Transcript [00:00] - You cannot control what a great military event [00:04] can set loose. More battle casualties than US forces had [00:08] suffered in every war combined down to that point happened in two [00:11] days. Two and a half months after that, George B. McClellan's army [00:16] engaged with Lee's army in what came to be called the Seven Days Battles at Richmond, [00:20] 36,000 casualties. So those two together just [00:24] showed that this was gonna be on a totally different [00:27] scale. He added a psychological twist. What, [00:31] what Grant envisioned his doing, and Sheridan actually did it in the Shenandoah [00:35] Valley before Sherman did it in Georgia, is go into an [00:39] agriculturally productive area, burn the mills, kill the livestock, [00:43] destroy the crops, lay waste to it so that it can't be a logistical support of the [00:48] Confederacy anymore. Sheridan did it in the Shenandoah Valley, and then Sherman [00:52] did it in Georgia. But Sherman said, "But I'm also going to break them [00:56] psychologically. I'm gonna show them that my army can go wherever it wants to go [01:00] whenever it wants to go, and there's nothing Jefferson Davis can do about it." The great [01:04] forces are all that matters and individuals don't really matter notion of history I [01:08] think is ridiculous. Individuals really matter. For the [01:12] United States, Lincoln and Grant matter beyond calculation- [01:16] ... in this war. And on the Confederate side, if you take Lee out of the picture, the [01:20] war doesn't last nearly as long as it does. In terms of causation, if you take [01:24] slavery out of the picture, there is no Civil War, period. [01:29] - The following is a conversation with Gary Gallagher, a [01:33] historian of the American Civil War. [01:36] This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors [01:40] in the description where you can also find links to contact me, [01:44] ask questions, give feedback, and so on. And now, dear [01:48] friends, here's Gary Gallagher. The American Civil War broke out in 1861. [01:57] What were the causes of the Civil War? Could it have been [02:01] avoided, or was it inevitable? [02:04] - I don't know if anything is inevitable in history, but it's certainly safe to say [02:08] that the conditions were in place to make it possible- [02:11] ... by the winter of 1860, '61, and the conditions that made it possible [02:15] were all related to the institution of slavery and [02:19] its effects both in the states where slavery was allowed and the states [02:23] where it was not allowed. And there had been a series of tensions [02:27] that grew in the decade preceding the 1850s. [02:31] It's not that one side wants to get rid of slavery and the other side [02:35] wants to protect slavery. I'm talking about the white people in the United States now [02:39] who would be making the political decisions. [02:43] It's a question of whether slavery was going to be able to expand into federal [02:47] territories. That is what really created [02:51] the starkest difference between the two sections in the [02:55] 1850s, even in the late 1840s. The issues that came to most, uh, [03:02] perilous a point in the view of many people then had to do with whether slavery would [03:06] be allowed only where it already existed, or would it be allowed to [03:09] expand. If it could expand, then it seemed that it might [03:13] be conceivable at some point even that the slaveholding states [03:17] could end up with a majority. They were in a minority by 1860, [03:21] '61 and feeling beleaguered, feeling threatened. They'd long since lost [03:25] the population race to the free states. [03:28] Early in the nation, the most powerful states were slaveholding states. Virginia was by [03:32] far the most important state. Four of the first five [03:36] presidents were from Virginia, all slaveholders, all prominent [03:40] members of the slaveholding class. Those days were long gone by the late 1850s. [03:45] - So that's an important thing to say. It wasn't before the Civil [03:49] War a discussion about abolishing slavery. It's about whether [03:52] slavery, the institution of slavery should be expanded. [03:56] - Allowed to expand into federal territories. There, there is a portion [04:01] of the white population that is adamantly in favor of [04:04] getting rid of slavery immediately. The abolitionists, they... There was even a political party [04:08] called the Liberty Party, that ran a candidate in 1840 and they got a handful of [04:14] thousand votes. They reached their high point in 1844. They got about [04:18] two and a half percent of the vote. [04:20] The abolitionists are a tiny minority among the— even in the North, tiny [04:24] minority among the white people of the United States. The African [04:28] American population, nearly four million of them by 1860, of [04:32] course, would have embraced it instantly and yearned for it. But in [04:36] the white population, the abolitionists are a tiny minority. They are much despised [04:41] even across much of the North because they were seen as agitators [04:45] who roiled the Union and deepened rifts that might [04:49] bring a significant political break. [04:52] - So how did this escalate to a civil war, this [04:55] almost policy discussion about the institution of slavery? How did it [04:59] actually escalate? [05:00] - It escalated into a civil war because in the presidential election of [05:04] 1860... There'd been two party systems in the United States. The first [05:08] party system, the Republicans, the Jeffersonian Republicans versus the Federalists. [05:14] After that, there was, the two parties were the Whig Party against the [05:18] Democratic Party. The Democratic Party grew out of the Jeffersonian Republican Party. [05:22] It's the same party. [05:23] The Whig Party foundered to a significant degree on the issue of slavery. [05:29] How do you maintain a national party that has a wing in the Southern [05:33] states and has a wing [05:35] in the Northern free states that can handle the issue of slavery? [05:39] The Democrats managed to do that. The Whigs could not do it, and so the Whig [05:43] Party ran their last candidate in 1852, presidential candidate, [05:46] significant candidate. And the Republican Party emerged in the [05:50] mid-1850s, took most of the old Whigs into the Republican [05:54] ranks and one of the Republican, the key Republican platform plank [05:58] was no expansion of slavery into the territories. [06:02] Not abolish slavery, no expansion. That was the key in [06:05] 1856 when they ran their first candidate. In 1860, that [06:09] is again the key plank in the Republican platform. The Republican platform in [06:12] 1860 says where slavery exists it will continue, but it cannot expand into the [06:19] territories. When white Southerners saw that, that meant that [06:23] they were doomed to become an increasingly [06:27] minority section in the nation, and you would have a federal [06:31] government increasingly dominated by the free states that could then do the one [06:34] thing that the white South could not countenance, and that is [06:38] tamper with the institution of slavery in the South. [06:43] The presidential election of 1860 brought the destruction of the [06:47] last national party, which was the Democrats. They couldn't even [06:51] settle on a candidate, so you end up with a Northern Democratic candidate running, [06:55] Stephen A. Douglas, and a Southern candidate running. The [06:58] convention fractured and John C. Breckinridge ran on the, on the Southern [07:02] Democrat platform. You had a Unionist candidate running who just [07:06] didn't wanna talk about slavery, let's talk about the Union, and you had Lincoln [07:10] running as a Republican. When Lincoln won, the white South looked at Lincoln [07:14] winning. Here's a guy who has said that he doesn't [07:17] think slavery would expand, but he'd said more than that. He [07:21] scared the white South more because in 1858, both Lincoln and William [07:25] Henry Seward, these are two prominent, prominent Republicans, [07:29] had said basically in separate speeches, the House Divided Speech [07:33] on Lincoln's part, the Irrepressible Conflict Speech on Seward's part, [07:37] that the nation could not continue in the long term half slave and half free. [07:42] And everybody in the South knew which way they wanted it to be. They [07:45] would want it to be no slavery. And so Lincoln's election [07:51] scared the white South enough so that seven of the 15 [07:54] slave-holding states seceded in response to Lincoln's election. [07:58] They seceded between December 20th, when South Carolina went out, [08:02] and the end of February. You had the deep South went out. [08:06] - What was the general view amongst the populace towards slavery? Let's [08:10] kind of lay it out. Let's you know, for the audience looking back, [08:16] let's put ourselves in the mind space of how people [08:20] saw the world, how people saw slavery, how people saw African Americans. [08:24] - Well, the baseline among the white Americans, there were about [08:28] 31, shade more than 31 million Americans in 1860 for the census of 1860. [08:35] About four million of them were African Americans, [08:39] three and a half million of those enslaved in the South. Anyway, [08:44] among the white population, [08:47] the average attitude toward Black people is what we would call [08:50] profoundly prejudiced. Doesn't matter whether you... A lot of people think this is a [08:54] Southern white thing. They're the only ones who were prejudiced. By our standards, the [08:58] overwhelming majority of people in the free states [09:02] were also deeply prejudiced. It's important to [09:06] keep in mind that attitudes towards slavery and attitudes toward race [09:10] do not, they're not necessarily the same. I mean, you could be against [09:14] slavery and still be prejudiced against Black people. By our standards, many [09:17] abolitionists were prejudiced against Black people. They... [09:21] But the overwhelming majority of the white North, [09:25] in the North, often had a hard time getting my students to understand the demographics [09:29] in 1860. The free states in 1860 were more than 98% white. [09:35] 98% white. African Americans are a tiny [09:39] minority in the free states. Black people lived in the 15 slaveholding [09:43] states in 1860. Most of the white North, by our [09:47] standards, was very prejudiced. They were against the expansion of [09:51] slavery into the territories because they thought that would circumscribe [09:54] white opportunities to make an economic life in these federal territories, [10:01] and they didn't want that to happen. About 45% of the people who lived [10:05] in the free states were Democrats. Most Democrats had no problem with [10:08] slavery. I mean, absolutely no problem with the institution of [10:12] slavery. There would be more problems among Republicans, [10:16] especially with extension of slavery, although many Democrats, white [10:20] Democrats in the North were against that as well. [10:23] The white South was overwhelmingly in favor of slavery. You [10:27] often read the argument, the kind of neo-Confederate argument that [10:31] they'll talk about how most Confederate soldiers didn't own slaves. That's true. [10:35] The a large majority of families in the South did not own a single slave. [10:39] But all white Southerners had a stake in slavery. They had a stake in [10:43] 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 [10:49] control. They knew, no matter what they said later in the Jim Crow era of [10:56] how happy Black people were in the institution of slavery, they knew that Black people, [11:00] of course, did not want to be enslaved, and they were afraid of what would happen if [11:04] they weren't enslaved anymore. They had in the backs of their minds Haiti. Is that [11:08] what's gonna... If you live in one of the coastal districts of South Carolina where [11:11] 90% of the residents are enslaved and you're a white person, you [11:15] probably don't sleep all that soundly at night if you think there's