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

You cannot control what a great military event can set loose. More battle casualties than U.S. forces had suffered in every war combined down to that point happened in 2 days. Two and a half months after that, George B. McClellan's army engaged with Lee's army in what came to be called the Seven Days Battles at Richmond: 36,000 casualties. Those 2 together just showed that this was going to be on a totally different scale.

He added a psychological twist. What Grant envisioned doing—and Sheridan actually did it in the Shenandoah Valley before Sherman did it in Georgia—was go into an agriculturally productive area, burn the mills, kill the livestock, destroy the crops, and lay waste to it so that it could no longer provide logistical support for the Confederacy. Sheridan did it in the Shenandoah Valley, and then Sherman did it in Georgia.

But Sherman said, “I’m also going to break them psychologically. I’m going to show them that my army can go wherever it wants to go, whenever it wants to go, and there’s nothing Jefferson Davis can do about it.” The notion of history that the great forces are all that matter and individuals don’t really matter, I think, is ridiculous. Individuals really matter. For the United States, Lincoln and Grant matter beyond calculation in this war. On the Confederate side, if you take Lee out of the picture, the war doesn’t last nearly as long as it does. In terms of causation, if you take slavery out of the picture, there is no Civil War, period.

1. What caused the Civil War?

The American Civil War broke out in 1861. What were the causes of the Civil War? Could it have been avoided, or was it inevitable?

I don’t know if anything is inevitable in history, but it’s certainly safe to say that the conditions were in place to make it possible by the winter of 1860–61. Those conditions were all related to the institution of slavery and its effects, both in the states where slavery was allowed and in the states where it was not allowed.

There had been a series of tensions that grew in the decade preceding the 1850s. It’s not that one side wanted to get rid of slavery and the other side wanted to protect slavery. I’m talking about the white people in the United States who would be making the political decisions. It was a question of whether slavery was going to be able to expand into federal territories.

That is what really created the starkest difference between the 2 sections in the 1850s, even in the late 1840s. The issues that came to a perilous point, in the view of many people then, had to do with whether slavery would be allowed only where it already existed or whether it would be allowed to expand. If it could expand, then it seemed that it might even be conceivable at some point that the slaveholding states could end up with a majority.

They were in a minority by 1860–61 and were feeling beleaguered, feeling threatened. They had long since lost the population race to the free states. Early in the nation’s history, the most powerful states were slaveholding states. Virginia was by far the most important state. Four of the first 5 presidents were from Virginia, all slaveholders, all prominent members of the slaveholding class. Those days were long gone by the late 1850s.

So that’s an important thing to say. Before the Civil War, it wasn’t a discussion about abolishing slavery. It was about whether the institution of slavery should be expanded.

It was about whether slavery would be allowed to expand into federal territories. There was a portion of the white population that was adamantly in favor of getting rid of slavery immediately: the abolitionists. There was even a political party called the Liberty Party that ran a candidate in 1840, and they got a few thousand votes. They reached their high point in 1844, when they got about 2.5% of the vote.

The abolitionists were a tiny minority among the white people of the United States—even in the North, a tiny minority. The African American population, nearly 4 million of them by 1860, of course, would have embraced it instantly and yearned for it. But among the white population, the abolitionists were a tiny minority. They were much despised even across much of the North because they were seen as agitators who roiled the Union and deepened rifts that might bring a significant political break.

So how did this escalate to a civil war, this almost policy discussion about the institution of slavery? How did it actually escalate?

It escalated into a civil war because of the presidential election of 1860. There had been 2 party systems in the United States. The first party system was the Jeffersonian Republicans versus the Federalists. After that, the 2 parties were the Whig Party and the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party grew out of the Jeffersonian Republican Party. It’s the same party.

The Whig Party foundered, to a significant degree, on the issue of slavery. How do you maintain a national party that has a wing in the Southern states and a wing in the Northern free states that can handle the issue of slavery? The Democrats managed to do that. The Whigs could not do it, and so the Whig Party ran its last significant presidential candidate in 1852.

The Republican Party emerged in the mid-1850s and took most of the old Whigs into the Republican ranks. One of the key Republican platform planks was no expansion of slavery into the territories—not abolishing slavery, but no expansion. That was the key in 1856, when they ran their first candidate. In 1860, that was again the key plank in the Republican platform.

