform. [7:03] You had a unionist candidate running who just didn't want to talk about slavery. [7:07] Let's talk about the union. [7:08] 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, but he'd said more [7:20] than that. [7:21] He scared the white South more because in 1858, both Lincoln and William Henry Seward, these [7:26] are two prominent, prominent Republicans, had said basically in separate speeches, the [7:32] House divided speech on Lincoln's part, the irrepressible conflict speech on Seward's [7:37] part, that the nation could not continue in the long term, half slave and half free. [7:41] 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 of the 15 slave [7:54] holding states seceded in response to Lincoln's election. [7:58] They seceded between December 20th, 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. [8:11] Let's, you know, for the audience, looking back, let's put ourselves in the mind space [8:18] of how people saw the world, how people saw slavery, how people saw African-Americans. [8:24] Well, the baseline among the white Americans, there were about 31, shade more than 31 million [8:30] Americans in 1860 for the census of 1860. [8:35] About 4 million of them were African-Americans. [8:38] Three and a half million of those enslaved in the South. [8:42] Anyway, among the white population, the average attitude toward black people is what we would [8:50] call profoundly prejudiced. [8:52] Doesn't matter whether a lot of people think this is a Southern white thing. [8:55] They're the only ones who were prejudiced. [8:56] By our standards, the overwhelming majority of people in the free states were also deeply [9:03] prejudiced. [9:03] It's important to keep in mind that attitudes toward slavery and attitudes toward race do [9:10] not, they're not necessarily the same. [9:13] I mean, you could be against slavery and still be prejudiced against black people. [9:16] By our standards, many abolitionists were prejudiced against black people. [9:20] They, but the overwhelming majority of the white North and the North often had a hard time [9:27] getting my students to understand the demographics in 1860. [9:30] The free states in 1860 were more than 98% white, 98% white. [9:37] African-Americans are a tiny minority in the free states. [9:41] Black people live in the 15 slaveholding states in 1860. [9:45] Most of the white North by our standards was very prejudiced. [9:49] They were against the expansion of slavery into the territories because they thought that [9:53] would circumscribe white opportunities to make an economic life in these federal territories. [9:59] And they didn't want that to happen. [10:02] About 45% of the people who lived in the free states were Democrats. [10:07] Most Democrats had no problem with slavery. [10:09] I mean, absolutely no problem with the institution of slavery. [10:13] There would be more problems among Republicans, especially with extension of slavery, although [10:18] 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] Remember, you often read the argument, the kind of neo-Confederate argument that they'll [10:31] talk about how most Confederate soldiers didn't own slaves. [10:34] That's true. [10:35] A large majority of families in the South did not own a single slave, but all white Southerners [10:40] had a stake in slavery. [10:42] They had a stake in it as a form of labor control. [10:46] But more important than that, they had a stake in it as a means of social control. [10:50] They knew, no matter what they said later in the Jim Crow era of how happy black people [10:57] were in the institution of slavery, they knew that black people, of course, did not want [11:01] to be enslaved. [11:01] 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 going to... [11:08] If you live in one of the coastal districts of South Carolina where 90% of the residents [11:12] are enslaved and you're a white person, you probably don't sleep all that soundly at night [11:18] if you think there's any chance that the black people are not going to remain under the control [11:22] of the white people. [11:24] So all white people in the South had a stake in slavery, not just some. [11:28] All of them did. [11:29] And there were all kinds of ways that it would go back and forth. [11:32] If you were a modest farmer and grew a little bit of cotton, you didn't have your own cotton [11:38] gin, but your more wealthy neighbor had a gin, could gin your cotton there, and then you would [11:43] take your turn on 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, but just to lay out [11:55] the context on slavery in general and human history, we should say that slavery was ubiquitous. [12:03] It existed in virtually every major civilization in the history of humans. [12:08] Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, China, the Islamic world, Africa, the Americas, North and [12:15] South America. [12:16] We should also say something that, as I was looking into this, another big topic, which is the Atlantic [12:22] slave trade, and it was surprising to me, the stat I wasn't aware of, I would venture to say most [12:29] Americans probably don't know, that only 4% of African slaves were brought to North America, [12:36] to the United States. [12:37] Brazil is the main destination. [12:39] Brazil, the Caribbean was over 90%, 4.9 million in Brazil, 4 million in the Caribbean, and it was [12:46] also the last of the Americas that abolished the slave trade. So only 4% of the Atlantic slave trade [12:53] went to the United States. So there's the story of human slavery is one that reaches deep into our [13:02] history and geographically is much larger than we often study in the context of the United States. [13:09] One thing the war, the Civil War, which I'll just call the war for the rest of our discussion, [13:15] I mean, one thing it did was end slavery in four years in the United States, whereas in the absence [13:23] of that war, it might have gone on for decades. I think that the United States would have had the [13:27] ignominious distinction of being the last place to get rid of slavery. It would have been after Brazil, [13:33] would have been after Spanish Cuba, because it was thriving in the United States in 1860. It was making [13:38] the transition from cash crop agriculture to other, to industrial applications and other applications, [13:46] growing of non, not growing just cotton and rice and sugar. It was, there was a time in the literature [13:55] when people argued that the war was needless, civil war was needless because slavery was on its way [14:01] out. That's absolutely wrong. It was not on its way out. It was thriving. Lincoln said at one point, [14:06] he thought it might've lasted another 50 years. And I don't know how many years it would have lasted, [14:11] but I think it would have lasted longer than it did in either Cuba or Brazil, if it hadn't, [14:15] if the war hadn't taken place. [14:16] So slavery was flourishing in the United States from an economics perspective, especially. [14:23] The wealthiest part, the 1860 census is our friend. And it tells us that the people who [14:31] controlled the most wealth in the United States were slaveholders and their property in slaves alone, [14:36] not their, their other holdings, not their land holdings, just property in slaves were valued at [14:43] about $3 billion. The value of all industries, all railroads, all of that put together fewer than [14:50] $2.5 billion. So the people who controlled the most wealth by far were the slaveholding class. [14:58] So it was the most valuable industry in the United States. And perhaps it is the reason, [15:05] again, a bit out of scope, but maybe it helps lay out the land. Let's look at the 19th century. So [15:13] most slave owning societies of the era were able to abolish slavery without people dying at the [15:19] mass scale that we'll discuss. So Britain freed 800,000 slaves in 1833 by buying their freedom. [15:29] Russia freed 23 million serfs in 1861 with a decree, so legally. Brazil, which imported more than 10 [15:37] times as many enslaved Africans as the United States, abolished slavery in 1888 through basic [15:44] ordinary legislation, no violence. Why did U.S. have a civil war with an estimated 750,000 people [15:53] dead in order to abolish slavery? Yes. Let's talk just for a second about the 750,000 [15:59] dead soldiers we're talking about. The number for years was 618,000. And that's been revised lately. [16:08] I think we're probably certainly more than 700,000, by far the bloodiest war in our history as a [16:14] percentage of the population off the charts, by far the bloodiest. I think there's a big difference [16:20] between Great Britain doing it and the United States doing it is Great Britain did it in other places. [16:25] There weren't millions of enslaved people in Great Britain at the time. I think for them, [16:32] it might have been a little bit easier to free enslaved people who don't live among you. Then [16:38] in the United States, the ante is up for the Confederacy because the enslaved people lived [16:42] here. And I think a lot of them were afraid of them. And what would happen if they weren't [16:46] enslaved anymore? The war goes from, it doesn't begin as a war to end slavery. There's a major shift [16:53] in the war, begins in the summer of 1862, where you add to the war, the war aim for the United States [17:00] initially is to suppress the rebellion, which is what they called this. They didn't call it the [17:06] civil war for the most part during the war. It's the war of the rebellion. That's the goal initially [17:12] as the war goes on and becomes costlier and more all encompassing. They decide that they're not going [17:17] to be able to suppress the rebellion unless they also strike at slavery because slavery underpins [17:23] the Confederate war making capacity. You have enslaved labor that keeps the economy going and allows [17:29] the Confederacy to mobilize between 85 and 90% of all their white military age males. It's an [17:35] astonishing mobilization. It's only possible because enslaved labor keeps the economy going. If you take [17:41] that enslaved labor away, it deals a significant blow to the Confederate economy and by extension to [17:48] its ability to wage a 19th century war. So the Emancipation Proclamation was in part [17:54] a military strategy. Abraham Lincoln based it entirely on his war making power as commander [18:02] in chief in a time of open rebellion. His inclination, there's no, he's often been criticized [18:08] for not including the soaring language he was capable of in the Emancipation Proclamation. One historian [18:14] likened it to a bill of lading. It had all the soaring language of a bill of lading. He did that on [18:19] purpose. He did it because he doesn't have the power to strike at slavery in the absence of a war. The [18:27] president doesn't. And he did it because he knows that he can't win the war with only Republicans in the [18:33] army. He needs to keep Democrats on board with the war as well. They're not in favor of emancipation. The one [18:39] 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 [18:47] rebels this way, strike at slavery. That will hurt their war effort. And it will also punish the people [18:52] who brought on the war. And that would make, so Lincoln hoped that by basing it strictly on his [18:57] war power, it might be more widely accepted across all parts of the loyal states and not as [19:05] controversial as it was. It was still intensely controversial. It alienated many Democrats when he [19:10] issued it, who said, you're changing what this war is about. We're willing to shed our blood and maybe [19:16] risk our lives to restore the union of the founders. I'm not going to risk my life to [19:21] free a black person. That's a very, very common attitude among Democrats. [19:26] So what did the Emancipation Poclamation actually do? It emphasized the freeing of slaves in the South. [19:35] It's even more complicated than that. The only place that Lincoln said he had the power [19:40] as the war leader to strike at slavery is where the rebels were actually still in rebellion and in [19:47] control. So any place where the U.S. Army was in control, he said that is in essence United States [19:54] territory. Now I can't free them there because I don't have the power. I can only free them where [20:00] we don't have the power. So he exempted parts of states and areas in the South that it didn't apply [20:05] to as of the moment he signed it. Going forward, any place that the United States Army went where [20:12] it hadn't been on January 1st, 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation applied and enslaved [20:19] people would be freed by it. Literally at the time he signed it, he didn't free anybody because he's [20:25] only saying, I can free them where we're not in control. We have to be in control for this to have [20:29] effect and for this to have power. [20:31] So in part, this is why the Army was the boundary which the freeing was happening. [20:39] It's absolutely the boundary. And Congress had already passed what was called the Second [20:43] Confiscation Act. It passed this in July of 1862 that announced that all enslaved people belonging [20:51] to rebels were free. It didn't apply to people who could prove they were unionists living in the [20:59] South and no enslaved. 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. There's so many tensions we can take, but let's zoom out once again. [21:12] There's a difference between cause, as you've talked about, cause and motivation. [21:16] Absolutely. [21:17] Quite a large number of people volunteered to fight. [21:21] In fact, a majority of all the soldiers who fought on both sides were volunteers during the Civil War. [21:27] About 3 million served, 2.2 million in the United States, 800,000, 900,000 in the Confederacy. [21:36] It's, again, I talk about things that are hard to get students to understand. This is one of them. [21:40] They have to separate. Causation and motivation are often conflated, not just by students, [21:46] but also by lots of talking heads on newscasts in the United States who don't know anything about [21:51] United States history, but know what they know. In terms of causation, if you take slavery out of [21:56] the picture, there is no Civil War, period. That's not a long conversation you need. You ask the [22:02] question, that's the answer. Let's go to the next question. The next question is, okay, so were most [22:07] white people motivated to put on blue uniforms because they wanted to kill slavery? The answer [22:13] to that is no, they were not. 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, based on the bloodshed in the American [22:26] Revolution, had bequeathed the successive generations. The two key parts of what the Union meant for them [22:32] was, number one, you had a voice in your own government. Someone will always say now to me, [22:39] well, but women couldn't vote. That's right. The people who could vote by our standards were limited [22:45] in the 19th century, but within the context of the Western world in 1860, the United States had by far [22:52] the broadest franchise, by far. And so they argued that's one thing the Union gives us, and it also [22:57] gives us the chance to rise economically. It doesn't guarantee that you can succeed, but it means you're [23:03] not doomed to be what your father was. And those are worth fighting for. And so I will put on a uniform, [23:09] so the slaveholding aristocrats and oligarchs, which is what they called them, of the South, they said, [23:15] they're not, they don't really believe in democracy. It's an oligarchy in the South. It's a slavery-based [23:20] oligarchy. And we know which way Europe's going, they said. The revolutions of the 1840s failed in [23:27] Europe. Europe's going the wrong way. They're going toward more aristocracy, more oligarchy, more, [23:32] and we are the last hope. When Lincoln spoke of the last best hope of earth, which he did in one of [23:40] his most memorable phrases, he's meaning that the United States is a beacon of small-D democracy [23:47] in a Western world that seems to be turning the other way. And those soldiers, it meant it was that [23:53] important to them. They are citizens in a republic that people shed blood to establish, and we can't [24:00] let it go. Part of the compact is, I'm a citizen. I derive these benefits from this republic, from the [24:06] union. I can have a voice in government. I can rise economically or have the chance to. I owe my [24:13] service to that republic. That's what most of them would have said if you'd pressed them on why they're [24:18] doing it. It doesn't mean everybody was on fire with ideology that way. Some guys would say, well, [24:22] you know what? I'm broke, and I'm going to get fed and clothed in the army. But this sense of [24:28] exceptionalism, exceptionalism is unpopular in the United States, but Americans had a sense of [24:35] themselves as a truly exceptionalist society within the context of the Western world. [24:40] And as a small aside, terminology-wise, blue is the union, or what we think of as the United States, [24:47] and red is the Confederacy. Yes. On the maps, the Confederate units are red blocks, [24:53] and the United States units are blue blocks. That's right. That is correct. And the North and [24:59] the South is another way we'll refer to it, just to clarify. And let me have a very brief rant on North [25:05] and South. I prefer to see this as a war between two mid-19th century republics, one of which [25:12] didn't last very long and spent its whole life in the midst of a great war. There were 15 slave [25:18] holding states in 1860. Only 11 of them seceded from the United States. [25:23] Even though there's 13 stars, we'll talk about that. [25:25] We'll talk about that demented notion of things in just a minute. But there are only 11 left. So there [25:30] are four slave holding states in the United States. Kentucky and Missouri and Maryland and Delaware [25:35] remain in the United States. So it's not just North versus South. Those states are all part of the [25:41] South. It's the United States versus the Confederacy. But see how you refer to it as the United States. [25:47] So the union is also referred to as the United States. [25:50] That's correct. Yes. Yes. But the Confederacy was, as you write about, a set of people who also had a [25:57] sense of nationalism, pride. Well, and took their founding document. I mean, it took the whole summer [26:03] of 1787 in Philadelphia, that hot, steamy, humid summer of 1787, to come up with the Constitution. [26:10] The Confederacy did it quickly because they basically had the U.S. Constitution here, a blank piece of paper [26:15] over here, copied most of the Constitution over here, just changed the parts that they needed to [26:20] make sure slavery was protected and you didn't have the wrong kind of tariffs and so forth. That's [26:25] one reason they could do it so quickly. It's absolutely based on the government they've been [26:31] thriving under, which is under the United States Constitution. Both sides claim they were the true [26:36] inheritors of the revolutionary generation. That was one of their... They all... Jefferson Davis loved [26:42] the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration is Abraham Lincoln's [26:45] favorite document. They just like different parts of it. So we should think of this as two [26:51] republics. I argue that. That makes many people very angry. I will make many people angry today. [26:57] They say that I am conferring legitimacy on the Confederacy that they don't deserve. [27:03] And my response to that is they have a national government. They have a Senate. They have a Congress. [27:08] They have an army. They have a Navy. They have departments. It walks like a duck. It quacks like a duck. [27:15] In the end, it's a slaughtered duck faster than it would have been because the United States military [27:19] forces crushed it. We should say that you are respected, admired, loved by most people on both [27:28] sides from a perspective sense. You're deeply respected by historians of civil war and just historians of [27:37] American history. But of course, when you do your job well on a controversial topic and a controversial [27:43] period of human history, 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. So sometimes when we speak today, some of the controversial [27:59] things that you express are controversial from that small minority of folks on both sides for different [28:06] reasons. Yes, I won't. One of my favorite pieces of hate mail I got was an email where this guy I had, [28:13] he was upset that I referred to the Confederacy as a slaveholding republic that was, and he said that [28:18] he hoped I would develop virulent pancreatic cancer and die a horrible death. Not just regular pancreatic [28:26] cancer. He wanted virulent pancreatic cancer. And then he signed his name and said he'd be happy to [28:31] talk to me anytime I wanted to. Yeah. I'm sure that would be a wonderful conversation. Yeah. [28:36] But there's also really strong senses throughout the United States, the United States, of this [28:46] diversity of opinion of what is the United States. Of course. And that's where the passion is really [28:55] rooted. Both sides claimed in the election of 1860, Douglass talked about how much he loved the [29:02] union. Lincoln talked about how much he loved the union. Breckenridge talked about how much he loved [29:07] the union. They're all, and John Bell, who's the unionist, the constitutional union, that's all he [29:13] talked about. They just had different versions of what the union was. And that's why I love this [29:19] country. I think it's the greatest country on earth. And it has a bunch of people that very strongly [29:24] disagree with each other. Of course, hopefully never again escalating to the degree that it did during [29:31] this period of time. 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, why would, let's say, a farm boy [29:48] in Ohio want to die for the union? That is the most important, and I didn't even ask you to ask that [29:56] question. That's the hardest thing. Let's be honest, you paid me a lot of money to ask that [29:59] question, yeah. I didn't think it was so much. I'm sorry. I tell my students at the beginning of my [30:06] Civil War class that if they couldn't explain, I didn't use Ohio, I said, if you can't explain why [30:11] a farmer from Vermont would put on a blue uniform and pick up a musket to make South Carolina come back [30:18] in, why didn't he just say, great, South Carolina's gone. I never liked them anyway. This is a better union. [30:23] If you can't explain that, then you can't understand the Civil War. And the key to that, [30:28] I'll come back to it, is union, because he would have said, if we allow South Carolina to go, [30:33] that means that other places could go and you could dismantle. And the only reason they're [30:38] going is because they didn't like who was elected president. They didn't say that Lincoln was corrupt. [30:43] They didn't say Republicans bought the election. They just didn't like who won the election. [30:47] And so if the republic is so fragile that it can't have an election without having the people who [30:53] didn't like who won leave, then the founders had wasted their time. The revolution was for nothing. [30:59] All that bloodshed meant nothing. You had to step up and save this precious republic that had put in [31:07] place by the revolutionary generation and gave its citizens the benefits that I've already talked about. [31:13] That's why they would put on a uniform and risk their life, because they believed a citizen. [31:18] These are citizen soldiers. We don't know what that means so much now because we have a professional [31:26] military establishment now. I mean, even when I was younger, there was still a draft, but that's gone [31:34] now. And so we don't understand what the concept of citizen soldier was, that you owe something back [31:40] to the republic that has conveyed these things to you. And that's why the guy from Vermont or New [31:46] Hampshire or Ohio would put on a uniform and go into military service. [31:52] Is it possible for us to understand that level of love of nation and believe in nation? Is this [31:59] very distant from what America is today? [32:02] I actually think many people probably still feel that way, but they're not the ones who are on [32:07] television most of the time. 