any [11:19] chance that the Black people are not gonna remain under the control of the [11:23] white people. So all white people in the South had a stake in slavery, [11:27] not just some. All of them did, and there were all kinds of ways that [11:31] it would go back and forth. If you were a modest [11:35] farmer and grew a little bit of cotton, you didn't have your own cotton gin, you... [11:39] but your more wealthy neighbor had a gin, could gin your cotton there, and [11:43] then you would take your turn on the slave patrol, the slave patrols. So there's a [11:47] reciprocity in that regard. [11:50] - This is perhaps a bit outside the scope of what we'll talk about today, [11:54] but just to lay out the context on slavery in general in human [11:58] history, we should say that slavery was [12:01] ubiquitous. It existed in virtually every major [12:05] civilization in the history of humans. [12:08] Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, China, the Islamic [12:12] world, Africa, the Americas, North and South America. [12:16] We should also say something that, as I was looking into this, [12:20] another big topic, which is the Atlantic slave trade. And it was surprising to me, [12:26] the stat I wasn't aware of, I would venture to say most Americans probably don't know, [12:30] that only 4% of African slaves were brought to North America, to the United States. [12:37] - Brazil is the main destination. [12:39] - Brazil, the Caribbean was over 90%, 4.9 million in [12:43] Brazil, 4 million in the Caribbean, [12:46] and it was also the last of the Americas to abolish the slave trade. So [12:50] only 4% of the Atlantic slave trade went to the United States. So there's-- [12:56] the story of human slavery is one that reaches deep [13:02] into our history and geographically is much [13:05] 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 [13:13] our discussion, I mean, one thing it did was end slavery [13:18] in four years in the United States. [13:22] Whereas in the absence of that war, it might have gone on for decades. I think the [13:26] United States would have had the ignominious distinction of being the last [13:30] place to get rid of slavery, would have been after Brazil, would have been after Spanish [13:34] Cuba, because it was thriving in the United States in 1860. It was [13:38] making the transition from cash crop agriculture- [13:42] ... to other, to industrial applications and other applications [13:46] growing of non-- not growing, growing just cotton and rice and sugar. It was-- [13:54] There was a time in the literature when people argued that the war [13:58] was needless, the Civil War was needless because slavery was on its way out. That's absolutely [14:02] wrong. It was not on its way out. It was thriving. Lincoln said at one point he [14:06] thought it might have lasted another fifty years, and I don't know how many [14:10] years it would have lasted, but I think it would have lasted longer than it did in either Cuba or [14:14] Brazil if it hadn't, if the war hadn't taken place. [14:17] - So slavery was flourishing in the United States from- [14:20] - Flourishing. [14:21] - ... from an economics perspective- ... especially. [14:24] - The wealthiest part... The 1860 census is our [14:28] friend, and it tells us that the people who controlled the [14:31] most wealth in the United States were slaveholders, and their property in [14:36] slaves alone, not their other holdings, not their land holdings, [14:39] just property in slaves were valued at about three billion dollars. The value [14:45] of all industries, all railroads, all of that put together, [14:50] fewer than two point five billion dollars. So the people who controlled the most [14:54] wealth, by far, were the slaveholding class. [14:58] - So it was the most valuable industry in the United States, [15:02] and perhaps it is the reason, [15:05] Again, a bit out of scope, but maybe it helps lay out the land. [15:10] Let's look at the nineteenth century. So [15:14] most slave-owning societies of the era were able to abolish slavery [15:18] without people dying at the mass scale that we'll discuss. So [15:21] Britain freed eight hundred thousand slaves in 1833- [15:26] ... By buying their freedom. Russia freed twenty-three million serfs in 1861 with [15:33] a decree, so legally. Brazil, which [15:36] imported more than ten times as many enslaved Africans as the United [15:40] States, abolished slavery in 1888 through basic ordinary legislation. [15:46] No violence. Why did the US have a civil war [15:50] with an estimated seven hundred and fifty thousand people dead in [15:54] order to abolish slavery? [15:55] - Yes. That's-- Let's talk just for a second about the seven hundred and fifty thousand [16:00] dead soldiers we're talking about. The number for years was six [16:04] hundred and eighteen thousand, and that's been revised lately. [16:09] I think we're probably certainly more than seven hundred thousand. By far the bloodiest war in, [16:13] in our history as a percentage of the population off the charts, [16:17] by far the bloodiest. I think there's a big difference between Great [16:21] Britain doing it and the United States doing it, is Great Britain did it in other [16:25] places. There weren't millions of enslaved people in Great Britain at the time. [16:31] It's-- I think, for them, it might have been a little bit easier to free [16:35] enslaved people who don't live among you than it... In the United States, [16:39] the ante is up for the Confederacy because they, the enslaved people lived here, and I think they [16:43] were, a lot of them were afraid of them and what would happen if they weren't [16:47] enslaved anymore. The war goes from... It doesn't begin as a [16:51] war to end slavery. There's a major shift in the war, [16:54] begins in the summer of 1862, where you add to the [16:58] war. The war aim for the United States initially is to suppress the [17:02] rebellion, which is what they called this. They didn't call [17:06] it the Civil War for the most part during the war. It's the War of the Rebellion. [17:10] That's the goal initially. As the war goes on and becomes costlier [17:14] and more all-encompassing, they decide that they're not gonna be able to suppress [17:18] the rebellion unless they also strike at slavery, because [17:21] slavery underpins the Confederate war-making capacity. [17:26] You have enslaved labor that keeps the economy going and allows the Confederacy [17:30] to mobilize between eighty-five and ninety percent of all their white [17:34] military-aged males. It's an astonishing mobilization. It's only [17:37] possible because enslaved labor keeps the economy going. If you take that [17:41] enslaved labor away, it deals a significant blow to the Confederate economy and, [17:47] and by extension, to its ability to wage a nineteenth century war. [17:51] - So the Emancipation Proclamation was in part a military strategy. [17:57] - Abraham Lincoln based it entirely [18:00] on his war-making power as commander-in-chief in a time of open [18:04] 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 [18:11] Emancipation Proclamation. One historian likened it to a bill of [18:15] lading. It had all the soaring language of a bill of lading. He [18:19] did that on purpose. He did it because he, [18:23] he doesn't have the power to strike at slavery in the absence of a war. The [18:27] president doesn't. And [18:29] he did it because he knows that he can't win the war with only [18:33] Republicans in the army. He needs to keep Democrats on board with the war as well. [18:36] They're not in favor of emancipation. The one way that they might accept it [18:41] is as a tool to help achieve union, and [18:45] to do that we've got to strike at the rebels this way, strike at [18:49] slavery. That will hurt their war effort, and it will also punish the people who brought on the war, [18:53] and that would make... So Lincoln hoped that by basing it [18:56] strictly on his war power, it might be more widely accepted [19:01] across all parts of the loyal states and not as [19:05] controversial as it was. It was still intensely controversial. It alienated [19:09] many Democrats when he issued it, who said, "You're changing what this [19:13] war is about. We're willing to shed our blood and maybe risk our lives to [19:17] restore the union of the founders. I'm not gonna risk my life to [19:21] free a Black person." That's a very, very common attitude among Democrats. [19:25] - So what did the Emancipation Proclamation actually do? It [19:30] 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 [19:39] the power as the war leader to strike at slavery is where the [19:45] rebels were actually still in rebellion and in control. So [19:49] any place where the US Army was in control, any place-- He said that [19:53] it is in essence United States territory now. I can't free them there [19:57] because I don't have the power. I can only free them where we don't have the [20:00] power. So he exempted parts of states and areas in the South [20:04] that it didn't apply to as of the moment he signed it. Going forward, [20:10] any place that the United States Army went where it hadn't been on January 1st, [20:14] 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation applied and enslaved people would be [20:20] freed by it. At the, literally at the time he signed it, he didn't free [20:24] anybody because he's only saying, "I can free them where we're not in control. We have to be [20:28] in control for this to have 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, it's, it's absolutely the boundary, and Congress had already passed what was [20:43] called the Second Confiscation Act. It passed this in July of 1862 [20:48] that announced that all enslaved people belonging [20:52] to rebels were free. It didn't apply [20:56] to people who could prove they were unionists living in the South and owned [20:59] slaves. Lincoln didn't make that distinction in the Emancipation Proclamation. [21:03] His proclamation is broader than the Second Confiscation Act was. [21:07] - Okay. There's so many tangents 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 [21:24] sides were volunteers during the Civil War. About 3 million [21:29] served, 2.2 million in the United States, 800, 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. [21:39] They have to separate... The causation and motivation are [21:43] often conflated, and not just by students but also by lots of talking heads on [21:48] newscasts in the United States who don't know anything about United States [21:51] history- ... but know what they know. In terms of causation, if [21:55] you take slavery out of the picture, there is no Civil War, period. [21:59] That's not a long conversation you need. You ask the question. That's the answer. [22:03] Let's go to the next question. [22:04] The next question is, okay, so were most white people [22:08] motivated to put on blue uniforms because they wanted to kill [22:12] slavery? The answer to that is no, they were not. They were motivated [22:16] to put on blue uniforms to salvage the Union, [22:19] which they saw as a unique gift that the [22:23] founding generation, based on the bloodshed in the American Revolution, [22:27] had bequeathed the successive generations. And the two key parts of what the [22:31] Union meant for them was, number one, [22:35] you had a voice in your own government, and someone will always say now to me, [22:39] "Well, but women couldn't vote." That's right. [22:42] The people who could vote by our standards were limited in the 19th [22:46] century, but within the context of the Western world in [22:49] 1860, the United States had by far the broadest franchise, by [22:53] far. And so they argued that's one thing the Union gives us, and it [22:57] also gives us the chance to rise economically. Doesn't guarantee that you can [23:01] succeed, but it means you're not doomed to be what your father was. [23:06] And those are worth fighting for. And so I will put on a uniform so the [23:10] slave-holding aristocrats and oligarchs, which is what they called [23:13] them, of the South, they