#499 – Gary Gallagher: American Civil War, Slavery, Lincoln, Grant & Lee

Gary Gallagher argues without qualification that slavery caused the Civil War, but draws a sharp distinction between causation and motivation. The central political conflict was not over abolishing slavery but over whether it could expand into federal territories, with slaveholding states fearing that blocked expansion would lock them into permanent minority status under a federal government capable of interfering with the institution. Abolitionists were a tiny minority even in the North, with the Liberty Party reaching only about two and a half percent of the vote in 1844. The Republican Party's platform in 1856 and 1860 was no expansion of slavery into territories, not abolition, yet white Southerners read even that limited position as a path toward eventual federal interference. Seven Deep South states seceded directly in response to Lincoln's election, with South Carolina going first on December 20, 1860.

The 1860 census valued slaveholders' property in enslaved people alone at approximately three billion dollars, exceeding the combined value of all industries and railroads at under two and a half billion. Slavery in 1860 was not dying out but expanding and moving beyond cash crop agriculture into industrial applications. Gallagher argues that without the Civil War the United States would have been the last major nation to abolish slavery, outlasting Brazil and Cuba, and that Lincoln himself believed slavery might have lasted another fifty years. Britain freed 800,000 enslaved people in 1833 by purchase, Russia freed 23 million serfs in 1861 by decree, and Brazil abolished slavery in 1888 through ordinary legislation, all without mass violence. Gallagher notes Britain's abolition was comparatively easier because enslaved people did not live among the British home population.

Most Union soldiers enlisted to preserve the Union rather than to destroy slavery. They understood the Union as a unique inheritance from the founding generation offering political voice and economic opportunity, and in 1860 the United States had by far the broadest voting franchise in the Western world. The failed European revolutions of the 1840s reinforced the sense that American democracy was uniquely fragile. Lincoln's phrase last best hope of Earth referred to the United States as a beacon of small-d democracy in a world drifting toward aristocracy. The initial Union war aim was suppressing the rebellion, and that goal shifted only in the summer of 1862 when Union leadership concluded the rebellion could not be suppressed without striking at slavery. Lincoln grounded the Emancipation Proclamation entirely in his war-making power as commander-in-chief, deliberately omitted soaring language to frame it as a military measure, and at the moment of signing it freed no one because it applied only where Confederate forces remained in control.

The Civil War death toll has been revised upward from the long-cited 618,000 to certainly more than 700,000 and likely over 750,000, making it by far the bloodiest war in American history as a share of population. The Confederacy mobilized between 85 and 90 percent of all white military-age males because enslaved labor kept its economy functioning. The Confederacy passed the first national conscription law in American history in spring 1862, before the Union did, and also enacted a national graduated income tax and a tax in kind on crops, making it paradoxically the most intrusive central government in American history until deep into the twentieth century. Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens opposed Jefferson Davis's nationalist expansion of central power throughout the war.

Gallagher rates Lincoln as the most eloquent president in American history by a wide margin and calls the Second Inaugural Address the greatest speech in American history. Lincoln placed his main rivals including Seward and Chase in his cabinet, tolerated extreme personal rudeness from McClellan because he believed McClellan might win the war, and carried deep depression throughout his life while managing an all-encompassing conflict. Grant's total casualties across all major battles before the Overland Campaign were 37,000, while Lee's exceeded 98,000 in the same period. A demographic study found soldiers in Lee's army had a 73 percent chance of becoming a casualty, and Gallagher calls Lee the bloodiest general in American history in terms of how many of his own men were shot. Gallagher argues that if Lee is removed from the picture the war could have ended as early as summer 1862 with slavery still intact, but that Lee paradoxically furthered emancipation by extending the war long enough that the United States concluded it had to destroy slavery to win.

Union victory was not structurally guaranteed despite massive advantages. The U.S. Army had only 15,000 men in 1860, the Navy had fewer than 50 vessels with exactly three available to blockade 3,600 miles of Confederate coastline, and Confederate territory was as large as all of Western Europe. The Confederate strategic requirement was not to defeat the Union militarily but only to convince loyal-state civilians the war was not worth its cost, a goal the Confederacy came very close to achieving in the summer of 1864, a dynamic Gallagher compares directly to the American experience in Vietnam. Union civilian morale reached its lowest point in July and August 1864, and Lincoln convened his cabinet to sign what became known as the blind memorandum, stating he expected to lose the election. Sherman's capture of Atlanta in early September 1864 was, in Gallagher's view, the real turning point for Lincoln's reelection.