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. People coming into a [32:20] nation that was in the middle of a great war. And they said, this is a testament to the promise [32:27] of the United States. And I think that that promise continues. I mean, we've argued about, [32:33] as with so many things, Americans have no sense of history. They believe we've never argued [32:37] about immigration before. We've always argued about immigration with some people always saying, [32:41] shut the door. They're ruining us. The Italians are ruining us. The Irish are Catholics. They're [32:46] ruining us. God, the Southern Europeans are even worse than the Irish were. The people change. [32:54] The arguments stay very much the same. And I think it's really telling that in the midst of the war, [33:00] people would say, look at our republic. It offers so much to people that even in the midst of this [33:05] great war, they're still coming to the United States. [33:09] And like you said, both sides, both of these republics claimed, for example, George Washington. [33:16] Yes, they both claim. I'll leave it at that. They both claimed George Washington. They wanted to be [33:19] right with the man, which is what George Washington was. He's the indispensable man. No question. [33:26] Both sides wanted him on their side. They both quoted Thomas Jefferson, although Confederates were a [33:33] little more leery of Jefferson because he's too complicated for them sometimes. But no, they wanted [33:38] to be right with the founders and claimed to be right with the founders. The Confederates would say, [33:43] the Constitution allowed slavery. What are you talking about? We're out of step with the [33:47] Constitution. We're in step with the Constitution. You're the ones who are out of step with the [33:50] Constitution. [33:51] What about the topic of states' rights, at the very least? [33:54] I love state rights. State rights. I mean, I love the way people use it with the Civil War. They [33:59] associate it solely with Southern states, of course. State rights is always available in United States [34:06] history for somebody who's not happy with what the federal government is doing. During the War of 1812, [34:11] it was New England that most often talked about resorting to state rights. They had a convention where [34:16] they sort of wandered over towards secession territory in the Hartford Convention. We think of it as [34:22] state rights because as you lead up to the Civil War, you hear white Southerners talking about it all the [34:29] time. We need our state rights. I always love to ask 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, give me the top three. No, really, [34:40] just give me the top two. There's only one. The state right that they're worried about is the right of their [34:46] state to interpose its power between a federal government that might try to interfere with [34:50] slavery and a state government that wants to maintain it. That's the state right that matters [34:55] then. Northern states also resorted to state rights during the ramp up to the Civil War with what [35:02] were called personal liberty laws. They tried to interpose their state power in between a federal [35:07] government that would use its power to force enslaved people back into slavery. It's whoever's [35:15] unhappy with the federal government. The concept of state rights is available and both sides used it. [35:21] And of course, the beautiful, dark, ironic hypocrisy was illustrated by the Confederacy when they were the [35:30] first to pass a national draft in American history. [35:34] Lex, irony is wonderful in history. Another thing that I love to teach is that the most intrusive central [35:45] government in American history by far until deep into the 20th century was the Confederate central [35:51] government because it had to do things to keep the war going that it couldn't have done unless the [35:56] central government stepped in, such as passing the first national conscription law in American history. [36:01] The government, the U.S. government never forced people into uniform before the Civil War. [36:05] The Confederacy did it first. They did it in the spring of 1862. They passed a national graduated income tax. [36:11] And when taxing didn't work, when their money became so devalued, they then passed what they [36:16] called the tax in kind. They would take a percentage of your crop. They allowed the government to impress [36:22] horses and mules and enslaved labor to work on. All of these were intrusions from the central [36:28] government that drove true state rights people crazy in the Confederacy. Confederates didn't have [36:34] political parties because 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 nationalists were going to let the central government do whatever [36:43] it needs to do. That's Jefferson Davis's wing, and Robert E. Lee's over there, too. And the people [36:48] like the vice president, Alexander Stevens, who said, you can't do all this stuff because the states [36:53] should have more power. The only reason the war lasted as long as it did is because the central [36:58] government did things no one ever would have believed they would do. He also got rid of habeas corpus, [37:03] just like Abraham Lincoln did in selected situations. And of course, we should really [37:08] emphasize that on both sides, there was volunteers. On the Confederacy, there's a very large number of [37:16] people, percentage-wise, that volunteered to fight. And then I believe the volunteer period [37:21] was one year. And then there's all kind of funky stuff that the government started doing to trap [37:28] those people into then serving. Here's what the Confederacy did. Nobody thinks the war is going [37:35] to last a long time in the spring of 1861. So if you enlist for a year, that's probably plenty of [37:40] time to finish this war. Well, a year goes by and a significant percentage of the Confederate men [37:45] under arms are due to get out. So what the Confederate Congress did was pass conscription. [37:50] We're going to make everybody liable to three-year service. And in the midst of doing that, [37:56] all you guys who volunteered for one year are now in for two more years. Well, that outraged. I mean, [38:02] that's you're breaking faith with us, they said. They didn't stop there. Later, they revised it when [38:08] the war kept going on. And then the three-year guys were going to get out. Then the Congress stepped in [38:12] and said, you're in for the duration. The bottom line is the Confederacy ever gets you in uniform, [38:18] you don't get out because they keep changing the rules on you. And that was considered, [38:23] national conscription was considered a fundamental abridgment of individual rights by many people. [38:29] That's something the government should never force a citizen into uniform. A citizen should volunteer [38:33] their service. U.S. government waited a year, then it did it in the spring of 1863, although it always [38:40] respected original terms of enlistment. Never made it the war for the duration the way the Confederacy did. [38:47] Quick pause for a bath and break if it's okay. Quick 10-second shout out to our sponsors. [38:53] Check them out in the description. It really is the best way to support this podcast. [38:58] Go to lexfriedman.com slash sponsors. And now, dear friends, back to my conversation with Gary Gallagher. [39:07] All right, we're back. 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. So one angle to look at here is some of the [39:19] legendary historical figures from this time. Let's talk about some of the key figures of the Civil [39:26] War. We have Abraham Lincoln, of course, the President of the United States, who held the [39:31] Union together and turned the war into a fight for a new birth of freedom. Jefferson Davis, who you [39:36] mentioned, President of the Confederacy. Ulysses S. Grant, somebody we'll talk about quite a bit, [39:43] General-in-Chief of the Union Armies. Robert E. Lee, on the other side, the Commander of the Army of [39:49] Northern Virginia. Somebody who you've studied for decades now. We'll talk a lot about him. [39:57] There's Sherman. There's Stonewall Jackson. There's Frederick Douglass. There's McClellan. There [40:04] is John Brown, a militant abolitionist. Many more figures, but let's look at three at first. Let's look [40:13] of Lincoln, Grant, and Lee. Lincoln first. So Abraham Lincoln, we have this backwoods lawyer [40:23] with a single year of schooling who somehow outgrew every polished man around him and became one of the [40:30] most consequential leaders in human history. So what do we need to understand? What can we possibly [40:36] understand at a 10,000-foot level about Lincoln that made it all possible? What was it about Lincoln's [40:44] mind that made this man do what he did? Almost nobody continues to go up in my estimation as I [40:51] get older and older, but Lincoln is one of the people who does. And Lincoln is, quite frankly, [40:57] a mystery to me. I don't see how you get Abraham Lincoln out of someone who came from his very poor [41:03] background. You said he had a year of schooling. You're being very generous to him there. He didn't [41:08] even really have a year of formal schooling. And you end up with a person who is the most eloquent [41:15] president we've 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 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. He is someone—he [41:37] had an ego, but I think one of his real gifts was the ability to put his ego aside and keep his eye [41:45] on the goal. 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—he hated the institution of slavery. [41:59] He's not an abolitionist, but he hated the institution of slavery, and he was very happy [42:03] to see that slavery was added to the roster of what the United States would insist on at the end [42:11] of the war. He's able to let all the other things go. He can pay attention to many things, but he never [42:17] loses his principal focus, which is, how do I maintain this great war? And it's really hard to get [42:24] people to understand the scope of the Civil War. There are 31 million people in the United States [42:31] then, about a shade more than 3 million put on uniforms. It would be as if we had 35 to 40 million [42:39] people under arms. Now, for the Confederates, it would be like having more like 55 million people [42:44] under arms as a percentage of the population. The dead would be between 6 million and 7.5 million, [42:51] depending on how you count it. The scope is just, during the Gulf Wars, New York Times put a picture [42:56] of every United States service person who was killed, put a picture in the paper over the scope [43:03] of those wars. And that is about as many people as were shot in a few hours at Antietam. It's just [43:09] very different to get students now to understand the different scale. And that's what Lincoln's dealing [43:15] with. How do I keep the focus on a war that is becoming far more costly than anyone imagined, [43:25] and eating up our young manpower at a rate that no one, there's never been anything in our history [43:30] to prepare the United States for this. Winfield Scott captured Mexico City with an army of fewer [43:35] than 15,000 during the war with Mexico. U.S. Grant has 120,000. I mean, the whole scale is just so [43:43] different that it's hard to come to terms with it. And that's what Lincoln was dealing with. I think [43:47] the fact that he was willing to surround himself with really able counselors is important. Who does [43:54] he put in his cabinet? He puts his main rivals in the cabinet. He put William Henry Seward in his [44:00] cabinet, who's the most famous Republican in the country. He puts Solomon P. Chase, who's a very [44:06] smart and effective and ambitious person from Ohio in his cabinet. He surrounds himself with people who [44:13] are capable and energetic and have their own ambitions. He's not afraid to do that. All of [44:20] whom had far better educations 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. He didn't pretend to talk away, to talk in a fashion [44:29] that he didn't actually talk. He would have pronounced words in ways that anybody who went to Harvard would [44:35] just sneer at. He didn't, and he knew they sneered and he didn't care because eventually all of them, [44:41] except the ones with only a 20-watt bulb, figured out that Lincoln was actually probably smarter than [44:47] they were and had a better grasp of things than they did and brought them around. He really brought [44:52] Seward around, which is very impressive. Yeah, there's so many fascinating things about [44:58] Lincoln. So backwoods of Kentucky, and Kentucky is a very important state in this story, and the [45:06] right words, the right speeches, the right debates, at this moment in history, it really does make me [45:13] wonder, you know, if Lincoln didn't exist, if certain humans in history didn't exist, that everything [45:25] could have turned out very differently. The great forces are all that matters and individuals don't [45:29] really matter. The notion of history, I think, is ridiculous. Individuals really matter. For the United [45:35] States, Lincoln and Grant matter beyond calculation in this war. And on the Confederate side, if you [45:42] take Lee out of the picture, the war doesn't last nearly as long as it does. In fact, we'll talk about [45:47] this later probably. I think it could have ended early in the summer of 1862 with slavery still intact. [45:53] I mean, in a perverse way, Lee furthers the cause of emancipation because he extends the war long enough [46:01] that the United States says, we have to do this. We've got to get rid of slavery to defeat the rebels. [46:08] And also on the psychological side, Lincoln is a fascinating study because he carried deep [46:15] depression all his life. He had black, black moods in his life. Yes, he did. And so for somebody that [46:21] has to go through an all-encompassing war to be able to sort of survive through that, to think through [46:30] that without an education, without any acquired skill that enables him to be a commander in chief [46:40] during a time of war, he's got nothing in the toolbox and yet he steps up. If you looked at his [46:47] resume and Jefferson Davis's in 1860 and said, okay, here, here are the two guys who are going to be your [46:53] respective commanders in chief. Who do you want on your team? Lincoln had no administrative experience [46:59] beyond running a little law office. He had one two-year term in the House of Representatives in [47:05] terms of national government. He had no military service to speak of a little while in the Blackhawk [47:12] War as a junior officer in the Blackhawk War. Didn't check any of the education boxes, as you said. [47:19] Jefferson Davis was a graduate of West Point. He'd commanded more men in the war with Mexico than most of [47:25] the men who commanded armies during the Civil War. He'd chaired the Senate committee on military affairs. [47:31] He'd been secretary of war, a lot of administrative experience. He checked every box. Lincoln checked [47:35] none of the boxes. And yet you got Lincoln as a commander in chief. It's really quite remarkable. [47:42] He could listen to people that he thought knew more about something than he did. That's a quality that [47:48] all of our presidents, to put it mildly, have not had. Lincoln did have that. He could admit when he [47:55] was wrong and change his mind about things. And he could put up with obnoxious behavior on the part of [48:03] people that he thought might deliver the goods. And a perfect example of this is George Brinton McClellan, [48:09] whom we'll talk about later. His young, who was general in chief for a while, commanded the Army of the [48:13] Potomac. In 1861, Lincoln and his secretary of state, William Henry Stewart, went to McClellan's [48:20] house to talk to McClellan, went to McClellan's house. The commander in chief goes to McClellan's [48:25] house. McClellan wasn't there. The butler or somebody put them in a side room. McClellan came home, [48:30] was told Lincoln was there. He went upstairs and then told the person who worked for him to go tell [48:36] the president that he'd be happy to talk to him some other time. And so Lincoln just left. He never went [48:42] back to see McClellan again, didn't pitch a fit, filed that away. Okay, McClellan's an ass, [48:47] but I think he might win the war. I mean, he had that ability to do that, to put aside that kind of [48:55] behavior on the part of someone if he thought they would deliver. He just has a number of qualities, [49:01] I think, that are very unusual to find in someone. And as you say, he did have depressive moments and [49:08] we talk about what bad days presidents have now. Lincoln would have said, [49:12] I'll take that president's worst day every day rather than the days that I get for the most part. [49:18] I mean, it's hard to imagine the burdens that he carried. And at the right time was just a handful [49:25] of words expressed something that no military could possibly do. Explain what the war was about, [49:33] why it was worth fighting, what it meant, his second inaugural address. I mean, people went, [49:38] when people went to hear the president give his second inaugural address on that cold day in 1865, [49:45] what they wanted to hear, they finally beat the rebel scum from their point of view. Let's have [49:49] some retribution here. What are we going to do to them? How are we going to make these people who [49:53] brought this great war pay for this? And what does Lincoln tell them? He tells them, [49:59] slavery caused it. Everybody knows that somehow that's the truth. And we're all implicated in it. I mean, [50:05] he didn't tell them anything that they wanted to hear that day. 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. And he did it in the [50:17] most eloquent language that any president's. That's the greatest speech in American history, [50:22] the second inaugural, in my view. With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness [50:28] and the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, [50:36] to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow [50:44] and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and [50:52] with all nations. And we're all complicit in this because we all countenanced slavery. I mean, [50:59] that's all in that one speech. And it's a short speech. The whole speech probably only lasted [51:05] eight or nine minutes. And he also pays tribute to the citizen soldiers at the beginning of it, [51:10] because he says that the war is going well. And we all know that everything depends on what our [51:14] soldiers do. And by that he meant saving the union, killing slavery, it all depends on them. And then he [51:21] comes back and finishes with his tribute to the soldiers at the end. And I have to say the [51:26] Gettysburg Address. Oh no, you can't. If I may, it's only maybe 200 words? Yep. Yep. [51:35] Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, [51:43] conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a [51:51] great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long [51:58] endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field [52:08] as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is [52:16] altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, [52:22] we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men living and dead who struggled here [52:30] have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long [52:38] remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, [52:46] rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they, who fought here, have thus far so [52:52] nobly advanced. 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 for which they here give [53:06] the last full measure of devotion, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in [53:13] vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that governments of the [53:20] people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." That's a big statement about [53:28] what this country is about. It's about freedom. And he comes back to, when most people read that, [53:35] the very last part of it, they emphasize the prepositions, of the people, by the people, [53:43] for the people. Lincoln, it's not about the prepositions. It's about the people. He, earlier [53:51] in the war, referred to this as a people's contest. It's the people that are the key, [53:56] the people who make up the republic, the people who will derive the freedoms and liberties that the, [54:03] I mean, it's an amazing, and it probably took you two minutes to read that. He was finished before [54:09] most people knew he had started at Gettysburg. Almost nobody heard him say that. The one thing [54:14] wrong about it is when he said no one would remember very long what he said there. It's [54:18] been remembered pretty well. And let's talk about the two other figures, which we'll return to time [54:22] and time again. Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee. So who was Grant? So this is a man who failed at [54:31] farming, failed the business, failed at his role in the peacetime army. Then when the war came, [54:41] the war revealed a genius. So he'd known a lot of failure. He'd known a lot of setbacks. And his [54:47] wartime record shows that he learned to deal with those things. He had a great, tremendous [54:52] relationship with his wife, a very strong family life, a family he loved. I think that was the rock for [54:57] him. But during the war, what he exhibited was an absolute willingness to break rules, [55:04] to take risks, to take responsibility for what he was doing, whether it was a success or a failure, [55:09] and not to be cast down by things that didn't work. If something didn't work, he'd say, okay, [55:14] that didn't work. Now let's do this. He very famously, when he got to Virginia in 1864 and took [55:21] over the Army of the Potomac, he had all these subordinates who were saying, well, what if General [55:25] Lee does this? What if General Lee does that? He finally said, why don't we start not worrying [55:30] about what General Lee is going to do and let General Lee worry about what we're going to do? [55:35] I mean, he just had, he was unflappable, under stress. He was the perfect person to end up heading [55:43] the Union armies. And he and Lincoln, and Lincoln realized that, and he proved indispensable. But he [55:51] has this reputation as a butcher, grant the butcher. That's something that former Confederates [55:55] and some Democrats in the North fastened on him. His preferred way of fighting wasn't [56:01] just kind of slug it out. It's really interesting to compare his record in the war and Lee's record [56:07] in the war before they wound up opposing each other in Virginia in a really bloody Overland campaign. [56:13] Grant's total casualties in all his great battles before they met were 37,000s. Lee's were over 98,000s [56:20] in the same period. The bloodiest general in US history, by far, in terms of how many of his men get [56:25] shot is Robert E. Lee. The most careful demographic study of any Civil War army is one done of Lee's [56:32] army by a scholar named Joe Glattar. And Joe figured out that if you were a soldier in Robert E. Lee's [56:38] army, you had a 73% chance of becoming a casualty. 73%. Grant's casualties get high when he runs into [56:46] Robert E. Lee, just like everybody else. So the butcher tag is completely unfair about Grant. He's also [56:52] known as a drunk. 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 was around and he had a key staff [57:06] officer to help him. 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 victories when the United States needed them, [57:18] and Lincoln figured that out. And the absolute proof of his stature because of this is that in [57:25] the March of 1864, Congress decided to dust off the rank of three-star general, lieutenant general, [57:34] and give it to Grant. The only person who ever had that rank was George Washington. [57:37] The man, Jorge. I mean, he is the man. And so they're saying, okay, Grant, you get the rank [57:45] the man had. And that shows there's never been anyone else who got it. You're the first. [57:50] And then he would also be the first to get a four-star rank in the United States army. There [57:54] couldn't be a better indication of his stature than that he got Washington's rank. Winfield Scott had [58:02] had it by brevet. Grant got the actual rank. So in part, the Grant the Butcher label was from [58:09] the Overland campaign that we'll talk about. It is from the Overland campaign. [58:12] It's the military decisions made there. Many would argue that those are critically important for the [58:18] for the success of the war. Yes. He and Lee are often compared, [58:24] but for the last year of the war, they're operating on, it's not apples to apples because Grant is [58:30] general in chief and is managing the entire war effort. He's managing what Sherman's doing and [58:35] what Sheridan's doing and what Nathaniel Banks. Lee is an army commander. He can recommend things to [58:40] Jefferson Davis, but he never commands more than an army. And so he never operates at the level that [58:45] Grant did. Very late in the war, he was made general in chief when it was so late that it didn't matter. [58:50] So who was Robert E. Lee? In April 1861, Lee was offered command of the Union Army. He was. And [58:59] chose Virginia instead. He did. What was he actually choosing in that decision? Was he choosing home? [59:05] Was he choosing honor? Was he choosing slavery? And maybe just zooming out, what do we need to [59:11] understand in the early steps about Robert E. Lee? Who was the man? Well, Lee is sort of the antithesis of [59:17] Grant in some ways. Lee is from an aristocratic family. Grant was from a solidly middle-class [59:22] family. Lee's from an aristocratic family at the very top of the Virginia aristocracy. The Lees are [59:28] all, he has uncles who were prominent to sign the Declaration of Independence. His father was a famous [59:35] commander under George Washington. 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. That's Lee's father, who was later [59:44] prominent Virginia politician. Lee's idol is George Washington. He patterns himself on Washington. [59:52] He differs from him in some ways, but he patterns himself on Washington. He considered Washington the [59:58] most admirable person in United States history. And then, of course, he almost undoes the work that [1:00:02] George Washington put in place during the American Revolution. He chose Virginia. He didn't leave, [1:00:10] he didn't resign his commission in the United States Army to go with the Confederacy. He resigned [1:00:14] his commission in the United States Army to go to Virginia, which wasn't in the Confederacy yet, [1:00:19] become the head of state forces in Virginia. But then when Virginia went into the Confederacy, [1:00:24] he took his Confederate commission and ended up as the third-ranking officer in Confederate service. [1:00:33] And he makes an easy transition to a Confederate loyalty. I think it's his loyalty to Virginia and [1:00:40] what that means. That means his family, and of course that means slavery. That's part of what that [1:00:44] loyalty is. He's devoted to the slaveholding South as well as to Virginia. Virginia is a subset of that. [1:00:51] All of that is in one bundle with Lee. But he also had been an ardent U.S. nationalist earlier in his [1:00:59] career and a very successful military officer. Winfield Scott thought he was the greatest soldier [1:01:04] in the Army, and Scott he probably really thought except for me. But Scott is a great soldier that people [1:01:10] don't remember that way because he became a kind of job of the hut figure by the time of the Civil War. [1:01:14] He's enormous, weighs 350 pounds, has to be winched onto his horse. But he was a very smart guy, [1:01:21] and he thought very highly of Lee. Lee was a superb soldier, as he would show during the war. [1:01:28] But he's on the wrong side. [1:01:29] Maybe just to throw in a few more characters, I do think the folks on both sides of the more radical [1:01:38] persuasion are quite interesting. Somebody you spoke about, I'm not sure where, I think it might [1:01:42] have been in your lecture series about Thaddeus Stevens. [1:01:47] Thaddeus Stevens is one of the most radical of the radical Republicans. He's a congressman from [1:01:53] Pennsylvania. People think people say harsh things now in Congress. Thaddeus Stevens just eviscerated [1:02:00] people. And he was way out. I mean, he was an ardent abolitionist, and for equal rights for women [1:02:06] in many ways. And he picked up a number of courses and championed them. [1:02:10] I think in your lecture, you mentioned this thing, which I just love this slime line. [1:02:18] This is his kind of line. 