said they're not... They don't really believe in democracy. [23:17] It's an oligarchy- ... in the South. It's a slavery-based oligarchy, [23:21] and we know which way Europe's going, they said. The revolutions of the [23:25] 1840s failed in Europe. Europe's going the wrong way. They're going toward [23:29] more aristocracy, more oligarchy, more... [23:33] And we are the last hope. When Lincoln spoke of [23:37] the last best hope of Earth, which he did in one of his most [23:40] memorable phrases, he's meaning [23:43] that the United States is a beacon of small D democracy in a [23:47] Western world that seems to be turning the other way. And those soldiers, [23:52] it meant, it meant it was that important to them. They are citizens in a republic [23:57] that people shed blood to establish, and we can't let it [24:00] go. Part of the compact is I'm a citizen. I derive these [24:05] benefits from this republic, from the Union. [24:08] I can have a voice in government. I can rise economically or have the chance to. [24:12] I owe my service to that republic. That's what most of them would've [24:16] said if you'd pressed them on why they're doing it. Doesn't mean everybody was on fire with ideology [24:20] that way. Some guys would say, "Well, you know what? I'm broke, and I'm gonna get [24:24] fed and clothed in the army." But this sense of exceptionalism, exceptionalism's [24:30] unpopular now in the United States, but Americans had a [24:34] sense of themselves as a truly exceptionalist society within the [24:38] context of the Western world. [24:40] - And as a small aside terminology-wise, [24:44] blue is the Union or what we think of as the United States, [24:48] and red is the Confederacy. [24:49] - Yes. On the maps, the Confederate units are red blocks. And the United [24:53] States units are blue blocks. That's right. [24:56] - And, uh [24:57] - That is correct. [24:58] - And the North and the South is another way we'll refer to it just to clarify. [25:03] - And let me have a very brief rant on North and South. [25:06] I prefer to see this as a war between two mid-19th-century republics, [25:12] One of which didn't last very long and spent its whole life in the midst [25:16] of a great war. There were 15 slaveholding states in 1860. [25:20] Only 11 of them seceded from the United States. [25:23] - Even though there's 13 stars. We'll talk about that. [25:25] - We'll talk about that demented notion of things in just a minute, but only 11 [25:29] leave. So there are four slaveholding states in the United States: Kentucky, and [25:33] Missouri, and Maryland, and Delaware remain in the United States. So [25:37] 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. [25:44] - But see how you referred to it as the United States. So the [25:47] Union is also referred to as the United States [25:50] - That's correct. Yes, yes [25:52] - But the Confederacy was, as you write about, a set of [25:56] people who also had a sense of nationalism, pride [25:59] - Well, and took their founding document. I mean, it took the whole summer of [26:03] 1787 in Philadelphia, that hot, steamy, humid summer of [26:07] 1787 to come up with the Constitution. The Confederates did it [26:11] quickly 'cause they basically had the US Constitution here, a blank piece of [26:15] paper over here [26:16] ... copied most of the Constitution over here, just changed the parts that they needed [26:20] to make sure slavery was protected, and you didn't have the wrong [26:24] kind of tariffs and so forth. That's one reason they could do it so quickly. It's [26:27] absolutely based on [26:30] the government they've been thriving under, which is under the United States Constitution. [26:34] Both sides claimed they were the true inheritors of the revolutionary generation. [26:38] That was one of their... They all... Jefferson Davis loved the [26:42] Declaration of Independence. The Declaration is Abraham Lincoln's favorite [26:46] document. They just liked different parts of it [26:48] - So we should think of this as two republics [26:52] - I argue that. That makes many people very angry [26:55] - I will make many people angry today [26:57] - They say that I am conferring legitimacy on the Confederacy that they [27:01] don't deserve, [27:03] and my response to that is they have a national government. They have a [27:06] Senate. They have a Congress. They have an army. They have a navy. They have [27:10] departments. They... It's... It walks like a duck. It [27:14] quacks like a duck. In the end, it's a slaughtered duck faster than it would've been [27:18] because the United States military forces crushed it [27:21] - We should say that you are respected, admired, loved by most people on both sides [27:29] in, from a perspective sense. You're [27:33] deeply respected by historians of Civil War and just historians of [27:37] American history. But of course, when you do your job [27:40] well on a controversial topic in a controversial period of human history- [27:45] ... you're going to get, hopefully an equal amount of critics on both [27:51] sides. And that's when you do your job well. So sometimes when we [27:56] speak today, some of the controversial, quote-unquote, [28:00] controversial things that you express are controversial from that small [28:04] minority of folks on both sides for different reasons [28:07] - Yes. I won't be... One of my favorite pieces of hate mail I got was an [28:11] email where this guy, I had... He was upset that I referred to the [28:14] Confederacy as a slave-holding republic that was... And he said that he [28:18] hoped I would develop virulent pancreatic cancer and die a horrible death. Not [28:25] just regular pancreatic cancer. He wanted virulent pancreatic cancer [28:28] And then he signed his name and said he'd be happy to talk to me anytime I wanted [28:32] to [28:33] - Yeah. I'm sure that would be a wonderful conversation [28:36] But there's also really strong senses throughout, [28:40] throughout the United States, the United States, of the, [28:46] this diversity of opinion of what is the United States [28:51] - Of course. Yes [28:52] - And that's where the passion is really rooted [28:56] - Both sides claim... In the election of 1860, [29:00] Douglas talked about how much he loved the Union. Lincoln talked about how much he [29:04] loved the Union. Breckinridge talked about how much he loved the Union. [29:08] They're all... And John Bell, who's the Unionist, the Constitutional Union- [29:12] That's all he talked about. They just had different versions of what the Union was [29:18] - And that's why I love this country. I think it's the greatest country on Earth, and it [29:21] has a bunch of people that very strongly disagree with each other. [29:26] Of course, hopefully never again [29:29] escalating to the degree that it did during this period of time. [29:33] So we talked about the blue people on the map and the red people on the map. [29:38] It may be a silly thing to ask, but sticking with the motivation, [29:45] why would, let's say, a farm boy in Ohio- ... want to die for the Union? [29:53] - That is the most important, and I didn't even ask you to ask that question. That's [29:57] the, that's the hardest thing- [29:58] - Let's be honest. You paid me a lot of money to ask that question, yeah. [30:00] - I didn't think it was so much. [30:03] - Okay. I'm sorry. Go ahead. I won't distract. [30:04] - No. The, I tell my students at the beginning of my Civil War class that if they couldn't [30:07] explain, I didn't use Ohio. I said, "If you can't explain why a farmer from Vermont- [30:13] ... would put on a blue uniform and pick up a musket to make South Carolina [30:17] come back in, why didn't he just say, 'Great. South Carolina's gone. I never liked them [30:21] anyway. This is a better union.' If you can't explain that, [30:25] then you can't understand the Civil War." And the key to that, I'll come back to it, is [30:29] union because he would've said, "If we allow South Carolina to go [30:33] That means that other places could go and you could dismantle. [30:37] And the only reason they're going is because they didn't like who was elected president. [30:41] They didn't say that Lincoln was corrupt. They didn't say Republicans bought the election. [30:45] They just didn't like who won the election. And so if the republic is [30:49] so fragile that it can't have an election without having the [30:52] people who didn't like who won leave, then the founders had wasted [30:56] their time, the revolution was for nothing, all that bloodshed meant [31:00] nothing. You had to step up and save this precious republic that had put in place [31:08] by the revolutionary generation and gave its citizens the benefits [31:12] that I've already talked about. That's why they would put on a uniform and risk their [31:16] life, because they believed a citizen... These are citizen soldiers. [31:22] We don't know what that means so much now. [31:25] because we have a professional military establishment now. Not-- [31:29] I mean, even when I was younger, there was still a draft, and but that's gone now. [31:35] And so we don't understand what the concept of citizen soldier was, that you [31:39] owe something back to the republic that has conveyed these things [31:43] to you, and that's why the guy from Vermont or New Hampshire or Ohio [31:48] 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 [31:56] and believe in nation? Is this, is this 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 [32:06] who are on television- [32:07] ... most of the time. Republicans in the midst of the war commented [32:11] about the fact that even with this gigantic conflict going [32:15] on, immigration continued at a high level. People [32:19] coming into a nation that was in the middle of a great [32:23] war. And they said, "This is a testament to the promise [32:27] of the United States." And I think that promise [32:31] continues. I mean, we've argued about... As with so many things, Americans have [32:35] no sense of history. They believe we've never argued about immigration before. [32:38] We've always argued about immigration, with some people always saying, "Shut the door. [32:42] They're ruining us. The Italians are ruining us. The Irish are Catholics. They're ruining [32:46] us. God, the Southern Europeans are even worse than, than the Irish were." [32:52] It's-- The people change, the arguments stay very much the [32:56] same, and I think it's really telling that in the midst of the war, people [33:00] would say, "Look at our republic. It is-- It offers so much to people [33:04] that even in the midst of this great war, they're still coming- [33:07] ... to the United States." [33:09] - And like you said, both sides, both these republics [33:13] claimed, for example, George Washington. [33:16] - Yes. They both claim... I'll leave it at that. They both claim George Washington. [33:19] They wanted to be right [33:21] with the man, which is what George Washington was. He's the indispensable [33:25] man, no question. Both sides wanted him on their side. They [33:29] both quoted Thomas Jefferson, although Confederates were a [33:33] little more leery of Jefferson 'cause he's too complicated for them [33:36] sometimes. But no, they wanted to be right with the founders and claimed to [33:40] be right with the founders. The Confederates would say, "The Constitution allowed [33:44] slavery. What are you talking about we're out of step with the Constitution? We're in step [33:48] with the Con- You're the ones who are out of step with the 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 [33:58] it with the Civil War. They associate it solely with Southern states- [34:02] ... of course. State rights is always available in United States history for [34:06] somebody who's not happy with what the federal government is doing. [34:10] During the War of 1812, it was New England that most often talked- [34:14] ... about resorting to state rights. They had a convention where they sort of wandered over [34:17] towards secession territory in the Hartford Convention. [34:21] We think of it as state rights because as you lead up to the Civil [34:25] War, you hear con- white Southerners talking about it all the [34:29] time. "We need our state rights." I always love to ask [34:33] people who say that, "What are all the state rights? Give me-- List the state rights that [34:37] the white South is concerned." [34:38] You know, "Give me the top three. No, really, just give me the top two." There's only one. [34:43] The state right that they're worried about is the right of their state to [34:46] 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 [34:54] matters then. Northern states also resorted to state rights during this, the [35:00] ramp-up to the Civil War, with what were called personal liberty laws. They [35:04] tried to interpose their state power in between a federal government that would [35:08] use its power to to force escaped, enslaved people back into slavery. [35:14] It's whoever's unhappy with the federal government, the concept of state rights is [35:18] available, and both sides used it. [35:21] - And of course, the beautiful, dark, [35:25] ironic hypocrisy was illustrated by the Confederacy when they were the first to [35:31] pass a national draft in American history. [35:34] - Like, irony is wonderful- ... in history. Another thing that I love to teach [35:42] is that the most intrusive central government in American [35:46] history, by far, until deep into the 20th century, was the [35:50] Confederate central government, because it had to do things to keep the war [35:54] going that it couldn't have done unless the central government stepped in, [35:57] such as passing the first national conscription law in American history. The [36:02] government, the US government never forced people into uniform before the Civil War. [36:05] The Confederates did it first. They did it in the spring of 1862. They passed a [36:09] national graduated income tax. And when taxing didn't work, [36:13] when their money became so devalued, they then passed what they called the tax in [36:17] kind. They would take a percentage of your crop. They allowed the government to [36:21] impress horses and mules and enslaved labor to work [36:25] on All of these were intrusions from the central government that [36:29] drove true state rights people crazy in the Confederacy. [36:33] Confederates didn't have political parties because they said the founders didn't want them, [36:37] so we won't have them. But what they did have was a sort of [36:41] nationalist, "We're gonna let the central government do whatever it needs to do." That's Jefferson [36:45] Davis' wing, and Robert E. Lee's over there, too. And the people like the [36:49] vice president, Alexander Stephens, who said, "You can't do all this stuff [36:52] because the states should have more power." [36:55] The only reason the war lasted as long as it did is because the central government did things [36:59] no one ever would have believed they would do. He also got rid of habeas [37:03] corpus just like Abraham Lincoln did in selected situations. [37:07] - And of course, we should really emphasize that on both sides, those volunteers, [37:12] the on the Confederacy, there's a very large number of people [37:16] percentage-wise that volunteered to fight. And then I [37:20] believe the volunteer period was one year, and [37:24] then there's all kind of funky stuff that the that the government started doing to [37:28] trap those people into then serving and- [37:30] - Here's what the Confederacy did. [37:34] They... Nobody thinks the war's gonna last a long time- [37:36] ... in the spring of 1861. So if you enlist for a year- [37:39] ... that's probably plenty of time to finish this war. Well, a year goes by and a [37:43] significant percentage of the Confederate men under arms are due to get out. So what [37:47] the Confederate Congress did was pass conscription. [37:50] We're gonna put every- make everybody liable to three-year service. [37:54] And in the midst of doing that, all you guys who volunteered for [37:58] one year are now in for two more years. [38:01] Well, that outraged... I mean, "That's, you're breaking faith with us," they said. [38:04] They didn't stop there. [38:07] Later they revised it when the war kept going on and then the three years guys were [38:10] gonna get out, then the Congress stepped in and said, "You're in for the duration." The bottom [38:14] line is, the Confederacy ever gets you in uniform, you don't [38:18] get out because they keep changing the rules on you. And that [38:22] was considered, national conscription was considered a fundamental [38:26] abridgment of individual rights by many people. That's something the government should never [38:30] force a citizen into uniform. A citizen should volunteer their service. [38:35] The US government waited a year, then it did it in the spring of 1863, [38:39] although it always respected original terms of enlistment. [38:44] Never made it the war for the duration the way the Confederacy did. [38:48] - Quick pause for a bathroom break if it's okay. [38:51] Quick 10-second shout-out to our sponsors. Check them out in the description. [38:55] It really is the best way to support this podcast. Go to [38:58] lexfridman.com/sponsors. And now, dear friends, [39:03] back to my conversation with Gary Gallagher. [39:07] All right, we're back. There's so many different directions we can go, but [39:11] I am somebody who believes that individuals can steer the direction of history. [39:14] So one angle to look at here is, [39:18] some of the legendary historical figures from this time. [39:24] Let's talk about some of the key figures of the Civil War. We have Abraham Lincoln, [39:28] of course, the President of the United States who held the Union together and turned the war [39:32] into a fight for a new birth of freedom. Jefferson Davis, who you [39:36] mentioned, President of the Confederacy. Ulysses S. [39:40] Grant, somebody we'll talk about quite a bit, General in [39:43] Chief of the Union armies. Robert E. Lee on [39:47] the other side, the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, [39:52] somebody who you have studied for decades now. We'll talk a lot [39:55] about him. There's Sherman, there's Stonewall Jackson, there's Frederick Douglass, [40:02] there is McClellan, there is John Brown, a militant abolitionist. [40:08] Many more figures, but let's look at three [40:12] at first. Let's look at Lincoln, Grant, and Lee. Lincoln first. So [40:20] Abraham Lincoln, we have this backwoods lawyer with a [40:24] single year of schooling who somehow outgrew every [40:27] polished man around him and became one of the most consequential leaders in [40:31] human history. So what do we need to understand? What can we [40:35] possibly understand at a 10,000-foot level, [40:39] About Lincoln that made it all possible? What was it [40:43] about Lincoln's mind that made this man do what he did? [40:48] - Almost nobody continues to go up in my estimation as I get older and [40:52] 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 [41:01] came from his very poor background. You [41:05] said he had a year of schooling. You're being very generous to him there. He didn't even really have a [41:09] year of formal schooling. And you end up with a person [41:14] who is the most eloquent president we've ever had by a very wide margin [41:18] and I think even more eloquent than Jefferson, [41:21] and who is able to distill into the fewest possible [41:25] words the most complex ideas and topics imaginable and just have them [41:33] ring in a way that almost no one is able to do. He is someone... [41:37] He had an ego, but I think one of his real gifts was the ability to [41:41] put his ego aside and keep his eye on the goal. He was able to really focus, [41:48] and he focused relentlessly on, number one, [41:53] suppressing the rebellion and restoring the Union, [41:56] but also getting... He hated the institution of slavery. He's not an [42:00] abolitionist, but he hated the institution of slavery and he was very happy to [42:04] see that slavery was added to the roster of what the United [42:07] States would insist on at the end of the war. [42:12] He's able to let all the other things go. He can pay attention to [42:16] many things, but he never loses his... his principal focus was, "How do I [42:20] maintain this great war?" And it's an all en- it's [42:24] really hard to get people to understand the scope [42:28] 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 [42:35] 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 [42:42] 55 million people- ... under arms as a percentage of the population. [42:47] The dead would be between 6 million and 7.5 million, depending [42:51] on how you count it. The scope is just... During the Gulf Wars, [42:55] The New York Times put a picture of every United States service person who was [42:59] killed, put a picture in the paper [43:02] over the scope of those wars, and that is about as many people [43:06] as were shot in a few hours at Antietam. It's just very different to [43:10] get students now to understand the different scale, and that's what [43:14] Lincoln's dealing with. How do I keep the focus on a war [43:19] that is becoming far more costly than anyone imagined, [43:25] and eating up our young manpower at a rate that no one... There's never been [43:29] anything in our history to prepare the United States for this. The [43:32] Winfield Scott captured Mexico City with an army of fewer than 15,000 [43:36] during the war with Mexico. [43:40] U.S. Grant has 120,000. I mean, the whole scale is just so different that it's [43:44] hard to come to terms with it. [43:45] And that's what Lincoln was dealing with. I think the fact [43:49] that he was willing to surround himself with really able [43:53] counselors is important. Who does he put in his cabinet? He puts his [43:56] 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 Salmon P. Chase, [44:04] who's a very smart and effective and ambitious person from Ohio, in his [44:10] cabinet. He surrounds himself with people who are capable and energetic [44:17] and have their own ambitions, he's not afraid to do that, all of whom had far better [44:21] 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 a way he, uh, to talk [44:29] in a fashion that he- ... didn't actually talk. [44:31] He would've pronounced words in ways that anybody who went to Harvard would just [44:35] sneer at. He didn't, and he knew they sneered, and he didn't care. [44:39] Because eventually, all of them, except the ones with only a 20-watt [44:43] bulb, figured out that Lincoln was actually probably [44:47] smarter than they were and had a better grasp of things than they did and [44:51] brought them around. He really brought Seward around, which is very impressive. [44:56] - Yeah, there's so many fascinating things about Lincoln. So backwoods of [44:59] Kentucky, and Kentucky is a very important state in this story. And [45:06] the right words, the right speeches, [45:09] the right debates at this moment in history. It really does make me wonder, [45:15] you know, if Lincoln didn't exist, if certain humans in history didn't exist, [45:24] that everything could have turned out very differently. [45:27] - The great forces are all that matters and individuals don't really matter notion of [45:31] history I think is ridiculous. Individuals really matter. [45:35] For the United States, Lincoln and Grant matter beyond calculation-- [45:40] ... in this, in this war. And on the Confederate side, if you take Lee out of the picture, the [45:44] 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 [45:52] with slavery still intact. I mean, in a perverse way, [45:56] Lee furthers the cause of emancipation because he-- [46:00] extends the war long enough that the United States says, "We have to do this. [46:04] We've gotta get rid of slavery to defeat the rebels." [46:08] - So, and also on the psychological side, Lincoln is a, [46:12] this is a fascinating study because he, he carried deep depression all his life. [46:16] - He had black, black moods in his life, yes, he did. [46:20] - And so for somebody that has to go through an all-encompassing war, [46:26] to be able to sort