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 to come down to the floor, and he says, [1:02:28] and this is a paraphrase, I'm going to 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. That's a great line, impromptu. [1:02:40] Yeah. [1:02:41] He had women used to ask for locks of hair from famous people, and he was completely bald and [1:02:47] wore a full wig. He had a woman stop him on the steps of the Capitol Way and ask for a lock of his [1:02:53] hair, took his whole wig off and said, Madam, have them all. It's very good. [1:02:59] But of the radical persuasion. [1:03:01] Oh, absolutely. Yes, he defined it. He is the character in Birth of a Nation, [1:03:06] that Stoneman, the character in Stoneman, the evil radical Republican named Stoneman, [1:03:11] is patterned on Thaddeus Stevens. All right. If we can, let's talk about the buildup to the war. [1:03:18] All right. [1:03:19] What were the key states on both sides that were debating? What are the ones that were certainly [1:03:25] going to be firmly on one side or the other? And maybe what are the ones that are critical at the [1:03:32] borderline? The states that were in the forefront 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. It just so happened that [1:03:43] the Democrats had their national convention in Charleston in 1860, which is the worst place in [1:03:49] the world they could have had it if they wanted a quiet, rational discussion of anything. South Carolina [1:03:57] is the first state to secede and then is quickly followed. You can just go the tier across Alabama, [1:04:02] Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, Texas. It's seven states. The Deep South states go out [1:04:08] in that initial. But there's a long period then, and they gather in Montgomery, Alabama to establish [1:04:14] a new government with Montgomery as the capital of the Confederacy. Delegates from those states do. [1:04:20] And they set up a provisional government that's going to last a year and call for the first national [1:04:25] elections in 1861. There are only seven states there and really only six for a lot of it because Texas [1:04:31] got there late. It was the last of the first seven to secede. But the states that haven't seceded yet [1:04:36] are the ones with the most people. Virginia, which is the most populous. North Carolina, Tennessee, [1:04:42] Kentucky, Missouri. Eight states have not gone out. Eight slave-holding states have not gone out. The [1:04:48] most important one is Virginia among those that have not gone out. The question is, can they find some [1:04:56] resolution to all of this or is it going to get more serious and are those states going to go? [1:05:00] And it came to focus once again on Charleston, South Carolina and a federal installation in [1:05:06] Charleston Harbor, Fort Sumter. Much United States property and installations had been just given over [1:05:15] to the Confederates. And the question is, can we do it with this one as well? This is a very difficult [1:05:21] decision to make. And it comes down to what's going to happen in Charleston Harbor. And in the end, [1:05:27] I mean, Jefferson Davis believed that he couldn't allow it to remain a federal installation because [1:05:32] it's actually in the Confederacy from their point of view. And Lincoln, who's not conceding the right [1:05:38] of states to secede, they're temporarily out of our power, but we have to maintain, he decided in the [1:05:44] end to maintain power there, not to reinforce it, but to resupply it, needed supplies. And that's [1:05:52] what triggers it. Then, then the balls in Jefferson Davis's court, okay, they're going to resupply it. [1:05:56] What do we do? And they decided we need to insist that it surrender. And if it won't surrender, we need [1:06:01] to fire on it. And the Confederates fired the first shots. They would have said we were forced to fire [1:06:07] the first shots by what Lincoln did. Nobody wanted to be the ones who fired the first shots. But in the [1:06:12] end, it's the Confederates who fired the first shots. And once that is fired, the key thing, [1:06:18] the key thing is not the firing on Sumter in the end, but that sets up the key thing, which is Lincoln's [1:06:24] call for volunteers to suppress the rebellion. And he is going to ask each state to supply people. And [1:06:32] the upper South states, most of them said, we're not going to secede, but you can't, but, but the [1:06:37] states that are gone had the right to secede 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. And so four more states went out. [1:06:49] Virginia went out. Arkansas went out. Tennessee went out. Then North Carolina went out. And now [1:06:55] you have an 11 state Confederacy rather than seven. But more than that, you have Virginia. [1:07:01] The city of Richmond has 40% of all the industrial capacity in the entire Confederacy, [1:07:06] what became the Confederacy. Virginia is the most populous state, has the largest slave population, [1:07:11] the largest white population. It supplies the most important military leaders. And the capital [1:07:17] ends up in Richmond. They moved from Montgomery to Richmond in acknowledgement of how important [1:07:23] Richmond is, that this is the key state. The key states that didn't go out were Maryland, Kentucky, [1:07:29] and Missouri. Delaware neither, but who cares? The other three didn't go out. And that really mattered [1:07:34] because they were more populous. But 11 are gone. Four remain in the Union. [1:07:39] And to lay out some more context, going to perplexity here. By total enslaved population on [1:07:47] the eve of the Civil War, we have looking at the top five states. Virginia, as you said, [1:07:54] with the most number of slaves, 490,000. Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, all [1:08:01] with over 400,000 slaves. And Mississippi and South Carolina have the highest proportion of enslaved [1:08:08] people of any of the states. 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, those are the two wealthiest states [1:08:17] per capita in the United States are South Carolina and Mississippi in 1860. Boy, the complicated history [1:08:25] of this great nation of ours. It's hard to overstate the resources. The states that sent the most [1:08:30] men into the Confederate army are Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia. Three of those come [1:08:38] in this second wave of secessions. Three of them, three of the four. Only Georgia among the original [1:08:43] ones was in those top four states. So you would have had a much, much smaller pool of manpower for that [1:08:49] earlier version of the Confederacy. It's inconceivable to me that you would have had the war we had with just [1:08:55] that version. So it does feel, just to linger on it, like there was a lot on the balance here. Like [1:09:03] there was a lot of different decisions that could have been made, even on the political side, that [1:09:10] could have turned the tides. For example, there's a secession convention in Virginia. It goes and it [1:09:17] votes twice against secession. Twice. It's only after Sumter that they come back for another vote. I mean, [1:09:24] it's a unionist vote in that convention in Virginia. And it's only after Fort Sumter. And then it's still [1:09:32] so divided that a big chunk of Virginia decide that's how you get West Virginia. West Virginia [1:09:39] essentially secedes from Virginia in the course of the Civil War. And given the industrial capacity [1:09:44] of Virginia, that was a critical state. So it could have been, Virginia could have changed. We could [1:09:49] have avoided the Civil War with Virginia alone. It would have really changed. I mean, [1:09:53] Virginia is the key. Virginia is the key because of the manpower, the industrial capacity, the food [1:09:59] production. And Virginia gives you Lee, Jackson, Jeb Stewart. I mean, and the most soldiers of any [1:10:07] state in the Confederacy. It's just, it's a real game changer to get Virginia. Plus it also gives you [1:10:15] these unbelievable ties to the revolutionary generation. Hey, it's George's home state. It is now in the [1:10:21] Confederacy with his big statue on the Capitol grounds of George Washington. Because you get [1:10:26] Washington, the ties to Jefferson, the ties to Madison, 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. You're really painting a [1:10:38] picture here where it perhaps was not inevitable. I don't think it's inevitable. Things happen in a [1:10:44] sequence. I was at an academic conference once when they were trying to decide what important dates [1:10:49] were. And they concluded that no dates are, dates are an artificial construction. No date is more [1:10:55] important than any other. That is so obviously preposterous. I mean, things happen in a sequence. [1:11:02] They don't just sort of happen. Lincoln's elected, then South Carolina secedes, then other states [1:11:07] secede. Then, I mean, things happen as a consequence of what happened before. And you have these various [1:11:12] things that have to happen before the next thing does. And then we end up with a war that seems to be [1:11:18] inevitable. But it's not, it's just the way things played out. All of these factors are in motion, [1:11:23] and you end up with the sequence that gets you to where people start shooting each other. [1:11:27] Yeah, when you read history and look back, it seems inevitable. But if we were to place ourselves [1:11:32] in that moment of time, do you think there's decisions that could have been made? [1:11:36] The decision to not let Fort Sumter, I mean, that's a big decision to make. If Lincoln had just said, [1:11:43] go ahead and take Fort Sumter, okay, then maybe, then what would it have taken to trigger the [1:11:49] departure of those upper South states? That would have changed that whole equation. But Lincoln decided [1:11:55] you just can't keep giving them everything that they want if you don't concede that they have the [1:12:00] right to do what they did. Yeah, there would be a continued heated political debates, intense [1:12:07] political debates about the expansion of slavery. But it would not cause rebellion to then escalate [1:12:13] into a full on hot war. I think that's conceivable. 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. I mean, [1:12:24] that's stating because it did happen. But it's, I think it's very tricky to just say that it was [1:12:30] inevitable. That's kind of starting at the end of the story and just saying, let's look at the factors [1:12:35] that got us here. We know what was going to happen. And these are the things that pointed this direction. [1:12:39] Can we just actually linger on this, on the nature of war, over 700,000 people dead? [1:12:45] How do we make sense of our capacity as in that context, Americans, to kill sometimes literally [1:12:54] our brothers? Yes, sometimes literally our brothers. [1:12:57] How is that even possible? [1:12:58] Well, one thing, it tells me things are pretty important to people on both sides, [1:13:02] if you're going to continue for a war that long. I mean, there was a period in the literature, [1:13:07] in the scholarly literature in the 1980s and into the 1990s, where they argued that the Confederacy [1:13:12] wasn't a nation. And the proof was that they didn't try very hard, that if they really thought [1:13:17] of themselves as a nation, they would have tried harder and fought longer. Well, they lost between [1:13:22] four and a half and five and a half percent of their entire population, which is more than [1:13:28] Great Britain, France, Germany, or Russia during World War I. They had a higher percentage [1:13:34] loss than any of the powers in World War I. The U.S. lost about 1.8% of its population from the war. [1:13:40] U.S. in World War II, three-tenths of one percent of its population. They lost more than 30% of their [1:13:46] entire white military-aged males in the war, be the equivalent of about 18 million Americans being [1:13:51] killed now in a war. That seems to me that they're pretty serious about something there. [1:13:57] That means that's one of the largest percentages of loss, if that's a measure of dedication. [1:14:04] If that's your measure of dedication, yes. And it seems to me that it should be one of [1:14:09] the metrics that you bring to play, that they just keep at it. They didn't give up easily. [1:14:15] What can we say about the motivation? On the psychological side, did the [1:14:21] members of the Confederacy hate the members of the Union? [1:14:25] Well, that escalated on both sides during the war. As more and more loss came, there was more hatred [1:14:31] directed toward the enemy more and more. This notion that they're all brothers and not really [1:14:35] mad at each other, that just doesn't hold up. There are places where the soldiers fraternized [1:14:41] with one another and traded tobacco for coffee and that kind of stuff. But no, the bitterness [1:14:46] as the war went on and there was greater loss on the home front and as the war became more [1:14:51] all-encompassing and really went after the entire, the civilian side of the Confederacy was not shielded [1:14:57] from it, the bitterness increased and increased and increased. And there's a lot of unhappiness with [1:15:04] the war behind the lines in the Confederacy. Absolutely unhappiness with the government. There's desertion. [1:15:12] About 15% of Confederate soldiers deserted. About 12% of United States soldiers deserted. [1:15:18] So there's desertion on both sides. There's war weariness. But the war goes on because I think if [1:15:25] you had been able to pull most white Southerners even late in the war and say, okay, here are your [1:15:29] choices. You either have Jefferson Davis in the government and the war goes on or you're going [1:15:36] back into the United States and the Lincoln government will be in charge and you won't [1:15:40] have slavery. Which one do you pick? They're going to pick the first one. And that's why the war went on [1:15:44] as long as it did. But at the same time, to fast forward, and that maybe teaches you something [1:15:52] about the nature of war. But after the war, maybe some of the decisions that Grant made, [1:15:59] people were able to rediscover the Brotherhood. You mean at Appomattox, you're talking about [1:16:03] the terms at Appomattox. Yes. And those were, and he didn't just reach up in the air and say, [1:16:09] I've got some terms. Lincoln very specifically, he met with Lincoln shortly before Appomattox. [1:16:15] Sherman was there. One top Naval officer was there, Grant and Lincoln. And Lincoln said, [1:16:20] this is what I want. This is the kind of peace I want. The whole point of this war [1:16:24] is to put the nation back together. And a good start on that is, I mean, if it's just a rebellion, [1:16:30] what do you do with traitors and rebels? You hang them. You don't bring them back. You don't treat [1:16:35] them as prisoners of war, which the United States did during this. But the goal is to put the nation [1:16:40] back together. And Lincoln said, this is a good start. Make them sign a parole, make them accept, [1:16:46] the end of slavery, and the fact that they're back in the union. If they do that, [1:16:50] they get to go home and resume their lives. It hadn't been decided yet whether they'll get to vote. [1:16:55] But let them go home. Don't imprison them. Don't execute them. Don't execute their leaders. That's [1:17:00] the decision. From the perspective of the union, what do you think about that kind of forgiveness? [1:17:05] Well, I think that it was sort of a nod toward the direction of forgiveness, [1:17:10] but I don't think the real, I don't think real forgiveness was. There was still extremely [1:17:14] hard feelings on both sides. And Lincoln's assassination [1:17:18] upped the ante on that, especially for a while in the United States. The forgiveness, [1:17:27] two things in terms of the aftermath of the war, two words that often come into play, [1:17:31] are reunion and reconciliation. Those are two other things that are often conflated. Reunion [1:17:38] is literally putting the nation back together. That happened. True reconciliation, that's much, [1:17:45] much, much tougher. And that didn't come anytime soon on the part of millions of people on both sides, [1:17:50] I think. And we'll probably maybe talk about in multiple ways how maybe that is something that's [1:17:58] still going on. Oh, there are echoes of the Civil War all over the place. It's not still being fought. [1:18:03] But you can see resonances of the Civil War because it's such a profoundly disruptive [1:18:09] event that gets right at the heart of what the Republic means. I mean, and so there's nothing else like [1:18:15] it in U.S. history. And it's a great moment of truth, the residual aftermath and effects of which [1:18:23] lingered for decades and are still present in some ways, I think. So in 1859, most Americans were just [1:18:32] living their life. Did they have a sense what was on the horizon? It's what I like to call the [1:18:40] Appomattox Syndrome, which starts at the end of the story and says, of course, there was going to be a [1:18:45] war because the war was inevitable. And of course, the United States was going to win and slavery was [1:18:49] going to be destroyed because they were. So let's find out how we got right here. But no, most people [1:18:54] didn't wake up in Iowa in 1857 and their first thought was, boy, I hate the South. Those slaveholders, [1:19:01] they're really... No, people got on with their quotidian lives and they got to the farm or they went to [1:19:07] their business and they did. Nobody knew that they were living in the antebellum era and that those great [1:19:14] antebellum years were about to come to an end. That is something that it's hard to get people [1:19:20] not to just put it out of your mind that that's all anybody is thinking about. They're thinking [1:19:25] there's a lot of other stuff going on. There's a big gold rush in Colorado. More people go to [1:19:31] Colorado than went to California for a while. And you have these tremendous changes coming about, [1:19:40] technological changes of the 1850s, where you have the real expansion of railroads, [1:19:45] the real expansion of the telegraph. There's a shrinking of time and space that's remarkable [1:19:50] for people at the time. It seemed dizzying to them at the time. There are a lot of things to think [1:19:54] about other than how much I hate Yankees if I'm in South Carolina or I hate slaveholders if I live in [1:20:00] New Hampshire. But periodically there are these events that pop up that refocus on the differences [1:20:08] between the sections. And you have the Kansas-Nebraska Act, you have Dred Scott, you have the caning of [1:20:15] Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate. You have Uncle Tom's Cabin earlier in the decade in 18, [1:20:22] and the impact that that had on attitudes towards slavery doesn't create a bunch of abolitionists, [1:20:27] but it creates a bunch of people who rethink their thoughts about slavery. [1:20:31] Sorry to ask the big question about history. But we're living today, 2026, and there's the sense that [1:20:44] every day you wake up, the possibilities before us are endless for the good, for the bad, for the truly [1:20:53] destructive. There's an eerie sense that the possibility of a world war in different kinds of [1:20:59] ways, whether it's the sparked in the Middle East, or sparked in China and Taiwan, or sparked in Ukraine, [1:21:08] Russia, or elsewhere, totally surprising in the world, may be related to nuclear weapons or not. [1:21:14] There's a sense that everything is possible. And of course, when history is written about the 21st [1:21:20] century, it will all be obvious. It's always obvious in retrospect. That's right. [1:21:25] What can we learn from the Civil War about how history unfolds itself, I suppose, for the modern [1:21:35] day? Well, I think that the potential threats now are different from the potential threats in the [1:21:40] mid-19th century. The nuclear dimension, some kind of really brutal use of pathogens. I mean, [1:21:48] there are lots of things that could happen now that couldn't happen then, at least not because [1:21:53] humans were making them happen. But I mean, to me, one of the things to take away from the Civil War [1:22:01] is really the resiliency of this republic, which I still think it's a resilient republic. We're living [1:22:08] in a sort of wacky time. But I believe that the, I think that I have a great faith in the resiliency [1:22:17] of the nation, I really do, of the United States. I think it's been through much tougher times than we're [1:22:21] in now. And I think that we will weather this, although everybody will have some scar tissue. [1:22:29] There might even come a time when our leadership class actually leads, which would be interesting. [1:22:35] And I'm talking about both sides of the fence here. But it is, that to me, this is the supreme [1:22:45] test of a republic that had been put in place in the late 18th century. Can that late 18th century [1:22:49] republic adjust, including adjusting to deal with the profoundly disruptive issue of slavery [1:22:57] in a way that allows it to go forward? And the answer is yes. In a war that brings slaughter on [1:23:02] an unimaginable scale and brings social disruption in the former slaveholding states, it just couldn't [1:23:09] be more profoundly disruptive if you're a Confederate. There's not slavery anymore, and we lost the war, [1:23:15] and a third of our military-aged white men are dead. Wow, that's a bad four years for our team. [1:23:21] What's going to happen here? The republic emerged from that and worked it out. And I think it is, [1:23:26] it goes back to, to me, 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. And it's sort of a miracle to me [1:23:39] that from a nation that was as prejudiced, racially prejudiced as the United States was, [1:23:46] you get the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments out of this. It's just kind of mind-boggling that that [1:23:55] happens. Yeah, I think resilience and adaptive innovation often looks like chaos in the moment. [1:24:04] It absolutely does. It absolutely does. But then when you really get to the end of that story, [1:24:10] you look, and there you are. And oh, it's okay, the nation is still intact. [1:24:16] And the 13th Amendment is in place? Wow, we didn't think that was going to happen in 1861 [1:24:22] when secession started. I mean, it really, another lesson is that you cannot control [1:24:28] what a great military event can set loose. 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. You don't get to ratchet [1:24:41] that back and say, well, that'll never happen again. No, you know what? It happened. And maybe [1:24:45] it will happen again because we've seen it happen. Nobody imagined that. The federal budget in 1860 was [1:24:51] $63 million. That was the entire federal budget. 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, which means federal [1:25:03] expenditures in 1860 would have lasted about 11 days in 1865. Nobody foresaw that. Absolutely nobody [1:25:12] foresaw that. And education legislation that would create the great land-grant colleges and universities, [1:25:22] it's the war. The war brought a lot. And I think most of the things that has happened through the [1:25:30] hard periods of our country's history, nobody could have really foreseen. And then we somehow figure it [1:25:36] out. And that gives me a lot of hope that this kind of like extreme division, the arguments, the people [1:25:45] basically speaking in the harshest of ways against each other, that is like the engine of [1:25:53] brainstorming and figuring problems out that in the long arc of history create progress. But in the [1:26:03] short term, it feels like a dumpster fire. It does. And to me, the arc of U.S. history has been, [1:26:14] and Lincoln talked about this too, it's an expansion of freedoms and liberties. That's the long arc [1:26:20] with very problematical places along the way. But again, the documents allow for that and the process [1:26:28] allows for that. And I think that's one of the remarkable things about Philadelphia in the summer [1:26:34] of 1787. I mean, those guys, a lot of whom owned slaves, put together something that's proved to be [1:26:43] resilient and adaptable and changeable. And it has evolved in a way that is in the right direction, [1:26:48] although there are always problems. I love this country. I will never stop saying how much I love [1:26:56] this country. It's an incredible experiment. We're this year celebrating 250th birthday. I can't wait for [1:27:06] the next 250 years. This is such a fascinating study of human civilization. And it is complicated. What we want [1:27:16] now is a sort of cartoon version of what we Americans, as you watch popular culture, we want [1:27:23] a 30 second view of whatever. Well, who should I like? Who are the good guys? Who are the bad guys? I want a [1:27:28] 30 second version of the Civil War. What do I, history is not that way. I've spent my whole life [1:27:35] studying history. And the, maybe the main thing I've learned is however complicated I thought something [1:27:40] was when I really started to explore it, it's more complicated than I thought it was. People aren't [1:27:44] simple, they're complicated. And you have to at least appreciate, you don't have to embrace the [1:27:54] complexity. I guess you can't make people do that, but you have to at least concede that things are, [1:27:59] there's not a 20 second version of anything in the past. The past is complicated because humanoids are [1:28:04] involved in it. They're complicated. Yeah. When you look at the system as a whole, [1:28:09] but as individual humans, we like to do the black and white thing where we just see the good, [1:28:14] everything is good and evil. Cause it's easier. And then we get together at Thanksgiving dinner [1:28:19] and we yell at each other and then people lose their shit and they stop talking to each other for a [1:28:23] year. And then they make up and all this, cause this is how humans interact with each other. [1:28:28] And, but as a system, especially with the increasing levels of freedom, with the freedoms of speech and be [1:28:34] able to speak out about your feelings, even when they're intense feelings, that somehow works as [1:28:40] a system. And it's very messy. Yeah. The more freedom, the messier it is. Really, the messier [1:28:46] it is. And your job as a historian is a difficult job. And as you said, because the more you learn, [1:28:53] the more you come to understand, the more complicated the picture appears. 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. [1:29:01] So some humility, it will take you a long way. Yes. You want more of Grant [1:29:08] than McClellan in that, on that humility score. Grant would score high on humility. McClellan [1:29:15] every day, every day, the first thought was, what about me? Who is going to not appreciate [1:29:21] how wonderful I am today? Thought George B. McClellan. That's the thought that nagged at him. [1:29:25] Somebody might not know how great I am. That's an aside. Reminds me of somebody. But anyway, [1:29:31] quick 10 second shout out to our sponsors. Check them out in the description. It really is the best [1:29:37] way to support this podcast. Go to lexfriedman.com slash sponsors. And now, dear friends, back to my [1:29:44] conversation with Gary Gallagher. Okay. Let's, let's at the start, first shots fired before something, [1:29:53] as you mentioned. And this thing starts brewing and escalating towards a full on war. [1:30:01] What are the different advantages of each side from a military perspective? [1:30:06] Here's one of the great misconceptions about the Civil War. Among the people who know anything about [1:30:11] it, which in the US is a very small percentage, but if they know anything, they know United States [1:30:17] victory was inevitable because the United States had 22 million people. The Confederacy had 5.5 million [1:30:24] white people and 3.5 million enslaved people. The United States economy was infinitely more powerful [1:30:32] than the Confederate economy. The United States had the United States Army. The United States had the [1:30:36] United States Navy. Really? Who's going to win this war? The US. It's inevitable. Next question. [1:30:43] It's not true at all. The US did have those advantages, but the Confederacy had [1:30:48] compensating advantages. And one of those advantages was it had a much lower bar to cross, [1:30:54] for success. It didn't have to invade the United States. It didn't have to capture Washington. [1:30:59] It didn't have to project its military power into New England. All it had to do [1:31:04] was convince a majority of the civilian population of the loyal states that it wasn't worth the cost to [1:31:11] make these rebel states come back into the Union. These are two democratic republics at war, [1:31:17] and in the end, the civilian sector decides... Somebody my age can... We have the perfect example, [1:31:24] Vietnam. The United States was not defeated militarily in Vietnam, and it didn't matter. [1:31:29] Because when the people said, we're not going to support this war anymore, the war is going to come [1:31:33] to an end. The smart people in the Confederacy understood this. They understood it at the time. [1:31:38] Lee understood it. Jefferson Davis understood it. 