of survive through that, to think through that, [46:31] without an education, without any acquired skill [46:37] that enables him to be a commander-in-chief during a time of war. [46:43] He's got nothing in the toolbox, and yet he steps up. [46:46] - If you looked at his resume and Jefferson Davis's-- [46:51] ... in 1860 and said, "Okay, here are the two guys who are gonna be your respective [46:54] commanders-in-chief. Who do you want on your team?" [46:57] Lincoln had no administrative experience beyond running a little [47:01] law office. He had one two-year term in the House of [47:05] Representatives in terms of national government. He had no [47:09] military service to speak of, a little while in the Black Hawk [47:12] War as a junior officer in the Black Hawk War. [47:17] Didn't check any of the education boxes, as you said. Jefferson Davis was a graduate of [47:21] West Point. He'd commanded more men in the war with Mexico than [47:24] most of the men who commanded armies during the Civil War. He'd chaired the [47:28] Senate Committee on Military Affairs. He'd been Secretary of [47:32] War, a lot of administrative experience. He checked every box. Lincoln checked none of the [47:36] boxes, and yet you got Lincoln as a [47:40] commander-in-chief. It's really quite remarkable. He could listen to people [47:43] that he thought knew more about something than he did. That's a [47:47] quality that all of our presidents, to put it mildly, have not [47:51] had. Lincoln did have that. He could listen. He could admit when he was wrong [47:56] and change his mind about things, and he could put up [48:00] with obnoxious behavior on the part of people that [48:04] he thought might deliver the goods. And a perfect example of this [48:08] is George Brinton McClellan, whom we'll talk about later, his young... who was [48:12] general-in-chief for a while, commanded the Army of the Potomac. [48:15] In 1861, Lincoln and his Secretary of State, William Henry [48:19] Seward, went to McClellan's house to talk to McClellan. Went to McClellan's [48:23] house. The commander-in-chief goes to McClellan's house. McClellan wasn't there. [48:27] The butler or somebody put them in a side room. McClellan came home, was [48:31] told Lincoln was there. He went upstairs and then [48:34] told the person who worked for him to go tell the president that he'd be happy to talk to [48:38] 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 [48:46] that away. Okay, McClellan's an ass, but I think he might win the war. I mean, he [48:50] 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. [48:59] He just has a number of qualities, I think, that are very unusual to [49:03] find in someone. And as you say, he did have depressive moments, and [49:07] he-- we talk about how, what bad days presidents have. Now, [49:11] Lincoln would have said, I'll take that president's worst day every [49:15] day rather than the days that I get, for the most part. I mean, he-- [49:19] it's hard to imagine the burdens that he carried. [49:22] - And at the right time was just a handful of words [49:27] expressed something that no military could possibly do. [49:30] - Explain what the war was about, [49:33] why it was worth fighting, what it meant, his second inaugural address. [49:37] I mean, people went-- when people went to hear the president give his second [49:41] inaugural address on that cold day in [49:44] 1865, what they wanted to hear, they finally beat the rebel [49:48] scum from their point of view. Let's have some retribution here. What are we going to do to them? [49:52] How are we going to make these people who brought this great war [49:56] 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 [50:03] all implicated in it. I mean, he didn't tell them anything that [50:07] they wanted to hear that day. And it was-- and it [50:11] took great courage, I think, to do that at that moment, to tell an [50:15] audience what they didn't want to hear. And he did it in the most eloquent [50:18] language that any president's-- that's the greatest speech in American history, the second [50:22] inaugural, in my view. [50:25] - With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness [50:29] in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us [50:33] strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind [50:37] up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall [50:40] have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve [50:48] and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations. [50:54] - And we're all complicit in this because we all [50:58] countenanced slavery. I mean, that's all in that one speech. And it's a short [51:02] speech. The whole speech probably only lasted eight or nine minutes. And he [51:07] also pays tribute to the citizen soldiers at the beginning of it because he says that the [51:11] war is going well and we all know that everything depends on what our soldiers do. [51:16] And by that he meant saving the union, killing slavery, it [51:20] all depends on them. And then he comes back and finishes with his tribute to the soldiers [51:24] at the end. [51:25] - And I have to say the Gettysburg Address. [51:27] - Oh, no, it's you can't. [51:30] - If I may, it's only maybe 200 words. Four score and seven years ago, our fathers [51:39] brought forth on this continent a new nation, [51:43] conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men [51:47] are created equal. Now we are engaged in a [51:51] great civil war, testing whether that nation or [51:55] any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great [52:02] battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as [52:09] a final resting place for those who here gave their [52:12] lives that that nation might live. [52:15] It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. [52:20] But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we [52:24] cannot hallow this ground. The brave men [52:28] living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it [52:32] far above our poor power to add or detract. [52:36] The world will little note nor long remember what [52:39] we say here, but it can never forget what they did [52:43] here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated [52:47] here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have [52:51] thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be [52:55] here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that [52:59] from these honored dead we take increased [53:02] devotion to that cause for which they here gave the [53:06] last full measure of devotion, that we here highly [53:10] resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, [53:14] that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, [53:19] and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall [53:23] not perish from the earth. [53:27] That's a big statement about what this country is about. It's about freedom. [53:31] - And he comes back to, when most people read that, the very last part of it, they [53:37] emphasize the prepositions of the people, by the people, for the people. [53:47] Lincoln, it's not about the prepositions. It's about the people. He [53:51] earlier in the war referred to this as a people's contest. [53:55] It's the people that are the key, the people who make up the republic, the [53:59] people who will derive the freedoms and [54:02] liberties that the-- I mean, it's an amazing-- and it [54:06] probably took you two minutes to read that. He was finished before most people [54:10] knew he had started at Gettysburg. Almost nobody heard him say that. The one [54:14] thing wrong about it is when he said no one would remember very long what he said there. [54:17] It's been remembered pretty well. [54:19] - And let's talk about the two other figures which we'll return to time and time again. [54:24] Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee. So who was Grant? [54:29] So this is a man who failed at farming. Failed at business, [54:34] failed at his role in the peacetime army. Then when the war came, the war revealed a [54:42] genius. [54:43] - So he'd known a lot of failure, he'd known a lot of setbacks, and [54:47] his wartime record shows that he'd learned to deal with those things. He had a great, [54:51] tremendous relationship with his wife, a very strong family life, a family he [54:55] loved. I think that was the rock for him. But during the war, what he exhibited [54:59] was an absolute willingness to break rules, [55:04] to take risks, to take responsibility for what he was doing, [55:08] whether it was a success or a failure, and not to be cast [55:11] down by things that didn't work. If something didn't work, he'd say, "Okay, that didn't work. [55:16] Now let's do this." He very famously, when he got to [55:19] Virginia in 1864 and took over the Army of the Potomac, [55:22] he had all these subordinates who were saying, "Well, what if General Lee does this? [55:26] What if General Lee does that?" He finally said, "Why don't we start worrying-- let's-- [55:30] not worrying about what General Lee is gonna do and let General Lee worry about what [55:34] we're going to do?" I mean, he just had... He was unflappable [55:39] under stress. He was the perfect person to end up [55:43] heading the Union armies, and he and Lincoln-- And Lincoln realized that, [55:47] and he proved indispensable. But he has [55:51] 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 [55:59] preferred way of fighting wasn't just kind of slug it out. It's really [56:03] interesting to compare his record in the war [56:06] and Lee's record in the war before they wound up opposing each other [56:10] in Virginia in a really bloody overland campaign. Grant's total [56:14] casualties in all his great battles before they met were 37,000. [56:18] Lee's were over 98,000-- [56:20] ... in the same period. The bloodiest general in US history by far in terms of [56:24] how many of his men get shot is Robert E. Lee. [56:27] The most careful demographic study of any Civil War army is [56:31] one done of Lee's army by a scholar named Joe Glatthaar, and Joe figured out [56:36] that if you were a soldier in Robert E. Lee's army, you had a 73% [56:40] chance of becoming a casualty. 73%. Grant's casualties get high when he [56:46] runs into Robert E. Lee, just like everybody else. So the butcher tag is [56:50] completely unfair about Grant. He's also known as a drunk, [56:54] and people have gone back and forth on that, whether he just had a [56:57] weakness, couldn't hold his alcohol very well or [57:03] was okay as long as his wife was around and he had a key staff officer to help him. [57:07] The point is, alcohol never got in the way of anything Grant did during the [57:11] war, and he had [57:15] a superlative record of delivering victories when the United States needed them, [57:18] and Lincoln figured that out. And the absolute [57:22] proof of his stature because of this is that in the March [57:26] of 1864, Congress decided to dust [57:30] off the rank of three-star general, lieutenant general, and give it to [57:34] Grant. The only person who'd ever had that rank was George Washington, [57:38] the man, Jorge. I mean, he is the man. And so they [57:42] are saying, "Okay, Grant, you get the rank the man had," and that [57:46] shows there's never been anyone else who got it. You're the first. And then he would [57:50] also be the first to get a four-star rank in the United States Army. That... [57:54] There couldn't be a better indication of his [57:58] stature than that he got Washington's rank. Winfield Scott had had it by brevet. [58:04] Grant got the actual rank. [58:06] - So in part, the Grant the Butcher [58:09] label was from the Overland Campaign that we'll talk about- [58:11] - It is from the Overland Campaign [58:12] - ... as the military decisions made there. [58:14] - Yep. [58:15] - Uh, many would argue that those are critically important for the success [58:19] of the war. [58:20] - Yes. He and Lee are often compared, [58:24] but for the last year of the war, they're operating on it's not [58:28] apples to apples because Grant is general in chief and is