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 as large as ours has ever been [1:31:50] subjected in a war like this. A tie is as good as a win for the Confederacy. And they came very close to [1:31:56] that in the summer of 1864. The other thing is the sheer size of the Confederacy is a huge advantage to [1:32:03] them. It's huge. With a very poor 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. The same thing had [1:32:16] happened to the British both during the American Revolution and the War of 1812. The Confederacy is [1:32:22] as big as all of Western Europe. That's a problem. It's also a problem that the Confederates are fighting, [1:32:30] literally fighting to defend their homes. That's almost always a stronger factor than trying to impose [1:32:37] your will on somebody else. All of these factors helped the Confederacy. The US did have an army. [1:32:43] The army had 15,000 men in it in 1860, 15,000. The Navy had fewer than 50 vessels. Most of them on [1:32:53] overseas stations, there were exactly three vessels available to blockade the Confederacy at the [1:32:59] beginning of the war. The Confederate coastline is 3,600 miles long. Probably not going to be able to shut [1:33:03] down a lot there. The point is that there are factors that help both sides. To me, the conditions [1:33:14] for victory are the most important factor that favors the Confederacy. We just have to make it painful [1:33:19] enough to the United States that they're going to say, let them go. We never liked South Carolina [1:33:26] anyway. Just let them go. It's not worth it. It's killing too many of our boys. It's costing too much [1:33:30] money. We don't have to worry about slavery in the territories if they're gone, because they'll be [1:33:35] gone, and our territories will be free of slavery. So again, the Union is the invading force. Yes. [1:33:42] Geography comes into play, as you mentioned, vast land. Immediately, yes. So in some sense, [1:33:47] it's a miracle that the war lasted as long as it did, and then there was as much motivation. Yes, [1:33:54] that they stuck to it. Because again, victory for the Confederacy was stop the war. Stop the war. [1:34:00] Neither side has an advantage in terms of its leadership. The generals all come. You often used [1:34:06] to read frequently, Confederates had better generals. But this is the first war where West [1:34:13] Pointers are in charge. They were subalterns in Mexico. The West Point is the United States [1:34:18] Military Academy, where the Professional Officer Corps gets its training. It was established under [1:34:24] Jefferson. It's the premier engineering school in the United States. I mean, West Point-trained [1:34:28] engineers are very, 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, it is West Pointers, who were lieutenants and captains in the war with [1:34:41] Mexico, are now going to be the people in charge. Almost every army commander, almost every corps [1:34:46] commander, which is the next level, are West Point graduates. They took the same classes from the same [1:34:53] professors, read the same textbooks, 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 have been weird if one side or the other had an inherent advantage in leadership. [1:35:10] The one place where the U.S. ends up 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. Grant, Sherman, Philip Henry [1:35:22] Sheridan, and George H. Thomas. The Confederacy only ever found one, and that's Lee. And they had more [1:35:28] than one army, so that's a problem. If you have more than one army, but only one really good army [1:35:32] commander, that puts you at a disadvantage. [1:35:34] In what ways would the two sides balance militarily, uh, equal militarily? So the, the passion, [1:35:43] like we mentioned, of the, of the fighting force, the soldiers, the dedication to the fighting? [1:35:49] Both brought the same notions of how to fight a war to the table, because the officer corps [1:35:54] had been, on both sides, had been trained in, in the same way. Neither side has a real advantage in [1:36:00] terms of technology. Both sides used the railroad. Both sides used the telegraph. The United States [1:36:07] could have used repeating weapons, but decided not to. The Confederacy didn't have the industrial [1:36:11] capacity to produce. So the war is fought by infantrymen, for the most part, carrying muzzle [1:36:17] loading, single shot muskets, rifle muskets. That's the weapon that inflicts 85 to 90 percent of the [1:36:24] casualties in the Civil War. And they both have exactly the same thing. And they have the same kinds of, [1:36:30] of artillery pieces. The United States Navy is much bigger, but it's, it's, and the Navy is important, [1:36:36] but armies really decide the war. And the armies are, they're organized exactly the same way. [1:36:43] They are off, they get officers the same way. They're very similar. [1:36:47] So what was the actual fighting like? Like you mentioned, most of it was with muskets. What was the [1:36:52] experience of it like? It's, it's linear formations, shoulder to shoulder kinds of formations that would allow [1:36:58] you to maintain unit integrity on a battlefield, which is one reason casualties were high. They [1:37:04] line up and, and fight each other. As the war went on, they resorted more and more. One of the [1:37:10] developments was the field entrenchments became very common by 1864. And both armies, if they would [1:37:16] stop for the night, they would entrench. They'd throw up field works, which gave the defenders a much [1:37:22] greater power vis-a-vis the attacking force. They came to decide that you needed about a three to [1:37:27] one advantage in numbers to have a successful attack once field entrenchments were in place. [1:37:33] But it is, it's a, it's an infantryman's war overwhelmingly. And the infantryman's experience [1:37:40] on both sides, the United States side was a little better supplied. Union soldiers ate a little better [1:37:47] for the most part. They got regular issues of clothing a little more regularly than the [1:37:52] Confederates did. The uniforms all kind of looked the same. The Confederates would have had a more [1:37:56] motley look, but the Confederates didn't lose any battles because they didn't have enough shoes and [1:38:02] they didn't lose any battles because they didn't have enough powder. They never had a problem with [1:38:07] that. So it's a war where each side looks like 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, they would have looked [1:38:18] the same to us. But it wasn't just about bullets. There's also dysentery and disease. [1:38:22] Two out of every three soldiers who died, died of disease. It depends on what unit you're in. If [1:38:29] you're in the Irish brigade, ah, God love them. You know, just point us towards something and let us [1:38:35] indulge in self-immolation for God's sake. The Irish brigade had the reverse. They had two men who died [1:38:41] from battle wounds for every man who died from disease. But overall, it's one man died from [1:38:48] battle wounds and two died from disease. Overall casualties, killed, wounded, prisoners of war, [1:38:56] about a million and a half casualties in the Civil War. You know, there's this idea that a big part of [1:39:01] the American spirit is the Scots-Irish spirit, the fighting spirit. You think there's some truth to that? [1:39:07] Well, the songs are Irish songs that both sides sing with different words. And I mean, [1:39:12] there are a lot of Irish soldiers in the Union Army. But in the entire military-age white population [1:39:20] of the loyal states in 1860, 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. So they're actually underrepresented in the United [1:39:33] States Army. Far lower percentage of foreign-born soldiers in the Confederate Army. But there, [1:39:37] they're a little bit over-represented. So there are lots of foreign-born soldiers in the Army. [1:39:43] The largest group are not Irish. They're the second largest group. The largest group are Germans [1:39:48] on the U.S. side. The Irish are second. And then you'd go way down the line to get others. [1:39:52] So we talked pretty thoroughly about slavery. Can we talk about immigration? [1:39:58] What was the view at the time of immigrants? [1:40:02] Well, I think you know the answer to that. We need to have all that stuff done, but we don't [1:40:08] especially like the people doing it. That's basically the... [1:40:11] Oh, America. [1:40:13] I mean, the anti-Irish, and a lot of it is bound up with anti-Catholic sentiment, [1:40:20] because the Irish are changing the nature of the country. The country is a Protestant, [1:40:25] British country, and here come all these Irishmen. And especially in the 40s and 50s, [1:40:30] that my Gallagher's came in the late 50s. They are changing the nature, and they take over. Look at [1:40:37] them. They don't know their place. Pretty soon, they're taking over cities, and they all cheat when they [1:40:41] vote. We know that. You can buy an Irish vote for one drink. [1:40:44] This all sounds familiar, right? [1:40:46] The cartoons were brutal on depicting African-American characters, but they also depicted the Irish as [1:40:52] sort of simian characters, often with a jug of whiskey in one hand. I mean, it's very... [1:40:56] There's profound prejudice. And prejudice against the Germans, whom they called the Dutch. That was what [1:41:02] the soldiers would call the German regiments, Dutch regiments. And yeah, there's a lot of ethnic prejudice. [1:41:09] So, to mention, you mentioned Protestants. So, both sides were primarily Protestant, [1:41:15] Christians... Overwhelmingly. [1:41:16] At that time, it was a very religious country. So, the religious sentiment was pretty strong. [1:41:22] Yes. Units had chaplains, and there were Catholic priests with Catholic units. Yes, [1:41:27] a very big presence. Was Christianity used to justify? [1:41:30] Of course it was. Both sides used it. Yes. I don't mean to jump on your question, but yes, they did. [1:41:36] I mean, how was it used to justify fighting for a nation? [1:41:41] Yeah, there's a lot of fighting in the Bible. A lot of people killing other people. As long as [1:41:46] you're doing it for the right reasons, you can... And you could use it different ways. I mean, [1:41:51] you can deal with setbacks by saying, well, God tests us. We're being tested. What do you do when [1:41:56] God tests you? You don't give up when God tests you. You try harder when God tests you. The very top [1:42:02] leaders... This is interesting. The top leaders on the Confederate side, the most [1:42:06] famous ones, Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Jeb Stuart, they were much more overtly religious than people [1:42:15] like Grant, Sherman, Philip Sheridan. I mean, much, much more. Lee is an Episcopalian. Jackson was a [1:42:24] Presbyterian, but they talked... I mean, their official reports, their correspondence, it's filled with [1:42:30] allusions to religion, much more than Grant's or Sherman's. What about African Americans in the [1:42:37] Army? African Americans made up... There were about 200,000 black men served in what were called [1:42:43] United States Colored Troops Units, USCT. It was on the Union side. On the... Yes. Okay. Let's just dispense [1:42:50] with the hallucination that there were a lot of black men in the Confederate Army. That is such total, [1:42:57] ridiculous nonsense, utterly unsupported by any evidence that anyone would consider credible. [1:43:06] This whole notion of... I mean, it's just preposterous. And I'm really managing my language [1:43:15] right here. I'm not saying what I really think it is. I've seen estimates of as high as 100,000 black [1:43:23] men in the Confederate Army. Not true. Really? Really? No. No. Were there black men with the [1:43:28] Confederate Army? Yes. 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. That's what's going [1:43:39] on in the Confederate Army. There are a lot of black men around Union armies before they became soldiers as [1:43:44] well. But there are these 200,000 black men joined the military service during the war. They're in the [1:43:51] Navy and in the Army. They'd always been in the Navy, the US Navy, and they're not segregated in the [1:43:57] Navy in the way that they can be in the Army. They're just in black... You have integrated crews [1:44:02] on naval vessels, although they're separated in some ways, but there've always been black sailors [1:44:07] in the Navy. The Army? No. That was a big... It's a big thing to put black men in uniform. And for a [1:44:14] Confederate, it's bad enough if you announce emancipation, but then you start arming black [1:44:19] men, that to Confederates is urging a widespread slave rebellion, basically. Black regiments on [1:44:28] the Union side was enraging the Confederate side. Yes. And they have white officers overwhelmingly. [1:44:35] There are a few black officers, but overwhelmingly, the USCT units have white officers leading them. [1:44:43] But symbolically, that is a really powerful thing, right? Oh, it's hard for modern Americans to [1:44:47] understand just how jarring that would be to a Confederate. Not only would you have enslaved [1:44:54] people no longer enslaved, but you would have the men in uniforms carrying muskets. [1:45:01] So you, as a historian, you've looked at every layer of this, including diaries, and [1:45:06] what was motivating, what was going through the minds of African Americans who are fighting for the Union [1:45:14] side? I think what you would expect is going... I mean, they would talk about Union occasionally, [1:45:18] but what that means to them, it's a Union without slavery. They have the most... Of all the people who [1:45:24] can have a direct impact on what's going on versus slavery, there's nothing more direct than picking up a [1:45:31] musket and firing at the people who are defending a slavery-based society. It doesn't get... And at [1:45:36] the same time, you are not only doing that, you are also establishing an unimpeachable claim to [1:45:42] citizenship. The whole point of a citizen soldier is that you do your bit for the nation that's helping [1:45:48] you, and the nation does these things for you. Well, okay, if I'm picking up and risking my life with [1:45:53] a musket in my hand, are you going to tell me I can't vote after I do? I thought that's the whole point of [1:45:58] this. One, I'm protecting the right to vote by doing my citizen's role as a soldier. And that [1:46:03] was a big debate in Congress. That really changed the equation of that debate as well. How are you [1:46:08] going to treat people after they've served in United States units? Can you tell them they can't vote? [1:46:14] You're not going to give the vote to them? How many people in the Black regiments, but also, [1:46:18] you know, folks like Frederick Douglass saw that Black Americans and White Americans should have equal [1:46:24] rights? Well, Douglass saw that, of course. But even within their context, their notion of equal [1:46:29] rights is that that doesn't mean that Black women are going to vote. Just like for white people, [1:46:33] it didn't mean white women would vote. But in terms of the context of the time, yes, [1:46:38] equal rights should come out of this. Abolishing slavery is the first step of this. It's not the [1:46:42] end game. The end game is equal rights for everybody. Do many people see that? No, a tiny percentage of [1:46:48] people saw that. There's a notion that's very common that somehow the white North turned its [1:46:54] back on Black people after the war, and it should have tried harder during Reconstruction to force [1:46:59] the white South to convey full equal rights to Black people. The assumption there is simply flawed. Most [1:47:06] white people in the North didn't believe that they believe first save the Union, and yes, we'll need to [1:47:13] kill slavery as well. Those are the two things on the list. Check, check. We've done those full equal [1:47:18] rights for Black people is not on their list, and they were not willing to do the things that it [1:47:22] would have taken to do that, including the white soldiers in uniforms who wanted out of the Army [1:47:28] after the Confederates surrendered and said, well, now we need the Army to make the white South do the [1:47:32] right thing vis-a-vis Black people. They would have said, what are you talking about? I signed on to do [1:47:38] this. We did it. Send us home right now. I think that's one of the lessons you learn from human [1:47:44] history across the different places where slavery was abolished. Abolishing slavery is not the end of [1:47:51] a journey. It's the beginning of a journey. It's the beginning. And it sometimes takes, quite often [1:47:55] takes at least 100 years to go from that to something you would identify as equal rights. [1:48:02] And then maybe even beyond that, there's a complicated story about even outside of rights, [1:48:07] just how society sees the different people. There's a difference between [1:48:10] passing, I mean, the great society passed most of it. You've got the Civil Rights Act, [1:48:14] the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act. You got all of this legislation that does a lot of the [1:48:18] legal stuff, but it's what's in people's heads that takes longer and is a more frustrating process. [1:48:27] It remains, as has appeared in human history, potential fuel for the division to rise up again. [1:48:36] Of course. And then people can exploit that. It's waiting to be exploited and people exploit it. [1:48:42] This is something we do as humans. We like to otherize certain groups. [1:48:46] Good to have an enemy. [1:48:47] And the Civil War for our country is a story of this. So understanding the Civil War is in part [1:48:54] extremely important for understanding the division, maybe the dormant division that's there. [1:49:03] Yes. And even before the war, there were notions about the other side. For a lot of people in the [1:49:12] Free States looking South, they said white Southerners are, because they're lazy, they're violent, [1:49:20] they don't want to talk out a problem. They'll do what Preston Brooks did to Charles Sumner, [1:49:25] they'll beat him over the head with a cane. And they're used to this because they have slavery [1:49:29] and they're used to brutalizing black people. That's just how they approach things. [1:49:33] And the white South would look North and say, they don't care anything about family. They're [1:49:37] all just lusting after money. All they care about is material things. They don't have any sense of [1:49:42] kinship or family there. That's what Yankees are. It doesn't even matter whether any of that is true. [1:49:48] Of course, there was a sense perceptions are more important than reality with human beings. And the [1:49:53] perceptions on the eve of the Civil War were that the other side was different in a lot of ways. [1:49:58] They also had profound commonalities. They had a common language, a common religion, [1:50:05] a common history, these founding documents. All of that would pull people together, [1:50:11] but they found ways to see differences and divided some of the churches. I mean, [1:50:16] Protestant churches divided over slavery. [1:50:18] And many of these themes continue to today. Let's talk about the different theaters of the war. [1:50:25] The Eastern Theater and the Western Theater. You mentioned the Navy's geography. How does [1:50:29] geography come into play? What are the different parts here? [1:50:32] There are three main theaters of the war. The Eastern Theater is the theater that features [1:50:37] Washington and Richmond, plays out in Virginia, a little bit of Maryland, and a little bit of [1:50:42] Pennsylvania. It's where the Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac fight for the [1:50:46] most part. 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. There are famous battles in the other theaters, [1:50:58] but that's the one. And it's mainly because of the presence of Lee and then of Grant. [1:51:02] The Western Theater is a much larger one. It goes from the Appalachian Mountains to the [1:51:07] Mississippi River, east to west, and would go from the Gulf to the Ohio River. So it's huge [1:51:15] and involves Tennessee. And then beyond the Mississippi River is the [1:51:20] descriptively named Trans-Mississippi River, 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, it's by far the least [1:51:34] important. Some people get up very upset when I say that, that the transit, you know, it's basically [1:51:39] who cares about what's going on out there. 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 Theater is really important for the war. [1:51:51] Very important. And it's where we get Grant, the soldiers who won the war for the United States, [1:51:58] all come out of the Western Theater. Grant, Sherman, Philip Sheridan, George Thomas, [1:52:05] those are all in the Western Theater. So at the very beginning, the first real battle, [1:52:12] the first Manassas in July 1861. I think one interesting aspect of that, as you've talked [1:52:18] about, is that people gathered for a picnic. They came out to watch from Washington. They [1:52:23] brought the carriages out, set up on a little ridge that let them look down over the battle. [1:52:28] So that kind of gives you a sense that people of the time, first of all, didn't think this is [1:52:35] going to scale to the size that it did or last as long as it did, but also not understand the [1:52:41] seriousness of the situation. They're clueless about what's actually going on. To even think [1:52:46] that you should go observe a battle like that is ridiculous. But they did. And there was a strong [1:52:53] belief, and Lincoln was part of this at the beginning, that there's probably going to be one [1:52:57] battle. It's not going to lie. He asked for 90-day volunteers to suppress the rebellion right after [1:53:04] Fort Sumter. William Tecumseh Sherman reacted to that by saying that you might as well try to put [1:53:09] out a fire with a squirt gun. I mean, it's ridiculous. They're not thinking about what [1:53:15] this war could easily be. Take years, take hundreds of thousands of men maybe, not one battle. [1:53:21] When did the dark cloud, the reality of the war, come in? [1:53:27] Well, first Bull Run or Manassas, each side, many battles have two names, one that the United States [1:53:35] soldiers used and one. And usually, the Confederates would pick the nearest town. And the United States [1:53:42] often picked terrain features. So you get Bull Run, which is a creek or stream. That's what the [1:53:46] Union soldiers called it. Manassas is what the Confederates called it. Antietam, a creek in Maryland, [1:53:53] is what the Union, Sharpsburg is what Confederates called it. Anyway, there are several of those. [1:53:59] That brought a little sense of reality to people in the United States, especially. They'd expected [1:54:05] it to be over, and it didn't go the way they thought it would go. And so it's going to take [1:54:08] more men. The summer of 61 was spent. Hundreds of thousands of men went into uniform in the summer [1:54:13] of 61. The whole supply situation became more evidently imperative. But not much happened [1:54:22] for the rest of the war. There's a pretty big battle called the Battle of Wilson's Creek that [1:54:27] takes place in Missouri. But the rest of 1861 doesn't have... The real fighting begins in the [1:54:32] spring of 62. And what really brought home, in a way that no one had imagined, what could be in store [1:54:39] was one battle in the East and one battle in the West. The one in the West is Shiloh, which happened in [1:54:44] early April. U.S. Grant on the United States side, and a General Albert Sidney Johnson on the Confederate [1:54:51] side. But at Shiloh, in two days, there were upwards of 25,000 casualties, and that's more [1:54:58] battle casualties than U.S. forces had suffered in every war combined down to that point. It happened [1:55:04] in two days. Two and a half months after that, George B. McClellan's army engaged with Lee's army [1:55:12] in what came to be called the Seven Days Battles at Richmond, 36,000 casualties. So those two together [1:55:18] just showed that this was going to be on a totally different scale, [1:55:23] and it was going to involve sacrifices and allocation of resources that no one had imagined [1:55:29] before. Since you mentioned Missouri, you've talked about how that was the most brutal guerrilla [1:55:33] warfare of the conflict. It was. And maybe can you speak to what do you mean by guerrilla warfare? [1:55:39] What kind of war was that? And then contrast with the structure, the dynamics of battles elsewhere in [1:55:47] the war. Guerrilla war is more of what I think most Americans can sort of imagine what guerrilla war is. [1:55:53] It involves small, much, much smaller numbers of actors, obviously, on both sides. Guerrilla bands [1:56:00] might have a few dozen members. They might have a few hundred at different times. There are no real [1:56:06] battles, battles, battles between guerrillas. There is a lot of bushwhacking, which is what they [1:56:13] call it, ambushing people, terrorizing civilians, killing livestock, killing some civilians, killing [1:56:22] prisoners after you've captured them, hanging some people. There are a few semi-large scale ones. [1:56:28] There's a Confederate guerrilla named Quantrill led a raid against Lawrence, Kansas, where they burned [1:56:34] parts of the town, executed more than 150 men in the town and terrorized the place. [1:56:38] That is going on in the... There's a relationship in many places between elevation and guerrilla [1:56:47] activity. The more mountainous or hilly, the more likely there'll be guerrillas operating. They [1:56:51] operate in the mountains, East Tennessee, Western North Carolina, Southwestern Virginia, [1:56:58] Central. There's even some activity in parts of Texas, but Missouri and Kentucky have the worst guerrilla [1:57:03] warfare. It's present through the whole war, probably involves maybe 50,000 men out of the [1:57:10] 3 million who were in action during the war, and was very nasty, no rules. One reason that [1:57:17] rules of war were codified was because Henry Halleck, who was a union general in Missouri, [1:57:24] was dealing with this guerrilla activity. He said, we need to get some rules about who's a civilian, [1:57:28] who's not a civilian. How do you deal with this kind of situation and that kind of situation? [1:57:34] What should we take away from the fact that most of the fighting had the rules of war behind it, [1:57:40] so it was more structured? I think what we take away from that [1:57:44] supports my argument that this is a war between two mid-19th century nation states that have a sense [1:57:51] of how you fight a war. You fight a war with national armies who are led by professional soldiers [1:57:57] and who understand that there are limits to what you do in a war, and all the war's limits expand as [1:58:03] it goes on, but it doesn't reach the point where you have indiscriminate killing of civilians and so [1:58:08] forth. I mean, there's an argument about whether it's a total war or not. It all depends on how you [1:58:12] define total war. As you mentioned in terms of how encompassing it was, as total war as it gets, [1:58:19] because the entirety of the society was involved in it. When there's wide-scale targeting of the [1:58:25] economic infrastructure of your opponent that can be used to support the war effort, which is what [1:58:30] you get increasingly as the war goes on and officially when Grant is in charge as general [1:58:35] in chief, then certainly that's a total, if you're the farmer who experiences an army coming by and [1:58:43] they take or kill all your livestock and destroy your crops, and that's pretty much like a total war, [1:58:51] even if they don't kill you. So the war escalates. Yes, the war does escalate. 62, it takes a quantum [1:58:59] leap. In the spring and early summer of 1862, the signals are clear. This is something that we had [1:59:05] not counted on before. And the armies are much, they're going to be much bigger. The army, the [1:59:09] Potomac's more than 100,000 men. There's never been an army like that in U.S. history, nothing like that. [1:59:14] What do we understand from the diaries of soldiers coming for the first time face-to-face with this [1:59:23] scale of war? We're talking about a year, they've been volunteering for a year, like you mentioned, [1:59:28] you know, in the summer, in the spring, in the summer of 62. There's so many themes in soldier [1:59:33] letters and it's an incredible gift to people such as myself who study this, is that almost, that a very [1:59:41] large majority of the men on both sides were literate. And so we have this mass of testimony. [1:59:48] And they sent millions of letters from the armies home and back to the armies on both sides. So we [1:59:57] have this trove of firsthand evidence and diaries too, many, many, many, many, many diaries. But [2:00:04] so you can see in real time how attitudes are changing, hardening. You can see the hardening process [2:00:11] in soldiers who they don't have any idea what being a soldier is then they do, and they don't [2:00:15] like lots of things about it. They don't, they talk a lot about food, talk a lot about clothing, [2:00:19] talk a lot about officers they don't like. They don't talk, what one thing, it's really fascinating, [2:00:26] the thing they don't try to do is explain to people behind the lines exactly what it's like to be in a [2:00:31] battle because they understand the people who back home won't understand what they're talking about. [2:00:36] And so they'll say things like it was awful and words just can't convey what it was and then maybe [2:00:42] tell more about their individual experience. But they, there's a real sense that what a veteran knows [2:00:49] about being in the military and what the people back home will understand are two different things [2:00:53] and you just can't explain it to them. And so that takes us into the fall of the Battle of Antietam. [2:01:01] Can you walk me through what happened, the battle and why it mattered? [2:01:05] George B. McClellan, whom I've already referred to dismissively a couple of times, [2:01:11] he was in charge of the Army of the Potomac by this point. He'd been general in chief for a brief [2:01:17] time and commanding the Army of the Potomac. And he finally approached Richmond. He got within, [2:01:23] literally within five miles of Richmond. He was opposing an officer named Joseph E. Johnston, [2:01:29] his first thought every day was, what a great day to retreat. Where could I go? I could go that [2:01:33] way or I could go that way. He and McClellan were a match made in heaven. McClellan didn't want to go [2:01:36] anywhere and McClellan only, and Johnston only wanted to retreat. Anyway, they finally ended up [2:01:41] at Richmond. Johnston got wounded, got hit by a shell fragment outside Richmond in the Battle of [2:01:49] Seven Pines. And he was replaced by Robert E. Lee. And McClellan, in his usual perceptive way, [2:01:54] observed that this was great because he knew that Lee was too timid to ever be an effective [2:01:58] presence on the battlefield. So he read him just exactly the way that McClellan would. He ends up [2:02:04] fighting Lee. And he, in the Seven Days Battles, McClellan is pushed away from Richmond. He shouldn't [2:02:11] have been, but he was. That was considered a great victory. Lee's reputation goes up after that. Then [2:02:19] Lee follows that up with the campaign of Second Bull Run, which reorients the war from Richmond [2:02:26] to Manassas, the old first Manassas battlefield in Northern Virginia. Stonewall Jackson plays a key [2:02:31] role in it. He wins the Battle of Second Bull Run in late August, 1862, and then invades the [2:02:38] Loyal States for the first time. He crosses into Maryland in early September with an army that is [2:02:44] broken down in terms of supply. He has tremendous straggling problems and desertion problems. Lee did. [2:02:51] He moved across the army with about 50,000 men. When they finally came to battle at Antietam, [2:02:58] which is in Western Maryland, he only had about 35,000 soldiers on the field. McClellan had about [2:03:03] 80,000 on the other side. And McClellan had captured a copy of Lee's entire orders for the whole campaign, [2:03:10] Special Orders No. 191. They had gone through an old Confederate camp and found a copy of Lee's orders. [2:03:18] And still, McClellan didn't move quickly. I won't bash McClellan. They fight. The bloodiest single day [2:03:24] in U.S. history is Antietam, the Battle of 23,000 casualties in one day there. Very close thing. Lee [2:03:30] hangs on by just the narrowest margin, sits on the battlefield for another whole day, which he shouldn't [2:03:37] have done. He was being way too bold there, 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, reorient [2:03:48] the ward in Northern Virginia, cross into the United States. And they saw it as a success. [2:03:53] Richmond is no longer threatened. Lee's reputation has gone way up. McClellan has frustrated Lincoln [2:04:00] immeasurably. And as a result, Lincoln removes McClellan from command. He waits till the day after [2:04:06] the elections in November, because McClellan's popular among Democrats and Lincoln is an adept [2:04:11] politician. He fires him the day after the elections and replaces him with a guy named Ambrose Burnside. [2:04:18] So what can you say about what makes a great general and what makes a poor general in all of this? [2:04:23] Well, McClellan is a very smart guy. And he was on Winfield Scott's staff in Mexico, as was Lee, [2:04:31] which is a sign that you're a pretty bright officer. He built the Army of the Potomac. He did a brilliant [2:04:37] job building the Army of the Potomac. The troops loved him. There was never a bond with any other [2:04:42] commander the way they had with McClellan. But what he couldn't do when the moment came, when the moment [2:04:49] came, he couldn't risk things. He was risk averse. He had a chance to capture Richmond against Lee. He [2:04:56] should have, and he didn't. He withdrew. He had a chance. You almost never had a chance to destroy [2:05:02] another Army in the Civil War. He had a chance to destroy Lee's Army at Antietam, and he didn't. [2:05:07] He pulled back. He didn't even use 20,000 of his men. They never fired their muskets at Antietam. [2:05:13] If you're in Lee's Army, you're going to fire your musket. If you're in McClellan's Army, maybe, [2:05:17] maybe not. He didn't at Antietam. He let Lee get away. It frustrated Lincoln immensely, [2:05:23] and Lincoln finally fired him because of that. It was a flaw. He lacked what they would have called [2:05:28] in the mid-19th century the moral courage to risk everything. Grant had it. Lee had it. [2:05:36] McClellan didn't have it. One of the components of a great general is the willingness to risk it all, [2:05:42] obviously with good advice, with intelligence, but risk failure. The whole war changed in this arc [2:05:51] between the seven days in Antietam, and it changed in this way. McClellan's defeat at the seven days, [2:05:58] this is in late June and early July 1962, convinced both Congress and Lincoln that slavery was going [2:06:07] to have to be put on the table. The war is going to be moral. McClellan could have won the war with [2:06:12] slavery intact. He didn't, so Congress passed the Second Confiscation Act in late July, which I [2:06:18] mentioned earlier, which strikes at slavery. And then Lincoln decided, he told his cabinet [2:06:25] toward the end of July that he was going to 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. He should wait [2:06:33] until he had a victory. He got another defeat at Second Bull Run. He finally got a victory at [2:06:39] Antietam because Lee retreated. And then that's when he announced the preliminary proclamation. The key [2:06:44] battle here isn't Antietam. The key battle is the seven days in McClellan's defeat that persuades [2:06:49] Lincoln to do this. Antietam gives him the occasion to do it, and he issued his preliminary proclamation [2:06:56] five days after the battle on September 22nd, 1862. Can you elaborate why it became obvious that [2:07:02] the slavery has to be on the table as the motivation, as the driving motivation for the war at that time? [2:07:08] Because people believed, and they were right, the war was almost over at the end of May, 1862. [2:07:15] It had been a catastrophe for the Confederacy in the Western theater. They had lost New Orleans. [2:07:22] New Orleans was the biggest city in the Confederacy by far, 160,000 people, four times bigger than the [2:07:27] next biggest, the most important port. The key to the Mississippi River Valley is an economic art. [2:07:35] If you don't control New Orleans, the Mississippi isn't an economic river for you. New Orleans was [2:07:40] gone in April. Nashville was gone. The key city and capital of Tennessee, Memphis, was gone in June. [2:07:47] The whole state of Tennessee, except the mountainous East Tennessee, was basically not a Confederate [2:07:52] state anymore by May, 1862. There was a Union army of 100,000 in northern Mississippi by the end of May. [2:08:03] Catastrophic. And George B. McClellan's army was in five miles of the national capital in Richmond. [2:08:11] I don't think the Confederacy could have absorbed the loss of Richmond at that point. I think it would [2:08:17] have been over. And emancipation was not on the table yet in an official way. The fact that Richmond [2:08:23] didn't fall convinced people in the North that the war was going to have to last a lot longer, [2:08:30] the Confederates were going to be harder to beat, convinced Europe of the same thing. By Europe, [2:08:35] I mean France and England. That's what mattered. And so they decided that they were going to have [2:08:39] to take more extreme measures. And then the key more extreme measure is strike at slavery, [2:08:44] strike at it as a war measure directly. [2:08:47] And as a war measure, it attacks the economic infrastructure of the Confederacy. [2:08:54] It attacks the economic infrastructure that enables the Confederacy to maintain [2:08:59] the largest possible army in the war. [2:09:00] So this is not about the ethics, the morality of slavery. [2:09:05] It is for the abolitionists who see it. And Frederick Douglass realized that this is good. [2:09:10] The abolitionists realized early on, even in 1861, some of them, Charles Sumner, for example, [2:09:16] saw the union defeat at first bull run. Yes, it's bad that we lost, but the longer the war goes, [2:09:24] the more likely that we can get slavery on the table, get emancipation on the table. Frederick Douglass [2:09:29] believed the same thing. A longer war made that more likely. And McClellan handed them that gift [2:09:35] by not being as aggressive as he should have been at Richmond in 1862. [2:09:40] But we should say, and correct me if I'm wrong, that only a tiny minority [2:09:46] of Americans were abolitionists at that time. [2:09:49] We'll never know exactly. I would say, I think if you guessed 3%, [2:09:53] were really abolitionists. Destroy it now, destroy it completely. No compensation for rebel owners [2:10:00] or any owners. Kill it in Kentucky, kill it in Missouri, kill it in Maryland. [2:10:04] And yes, I think 3% would be about the ballpark. [2:10:08] So of course, now we venerate those folks and we mythologize them. And so they become bigger [2:10:16] in our minds, 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 forward the process that [2:10:25] leads to the 13th Amendment. It's not just people who hate slavery so much that they'll do anything to [2:10:30] kill it. In fact, most of them are, that's not what they are. We wish they were, but they're not. [2:10:36] And Lincoln is in a tough position. Lincoln hates slavery personally, but he's president trying to [2:10:42] win a war and he can't win the war with just Republicans. He has to try to keep Democrats on [2:10:47] board. So he has to, I mean, and the constitution protects slavery in Kentucky and Missouri and [2:10:54] Maryland and Delaware. They're still in the nation. The constitution still applies. Congress by the time, [2:10:59] by the end of June 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. No compensation in the [2:11:09] territories, but there were hardly any enslaved people there. And there was some compensation [2:11:14] in the District of Columbia. You said that Lincoln hates slavery. Can we just take that tangent and [2:11:22] from a perspective of some, there's a hypocrisy there in pushing for policy of colonization? [2:11:32] Colonization. Yes, colonization. In the summer of 1862, Lincoln met with a group of Black leaders and [2:11:38] tried to convince them to support colonization, which colonization meant if you freed enslaved people, [2:11:45] then they would go somewhere else. They'd go out of the United States. That's why Liberia exists. [2:11:50] And Lincoln, that is probably the least attractive element of his total thinking. He genuinely didn't [2:11:58] believe that white people would ever accept Black people as equals. He told the leaders that when he [2:12:03] met with them. And he said, you wouldn't want it that way. I wouldn't either. It's the way it is. [2:12:07] It's a reality. Do we know he believed that, or is this a pragmatic politician understanding the lay of the land? [2:12:14] I think for someone who was born in Kentucky and reared in Southern Indiana and Southern Illinois, [2:12:20] he was never around anything, but a level of intensity on race that he probably didn't ever [2:12:26] see, wasn't ever around white people who he could see accepting Black people as fully equal. [2:12:33] I do believe that. And still, it is a country that, [2:12:38] where the words, all men are created equal, is on the page. [2:12:40] They're right there on the page, waiting for that to be made good on. Yes, that's correct. Well, [2:12:48] it's true. And Lincoln also was capable of growth. [2:12:53] Well, he seemed to have evolved quite a lot in the years of the war. [2:13:00] He did. No, he did. He did. [2:13:02] And it's very, very possible, were he not assassinated, he would have arrived at a very [2:13:08] different worldview. We'll never know. But we do know that he was a lot smarter and a lot more [2:13:15] adaptable and a lot more politically adept than Andrew Johnson. And so it certainly would have looked [2:13:20] different. Well, it's true. No, I just, I think I vaguely remember you saying somewhere [2:13:26] that Andrew Johnson is the second worst president in America's history. [2:13:32] Yeah, he's right. He has the glory of being above James Buchanan. I said that a few years ago. [2:13:37] I think you said something about Buchanan, there's like a basement, there's like a basement below. [2:13:43] Sub-basement. He's in the sub-basement. [2:13:45] He's in the sub-basement. I put that in the category of the slime poetic commentary. [2:13:51] He's in a little corner of the sub-basement all by himself with one candle. [2:13:54] Can we take that tiny tangent of why there were terrible, the tangent on the tangent, [2:14:00] why was Andrew Johnson such a terrible president and Buchanan as well? [2:14:03] I think he was a terrible president because he was extremely prejudiced. He had all kinds of [2:14:11] grievances stacked up. He had the poor white man's grievance from being in a slave holder. He hates, [2:14:16] his slave holders were part of his enemies when he was growing up. Then he embraced them after the war. [2:14:21] He couldn't get beyond his most profound lifelong prejudices. He was not malleable in any way. [2:14:31] He thought what he thought and that's what he was always going to think. He just was not the right [2:14:36] person to be in place. [2:14:37] Well, why is Buchanan the worst president in America's history? [2:14:41] If you had a dictionary that had the word hack in it, it should have a picture of James [2:14:45] Buchanan by it. He was an absolute political hack who made his way up by staying alive, [2:14:52] and doing everything that you should do as a party hack as you went along. And then, [2:14:56] oh, I ended up as president in 1856 because the person I'm running against is from a party. This [2:15:02] is the first time they're running a candidate. His way of dealing with the secession crisis was [2:15:07] basically hiding under his desk and hoping the roof didn't fall in before he got out of Washington. [2:15:12] He's just horrible. [2:15:13] I think from that, I get a sense that what you admire in a leader and a president is a kind of [2:15:19] backbone to be able to, again, take risks and to stand behind political savvy, yes, [2:15:26] but also a backbone behind that savvy. [2:15:28] Yes, and to actually change a position if you're persuaded by both events and good counsel that [2:15:35] you had the wrong position before. Go ahead and do that. [2:15:37] So some kind of balance of a backbone behind principles and malleability based on the [2:15:46] information, knowledge, and wisdom that you gain versus for convenience or out of fear. [2:15:51] There's an apocryphal story about Lincoln that I think gets at his willingness to roll against [2:15:56] the tide if he needed to. They're discussing something in a cabinet meeting and he says, [2:15:59] well, let's vote. Let me get your sense. And they went around the table and every cabinet [2:16:04] member voted no. And Lincoln said, well, that's six no's and one yes. Mine, the ayes have it. [2:16:12] I mean, so he listened to them. And in that case, he's willing to do something that's unpopular [2:16:18] and knows that he's going to get, but he'll do it because, and that's, that's a quality not [2:16:22] everybody has either. Who's the greatest president in the history? [2:16:26] In my view? Yeah. In my view, it's neck and neck with [2:16:29] Washington and Lincoln. Without Washington, there's no United States. So it's sort of hard to [2:16:34] go against him. He set all kinds of precedents that were really important. [2:16:38] Just giving away power. Twice. He did it twice. The Europeans couldn't [2:16:43] wrap their minds around that. He gave it away after the revolution. In other words, his message is, [2:16:49] I'm not Caesar. I'm not Cromwell. I'm not Napoleon. There hadn't been a Napoleon yet, [2:16:54] but anyway, it wasn't one. I had power and I gave it back. And then he stepped down. He would [2:16:59] have been president for life if he wanted to be. He did two terms. That's enough. Let somebody else [2:17:04] do it. Who does that? Yeah. But he embodies the notion of what, this is what a citizen soldier does. [2:17:15] He comes forward at a time of crisis. He does his duty. And when the crisis is over, [2:17:21] he is Cincinnatus. He goes back to his farm when this is over with. Because the point is, [2:17:27] he'd done what small r Republican virtue dictated, and then he went back. And that image was invoked [2:17:37] over and over and over again. It has nothing to do with the Republican Party. Small r Republican [2:17:43] virtue of disinterested service to your republic. And Washington embodied that. He's crucial. [2:17:51] What's always been fascinating to me, Lex, is you have this guy. He's surrounded by this [2:17:56] freakishly talented group of people in this little nation. You have Madison and Hamilton and [2:18:02] Jefferson and Franklin. All these people who are probably smarter than Washington. They've certainly [2:18:07] read more Greek and Latin than Washington. And yet nobody's concerned about who the man is. It's [2:18:14] Washington. He's the guy. We're smarter. It's like what Sherman said about Grant one time. Sherman's [2:18:23] smarter than Grant probably. Sherman said, I know more about strategy than Grant. I know more about [2:18:27] tactics. I know more about supply. I know more about everything than U.S. Grant does. But where [2:18:33] he beats me and where he beats the world is he don't give a damn what the enemy is doing out of [2:18:39] his sight. And that scares me like hell. In other words, Grant could just let the background noise [2:18:47] go away, focus on his thing and do what he was going to do. And Sherman couldn't do that. Grant [2:18:52] liberated Sherman to become a great general because he had Grant over him taking responsibility. It's [2:18:58] really fascinating. And Washington, whatever faults he had, he could take responsibility. [2:19:04] And was aware that he was setting precedents as the first president of this new republic almost [2:19:11] every time he did something. It's a precedent. What did Washington do? Well, he gave up his [2:19:16] uniform and then he gave up the presidency. Yeah. Just from studying history, [2:19:21] understanding how difficult it is to give away power in the way that Washington did, [2:19:25] I have to put him as the number one. Because without him, the rest doesn't happen. I mean, [2:19:30] that's my bottom line on it. And I really do believe that without him, the rest doesn't happen. I don't [2:19:34] know what, if they hadn't had Washington to persuade people that a strong central, stronger [2:19:38] central government might be possible because Washington's going to be president, who else [2:19:42] would they agreed could be trust there? There's Washington and then there's everybody else. [2:19:47] And I think America is a truly positive force in human history. So the fact that whatever ideas [2:19:53] that were created at that time and that Washington was the foundation of that is a great gift to [2:20:01] humanity. Lucky to have him. Lucky to have Lincoln. We've been lucky in our leaders. We're lucky to [2:20:06] have FDR in World War II. I mean, we've been lucky to have people at moments of real crisis. [2:20:12] But we need the basement too. We need the full variety. Well, we've got them. And you never know [2:20:20] when we might need a new sub-basement. It's complicated and an ongoing story. [2:20:25] And it is a beautiful theater, beautiful drama. And I, like you, have faith in the resilience [2:20:32] of the people to deal with the full mess of it. Quick bathroom break, if it's okay. [2:20:37] Yeah. [2:20:37] I wanted to mention to you, just as a plug, but also as a big thank you, that I don't know how [2:20:45] many hours, it must be maybe over 50 hours of enjoyed listening to your great courses. So you [2:20:53] have two on the American Civil War and on Robert E. Lee. [2:20:57] Right. [2:20:58] And so I just wanted to mention this thing that I've been using. It's called Plod. So [2:21:03] what I do is I run along the river and then I'll use this Plod thing where you just press [2:21:09] the button and then you leave a note. Like what I'm saying now is being recorded. [2:21:13] Right. [2:21:14] And then it transcribed. Those notes are then transferred. [2:21:17] What technology. Jeez. [2:21:18] Yeah. This thing is great. So it's great for just, it's been running this whole time too. So [2:21:22] it's transcribing automatic. It's using AI to transcribe. [2:21:25] So it's doing every word, everything that we say. [2:21:27] Yeah. You know, transcribing it into text. [2:21:29] Right. [2:21:29] Right. [2:21:30] And then it can summarize it for you. And then I organize and study the notes afterwards. This [2:21:35] thing is great. Highly recommend it. It's called Plod. [2:21:38] Plod. [2:21:38] Plod. It's a clip. [2:21:40] I used to run around Town Lake or what was, I guess it's Lady Bird Johnson Lake now. Is [2:21:45] that what they call it? We used to run six miles a day at noon for years when I worked at the LBJ [2:21:53] library. We had a little group of us who went. [2:21:55] Just run. [2:21:56] Just ran. We do it in, we would do six miles in 38 minutes. [2:22:02] It's actually a really hard problem to solve of how to note take while I'm running. I'm just [2:22:08] really happy this exists. Okay. Uh, cause my smartphone was being a pain in the ass, [2:22:15] like writing it down. It's been, it's been a hard problem for me to solve. You listen to [2:22:20] audio books or no, or you just read? [2:22:22] All the time on my, I walk, I don't run anymore, but I walk six or seven miles a day. And I [2:22:27] listen to audio, do audible all the time. That's what I, that's what I do. I love audible. [2:22:33] Well, just out of curiosity, you should take that tangent. Do you listen to like history books? [2:22:39] Like what, or do you want to escape? I listened to a mixture. I listened to some history books, [2:22:45] but I also listened to some mysteries and some fiction. Oh, fiction. Oh yeah. Yeah. And some [2:22:52] fix, some books that I think I should listen to and haven't ever gotten around to reading. I did [2:22:57] Moby Dick that way. So the classics also. Oh yeah. But I've never read war and peace [2:23:03] and I don't think I ever will. I think I would have done it by now if I was going to. [2:23:08] We're making a statement today. I like, I like, um, a person. It's not, not always, [2:23:13] but I like short books. I do too. I write short books. A lot of long books would make good short [2:23:20] books and a lot of short books would make good essays. I think. Yeah. Can you, I'm sorry to be [2:23:25] taking so many tangents because you've written so many excellent books. How much of it is editing? [2:23:29] Like how, well, what does it take to write a good history book? What's the process? [2:23:34] Well, for me, it's having either a question that you want to answer or having some strain [2:23:40] in the literature that you think is wrong and you need to, for me, the union war was trying to rescue [2:23:46] something that I thought people just don't understand anymore is what union meant to that [2:23:50] generation. It makes more sense. A war fought to end slavery makes sense to us now. That's of course, [2:23:57] it's a monstrous institution fight a war, but that's not what it was about for most of the [2:24:02] people. And, and to, to get at what it was about is a harder pull and explaining what union then meant [2:24:10] to an era where it doesn't mean anything. I mean, union, as they understood it does, [2:24:16] it's not in our vocabulary anymore. It's, it has to do with labor relations now, but to say, [2:24:21] what is what, but what is the concept of union mean? Get crickets. [2:24:26] Is it basically a strong sense of nation? So like, what can we just kind of pull that apart? [2:24:35] So there's different States and, uh, uh, Americans have always had a sense of like, [2:24:42] I'm from this state pride. Absolutely. Different loyalties. You have a state [2:24:48] pride and a, and, and maybe even a regional pride. I think I wrote a little book where I talked about [2:24:54] Robert E. Lee in that regard as part of it, where he has a sense of, of loyalty to the nation, [2:24:59] to the state, to the slaveholding South and so forth. But union, I mean, it's composed of [2:25:06] individual States, which engender loyalties among the people who live in them, but the parts make [2:25:11] a greater whole. And that's what the union is. And you have to have the, the whole to get all the [2:25:18] benefits because, and, and that is what people thought then. And they tied it to the revolution, [2:25:23] of course, and tied it to earlier sacrifice and tie. They had an eye on what's going on in Europe. I [2:25:28] mean, the Western world is, was their world. They didn't care that much about the rest of the world, [2:25:34] but the