managing [58:32] the entire war effort. He's managing what Sherman's doing and what Sheridan's doing [58:36] and what Nathaniel Bank... Lee is an army commander. [58:39] He can recommend things to Jefferson Davis, but he never commands more than an army, [58:43] and so he never operates at the level that Grant did. Very late in the war, he [58:47] was made general in chief when it was so late that it didn't matter. [58:51] - So who was Robert E. Lee? In April 1861, Lee was offered command of the Union Army- [58:58] - He was [58:59] - ... and chose Virginia instead. [59:01] - He did. [59:02] - What was he actually choosing in that decision? Was he choosing home? Was he [59:06] choosing honor? Was he choosing slavery? And maybe just [59:10] zooming out, what do we need to understand in the early steps about Robert [59:14] E. Lee? Who was the man? [59:16] - Well, Lee is sort of the antithesis of Grant in some ways. Lee is from an [59:19] aristocratic family. Grant was from a solidly middle-class family. Lee's [59:23] from an aristocratic family at the very top [59:26] of the Virginia aristocracy. The Lees are all... He has uncles who [59:30] were prominent, two signed the Declaration of Independence. His [59:34] father was a famous commander under George Washington. His father's the one who [59:38] said that Washington was first in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen. [59:42] That's Lee's father, who was later a prominent Virginia politician. [59:46] Lee's idol is George Washington. He patterns [59:50] himself on Washington. He differs from him in some ways, but [59:54] he patterns himself on Washington. He considered Washington the [59:58] most admirable person in United States history. And then, of course, he almost [60:02] undoes the work that George Washington put in place during the American [60:05] Revolution. He chose [60:08] Virginia. He didn't leave... He didn't resign his commission in the United States Army [60:12] to go with the Confederacy. He resigned his commission in the United States Army to, [60:16] to go to Virginia, which wasn't in the Confederacy yet, become the head of state [60:20] forces in Virginia. But then when Virginia went into the [60:24] Confederacy, he took his Confederate commission and ended up as the [60:30] third-ranking officer in Confederate service, and he makes an easy transition to [60:36] A Confederate loyalty. I think it's his loyalty to Virginia [60:40] and what that means. That means his family, and of course that means slavery. [60:43] That's part of what that loyalty is. He's devoted to the slave-holding [60:47] South as well as to Virginia. Virginia's a subset of that. All of [60:51] that is in one bundle with Lee. It's all... But [60:55] th- he also had been an ardent US nationalist [60:59] earlier in his career, and a very successful military officer. [61:02] Winfield Scott thought he was the greatest soldier in the army, and Scott, he probably really [61:06] thought, "Except for me." But Scott is a great soldier that people don't [61:10] remember that way because he became a kinda Jabba the Hutt figure by the time of the [61:14] Civil War. He's enormous, weighs 350 pounds, has to be winched onto his horse. [61:19] But he was a very smart guy and he thought very highly [61:23] of Lee. Lee was a superb soldier, as he would show during the war, [61:28] but he's on the wrong side. [61:30] - Maybe just to throw in a few more characters, I do think [61:34] the folks on both sides that are the, [61:37] of the more radical persuasion are quite interesting. Somebody you spoke about, [61:41] I'm not sure where, think it might've been in your lecture series about Thaddeus [61:44] Stevens. [61:47] - Yes, the Thaddeus Stevens. [61:48] Thaddeus Stevens was one of the most radical of the radical Republicans. [61:51] He's a congressman from Pennsylvania [61:54] who... People think people say harsh things now in Congress. Thaddeus Stevens [61:58] just eviscerated people. And he was way out... I mean, he was an ardent [62:04] abolitionist and for equal rights for women in many ways and, [62:08] and he picked up a number of causes and championed them. [62:11] - I think in your lecture you mentioned this thing which I just love, the slime line. [62:17] - He had a-- This is his kind of line. He's sitting in the House of [62:21] Representatives and one of his opponents- [62:24] ... and he's speaking, and one of his opponents starts to come down to the floor and he [62:28] says, and this is a paraphrase, "I'm gonna pause while my colleague," [62:31] from wherever he was from, "slinks across the floor of this House and [62:35] adheres to his seat by his own slime." [62:38] - Yeah. Beautiful. [62:39] - That's a great line. Impromptu. [62:41] He had a... Women used to ask for locks of hair as, from [62:45] famous people, and he was completely bald and wore a full wig. He had [62:49] a woman stop him on the steps to the Capitol and ask for a lock of his [62:53] hair, took his whole wig off and said, "Madam, have them all." And c- [62:57] - Which is brilliant [62:57] - no, it's very good. [62:59] - But of the radical persuasion. [63:01] - Oh, absolutely. Yes, he defined it. He is the character in Birth of a Nation [63:06] Stoneman, the character of Stoneman, the evil radical Republican [63:10] named Stoneman, is patterned on Thaddeus Stevens. [63:14] - All right. If we can, let's talk about the buildup to the war. [63:18] - All right. [63:19] - What were the key states on both sides that were debating? [63:23] What are the ones that were certainly going to be [63:27] firmly on one side or the other? And maybe what are the ones that [63:31] were critical at the, at the borderline? [63:33] - The states that were in the forefront of the secession movement were the Deep South states, and [63:37] South Carolina was kind of ground central for what was going [63:41] on there. It just so happened that the Democrats had their national [63:45] convention in Charleston in 1860, which is the worst place in the [63:49] world they could've had it if they wanted a quiet, rational discussion of anything. [63:56] South Carolina is the first state to secede, and then is quickly followed. You can [64:00] just go the tier across Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, [64:04] Texas. That's the... It's seven states. The Deep South states go [64:08] out in that initial... But there's a long period then, [64:12] and they gather in Montgomery, Alabama, to establish a new government with [64:15] Montgomery as the capital of the Confederacy. [64:18] Delegates from those states do. And they set up a provisional government [64:22] that's gonna last a year and call for the first national elections in [64:25] 1861. There are only seven states there, and really only six for a [64:29] lot of it 'cause Texas got there late. It was the last of the first seven to [64:33] secede. But the states that haven't seceded yet are the ones with [64:37] the most people. Virginia, which is the most populous, North [64:40] Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri. Eight [64:44] states have not gone out. Eight slaveholding states have not gone out. The most [64:48] important one is Virginia among those that- [64:51] ... that have not gone out. The question is, [64:55] can they find some resolution to all of this, or is it gonna get [64:59] more serious, and are those states gonna go? And it came to focus, once again, on [65:03] Charleston, South Carolina, [65:05] and a federal installation in Charleston Harbor, Fort Sumter. [65:09] Much United States property and illic- and [65:13] installations had been just given over to the Confederates. [65:17] And the question is, can we do it with this one as well? This is a very [65:21] difficult decision to make, and it comes down to what's gonna [65:25] happen in Charleston Harbor. And in the end, I mean, Jefferson Davis believed [65:29] that he couldn't allow it to remain a federal installation 'cause it's actually [65:33] in the Confederacy from their point of view. And Lincoln, who's not [65:37] conceding the right of states to secede. They're, they're temporarily out [65:41] of our power, but we have to maintain... He decided in the end to maintain [65:45] power there, not to reinforce it, but to resupply it, needed supplies. [65:51] And that's what triggers it. Then, then the ball's in Jefferson Davis' court. [65:55] "Okay, they're gonna resupply it. What do we do?" And they decided we need to [65:59] insist that it surrender, and if it won't surrender, we need to fire on it. And [66:03] the Confederates fired the first shots. They would've said, "We were forced to fire the [66:07] first shots by what Lincoln did." Nobody wanted to be the ones who fired the first [66:11] shots. But in the end, it's the Confederates who fired the first shots. [66:15] And once that is fired, the key thing, the key [66:19] thing is not the firing on Sumter in the end, [66:22] but that sets up the key thing, which is Lincoln's call [66:26] for volunteers to suppress the rebellion, and he is gonna ask each [66:30] state to supply people. [66:32] And the Upper South states, most of them have said, "We're not gonna secede, but [66:36] you can't... But, but the states that are gone had the right to secede- [66:40] ... and you can't do anything to make them come back." Lincoln is seeming to [66:44] make them do things to come back. And so four more states went out. [66:49] Virginia went out. Arkansas went out. Tennessee went out. [66:53] Then North Carolina went out. And now you have an 11-state Confederacy [66:57] rather than seven. But more than that, you have Virginia. [67:02] The city of Richmond has 40% of all the industrial capacity in the entire [67:05] Confederacy, what became the Confederacy. Virginia is the most populous state, has [67:09] the largest slave population, the largest white population. [67:13] It supplies the most important military leaders. And the [67:17] capital ends up in Richmond. They move from Montgomery to Richmond [67:22] in acknowledgment of how important Richmond is, that this is the key [67:25] state. The key states that didn't go out were Maryland, Kentucky, [67:30] and Missouri. Delaware didn't either, but who cares? The other three didn't go out, and that [67:34] really mattered because they were more populous. But 11 are gone. [67:38] Four remain in the Union. [67:40] - And to lay out some more context, going to Perplexity here, [67:44] by total enslaved population on the eve of the Civil War, [67:49] we have looking at the top five states, Virginia, [67:53] as you said, with the most number of slaves, 490,000. [67:57] Then Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, all with over 400,000 slaves. [68:04] - Yes. And Mississippi and South Carolina have the highest proportion of [68:07] enslaved people of any of the states. And this is an [68:11] interesting little fact from the 1860 census. When you're talking about white people in the [68:15] United States, those are the two wealthiest states per capita in the United States, [68:19] are South Carolina and Mississippi in 1860. [68:23] - Boy, the complicated history of this great nation of ours. [68:27] - It's hard to overstate the resources. The states that sent the most men [68:31] into the Confederate Army are Virginia, [68:34] Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia. Three of those [68:38] come in this second wave of secessions. Three of them, three of the four. Only [68:41] Georgia among the original ones was in those top four states. And so you would have had a [68:46] much, much smaller pool of manpower for that [68:50] earlier version of the Confederacy. It's inconceivable to me that you would have [68:54] had the war we had with just that version. [68:56] - So it does feel, just to linger on it, [68:59] like there was a lot on the balance here. Like there was a [69:03] lot of different decisions that could have been made, [69:08] even on the political side, that could have turned the tides. [69:12] - For example, there's a secession convention in Virginia. [69:16] It goes in... It votes twice against secession. [69:20] Twice. It's only after Sumter that