Western world, what's going on there. And I think they believe things were going [2:25:39] the wrong way in much of Europe that the, the, the revolution, the, all the revolutionary fervor of the [2:25:45] 1840s had seemed to run into a cliff of oligarchy and aristocracy and monarchy. [2:25:53] And, and they saw the U S as a bulwark against that for small d democracy. [2:26:00] I think having a faith in, in nation is a beautiful thing. It's a, it's a, it's a narrative [2:26:07] that unites the people. And I think that in itself has power. It's not, you're going to make an [2:26:12] economic argument. You can make a freedom argument, all these arguments you can make, but [2:26:18] I think what makes a nation is a bunch of people believing in a narrative. It's like what makes [2:26:24] a great company. There's a mission, the power of humans, when you together believe in a thing [2:26:29] is remarkable. And so that belief in itself is really powerful. [2:26:33] That clearly was there among many, many, many, many, not everybody, of course, but, but it was [2:26:39] widespread and Lincoln articulated it perfectly. And he did it again and again, talking about the [2:26:46] give the, give the, you want to give a person a chance to rise a person and, and talking about [2:26:52] the last best hope of earth and talking. I mean, he, he got it and he distilled it and he conveyed it. [2:26:58] And it's not as if he's telling people things they don't already know, but he's reaffirming things in [2:27:04] ways that are eloquent and memorable. Quick 10 second. Thank you to our sponsors, [2:27:10] check them out in the description. It really is the best way to support this podcast. Go to [2:27:15] lexfriedman.com slash sponsors. And now dear friends, back to the conversation. [2:27:22] All right. So we were talking about Antietam and how that was, uh, the moment when, uh, the union [2:27:32] preliminary proclamation, preliminary proclamation where it's like, okay, slavery has to be a thing [2:27:38] as a central part of the civil war. And so where does that take us? Also very bloody battle. The [2:27:44] generals, McClellan is the end of the McClellan chapter, and that takes us to Fredericksburg. [2:27:51] So what, uh, what happened in Fredericksburg? Fredericksburg was a, it's another victory for [2:27:57] Lee. It's an easy victory for Lee. He has a very strong position on high ground across the [2:28:01] Rappahannock river from the union forces who are opposite Fredericksburg. His opponent is a guy named [2:28:07] Ambrose Everett Burnside, who's a very affable guy, kind of a nice guy who gave us the word sideburns. [2:28:12] He's he wore his whiskers. They came down and came up and made, and it wasn't a beard. And they were, [2:28:19] they were called burn sides at the time, the burn side cut, which was transposed into sideburns. [2:28:25] Everybody liked him. He just wasn't very bright in some ways. He became, he's a politician after [2:28:31] the war. So he went into the right field, but he was, his idea at Fredericksburg was to, [2:28:37] in the end, it wasn't his original plan, but he ended up launching frontal assaults, [2:28:42] one brigade at a time against very strongly entrenched Confederates. And it was a butchery [2:28:46] for another horrible defeat for the army of the Potomac. Lincoln was really cast down by it. And [2:28:55] it just seemed that in this, in this Eastern theater, he could not get any good news. He's [2:29:01] getting good news from the West. He's not getting any good news here. And he has this revolving door [2:29:06] of commanders. Burnside tried another march in early, in late January, 1863. He was going to get around [2:29:12] Lee's flank, but he had horrible weather. His army literally got stuck in the mud. It was, [2:29:17] then it was lampooned as the mud march, and he removed him from command. So now he has another [2:29:23] commander in the army, the Potomac. So you've had McClellan and Burnside, and now a guy named Joseph [2:29:29] Hooker. You have no continuity at the top in that army. You have complete continuity at the top in the [2:29:36] Army of Northern Virginia, which is a huge advantage to the Army of Northern Virginia. [2:29:39] Yeah. So this is where the famous words of Robert E. Lee, where he was watching the slaughter, [2:29:45] he said that, it is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it. [2:29:51] Yep. What did he mean by that? [2:29:53] He was getting, I mean, he was watching his soldiers butcher Union soldiers, and I guess, [2:30:02] kind of enjoying it. He's in a really strong position with really good artillery supporting his [2:30:08] infantry. And the Union troops are just attacking them and not having any success. And so there he [2:30:17] is. He's up there with James Longstreet and other people and watching it. And he, unlike McClellan, [2:30:27] was willing to risk, obviously, piling up casualties in every battle. He didn't have that many at [2:30:31] Fredericksburg. There were about 12,500 U.S. casualties at Fredericksburg and about 5,500 Confederate casualties, [2:30:38] because they were so well protected in their defensive lines. [2:30:43] So you are working on a manuscript on Chancellorsville. [2:30:49] Yes. [2:30:50] It's a legendary battle for many reasons. [2:30:52] It is. [2:30:53] Can you break down some of the military details of what made up that battle to give us a sense of, [2:31:02] in general, what battles were like? [2:31:04] This is often described as Lee's most successful battle. It's him against Joseph Hooker. It's the [2:31:11] last battle that Lee and Jackson fought as a team, Lee and Stonewall Jackson. It was Stonewall Jackson [2:31:16] as his principal subordinate. Hooker had replaced Burnside. Hooker had maneuvered to get rid of Burnside. [2:31:24] He wanted to be in commander of the army. He had made a statement that he said what the nation needed was [2:31:29] a dictator to make sure it won. And Lincoln, one of the best letters a president ever wrote [2:31:35] to a military commander, Lincoln wrote to Hooker and he said, basically, I know everything you're [2:31:41] saying. You're talking about all the things you're going to do. And he said that the only way you get [2:31:46] to be a dictator is if you have victories and I'm willing to risk a dictatorship to get victories. [2:31:50] And so I know I've got you figured out, Joe, he's saying, and he did. Hooker made a lot of [2:31:57] blustery talk. He got a, he had a great start. He built the army into what he called the great, [2:32:02] greatest army on the planet, about 135,000 men, beautifully supplied, reorganized the medical [2:32:09] service in it. He did everything that you should do to get an army in shape. And then he started a [2:32:19] campaign, his plan. Lee was still at Fredericksburg. He was going to get around Lee's left flank, [2:32:25] come in behind him, force Lee to either retreat to Richmond or fight him on unfavorable ground. [2:32:29] Everything went well with Hooker. He got going in late April until the moment of truth came. [2:32:34] The moment of truth came on May 1st, 1863, when Lee, instead of retreating, left part of his army [2:32:42] to watch one part of Hooker's and turned around to meet Hooker head on near a crossroads called [2:32:47] Chancellorsville, a few miles west of Fredericksburg. And as soon as the fighting started, [2:32:53] McClellan lost his nerve, pulled into a defensive position. And the upshot was after Lee and Jackson [2:33:01] carried off a very successful flank attack, although it left Hooker still in a very strong [2:33:06] position, Hooker in the end retreated. And it was another victory for Lee in a battle he never, [2:33:13] ever should have won. He was outnumbered two to one, 135,000 to about 64,000. [2:33:19] And when the moment of truth came, Joseph Hooker just lost his nerve. I mean, I really do believe [2:33:24] that. I had fun working on this book. I wrote a lot of books on campaigns that are very long [2:33:29] and detailed. I wanted a short book that would introduce interested readers who didn't really [2:33:33] know that much, perhaps, to there's one of the maps. So there's different positions, [2:33:41] the different troops positions, there's Hooker. Yes. The battle played out on May 1st, [2:33:46] 2nd, and 3rd. There's the opening of the campaign. See the Rappahannock River, Fredericksburg. [2:33:53] The armies are facing each other there. Hooker's plan was to leave part of his army to hold Lee's [2:33:58] attention and move the rest up the river, up the Rappahannock, cross the Rappahannock and then the [2:34:04] Rappahannock and get behind Lee so that Lee would be caught in a vice. He'd have Hooker in his rear [2:34:10] and the anvil of other Union troops at Fredericksburg. And he thought that that would force Lee to retreat [2:34:15] toward Richmond and that he could then harass him. They get around, they get behind Lee. They do exactly [2:34:21] what Hooker wanted to do. He got to Chancellorsville. He had more than 70,000 men at Chancellorsville. And [2:34:30] Lee doesn't find out till the very end of April what's going on. And then he decides to divide his [2:34:35] army, leave 10,000 men to watch 40,000 Federals at Fredericksburg. And he and Stonewall Jackson [2:34:41] head back toward Chancellorsville to meet Hooker. And they meet on May the 1st. The fighting starts [2:34:49] on May the 1st. Everybody's upbeat in the Army of the Potomac. They've gotten around Lee's flank. [2:34:53] They know they're behind him. Everything seems to go very well. Hooker said, this is it. We've done it. [2:34:59] We've done exactly what I wanted to do. And then the fighting starts the next day on May 1st. [2:35:04] They march toward that place called Zoan Church. You can see there just a little bit east [2:35:09] of Chancellorsville. And the fighting, they collide about 11 in the morning. Two o'clock [2:35:13] that afternoon, Hooker orders a retreat. Everybody retreats back into this wilderness. It's a kind of [2:35:21] cut over, woodsy area that has very few roads. And he just hunkers down around Chancellorsville, [2:35:28] hands the initiative to Lee. The next day, Jackson and Lee decide to send Jackson all the way around [2:35:37] the right flank. And you see the flank march there. They come, they strike a Union Corps that's [2:35:43] exposed, commanded by a man named Oliver Otis Howard. Howard University is named after him. He [2:35:48] headed the Freedmen's Bureau later in the war. They strike, they crush the 11th Corps, which has a very [2:35:56] high German element in it. And there's a lot of ethnic prejudice that comes into play there by the [2:36:00] other soldiers. But it ends up, the day ends up with Lee actually in worse shape than he was before. [2:36:07] He's got two divisions over here under Anderson and McClaws on the lower right. He's not even in touch [2:36:13] with Jackson's Corps. Jackson was wounded that night by his own men carried from the field. He'd die a few days later. [2:36:20] And Hooker still, although Hooker is in between these two parts of Lee's armies in an ideal position, [2:36:26] he's still just thinking about the defensive. And around the morning of May 3rd, the two parts of Lee's army [2:36:32] fight their way together around the Chancellorsville clearing. And Hooker then retreats toward the north. [2:36:38] You have this amazing moment on May 3rd where Hooker, who's been stunned by an artillery round [2:36:44] that hit a pillar he was leaning against at Chancellorsville. He had a concussion. He was [2:36:49] vomiting. He retreated to the rear. And as the Union troops retreated from that clearing near Chancellorsville, [2:36:57] Lee's army had fought itself together and Lee rode into the middle of his troops. And there was this [2:37:03] amazing moment when this spontaneous outpouring of emotion on the part of the Confederates, [2:37:10] that's the moment when Lee and his men finished this period of bonding this year that was unmatched [2:37:15] in the Civil War. There's no way Lee should have won this battle. There's one more day of action a [2:37:20] little farther to the east. But in the end, Hooker retreats. He never should have retreated. He was in [2:37:25] an impregnable position, but he did retreat. And Lincoln was absolutely beside himself after this. He's just [2:37:34] everybody knew what the numbers were. The newspapers had talked about it, that Lee had only half as [2:37:38] many men as Hooker. And once again, the army of the Potomac, the largest and most important army of [2:37:44] the Republic, has been defeated by this smaller army. Lee's sort of legend in the north grew and in [2:37:53] the south. He became, by this point, he and his army were the most important national institution in [2:37:58] the Confederacy. People looked to them to see whether, it's like Washington and the Continental Army [2:38:03] during the Revolution. If they're still in the field, there's still a chance for victory. This [2:38:08] cemented that position for Lee, this victory at Chancellorsville did, in the minds of [2:38:14] Confederates and made him a kind of bugaboo to people in the north. They were just thirsty for [2:38:19] someone to defeat Lee and capture Richmond. [2:38:22] So this, in some sense, created the legend of Robert E. Lee. [2:38:25] It certainly helped. Yes, it did. It went a long way toward doing it. A long way. [2:38:31] You write about the difference between reality and memory. How does the north remember this battle, [2:38:40] and how does the south remember this battle? [2:38:42] It's really fascinating. The north remembers this battle by not remembering it very much. [2:38:47] They sort of airbrush it out of their memory of the war. The Confederates, in the iconography of the [2:38:54] lost cause, Lee and Jackson had their last meeting ever here, just before the fighting on May 2nd got [2:39:01] going. And there was a famous painting of that done by an artist named Julio, that was then reprinted [2:39:07] as a lithograph that hung in innumerable homes and offices and courthouses in the south. It's Lee [2:39:16] and Jackson at high tide, kind of. Gettysburg hasn't happened, never mind Appomattox. These are the two [2:39:22] greatest Confederate soldiers at their greatest moment of success. It became hugely important [2:39:27] in the lost cause telling of the war. On the Union side, they didn't want to talk about Joseph [2:39:34] Hooker that much. They'd rather talk about other things. [2:39:37] Yeah, it's probably one of the most humiliating battles of the war. [2:39:41] I think it's just, it's really, it's just, it's amazing that Hooker lost this. It's just, [2:39:48] and it shows the complete dominance of one personality over another personality, in my view. [2:39:54] So Stonewall Jackson was shot. [2:39:56] Shot by his own men out trying to reconnoiter and keep the battle going and exploit his successes, [2:40:02] carried back to the rear, and he died on May 10th, died eight days later. [2:40:08] So what impacted it, that half of Stonewall Jackson's death? [2:40:13] Well, that had a, that there was unbelievable mourning across the Confederacy about that. [2:40:20] And even since it's really interesting, even some positive comments in the north about how he'd been [2:40:25] a sore, he'd misguided, but a very religious guy and all of this stuff, but they're quietly buried. [2:40:29] That's really good news for the United States. That Stonewall Jackson is dead, [2:40:33] dead, and really bad news for the Confederacy. [2:40:37] Outside of the myth, does it actually have a practical impact on the war? [2:40:43] I don't think so. And the people who love Stonewall Jackson would disagree with me, [2:40:46] but I don't see where he would have, he was a very good soldier at what he did, [2:40:51] and Lee used him very well, and they were a good partnership. [2:40:54] But I don't see how he would have changed the larger contours of the war. I don't. [2:40:59] If we zoom out and look at Robert E. Lee, somebody you've written about quite a bit, studied a lot. [2:41:05] Do you think we can use this battle to try to understand the military genius of the man, [2:41:10] and in general, who he was? [2:41:11] I do. And it shows both why he was successful and why [2:41:17] some of the reasons he was successful opened the way for what should have been big defeats, [2:41:20] but didn't. I mean, Lee's personality was at heart aggressive. His first impulse was always [2:41:27] to take the war to the opponent. He said, they outnumber us. If we just sit and wait for them [2:41:33] to come to us, they're going to have all the advantages. We need to try to disrupt them and [2:41:37] look for openings. What this campaign showed was his audacity. He divided his army three times in [2:41:43] the course of this campaign in the face of a much more powerful opponent, which showed his audacity. [2:41:50] It also highlighted the overall culture that he created in his army, which was a culture of risk [2:41:57] taking, of seeking to inflict the greatest possible harm on your opponent. It's the antithesis of the [2:42:03] culture that McClellan created in the Army of the Potomac, which is a culture of caution, [2:42:08] of not taking risks, of not doing anything until everything is just right. Any adult knows everything [2:42:14] is never just right. So if you're waiting for that, you'll never do anything. The two cultures are [2:42:20] absolutely antithetical to one another. And in the end, it shows Lee and how what he had accomplished, [2:42:27] he had created an army that was willing to absorb casualties because it won all the time. And they [2:42:35] realized that that was what they believed, making it more likely that their whole war effort would be [2:42:41] successful. There are only a few times during the war where you get a scene like you got on May 3rd, [2:42:45] where this whole army sees the old man right into their midst base. He clean, just has this. [2:42:50] I think they decided at that point, the soldiers, that he was always going to win. And Lee looked [2:42:56] at them and thought, they can do whatever I asked them to do. I think if you want to understand [2:43:00] Gettysburg, if you want to understand Pickett's charge, you need to look back to May 3rd at [2:43:05] Chancellorsville when Lee just decided that his infantry could do anything he wanted them to do. [2:43:10] But also from the infantry perspective, they believed in the- [2:43:14] You asked me earlier about what did the soldiers' letters say. The letters from Lee's army, [2:43:18] they absolutely didn't even contemplate losing to the Army of the Potomac. I mean, [2:43:24] they just didn't think they would lose to it. [2:43:27] What do you attribute that to? Does Robert E. Lee to him? [2:43:31] It's to Lee and the fact that they won these victories under Lee and that they took these [2:43:35] chances and everybody taught. And they always knew that they were outnumbered and yet they were still [2:43:39] winning the closest the numbers had ever been at the seven days when the armies were about the [2:43:44] same size. But after that, Lee is always at a significant disadvantage in numbers. And yet he [2:43:50] seems to be victorious. [2:43:52] So Lee's aggressiveness, like you've mentioned, produced also staggering casualties. [2:43:59] Lee's staggering casualties. He lost 13,000 men here and Hooker about 17,500. A much higher proportion [2:44:07] of Lee's army than Hooker lost in his army. But this should have been a disaster for Lee. Hooker [2:44:13] should have crushed Lee here. Absolutely should have crushed Lee, but he didn't. [2:44:18] So there's two cases. Lee's audacity being the South's best hope of winning the war. But the [2:44:26] other case is he was actually bleeding the South dry. Yes. And historians have criticized him for [2:44:32] not just being on the defensive all the time. I think Lee understood better than many of his [2:44:38] critics now understand that the key was Northern civilian opinion. He said it more than once. If we [2:44:43] win victories, it will depress their morale. If their morale is depressed, the Democrats [2:44:48] will do better. If the Democrats get into office, it's good for the Confederacy. And he also knew [2:44:54] that it's a race between, am I going to run out of men before they run out of morale in the United [2:44:59] States? I think he understood that. And I think that was the best chance for the Confederacy to win. [2:45:06] And in the end, I'm very happy to report the Confederacy ran out of men before the union ran out of [2:45:12] morale. And so the war went the way it did. But I think Lee was very perceptive in that regard. [2:45:18] He understood how important politically what happened militarily was. Much better understanding [2:45:26] of that than a lot of people had at the time. And better understanding, I think, than a lot of [2:45:30] historians have now. And this is a horrible time for the U.S. because behind the lines, [2:45:39] Democrats are unhappy with the Emancipation Proclamation. Just two months before this, [2:45:45] Congress passed the Conscription Act. Democrats are very unhappy about that. They're saying that [2:45:49] Lincoln is a tyrant. He's forcing people into a war that's not the war they wanted to fight anyway. [2:45:55] Union morale is very fragile. Morale, civilian morale at this point. And this makes it much, [2:46:02] much worse. The draft riots in New York City, the first draft numbers were pulled in New York City in [2:46:09] July. The draft riots come right after Gettysburg. But that is symptomatic of what morale... [2:46:14] Desertions went up in the Army of the Potomac after the Emancipation Proclamation. [2:46:18] So at this point, the Confederacy is arguably very close to winning the war. [2:46:22] I think this is one of the more optimistic points for the Confederacy, [2:46:28] in the late spring and early summer of 1863. Yes, I do. [2:46:33] If Robert Ely is correct and that it's all about morale, which seems like a valid argument, [2:46:38] then this feels like very close to breaking the morale of the union. [2:46:43] In the Eastern Theater, I think it is. But in the Western Theater, we have our boy Grant, [2:46:48] who's operating against Vicksburg at this point. So there are two big campaigns kind of going on at [2:46:53] this time. And Vicksburg is the other one. Can you speak to Vicksburg? This is 63. [2:46:59] Yeah, this is 63. And Vicksburg is the last major Confederate citadel on the Mississippi River. [2:47:06] They've already lost New Orleans. So they've lost the river. It's not a Confederate river anymore. [2:47:10] But they still have a strong point at Vicksburg and another one at Port Hudson in Northern Louisiana. [2:47:15] Grant has been operating against Vicksburg since the winter of 62. And he's finally through a series [2:47:21] of trial and errors and failures. He's finally found a way that he thinks he can get to the city. [2:47:27] He takes great risks. He crosses the Mississippi River after having the Union Navy run past all the [2:47:34] batteries, the artillery batteries there at Vicksburg. And he invests the city from the east. [2:47:39] He's laying siege to Vicksburg while he's just getting his campaign to do that started [2:47:45] when Hooker is at Chancellorsville. In May, he invests the city and begins a siege that will end [2:47:53] just as the Battle of Gettysburg ends. And it's one of the most impressive campaigns in U.S. military [2:47:59] history. Grant's campaign against Vicksburg cuts loose from his supply lines. Nobody understands what [2:48:04] he's doing. Sherman doesn't get what he's doing. Lincoln doesn't get what he's doing. And in the end, [2:48:09] they go, oh, that's what you were doing. And it worked. And in the end, he captures Vicksburg, [2:48:15] which surrenders on July 4th, 1863. And if you don't think that a kind of religious people didn't [2:48:23] read divine intervention into having that happen on July 4th, 1863, you would be incorrect. That's [2:48:32] the same day that Lee retreated from Gettysburg. What? Really? God's not putting a thumb on the [2:48:37] scales here? Huge victories in the west, huge victory in the east on the anniversary of the [2:48:43] Declaration of Independence. Well, that takes us to Gettysburg. Here we are at Gettysburg, [2:48:48] which everybody knows, Lex, is the turning point of the Civil War. Or is it? No. Short answer. [2:48:56] Well, that's first before we analyze its role as a turning point or not. What is Gettysburg? July 1863. [2:49:06] Walk me through the three days of Gettysburg. So Joe Hooker retreats across the Rappahannock. Lee is [2:49:11] frustrated because he hasn't dealt more damage to Hooker. And this is what he decides to do. He [2:49:17] decides to move north for a second time. His army is strengthened. He builds it up to 75,000. This is [2:49:23] his army at its absolute apogee as he gets ready to go north. It's confident. It's well supplied, [2:49:30] well led. And so they head north second week in June. And here's what his goal is. He has two main goals. [2:49:36] He wants to take the war out of Virginia so that the agricultural sector isn't subject to the [2:49:41] presence of the army, so to let agriculture recover a little. And he wants to provision his army [2:49:46] off the rich Cumberland Valley in Pennsylvania, siphon fodder and food and animals while he's north of [2:49:53] the Potomac. And he wants to stay up there for a long time to keep the war out of Virginia. He doesn't [2:49:58] want to, he has no, the movie Gettysburg, he says he wants to capture Washington. No, [2:50:03] he doesn't want to capture Washington. He knows it's too strong. He has no idea of doing that, [2:50:08] but he knows he'll pull the Union army after him and simply reorient the war. And he knows it'll be [2:50:12] bad politically for Lincoln if he's actually operating in the United States. So off he goes to [2:50:18] the north. He gets north of the river. His cavalry under Jeb Stewart is not doing its job because poor [2:50:24] Jeb, who is a very good cavalryman, but has a sort of adolescent streak where he has to be praised all the [2:50:31] time. He fights the biggest cavalry battle of the war near Culpeper, Virginia, Battle of Brandy [2:50:37] Station on June the 9th. And he almost loses and it hurts his little feelings. And so he decides that [2:50:43] he needs to do something dramatic so the newspapers will love him again. And he decides to ride all [2:50:49] the way around the army of the Potomac, which he did when McClellan was in command. It's easier to do [2:50:53] it when McClellan's in command because he's never moving. He decides he'll do it again here. [2:50:58] And just as he gets east of the army of the Potomac, the army of the Potomac starts to move [2:51:05] north. And so Stewart is trapped and he can't communicate with Lee. So Lee doesn't know what's [2:51:10] going on because his cavalry isn't doing its job. He spreads his army across southern Pennsylvania [2:51:15] and then finds out from a sort of civilian spy, a guy named Harrison, that the army of the Potomac is [2:51:22] actually following him and is much closer. And Lee, at the end of June, orders his army to concentrate [2:51:28] near Gettysburg and not to bring on a battle. And they concentrate, most of them come together. [2:51:36] There's a little clash on June the 30th, but on July the 1st, the armies make contact to the west [2:51:42] of Gettysburg. In a meeting engagement and more troops coming on each side, it builds into what turns [2:51:48] into the three-day biggest battle of the Civil War. It's not something Lee had planned. [2:51:54] And it wouldn't have happened if his cavalry had been doing its job, but they weren't. [2:51:58] And so here they come and there's a battle that goes for three days. Lee takes the tactical, [2:52:05] aggressive every day. He does the attacking. The Federals do the defending. Lee's army's 75,000. The [2:52:12] other army's about 85,000, 88,000. And famous terrain, Little Round Top, Round Top, Devil's Den, [2:52:20] the Peach Orchard, all these famous places. And it ends on the third day. Lee comes close on the [2:52:25] second day, a huge victory for the Confederates on the first day. Third day, Lee's frustrated, [2:52:31] and he just decides to let his infantry take care of it for him. And the result is what most people [2:52:37] call Pickett's charge. Pickett was just a part of the charge. 