they come back for another vote. [69:24] I mean, it's a Unionist vote in that convention in Virginia. [69:29] And it's only after Fort Sumter. [69:32] - Wow. [69:32] - And then it's still so divided that a big chunk of Virginia [69:36] decide that's how you get West Virginia. West Virginia essentially [69:39] secedes from Virginia- ... in the course of the Civil War. [69:42] - And given the industrial capacity of Virginia, that was a critical state. So it could have been... [69:47] Virginia could have changed. We could have avoided the Civil War with [69:51] Virginia alone. [69:52] - It would have really changed. I mean, Virginia is the key. Virginia is the key [69:56] because of the manpower, the industrial capacity, the food production, [70:00] and Virginia gives you Lee, Jackson, Jeb [70:04] Stuart. I mean, it, and the most soldiers of any state in the [70:07] Confederacy. It's just, it's a real game [70:11] changer to get Virginia. Plus, it also gives you these [70:15] unbelievable ties to the revolutionary generation. Hey, it's George's [70:19] home state. It is now in the Confederacy with his big statue [70:23] on the Capitol grounds of George Washington. I mean, gives you, you get Washington, the [70:27] ties to Jefferson, the ties to Madison. All of this comes in with Virginia. [70:32] - So I think a lot of historians have said that the Civil War was inevitable. [70:37] It... You're really painting a picture here where it perhaps was not inevitable. [70:41] - I don't think it's inevitable. Things happen in a sequence. I was at a [70:45] conf- academic conference once when they were trying to decide what important dates were, [70:49] and one... And they concluded that no dates are, dates are an [70:53] artificial construction. No date is more important than any other. [70:57] That is so obviously preposterous. I mean, things [71:01] happen in a sequence. They don't just sort of happen. Lincoln's elected, [71:04] then South Carolina secedes, then other states secede, then... I mean, things [71:08] happen as a consequence of what happened before, and you have these various [71:12] things that have to happen before the next thing does. And [71:16] then we end up with a war that seems to be inevitable, [71:19] but it's not... It's just the way things played out. All of these factors are in [71:23] motion, and you end up with the sequence that gets you to where people start shooting each other. [71:28] - Yeah. When you read history and look back, it seems inevitable. But if we were to [71:31] place ourselves in that moment of time, do you think there's decisions that could have [71:35] been made? [71:36] - The decision to not let Fort Sumter, I mean, that's a [71:40] big decision to make. If they had just, if Lincoln had just said, "Go ahead and take Fort Sumter," [71:45] okay, then maybe... Then what would it have taken to trigger [71:49] the departure of those upper South states? That would have changed that whole equation. [71:54] But Lincoln decided you just can't keep giving them [71:57] everything that they want if you don't concede that they have the right to do what they did. [72:01] - Yeah, there would be a continued heated political [72:06] debates, intense political debates about the expansion of slavery, but it [72:10] would not cause rebellion to then escalate into a full-on hot war. [72:16] - I think that's conceivable. I don't think the war was inevitable. I think it [72:20] But I think the conditions were present for it to happen, obviously. [72:24] I mean, that's stating... 'Cause it did happen. But I think it's [72:28] very tricky to just say that it was inevitable. That's kind [72:32] of starting at the end of the story and just saying, "Let's look at the factors that got us here. [72:36] We know it was gonna happen, and these are the things that pointed this direction." [72:39] - Can we just actually linger on this, on the nature of war? Over 700,000 people dead. [72:45] How do we make sense of our capacity as, in that context, Americans? [72:52] To kill sometimes literally our brothers [72:55] - Yes, sometimes literally our brothers [72:57] - How is that even possible? [72:58] - Well, one thing, it tells me things are pretty important to people on both sides if you're [73:02] gonna continue for a war that long. I mean, there was a period in the [73:06] literature, in the scholarly literature [73:09] in the 1980s and into the 1990s where they argued that the Confederacy [73:13] wasn't a nation, and the proof was that they didn't try very hard, that they... If they'd really [73:16] thought of themselves as a nation, they would have tried harder and fought longer. [73:20] Well, they lost between four and a half and five and a half percent of their [73:24] entire population, which is more than Great Britain, France, Germany, [73:31] or Russia during World War I. They had a higher percentage loss than any [73:35] of the powers in World War I. The US lost about 1.8% of its population from the war. [73:40] US, in World War II, three-tenths of 1% of its population... That seems... [73:44] They lost more than 30% of their entire white military-age [73:48] males in the war. It'd be the equivalent of about 18 million Americans being killed [73:52] now in a war. That seems to me that they're pretty serious about something there. [73:58] - It means that's one of the largest percentages of loss. [74:02] That's... If that's a measure of dedication- [74:05] - If that's your measure of dedication, yes, and it seems to me that it should be [74:09] one of the metrics that you bring to play that, that it's... They just keep [74:12] at it. They didn't give up easily. [74:15] - What can we say about the motivation? On the psychological side, did the [74:21] members of the Confederacy hate the members of the Union? [74:25] - Well, that escalated on both sides during the war. As more and more loss came, [74:29] you... They did. There was more hatred directed toward the enemy more and more. [74:33] This notion that it's they're all brothers and not really mad at each other and... [74:37] That just doesn't hold up. There are [74:39] places where the soldiers fraternized with one another and traded tobacco for [74:43] coffee and that kind of stuff, but no, the bitterness [74:46] as the war went on, and there was greater loss on the home front, and as the [74:50] war became more all-encompassing and really went after the entire, [74:55] The civilian side of the Confederacy was not shielded from it, the [74:59] bitterness increased and increased and increased. And there's a [75:03] lot of unhappiness with the war behind the lines in the Confederacy, [75:06] absolutely, unhappiness with the government. There's desertion. [75:12] About 15% of Confederate soldiers deserted. [75:16] About 12% of United States soldiers deserted. So there's [75:19] desertion on both sides. There's war-weariness, [75:23] but the war goes on because I think if you had been able to poll most white [75:27] Southerners even late in the war and say, "Okay, here are your choices. [75:32] You either have Jefferson Davis in the government and the war goes on, or you're going back [75:36] into the United States and the Lincoln government will be in charge and you won't have [75:40] slavery. Which one do you pick?" They're gonna pick the first one, and that's why [75:44] the war went on as long as it did. [75:46] - But at the same time, to fast-forward, [75:50] and that maybe teaches you something about the nature of war, but after the war, [75:56] maybe some of the decisions that Grant made, people were able to [76:00] rediscover the brotherhood. [76:02] - You mean at Appomattox you're talking about- [76:03] - Appomattox [76:04] - ... the terms at Appomattox. [76:05] - Yes. [76:05] - Yes, the... And those were... And he didn't just [76:08] reach up in the air and say, "I've got some terms." The... Lincoln very specifically... [76:12] He met with Lincoln shortly before Appomattox. Sherman was there. [76:16] One top naval officer was there, Grant and Lincoln, and Lincoln said, "This is [76:20] what I want. This is the kind of peace I want." [76:22] "The whole point of this war is to put the nation back together, and a good [76:26] start on that is..." [76:28] I mean, if it's just a rebellion, what do you do with traitors and rebels? [76:32] You hang them. [76:33] You don't bring them back. You don't treat them as prisoners of war, which the United States [76:37] did during this. You, he... But the goal is to put the nation back together, and Lincoln [76:41] said, "This is a good start. Make them sign a parole. Make them accept [76:47] the end of slavery and the fact that they're back in the Union. If they do that, they get to go [76:51] home and resume their lives." Hadn't been decided yet whether they'll get to [76:54] vote, but let them go home. Don't imprison them. Don't execute [76:58] them. Don't execute their leaders. That's the decision. [77:02] - From the perspective of the Union, what do you think about that kind of forgiveness? [77:05] - Well, I think that it was sort of a nod toward the direction of [77:09] forgiveness, but I don't think the real... I don't think real forgiveness was there. [77:13] It was still extremely hard feelings on both sides, and Lincoln's [77:17] assassination upped the ante on that, especially for a while, [77:21] in the United States. The, the forgiveness... [77:27] Two things in terms of the aftermath of the war, two words that often come into [77:31] play are reunion and reconciliation. [77:35] Those are two other things that are often conflated. Reunion is literally [77:39] putting the nation back together. That happened. Reconcile, true [77:43] reconciliation, that's much, much, much tougher, and that didn't [77:47] come anytime soon on the part of millions of people on both sides, I think. [77:51] - And we'll probably maybe talk about in multiple ways how maybe that is [77:58] something that's still going on. [77:59] - Oh, there are echoes of the Civil War all over the place. It's not still being fought, [78:03] but you can see resonances of the Civil War because it's such a [78:07] profoundly disruptive event that gets right [78:11] at the heart of what the republic means. I mean, and so it's... There's nothing [78:15] else like it in US history, and it's a great moment of truth, [78:20] the residual aftermath and effects of which lingered for [78:24] decades and are still present in some ways, I think. [78:27] - So in 1859, most Americans were just living their life. [78:34] Did they have a sense what was on the horizon? [78:39] - It's what I like to call the Appomattox Syndrome, which starts at the end of the story [78:44] And says, "Of course there was gonna be a war because the war was inevitable, and of course the [78:48] United States was gonna win and slavery was gonna be destroyed," because they were. [78:52] So let's find out how we got right here. [78:54] But no, most people didn't wake up in Iowa in 1857 [78:58] and their first thought was, "Boy, I hate the South." [79:00] "Those slaveholders, they're really..." No. People got on with their [79:03] quotidian lives and they got to the farm or they went to their business and [79:07] they did... They weren't... Nobody knew that they were living in the [79:11] antebellum era, and that those great antebellum years were about to come to an end. [79:17] They... That is something that it's hard to get people not... [79:21] To just put it out of your mind that that's all anybody is thinking about. They're thinking, [79:25] "There's a lot of other stuff going on." [79:28] There's a big gold rush in Colorado. More people go to Colorado than went to [79:32] California for a while. There is... And you have [79:36] these tremendous changes coming about, [79:40] technological changes of the 1850s where you have the real expansion of [79:44] railroads, the real expansion of the telegraph. There's a shrinking of time and [79:48] space that's remarkable for people at the time. It seemed dizzying [79:52] to them at the time. There are a lot of things to think about other than how much I hate [79:56] Yankees if I'm in South Carolina, or I hate slaveholders if I live in