12,500 infantry in a direct assault, [2:52:45] and it fails completely. And he retreats the next day. I think you can draw a straight line between [2:52:52] May the 3rd at Chancellorsville, when his infantry fought their way together, and July the 3rd at [2:52:59] Gettysburg. He admits it to us. He writes letters to both his wife and Jefferson Davis saying, [2:53:03] I asked too much of my infantry. No fault is on them. All the fault is on me. And he was [2:53:09] right. All the fault was on him. He and Grant are alike that way. They accept responsibility, [2:53:14] not like McClellan. His first reaction is, it's not my fault to pick a general at random who did [2:53:19] this. It's not my fault. It must be somebody else's fault. Lee took responsibility. He expected [2:53:25] too much from his infantry. His subordinates had not been doing that good a job, and they lost the [2:53:31] biggest battle of the war. What was the military mistake there? What could Robert E. Lee have done [2:53:36] differently? I think what he could have done, the most perceptive Confederate soldier who wrote [2:53:41] about the war was a guy named Edward Porter Alexander, who was the most gifted artillerist. [2:53:45] He's in Lee's army. He wrote after the war, Lee won a great victory on July 1st at Gettysburg. [2:53:52] Smashed two Union infantry corps, had a very strong position. He should have just hunkered down and said, [2:53:58] okay, attack me. See what you can do. He didn't do that. He almost certainly would have won the battle if [2:54:04] he had done that, but this is where his aggressiveness gets him in trouble. He was [2:54:10] pushing for a more aggressive, more decisive outcome right then, and he ended up costing, [2:54:17] he lost probably 25,000 men at Gettysburg, at least a third of his army. More than that, [2:54:24] he went across the river, went across the Potomac with 52 generals in his army. [2:54:29] 17 of them became cast. He lost a third of his entire corps of generals killed, wounded, [2:54:36] or captured in the Gettysburg campaign. It's a really bloody, costly campaign for him, [2:54:41] and he ends up retreating back into Virginia. Lincoln is at first very happy about it. There's [2:54:49] yet another general in command on the Union side. Hooker's gone. A guy named George Meade is in, [2:54:54] and Meade does what McClellan did after Antietam. He lets Lee get away, doesn't really harass him, [2:55:01] and Lincoln is beside himself with disappointment. He writes a letter to Meade, thanks him for his [2:55:09] great victory, and then says, you've let him get away. The war is going to continue indefinitely, [2:55:14] says Lincoln. Then he doesn't send a letter. He writes it, but doesn't send it to Meade. But he gets [2:55:21] another guy to tell Meade what's in it. So he's a guy named Halleck, who's the general in chief at [2:55:26] that point. Lincoln certainly did not think Gettysburg was the great turning point of the war. [2:55:31] He probably thought it should have been, but it wasn't because Lee got away with his army intact. [2:55:38] And after the battle, Lee said, well, he said they lost a lot too, and there's not going to be another [2:55:47] big battle. He said they'll be as quiet as a sucking dove for six months. And in fact, [2:55:53] it's 10 months before there's another big battle in the Eastern Theater until Grant gets there. [2:55:57] Yeah. So how does Grant come to change the theaters from the Western Theater into the Eastern? [2:56:02] So Gettysburg's a really important victory for the United States. [2:56:06] Yeah, but it's not the turning point. [2:56:07] No, and it's not as important as Vicksburg because Lee gets away. Grant captured an entire [2:56:12] rebel army at Vicksburg. McPemberton's whole army surrendered. And that's the second time Grant [2:56:18] had forced an army to surrender. He forced one at Fort Donelson back in February of 1862. [2:56:24] His victory is, there are no equivocations about it. It's a victory. The Mississippi is now all [2:56:31] controlled by the United States Navy, but Lee got away. So that puts a little cloud over Gettysburg [2:56:37] at the time. Grant wins one more victory in the West after this. He wins the Battle of Chattanooga in late [2:56:43] 1863. And that then puts him in position for Lincoln to decide that he not only should be in [2:56:52] charge of everything in the West, he should be general in chief. And that's what brings Grant to [2:56:56] the fore. And in March 64, he's now general in chief with the new rank of lieutenant general. He's got [2:57:04] three stars on his shoulders now instead of two. And then that, where does that take us? That takes us in [2:57:11] 64 with the Overland campaign. That story plus Atlanta, Sherman's march. That sets up. Grant is [2:57:18] now planning how the whole war is going to go. And he envisions five components. The two most [2:57:24] important are he's going to move against Lee. And his plan is lock up with Lee, inflict the greatest [2:57:29] possible damage on Lee, prevent Lee from sending reinforcements anywhere else. And if all goes well, [2:57:34] Richmond would fall. But he's not mainly interested in Richmond. He's interested in Lee's army, [2:57:39] which is what Lincoln has been trying to get his generals to be interested in [2:57:43] the whole time. Destroy Lee's army, and of course, Richmond falls. [2:57:46] So how was he thinking about the clash with Lee? Grant versus Lee? [2:57:50] Grant versus Lee is just confronting. And they're still near Fredericksburg where they, [2:57:56] on the Rappahannock River frontier, engage with him. And what they ended up with was a period of six [2:58:03] weeks of continuous combat that began with the Battle of the Wilderness on May the 5th and 6th. [2:58:10] The old pattern in the Civil War, Lex, was you fight a battle, one side retreats, [2:58:13] it might be weeks, might be months before you fight again. What happened here is Lee and Grant [2:58:18] fought the Battle of the Wilderness, 12,000 Confederate casualties, 18,000 Union, [2:58:23] 30,000 casualties at the Wilderness. They marched for one day, they start another battle, [2:58:27] Spotsylvania Courthouse, 12,000 more Confederate casualties, 18,000 more Union casualties. So now you've had [2:58:34] 60,000 casualties in two battles with no interval. That continues through May. Cold Harbor, they end [2:58:42] up near Richmond at Cold Harbor in early June. Grant launches frontal assaults there. They come to [2:58:47] nothing. His men are, many of them are butchered. The bottom line is that in the six-week campaign, [2:58:54] Grant suffers 65,000 casualties, which is as big as Lee's whole army had been. Lee suffers 35,000, [2:59:00] which is a higher percentage of his army than Grant lost, or about the same percentage actually. [2:59:06] But it is a kind of continuous campaign, no one had seen before, and it shatters both armies. It [2:59:12] eviscerates the officer corps in both armies. A lot of soldiers just break down. We would talk about [2:59:19] PTSD now probably. They just hadn't been used to something like this. And this kind of continuous [2:59:25] warfare, we can attribute that to Grant. Yes. And this is where the Grant the Butcher [2:59:32] image comes in. But also probably, as hard as it is to say, it's an act of military genius. [2:59:40] Well, he's doing what he wanted to do. He's bleeding Lee's army and at the same time pushing [2:59:45] it back toward Richmond. And what it ends up in is a siege at Petersburg, Virginia, which is just [2:59:52] south of Richmond and controls the communications into Richmond. And it's a siege of actually [2:59:56] Petersburg and Richmond. And that is the thing that Lee feared the most. And Grant had put him in [3:00:03] exactly that position. But the perception behind the lines in the United States is endless casualties. [3:00:11] Who's winning? We can't even tell who's winning. We have these casualties. And so union morale drops [3:00:18] to its lowest point of the entire war in July and August 1864. Because while this is going on, [3:00:23] Sherman is moving against Atlanta. And he is taking his time, not fighting these big battles, [3:00:29] but he's not capturing Atlanta either. The whole summer goes by. Atlanta hasn't fallen. Richmond [3:00:34] hasn't fallen. There's an election coming up in the fall in the United States. And Lincoln decides, [3:00:40] the morale gets so bad, he calls his cabinet together in late August and makes them sign what's [3:00:47] been called the blind memorandum. And what the memorandum said is, we're not going to be [3:00:51] reelected. And we're going to have to win the war before the Democrats come in because we know they [3:00:57] won't win the war. Lincoln did not think they would win. That's in August. And so I think the [3:01:01] United States civilian morale, the lowest point of the war for the United States is in July and August [3:01:08] 1864. And if we'd been able to stick our microphones in people's faces and said, well, [3:01:12] but what about Gettysburg? That was the turning point of the war. They would have said, [3:01:16] what are you talking about? That was a year ago. This is now, and we're not winning and it's not [3:01:22] worth it. And we're just about ready. McClellan incidentally was the Democratic nominee for [3:01:28] president that year. So he's running against Lincoln. So first of all, if Lincoln didn't win, [3:01:32] do you think? Well, we know it would have been good for the Confederates if Lincoln didn't win, [3:01:36] but just McClellan still, it's interesting. McClellan was running kind of against the Democratic [3:01:42] platform. What the Democratic platform called for was basically negotiations and armistice and then [3:01:48] negotiations. And many people believed if they ever stop fighting, they're not going to start fighting [3:01:53] again. And so some negotiated end of the war that might even yield a Confederacy. McClellan, to his [3:02:00] credit, and I hate to give him credit, at least said that he wasn't up for that. He said, we need to win [3:02:05] the war and then we'll have negotiations. But what's clear is, and it would have been, would have been [3:02:10] the end of emancipation because emancipation, the, what became the 13th amendment had passed through [3:02:17] the Senate in April of 64, but the house voted against it. That doesn't, isn't going to happen till [3:02:23] early 65. How close was it that Lincoln won slash lost? Well, Lincoln won. Grant didn't reelect [3:02:33] Lincoln because he, Grant against Lee would not reelect Lincoln, but other grants, other things [3:02:38] that grant part of his overall plan is general in chief. Sherman captured Atlanta in early September. [3:02:46] And that just changed everything. That was the real turning point. That was a huge military [3:02:51] turning point. And then on the heels of that, Philip Sheridan won a series of crushing victories [3:02:56] in the Shenandoah Valley, the last of which came just before the election. And it was Sherman [3:03:01] and to a lesser degree Sheridan that reelected Lincoln and not just Lincoln, but huge Republican [3:03:07] majorities in both the house and the Senate in 1864. And then the thing that broke the back of [3:03:13] Confederacy's, the Sherman's March, 60,000 men across Georgia to the sea, burning the infrastructure. [3:03:20] Yes. As he said, I'm going to go across and make Georgia howl is how he put it. He added a [3:03:26] psychological twist. What Grant envisioned his doing and Sheridan actually did it in the Shenandoah [3:03:32] Valley before Sherman did it in Georgia is go into an agriculturally productive area, burn the mills, [3:03:39] kill the livestock, destroy the crops, lay waste to it so that it can't be a logistical support of [3:03:46] the Confederacy anymore. Sheridan did it in the Shenandoah Valley and then Sherman did it in Georgia. [3:03:51] But Sherman said, but I'm also going to break them psychologically. That's what he said, [3:03:56] that I'm going to show them that my army can go wherever it wants to go, whenever it wants to go, [3:04:00] and there's nothing Jefferson Davis can do about it. He said, when they decide that they'll give up. [3:04:05] Didn't exactly work that way, but that's what he said. So he marched first to Savannah, [3:04:10] and then the final campaign for Sherman was up through the Carolinas. He went up through South [3:04:15] Carolina and into North Carolina, and Grant laid siege to Lee, and the siege lasted nine months, [3:04:24] the siege of Petersburg and Richmond. Finally, Grant broke Lee's lines on April 1st, 1865. Lee [3:04:33] started a retreat. Grant just gave him no pause, and he ran him to ground at Appomattox after about a [3:04:41] week, and Lee surrendered. What do we know about the relationship between the two men? [3:04:47] Grant and Lee? Well, it's really interesting. They basically operated in totally different worlds. [3:04:53] They were both in the war with Mexico, but they weren't with each other in Mexico. They had some [3:05:01] awkward small talk at Appomattox before they got down to business. One said he remembered the other [3:05:06] one. The other one said he didn't remember him at all. Grant was very generous. He gave 25,000 [3:05:14] rations to Lee's army to survive. Lee began the retreat with about 60,000 men, only fewer than 30,000. [3:05:22] His army disintegrated in a week. He only surrendered 28,000 at Appomattox. They were allowed to sign a [3:05:29] parole and go home. But at the peak of Grant versus Lee, surely they were thinking about each other. [3:05:37] They were. And I've always found this interesting. They tended to be very generous toward other [3:05:43] opponents. But Grant pretended that Lee wasn't the best opponent he ever faced. And Lee pretended that [3:05:52] Grant wasn't the best opponent he ever faced. And it's ludicrous that they would have actually thought [3:05:56] that. They clearly found out that that wasn't true. It's interesting when people do that. I [3:06:01] I sometimes wonder how is it possible. There's just a million examples of this. For example, [3:06:10] Hitler just completely dismissed America as a military force. [3:06:15] Oh, it's nothing. They're a bunch of, yes, they're soft. They'll never do anything. [3:06:18] I have to say it's probably some silly psychological things. You make up your mind for some stupid [3:06:25] reason. And then you stick to it. And you stick to it. And you almost like against, I mean, [3:06:30] with a lot of great generals and leaders, you have to be stubborn in the face of facts sometimes. [3:06:37] You do. Because like all the rational people will tell you, you should get this with Napoleon. [3:06:42] Like, what are you doing? Like the generals, the wise, smart people around you will say, [3:06:47] don't do this. Grant's a perfect example of that, Lex, at Vicksburg, where he, [3:06:52] his problem was to get his army on the same side of the river as the Confederates, where he could come [3:06:56] against Vicksburg. And the only way to do it was have the Union Navy run. And [3:07:01] he said to do it, no, don't do it, said the Navy, no, don't, no, German, no, don't. Everybody said, [3:07:06] no. And Grant said, do it. And it worked. [3:07:10] I mean, it has to do with, I guess you've criticized once or twice this guy named McClellan. [3:07:16] I did once or twice. [3:07:18] That, you know, you do have to take risk. You have to take risk in order to win battles. [3:07:23] I'll finish. I can't resist getting one more shot. Lee is often quoted as saying that McClellan was [3:07:29] the most talented general he ever faced. But what he actually said, and the quote started with his [3:07:35] nephew, Fitzhugh Lee, who wrote it in a book after the war. Lee called McClellan the most intellectual [3:07:42] general he ever faced. And I think that is not a compliment. I think Lee is saying, yeah, [3:07:47] he's an intellectual. He thinks about this. He thinks about, he never does anything. [3:07:51] He thinks about things. So I think it's actually a slight, not a compliment to McClellan. I really do. [3:07:56] Yeah. Because he couldn't have possibly thought he was the most talented one that he, that he faced. [3:08:02] I think it's a polite wink and nod to criticize. It's a wink and nod. [3:08:06] Uh, all right. How does the war end? So clearly there's the turning point with Atlanta and [3:08:12] Sherman's March. And the election of 64 is the, that drives the dagger into, I mean, there's no question, [3:08:19] but that the war will be pushed to the end because Lincoln and Grant are in charge and they are not [3:08:24] going to take their foot off the pedal. They're going to push it. So it's a question of time. [3:08:29] It drags on, still drags on another six months. Lee surrenders on April 9th. They lay down their [3:08:36] arms on April 12th. There are still tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers under arms in [3:08:42] different places, but it's a measure of how important Lee and his army were that for everybody, [3:08:47] virtually on both sides, that's the end of the war. Lee surrendered. There's no reason to push this [3:08:52] any farther. And other surrenders came pretty quickly. Jefferson Davis was one of the few [3:08:57] people who didn't figure that out. He thought something was still possible, but it wasn't. [3:09:01] That was the end of the war. The final surrenders are over in June and that's it. And everybody gets [3:09:06] the same terms that Grant offered to Lee. His friend Sherman tried to do more and they had to [3:09:12] rein Sherman in and say, you can't, no, you're a general, not a politician. You can't do this. [3:09:17] So can we talk about April 9th? I mean, this is a really important [3:09:21] moment of what Grant did in terms of how he treated the opposing army. As I said earlier, [3:09:29] he treated him the way that he knew that Lincoln wanted them treated. And it may be that Grant [3:09:34] thought exactly the same thing, but I think this is a measure of how Grant was a very, [3:09:39] he's a soldier who knew his place. He has civilian superiors. Other generals didn't act that way. I know [3:09:46] I'm beating up on McClellan. He's one. Joseph Johnson on the Confederate side is one. [3:09:50] They didn't really defer to their civilian superiors. U.S. Grant did. And this is one of [3:09:56] those cases. He sent the rations. He didn't know that Confederates supplied their own horses. [3:10:02] If you're a Confederate cavalryman, the government didn't buy a horse for you. You had to supply your [3:10:07] horse. And if a horse got killed, you had to buy another one or they'd make you an infantryman. When [3:10:13] Grant found that out, he let them take their horses home with them. He said they'll need them for the [3:10:18] planting and so forth. He did everything in a generous way that you could reasonably think [3:10:24] might happen in a situation like it. It's still an unconditional surrender. You are surrendering. [3:10:28] You're going home. You're not an army anymore, but nobody's going to prisoner of war camps. [3:10:35] Nobody's doing those things. You lay your arms down, you lay your flags down, [3:10:38] you lay your ammunition down, but that's it. [3:10:41] Yeah, but there's certain symbolic actions like this that can lay the groundwork for long-term peace. [3:10:47] Yes. He didn't demand that Lee give him his sword. He didn't do that. None of those kinds of things [3:10:52] that you could have done. Sorry to linger on it, but there's certain elements of humiliation [3:10:57] that prevent long-term peace. I have to go back to Hitler and what Germany experienced at the end of [3:11:04] World War I. You mean Versailles, the terms from Versailles, no question about it. [3:11:08] Some of it is economics, some of it is geopolitics, but some of it is just on a basic human level, [3:11:14] humiliation. And people are just not good with humiliation. They remember. [3:11:19] No, and they can turn that around into something you don't want it to be, [3:11:24] to get back national pride. But Lincoln's bottom line was, the point is to put the nation back [3:11:30] together. And the good way to start that is not by imprisoning tens of thousands of Confederate [3:11:35] soldiers. That's not the way to do it. Send them home, make them accept the terms, [3:11:39] but then send them home and leave them alone. The president wanted to go after Lincoln's death. [3:11:44] Andrew Johnson wanted to go after Lee, and Grant said, I'll resign. We extended the terms. He's [3:11:52] abiding by the terms. You can't change the rules here. But by the way, it should be said that that's [3:11:57] not easy to do. You have just fought an extremely bloody battle. There's hatred. There were lots of [3:12:03] people who wanted Davis to swing and Lee to swing. Kill them. Execute the rebels. They're rebels and [3:12:08] traitors who almost destroyed the nation. Why are you being so easy on them? Thaddeus Stevens was on [3:12:15] board that train. Lots of radical Republicans where you need to punish them for whether you [3:12:19] haven't punished them enough. You're not punished them. Yes, you took slavery away from them, but [3:12:24] that's not enough. They should be punished more for what they did. Confiscate their lands. Take their [3:12:30] wealth away from them. So what happened next in terms of reconciliation? Well, Lincoln got [3:12:36] assassinated just a few days after Lee's troops laid down their arms. Can you talk to the [3:12:42] assassinations? He was shot five days after the surrender. Yes, he was. So who was Booth? Who was [3:12:49] John Wilkes Booth? Why did he assassinate Lincoln? What impact did that have? Well, he was the youngest [3:12:57] of the most famous acting family in the United States. Junius Brutus Booth and Edwin Booth, [3:13:02] his father and older brother, were very famous actors. And he was a very successful actor too. [3:13:07] John Wilkes Booth was. He was good at jumping around the stage and he was very athletic [3:13:14] and an ardent pro-Confederate. That's the more important. [3:13:18] Yeah, not ardent enough to put on a uniform for the Confederacy, but ardent enough to argue for the [3:13:26] Confederacy. He heard Lincoln make a statement about maybe black soldiers getting the vote. [3:13:34] And he said that was it for him, that somebody needed to kill the tyrant. This is after Lee had [3:13:40] surrendered. So he was on the Union side. Oh, yeah. Oh, yes. But Lincoln was a tyrant in his eyes. [3:13:48] Lincoln was a tyrant because of his treatment of the White South. And he had plotted earlier to [3:13:55] kidnap Lincoln and hold him for ransom. And that didn't work out. So then he got this little group [3:14:01] of losers around him to help. I mean, real misfits. Their plan was to kill Seward, Andrew Johnson. [3:14:08] They were going to cut off the top leadership of the United States, kill the president, kill the [3:14:14] vice president, kill the secretary of state. That's what they wanted to do. On the Johnson side, [3:14:18] they chickened out. That guy chickened out. A guy named Lewis Powell was sent to kill Seward. [3:14:23] Seward had been in an accident and had his neck in a big brace. And he slashed at Seward, huge scars on [3:14:31] the side of his face. But the knife hit the brace and didn't kill Seward. So Seward was disfigured. [3:14:36] His son was wounded. The guy was supposed to kill Johnson, chickened out. And Booth killed Lincoln. [3:14:42] And there was a manhunt for Booth. It took a while. And he was shot in a barn rather than captured and [3:14:49] put on trial. But four of the conspirators were put on trial, including one woman, a woman named [3:14:55] Mary Surratt, who ran a boarding house where some of them stayed. And they were all hanged [3:15:00] at Old Capitol Prison. And the combination of that hanging, they were tried by a military commission [3:15:08] and hanged. But they also put on trial and hanged the Commandant of Andersonville Prison, [3:15:13] which was the most infamous of the Confederate prison of war camps. They hanged him as well. [3:15:19] And it seemed that those hangings sort of took the edge, the sort of we need some retribution edge [3:15:25] off attitudes in the North. I think those things helped offset Lincoln's assassination in a sort of [3:15:32] odd way because the temperature went down after that. [3:15:37] You talk about maybe a bit of an aside, but that we Americans like to spin up conspiracy theories [3:15:46] about assassinations of our presidents. So that's certainly very true, maybe true the most [3:15:53] about Lincoln's assassination. There was a long literature actually, [3:15:57] began with a chemist named Otto Eisenschimmel many, many decades ago that implicated Secretary [3:16:03] Vorstanton and blamed the radicals were unhappy with Lincoln for not being harsher on the former [3:16:10] Confederates. And what they wanted to do was get him out of the way. They thought they could manipulate [3:16:15] Andrew Johnson if they got Andrew Johnson in charge. So then they would pose these questions. [3:16:22] How come no one was guarding Lincoln that night? How come the only bridge over the Potomac that wasn't [3:16:27] guarded is the one that Booth escaped across all of these? How come Grant didn't go to the play with [3:16:33] Lincoln? The Lincolns asked them, well, they didn't because Mrs. Lincoln didn't like, I mean, [3:16:37] Mrs. Grant didn't like Mrs. Lincoln. I mean, there are answers to all the questions, [3:16:41] but they put all these together, added two and two and got five, and said that it was a plot on [3:16:48] the part of the radical wing of the Republican Party to get rid of Lincoln because Lincoln didn't [3:16:52] want to be harsh enough on the South. Yeah, it's difficult to believe that dramatic, [3:16:58] sometimes catastrophic things happen for seemingly that like the random, as you said, loser. [3:17:07] It's not satisfying. You want a more satisfying. And that is a big conspiracy is better. There are [3:17:12] all these forces at work to get rid of Lincoln, not just that the one guy assigned to guard Lincoln, [3:17:17] there's no secret service then, went across the street to get a drink. And Booth had played in that [3:17:24] theater many times. He knew exactly the layout. He'd come in earlier. He'd arranged, I mean, [3:17:28] it's just, that's the way it worked out. And I have to say, it's kind of interesting. I have to be [3:17:34] honest with my own mind that like, I love a good conspiracy. My brain does. Almost everybody does. [3:17:40] I think it's, what is it? It's maybe depressing or heartbreaking to know that so much destruction [3:17:48] be caused by random events. You want there to be a larger system at play that makes you feel like [3:18:03] there's a meaning to this whole thing as opposed to the tides of history can turn on a stupid actor [3:18:11] shooting, shooting one of the greatest, if not the greatest president in the history. [3:18:16] That's correct. Killing him, jumping out of the presidential box, breaking his leg when he hit [3:18:22] the stage, limping off and getting away. Yep. [3:18:25] Over 700,000 