New Hampshire. [80:01] But periodically, there are these events that pop up that [80:05] refocus on the differences between the sections. [80:09] And you have the Kansas-Nebraska Act. You have Dred [80:13] Scott. You have the caning of Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate. [80:18] You have Uncle Tom's Cabin earlier in the decade in 18-- and what... [80:22] And the impact that that had on attitudes towards slavery. Doesn't create a bunch of [80:26] abolitionists, but it creates a bunch of people who rethink their [80:30] thoughts about slavery. [80:32] - Sorry to ask the big question about history. But, [80:38] you know, we're living today, 2026, [80:43] and there's the sense that every day you wake up, [80:47] the possibilities before us are endless, [80:51] for the good, for the bad, for the truly destructive. There's a [80:55] an eerie sense that the possibility of a world war in different kinds of ways, [81:00] whether it's sparked in the Middle East or sparked in China and Taiwan, or sparked [81:08] in Ukraine-Russia, [81:10] or elsewhere totally surprising in the world, may be related to nuclear [81:13] weapons or not. There's a sense that everything is possible. [81:17] And of course, when history is written about the 21st century, [81:21] it will all be obvious. [81:23] - It's always obvious in retrospect. That's right. [81:25] - What can we learn about... from the Civil War about how history unfolds [81:33] itself, I suppose, for the modern day? [81:35] - Well, I think that the potential threats now [81:38] are different from the potential threats in the mid-19th century. The nuclear dimension, [81:42] some kind of really brutal use of [81:46] pathogens. I mean, there are lots of things that could happen now that couldn't [81:50] happen then, at least not because humans were making them happen. But I mean, to, [81:58] to me, one of the things to take away from the Civil War is really the resiliency [82:03] of this republic, which I still think it's a resilient [82:07] republic. We're living in a sort of wacky time. [82:10] Uh, but I believe that the... I think that... [82:14] I have a great faith in the resiliency of the nation, I really [82:18] do, of the United States. I think it's been through much tougher times than we're in now, [82:23] and I think that we will weather this, although everybody [82:27] will have some scar tissue. There might even come a [82:30] time when our leadership class actually leads, and which would be [82:34] interesting. And I'm saying, you know, I'm talking about both [82:38] sides of the fence here. But it is... That, to me, [82:43] this is, this is the supreme test of a republic that had been put in [82:47] place in the late 18th century. Can that late 18th century republic [82:50] adjust, including adjusting to deal with the profoundly [82:54] disruptive issue of slavery, in a way that allows it [82:58] to go forward? And the answer is yes. In a war that brings [83:02] slaughter on an unimaginable scale and brings social disruption in the former [83:06] slave-holding states on an unimaginable... It just couldn't be more profoundly [83:10] disruptive if you're a Confederate. There's not slavery [83:14] anymore, and we lost the war, and a third of our military-age white men are dead. [83:18] Wow, that's a bad four years for our team. What's gonna [83:22] happen here? The Republic emerged from that and worked it out, and I think it [83:25] is... It goes back to, to me, [83:29] the intelligence of the founding generation that put in place documents that [83:33] actually allowed the Republic to deal with something like this. [83:36] And it's sort of a miracle to me [83:40] that from a nation that was as prejudiced, racially [83:43] prejudiced as the United States was, you get the 13th, [83:47] 14th, and 15th Amendments out of this. It's just kind of [83:53] mind-boggling that that happens. [83:56] - Yeah, I think resilience and [84:01] adaptive innovation often looks like chaos in the moment. [84:05] - It absolutely does. It absolutely does. But then when you really get [84:09] to the end of that story, you look, and there you are, and oh, it's okay, the [84:13] nation is still intact. And the 13th Amendment is in place. Wow, we didn't think- [84:20] ... that was gonna happen in 1861- [84:22] ... when secession started. I mean, it really... One, another lesson is that you [84:26] cannot control what a great military event can set loose. [84:32] I mean, no, things that nobody imagined would happen, including expansion of [84:37] central power [84:38] in ways that no one would have imagined. You don't get to ratchet that back and say, "Well, that'll [84:42] never happen again." No, you know what? It happened, and maybe it will happen again because we've [84:46] seen it happen. Nobody imagined that. The federal budget in [84:50] 1860 was $63 million. That was the entire federal budget. [84:55] The federal budget in 1865 was $1.2 billion, and [84:59] if you throw in the Confederate side of that, it gets you over $2 billion, which means [85:03] federal expenditures in 1860 would've lasted about 11 days in 1865. Nobody [85:10] foresaw that. Absolutely nobody foresaw that. And [85:16] education legislation that would create the great land grant colleges and [85:19] universities and no- it's... The war brought a lot [85:26] - And I think most of the things that have happened through the hard periods of our [85:31] country's history, nobody could have really f- [85:34] foreseen, and then we somehow figure it out, and that gives me a lot of hope. [85:39] - We- [85:39] - That this kinda like extreme division, the arguments, the people [85:45] basically speaking in the harshest of ways against each other, [85:50] that is like the engine of, [85:54] brainstorming and figuring problems out that in the long arc of history create [86:02] progress. But in the short term, it feels like a dumpster fire. [86:06] - It does. And to me, the arc of US history [86:13] has been, and Lincoln talked about this too, it's an expansion of freedoms and [86:17] liberties. That's the, that's the long arc, [86:20] with very problematical places along the way. But [86:25] again, the documents allow for that, and the process allows [86:29] for that, and I think that's one of the remarkable things about [86:33] Philadelphia in the summer of 1787. I mean, those guys, a lot of whom own slaves, [86:41] put together something that's proved to be resilient and adaptable and changeable, [86:45] and it has evolved in a way that is in the right direction, although there are [86:49] always problems. [86:52] - I love this country. I will never stop saying how [86:56] much I love this country. It's an incredible experiment. [86:59] I'm... we're this year celebrating its 250th birthday. I can't wait for the next [87:07] 250 years. This is such a fascinating study of human civilization. [87:12] - And it is complicated. What we want now is a sort of cartoon version of what we [87:20] Americans, as you watch popular culture, we want a [87:23] 30-second view of whatever. Well, who should I like? Who are the good guys? Who are the bad [87:27] guys? I want a 30-second version of the Civil War. What do I... [87:31] History is not that way. I've spent my whole life [87:35] studying history, and the maybe the main thing I've learned is however complicated [87:39] I thought something was when I really started to explore it, it's more complicated than [87:43] I thought it was. People aren't simple. They're complicated. And you have to [87:50] at least [87:52] appreciate, you don't have to embrace the complexity. I guess you can't make people do that, [87:56] but you have to at least concede that things are... they're just... There's not a [88:00] 20-second version of anything in the past. The past is complicated, [88:04] because humanoids are involved in it. They're complicated. [88:07] - Yeah, the... when you look at the system as a whole. But as individual humans, we [88:10] like to do the black and white thing where- [88:13] - Of course. [88:14] - ... we just see the good, everything as good and evil, and then we bicker. [88:16] - 'Cause it's easier. [88:17] - And then we get together at Thanksgiving dinner, and we yell at each other, and then people lose [88:21] their shit, and they stop talking to each other for a year, and then they, [88:25] they make up and all this 'cause this is just how humans interact with each other. [88:28] And, but as a system, especially with the increasing levels of [88:32] freedom, with the freedoms of speech and be able to speak out [88:36] about your feelings, even when they're intense feelings, that somehow works as a [88:40] system. [88:40] - And it's very messy. [88:42] - Yeah, yeah. [88:42] - The more freedom, the messier it is. Really, the messier it is. [88:46] - And your job as a historian [88:49] is a difficult job, and as you said, because the more you learn, [88:53] the more you come to understand, the more complicated the picture appears. [88:56] - Yep, and the more you learn, the more you learn that you don't know as much as you [89:00] thought you did. [89:02] - So some humility will take you a long way. [89:06] - Yes, you want more of Grant, [89:08] than McClellan in that, on that humility score. Grant would [89:12] score high on humility. McClellan, [89:15] every day, every day the first thought was, "What about me?" [89:19] "Who is gonna not appreciate how wonderful I am today?" thought George B. McClellan. [89:23] That's the thought that nagged at him. "Somebody might not know how great I am." [89:28] That's an aside. [89:29] - Reminds me of somebody. But anyway. [89:32] Quick ten-second shout-out to our sponsors. Check them out in the description. [89:36] It really is the best way to support this podcast. Go to [89:39] lexfridman.com/sponsors. And now, dear [89:43] friends, back to my conversation with Gary Gallagher. [89:48] Okay, let's at the start, first shots fired at Fort Sumter, as you mentioned, [89:55] and this thing starts brewing and escalating towards a full-on war. [90:01] What are the different advantages of each side from a military perspective? [90:07] - Here is one of the great misconceptions about the Civil War. Among the people who know [90:11] anything about it, which in the US is a very small percentage, [90:14] but if they know anything, they know United States' victory was inevitable. [90:19] Because the United States had 22 million people. [90:22] The Confederacy had five and a half million white people- [90:25] ... and three and a half million enslaved people. The United States' [90:28] economy was infinitely more powerful than the [90:32] Confederate economy. The United States had the United States Army. The United [90:36] States had the United States Navy. [90:39] Really, who's gonna win this war? The US, it's inevitable, next [90:42] question. It's not true at all. The US did have those advantages, but the [90:46] Confederacy had compensating advantages. And [90:50] one of those advantages was it had a much lower bar to [90:54] cross for success. It didn't have to invade the United States, [90:58] didn't have to capture Washington. It didn't have to project its military [91:02] power into New England. All it had to do was convince a majority [91:06] of the civilian population of the loyal states that it [91:10] wasn't worth the cost to make these rebel states come back into [91:14] the Union. These are two democratic republics at war, and in [91:18] the end, the civilian sector decides. Somebody my age [91:22] can... We have the perfect example, Vietnam. The United States was [91:26] not defeated militarily in Vietnam, and it didn't matter. [91:29] 'Cause when the people said, "We're not gonna support this war anymore," the war's gonna come to [91:33] an end. The smart people in the Confederacy understood this. They [91:37] understood it at the time. Lee understood it. Jefferson Davis understood it. [91:41] You had key people at the time saying, "There's no way that a [91:45] nation as large as ours and a population [91:49] as large as ours has ever been subjected in a war like this.
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