people dead. These epic battles, all of that, Lincoln survives all of it. And then there's [3:18:35] when they had the grand review in Washington, when Sherman's armies in the Army of the Potomac [3:18:40] marched over two days, this amazing display of the troops that had won the main troops who had run the [3:18:46] war. One of the most common comments was, Lincoln's not here. Of all people who should have been here, [3:18:52] Lincoln should have been here, and he doesn't get to watch this. He's not in the presidential box [3:18:56] watching this. And the soldiers talked about it too. It's heartbreaking, really. Especially, [3:19:02] I would have loved to see his evolution as a leader, as a human being, and the words he may have found [3:19:13] to direct us as a country, you know, in the reconstruction. [3:19:18] Yep. It would have been different. We can't tell how different, [3:19:21] but it would have been different. And I think it would have worked more smoothly. [3:19:26] What was the construction? How rocky was it? [3:19:31] The White South liked to talk about the occupation of the South and how they were under the boot heel. [3:19:37] There was never an occupation of the former Confederacy, because there never were enough [3:19:41] troops available to do it. The most that were ever in the former Confederacy, [3:19:46] which is three quarters of a million square miles in size, was 30,000 men. And that was for a very [3:19:52] short period. By 1870, there were only about 10,000 men left. And the reason there wasn't an occupation is [3:19:58] because the Northern population wasn't willing to either pay for it or have keep men in uniform [3:20:04] long enough to make the White South do something that they didn't really care about, which was give [3:20:09] full, equal rights to formerly enslaved Black people. The White North just wasn't, they weren't [3:20:15] willing to do that. They were willing, largely because of Andrew Johnson's intransigence in the [3:20:23] summer of 1865, when he started to act like the South hadn't even quite lost, they were willing to [3:20:29] push far enough to get the 14th Amendment and the 15th Amendment. And that, to me, is sort of miraculous, [3:20:35] considering what the attitudes among White people were in the United States. You got the vote [3:20:40] given to African American men, and you got the 14th Amendment. So that's kind of amazing. And those [3:20:46] don't go away. They're still there on the books to be interpreted correctly down the line somewhere, [3:20:52] even though Jim Crow is a long and ugly episode of what comes. I mean, the Confederates just, [3:20:59] they weren't confused about being defeated. They were crushed. And so they vastly scaled back what they [3:21:05] wanted. They had wanted a slave-holding republic. They scaled back for just having white supremacy. [3:21:13] And that's what happened. You ended up with white supremacy and Jim Crow intact, which is a lot [3:21:19] different than keeping slavery intact. And that set off the whole process of [3:21:25] the Civil Rights Movement that lasted decades. [3:21:28] I mean, Jim Crow is the clearest expression of the White South's reaction to defeated Appomattox. [3:21:37] OK, what can we get out of this? We can't get what we wanted. This is the next best thing, [3:21:43] and that's what we'll get. We'll get Jim Crow. [3:21:45] You know, when you walk the ground of some of these battles in Gettysburg, [3:21:51] is there something you can only experience when you're there? [3:21:54] Yeah. In my experience, you cannot replicate in a classroom what you can do at a historic site. I [3:21:59] mean, a really historic site. You get people to a place like that. I've given untold tours on [3:22:06] battlefields and other historic places. You can talk about so much more than just what you can say. [3:22:11] First of all, you can understand what happened on the battlefield better than reading about it or [3:22:16] looking at maps, because the terrain makes it much clearer. But you can also talk about, OK, [3:22:21] what are the men like in the armies who are here? Why are they in the service? A lot of the things [3:22:25] we've talked about today. What's the status of the war now? What are the political situations behind [3:22:30] the lines? What difference will this battle make? What will happen if the Federals prevail or if the [3:22:36] Confederates prevail? Or you can use, at a place like Gettysburg, the memorial landscape as a wonderful [3:22:43] way to talk about memory from the war. Look at the inscriptions on the monuments. What was important [3:22:47] when they put these up? And the later monuments, the opportunities for a teacher on one of these [3:22:55] sites are just almost unlimited. And I don't want to be too woo-woo, but I also believe from some of [3:23:02] the experience I've had that the land has a kind of memory. I don't know what it is. They have a speech [3:23:07] in the cemetery at Gettysburg on the anniversary of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address every year. And I was [3:23:13] asked to do that a few years ago. And it was just, it was amazing to me. I mean, there have been very [3:23:19] few things in my career that are like that. And we, we want, we talked, we stopped in different parts [3:23:26] of the summer. There were a thousand people there. It was an extremely cold, windy November 19th. And it [3:23:32] was just, talk about feeling the ghosts of the past. It was really something that I've only felt a few [3:23:39] times in my life. It was really interesting, really interesting. You've mentioned the lost cause [3:23:45] a few times. What was the lost cause? Who created it and what did it claim? [3:23:49] The lost cause is the Confederate memory stream of the war. And let me just say very, [3:23:55] very briefly, I think there are four main ways the generation that experienced the war remembered it. [3:24:00] The one remembered by the most people would be the majority of white Northerners is what I call the [3:24:05] Union cause and that the greatest outcome of the war was putting the nation back together. [3:24:10] It's also good that slavery was killed. That's important. But the most important thing was [3:24:14] putting the nation back together. The emancipation cause memory of the war is yes, it's a good thing [3:24:19] that the Union was saved, but the most important thing is you killed slavery. You got rid of this [3:24:24] monstrous institution that had mocked that language in the founding documents. So those are both the [3:24:30] winners versions of the war. The Confederate version, the Confederates are in a tough spot. How do we make [3:24:36] something palatable out of this catastrophic decision we made in 1861? We'll do this to save [3:24:44] slavery. And four years later, slavery's dead. And a third of all, our white military age [3:24:48] boys are dead. So here's what we're going to do. First of all, it wasn't about slavery. Let's pretend [3:24:55] it wasn't about slavery. It was about high constitutional principles. It was about state rights as opposed to [3:25:00] central authority oppressing people. And second, we never could have won. It was a hopeless fight. [3:25:07] Against long odds. And so it was a gallant effort in pursuit of constitutional rights. [3:25:14] Okay, that gets us off the hook there. And who are we going to look to? Should we talk about [3:25:18] Jefferson Davis? No, we didn't even like him during the war. I know who we'll talk about. Let's talk [3:25:23] about Robert E. Lee. He won victories against the odds. So these are kind of the main tenets of the [3:25:29] lost cause. It wasn't about slavery. We never could have won. There's no loss of honor in losing a [3:25:33] battle you never could have won, but that you waged for high constitutional principle. And let's talk [3:25:38] about Lee, because we don't want to talk about Jefferson Davis, and there's almost no one else [3:25:42] to talk about except maybe Stonewall Jackson. Those will be our two boys that we talk about the most. [3:25:47] And that is basically the short form of the lost cause. The fourth way that people remembered, [3:25:53] and this came a little bit later, was the reconciliation cause. This is kind of white [3:25:57] northerners and white southerners agreeing not to talk about slavery. Don't talk about emancipation. Let's [3:26:02] talk about shared American virtues of courage and so forth. So some of that still persists with us [3:26:10] today. We look at the Confederate flag. So some historians argue for the long, quote, long civil. [3:26:16] Sure. And it's really long. It's the Civil War that never ends, kind of. And I certainly think that [3:26:21] there are ramifications from the Civil War that have never ended. But I think the Civil War ended, [3:26:27] and I think it ended in the early summer of 1865 with the destruction of the Confederate [3:26:32] government, the absolute dissolution of all the Confederate military forces. I think that is the [3:26:38] end of the Civil War. People at the time thought it was too. What comes afterward, the long coda. [3:26:43] Reconstruction is a 12-year coda to a four-year war that works out some of the difficulties of how you put [3:26:49] the nation back together. And then beyond that, you have these different memory streams that have been [3:26:56] contending with one another, some of which still reverberate today, including what are you going [3:27:02] to do with the Confederate flag? There are a lot of nitwits around. They don't even know what the [3:27:07] Confederate flag was. They fly a rectangular version of the St. Andrew's Cross. That is not [3:27:14] the Confederate flag. They call it the Confederate flag. The Confederate flag that had a St. Andrew's [3:27:20] Cross wasn't a rectangle. It was a square. And the actual Confederate flag had three big bars and then [3:27:26] stars up. And it looks kind of like the United States flag. They don't even know that. And they [3:27:31] go around flying it everywhere. It's a symbol and pretend that it represents all kinds of things. [3:27:37] The Confederate flag cannot be divorced from all the times, that version of it, the St. Andrew's [3:27:43] Cross version. Every Ku Klux Klan group flew it. You just can't sanitize it. I mean, I saw Confederate [3:27:51] flags in Britain and Ireland. I mean, it's become a sort of up-yours symbol, I think, in some places, [3:27:58] of just sort of rebellion, not necessarily tethered specifically. Rebellion against the [3:28:02] institutions. Against authority and institutions and the ruling class. But here, it has a very specific [3:28:09] meaning and you just can't separate it. People should quit trying. So you taught at UVA and lived [3:28:17] through Charlottesville in 2017. Can you tell me what Charlottesville was? What did it mean? [3:28:23] It's really interesting because the day just before that, I did a long interview with Katie Couric, [3:28:33] who was working on a documentary about Confederate monuments. And she and I spent two hours talking, [3:28:40] walking around the UVA campus, talking about the Confederate monuments were there. She was a [3:28:46] student at UVA. She said, I didn't even know these were here. I said, well, most people don't know [3:28:50] they're here. They're not aware of this, of this part of the landscape. We had no idea. Her film crew [3:28:56] went out the next day and filmed what was going on when they actually had the violence and the crowd [3:29:03] at the Lee statue, which was downtown. I didn't go down to watch any of that. [3:29:08] What's your view on Confederate monuments? You know, the monuments that capture [3:29:16] these periods, these complicated periods of our history? [3:29:19] Well, I have complicated views, but my first reaction to that is they're not all the same. [3:29:26] They're treated as if they're all exactly the same and they're not. There are the Silent Sam, [3:29:34] which was on the campus at UNC for years. It had some of the rhetoric when they dedicated that is [3:29:42] really horrific. It's horrible rhetoric. And I can understand why that needed to go. There's [3:29:46] what was called the Battle of Liberty Place monument in New Orleans that was a white supremacist monument. [3:29:54] Very definitely that. I think that local places should decide these. Wherever the monument is, [3:30:01] I think that's who should decide. And I think there should be a process how they decide it. [3:30:06] Let people have a public hearing. But they did that in Charlottesville, actually. At a public hearing, [3:30:11] I went and talked at it. Lots of other scholars and local people talked at it. And then they had a [3:30:18] commission that they had set up and the commission voted to keep the monuments in place, but re-examine [3:30:25] them with texts that put them in context and then put up monuments, new monuments to previously ignored groups. [3:30:35] The city council then came in and overrode that and decided they took them all down in Charlottesville. [3:30:40] They also took down the Lewis and Clark monument and they took down all the monuments that had been put up. [3:30:46] I think many of the Confederate monuments, the kind of ones on courthouse lawns and so forth, [3:30:53] that were put up by the Confederate generation. That is, the veterans themselves and the women who [3:30:58] were alive during the war tend to be monuments to the common soldiers that just kind of lost generation [3:31:04] of young men. The later wave of monuments that came were put up by other groups that were not, [3:31:14] they're not really Confederate monuments. They're put up by the ones that were put up in the 20s and 30s. [3:31:18] A third wave were put up in reaction to the civil rights activities in the 50s and early 60s. And [3:31:24] then a fourth wave went up after the movie Gettysburg and Ken Burns' series. But they're complicated and [3:31:30] I see them as historical. And I understand the arguments on both sides. I understand people who [3:31:35] just say they're hateful. They bring up hateful remembrances. We should get rid of all of them, [3:31:39] every one of them. I used them as teaching tools in Charlottesville for years with groups of teachers and [3:31:45] students. There were five monuments in Charlottesville, two that were put up by veterans, [3:31:51] two that were put up by groups later. The Lee and Jackson statues were those. And then there were two [3:31:57] bronze plates on the side of the rotunda that just listed UVA graduates who died in Confederate [3:32:03] service, had about 500 names on them. Those were all of the Confederate statues there. And I used them [3:32:10] to talk about different strains of memory. The main tenor of the Lee statue when it went up was this [3:32:18] reconciliationist Lee. Lee wanted the nation back together. Lee at Appomattox, that kind of stuff. [3:32:24] Didn't have anything to do with Jim Crow or white supremacy. Although all the people who put them up [3:32:28] probably would have, clearly, we would consider them racist. They were in favor of white supremacy. [3:32:34] But you don't need statues in the post-war South and the Jim Crow South. You have the police force, [3:32:41] state law, local law, state troopers. That's what enforces white supremacy, not statues. The historian [3:32:48] in me likes to use them as part of the historical record, interpret them, use them to explain different [3:32:56] parts of U.S. history. That's how I used them. Having said all that, I did and still do believe [3:33:04] that it should be a local issue. If a locality decides they don't want them up anymore, then [3:33:08] don't have them up anymore. Lee I think if we ignore history, [3:33:11] we're going to be doomed to repeat it. I think we should never censor books. We should read books. [3:33:18] We should read Mein Kampf. We should read books that capture a certain moment in history, [3:33:24] even if it's a hateful moment in history, even if it's a destructive moment in history. We need [3:33:28] to understand. Or have them read texts written at the time that have language that we wouldn't use [3:33:35] now. It helps you understand the time. There are a lot of hard edges in the past. There are a lot of [3:33:42] nice edges, too, that make you feel good. But there are a lot of really hard edges in the past. And if [3:33:47] you're going to be serious about coming to terms with history, you need to accept that and deal with [3:33:53] talk about them and not just try to erase them, I think. There are a lot of books that people won't [3:33:59] read now. I taught a graduate seminar at one point on foundational 19th century texts. And one of the [3:34:06] texts that I assigned in the class was Huckleberry Finn. And a lot of the students said they wouldn't [3:34:14] read Huckleberry Finn because they knew it had language in it and they didn't want to see those words. [3:34:18] Even just reading about slavery, American and otherwise, it's hard. It's really difficult. [3:34:25] But we're capable of that. We humans are capable of that. And it doesn't somehow go away because [3:34:34] we agree for it to go away. We always can return back to that, maybe in other forms, in other ways. [3:34:41] We can do evil things onto each other. And I personally believe all of us are capable of doing [3:34:47] evil things onto each other. And the dark reality of that is we too readily convince ourselves that [3:34:56] we're doing good. Yeah, because if you're doing good, you can do anything. And it's justified if [3:35:02] it's good. Yeah. If the end is good, all bets are off. You can do anything that you want to do. [3:35:08] And reading history to realize that we need to think deeper and more critically [3:35:16] about our actions. And also that history is complicated and there's a bunch of different forces [3:35:25] is really important. And also to realize that individuals can turn the ties of history, can lead [3:35:36] to progress, can stop evildoing when it's happening. All those things, like the power of the individual [3:35:42] is immense. Yes. I mean, coming back to the monuments for a minute, it's also worth talking [3:35:48] about that even at the time there were people who, a lot of Union veterans were against putting up [3:35:53] Confederate monuments. Frederick Douglass had a problem with the Emancipation Monument that was in [3:35:58] Emancipation Park on Capitol Hill and talked about the reasons why he had problems. Why is this the image [3:36:03] that you chose for that monument? Union veterans, they had a hard time with Confederate monuments. [3:36:09] And I just think that it is almost everything can be a teaching tool, but it bothers me that certain [3:36:19] books would be prescribed because they have some language that might bother somebody. And if you need [3:36:25] to, I mean, the language should bother you. So I think, I think history truly should bother you. [3:36:37] Yeah. It, it, it should be difficult. It should be a painful process to study human history because if [3:36:45] it's not painful, you're not really understanding the full range of what we're capable of. But anyway, [3:36:54] you know, people in the modern day, I have to ask you about this kind of casually talk about [3:37:00] the new civil war in America. As somebody who studied the civil war, do you think our country [3:37:06] today is divided to a degree that's on the verge of something like the civil war of the 19th century? [3:37:14] No, I really don't. And, and I'm not, and I don't mean to play down the degree to which [3:37:20] that we are divided. We are divided. We, we do resemble the 1850s now in that I think the first impulse [3:37:27] on the part of people on either side of the political spectrum is to attribute the worst to the other [3:37:32] side and to, and to not acknowledge any, any good on the other side, to attribute the worst possible [3:37:39] political characteristics to the other side and to have inflammatory rhetoric coming from various [3:37:46] directions that, that really seeks to sort of stir up as much unhappiness and controversy as possible. I think [3:37:53] we're like the 1850s in that way, but I, but in terms of whether we're really at the point where the [3:37:59] kind of actions that I've dealt with in my study of the civil war, I don't think we're anywhere near [3:38:06] that. And I mean, I really don't. If we get there, that will be heartbreaking, but I just don't, I just [3:38:12] don't see it. I don't see physical assaults against members of Congress on the floor of the Congress. I [3:38:19] don't see it. It's, it's, it's states talk about seceding if things don't go. Texas talked about [3:38:26] seceding when Obama was elected. California talked about seceding when Trump was elected, but you know [3:38:31] what, neither one of them called the secession convention and had delegates go to it. When Lincoln was [3:38:36] elected, they called conventions, they voted to secede and they left the nation. So it's, [3:38:42] that's different to me than talking about it and threatening it and posing different scenarios. [3:38:49] Are there genuine structural parallels between that time and now, if you can linger on that? [3:38:55] Well, I mean, the states, structurally, a state can call a convention if it wants to, [3:39:01] and to talk about whatever it wants to talk about. So I suppose that structure [3:39:06] is still in, is still in place, but I haven't seen any serious movement toward doing something like [3:39:14] that. Yeah. And I think there's a real cohesion and resilience to the union as, as we've talked [3:39:22] about. I think people are, despite the discourse in the bickering, um, there's a real love of nation [3:39:34] that maybe is not often expressed explicitly, but, um, there is a sense that we're all in this kind of [3:39:42] together. And then we're yelling at each other, kind of like you have a family at Thanksgiving dinner, [3:39:47] or there's very, uh, passionate yelling and arguing, but there's a kind of assumption that [3:39:55] we're still a family. At least that's the hope. You know, one of the questions that the civil war asked [3:40:03] is, um, what is America? Uh, so I have to ask you from, from over 50 years of studying civil war, [3:40:13] it's like, what, what do you think, what is this country? What is this union? What are, what are, [3:40:20] what is the core that makes us who we are? Well, I think in a lot of ways, it's much of what it was [3:40:28] in the mid 19th century. I still think it's a magnet. I mean, we're in an unbelievable, we're far [3:40:33] more diverse now as a people than we were during the civil war, because we continue to act in the [3:40:39] same way as it did in the civil war. Only they're not Germans and I, people come from everywhere here [3:40:44] now. I mean, they literally come from everywhere here now and everybody doesn't find a nice easy [3:40:50] road here by any means. And there are lots of things wrong with the United States, but I still [3:40:56] think the United States acts has, it has a role in the world. That's unlike, I won't say any other [3:41:04] place, but I can't think of a place that's quite like it, that has so many people coming from so [3:41:08] many places who somehow managed to fit in to this mosaic. And then I think most people do have a way [3:41:15] to fit into the mosaic. And then they become part of the old mosaic when the next group of people who [3:41:21] are not like them come in. And those are the ones who are the new ones fitting in. [3:41:24] Yeah. Sometimes I think about, I'm sorry to romanticize it, but because I do think that [3:41:31] Barack Obama is one of the great speech makers of my lifetime. And I sometimes imagine what [3:41:40] Lincoln would have thought if he could attend an Obama speech, if he saw that Obama became president, [3:41:49] that an African-American became president of the United States of America. It seems like such a trivial [3:41:56] thing to say, but I think it's not trivial at all. It's one of the great accomplishments of our country. [3:42:04] I think one of Lincoln's great attributes was his humanity comes through so many things that he wrote, [3:42:13] his real appreciation for people who faced long odds, worked against the odds, didn't begin [3:42:20] with advantages in their favor and so forth, and his ability to grow. I think he would have handled [3:42:26] that actually pretty well, much better than many other people I can think of from the mid-19th century. [3:42:33] I think he had genuine humanity. I don't think you can read all the things he wrote and not come to that [3:42:41] conclusion. So does he check all our boxes now? Of course he doesn't. Was he prejudiced by our [3:42:47] standards in some ways? Of course he was. But I think he would have handled that pretty well. And he [3:42:53] would have still been really tall. Even in our time, he'd be way taller than most people. [3:42:59] Yeah. What, uh, you know, 250th birthday, uh, what gives you hope about the future of America? [3:43:10] What gives me hope? I mean, and I'm, and I'm a grouchy, not optimistic person in a lot of ways. [3:43:15] Yeah, I am. I am. You had some moments of optimism today. I was just going to say, [3:43:21] but I do have moments of optimism. And one of them I have is in the resiliency of this republic. I, [3:43:29] I really do have, and it's genuine optimism. I'm not just, and I know a lot of people will think [3:43:34] that it's naive, but I really, because I see what it's been through and it's emerged [3:43:38] and it's gone forward and the trajectory, and this is something that Obama has commented on. [3:43:44] And as have many others, the trajectory is in the right direction with lots of things you wish were [3:43:50] different, but the overall trajectory is in the right direction. I really do believe that. And that's why [3:43:55] I, I tend to be in that regard optimistic. I think there's a few folks on the interwebs that [3:44:04] talk about the decline of their American empire, even using the word empire. I, I, I'm one of the, [3:44:11] one of the folks who, uh, thinks that America is flourishing and it's, it is a beacon of hope and [3:44:17] freedom in the world. And there's a lot to criticize the militarism, uh, and a lot of different [3:44:24] aspects that are hypocritical and, um, is not always living up to the great ideals that it, uh, [3:44:34] supposedly represents, but at least is striving towards that. And, uh, it is still a home for the great [3:44:42] diversity of humans, as you've mentioned, that I think is one of the great, beautiful aspects about [3:44:47] this country and the full mess of it, the drama, the arguments, the, the heated passion, the chaos, [3:44:55] the thing that feels like chaos, but I think ultimately will lead to progress. I love all of [3:45:00] it. I think it is the greatest nation on earth. So on this 250th birthday, I hope there's 250 years [3:45:07] more. And, uh, I'm truly grateful that there's somebody like you studying our great history and [3:45:16] I'm grateful for this wonderful conversation today. I appreciate the invitation. It's been fun. [3:45:20] Thank you, Gary. Thank you for listening to this conversation with Gary Gallagher. [3:45:25] To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description where you can also [3:45:30] find links to contact me, ask questions, get feedback, and so on. And now let me leave you with [3:45:36] some words from William Tecumseh Sherman, a United States Army General in the Union Army during the [3:45:42] Civil War. I am tired and sick of war, as glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither [3:45:50] fired or shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, [3:45:57] for desolation. War is hell. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.