The Republican platform in 1860 said that where slavery existed, it would continue, but it could not expand into the territories. When white Southerners saw that, it meant that they were doomed to become an increasingly minority section in the nation. You would have a federal government increasingly dominated by the free states that could then do the one thing that the white South could not countenance: tamper with the institution of slavery in the South.

The presidential election of 1860 brought the destruction of the last national party, which was the Democrats. They couldn’t even settle on a candidate, so you ended up with a Northern Democratic candidate running, Stephen A. Douglas, and a Southern candidate running. The convention fractured, and John C. Breckinridge ran on the Southern Democratic platform.

You had a Unionist candidate running who just didn’t want to talk about slavery—let’s talk about the Union—and you had Lincoln running as a Republican. When Lincoln won, the white South looked at that result. Here was a guy who had said that he didn’t think slavery would expand, but he had said more than that.

He scared the white South even more because, in 1858, both Lincoln and William Henry Seward—2 prominent Republicans—had said, in separate speeches, basically the same thing. In Lincoln’s case, it was the House Divided Speech; in Seward’s case, it was the Irrepressible Conflict Speech. They said that the nation could not continue in the long term half slave and half free.

Everybody in the South knew which way they wanted it to be. They would want it to be no slavery. Lincoln’s election scared the white South enough that 7 of the 15 slaveholding states seceded in response to Lincoln’s election. They seceded between December 20, when South Carolina went out, and the end of February. The Deep South went out.

What was the general view among the populace toward slavery? Let’s lay it out. For the audience looking back, let’s put ourselves in the mind-set of how people saw the world, how people saw slavery, and how people saw African Americans.

The baseline among white Americans was profoundly prejudiced. There were slightly more than 31 million Americans in the 1860 census. About 4 million of them were African Americans, 3.5 million of those enslaved in the South.

Among the white population, the average attitude toward Black people is what we would call profoundly prejudiced. A lot of people think this is a Southern white thing, that they were the only ones who were prejudiced. By our standards, the overwhelming majority of people in the free states were also deeply prejudiced.

It’s important to keep in mind that attitudes toward slavery and attitudes toward race are not necessarily the same. You could be against slavery and still be prejudiced against Black people. By our standards, many abolitionists were prejudiced against Black people.

In the North, I often have a hard time getting my students to understand the demographics in 1860. The free states in 1860 were more than 98% white—98% white. African Americans were a tiny minority in the free states. Black people lived in the 15 slaveholding states in 1860.

Most of the white North, by our standards, was very prejudiced. They were against the expansion of slavery into the territories because they thought that would circumscribe white opportunities to make an economic life in these federal territories, and they didn’t want that to happen.

About 45% of the people who lived in the free states were Democrats. Most Democrats had no problem with the institution of slavery. There would be more opposition among Republicans, especially to the extension of slavery, although many white Democrats in the North were against that as well.

The white South was overwhelmingly in favor of slavery. You often read the kind of neo-Confederate argument in which they’ll talk about how most Confederate soldiers didn’t own slaves.

That's true. The large majority of families in the South did not own a single slave. But all white Southerners had a stake in slavery. They had a stake in it as a form of labor control, but more important than that, they had a stake in it as a means of social control. They knew, no matter what they said later in the Jim Crow era about how happy Black people were in the institution of slavery, that Black people, of course, did not want to be enslaved, and they were afraid of what would happen if they weren't enslaved anymore.

They had Haiti in the backs of their minds. If you live in one of the coastal districts of South Carolina where 90% of the residents are enslaved, and you're a white person, you probably don't sleep all that soundly at night if you think there's any chance that the Black people are not going to remain under the control of the white people. So all white people in the South had a stake in slavery, not just some of them. All of them did, and there were all kinds of ways that it would go back and forth.

If you were a modest farmer and grew a little bit of cotton, you didn't have your own cotton gin, but your wealthier neighbor had a gin and could gin your cotton there. Then you would take your turn on the slave patrols. So there was a reciprocity in that regard.

2. Slavery

This is perhaps a bit outside the scope of what we'll talk about today, but just to lay out the context on slavery in general in human history, we should say that slavery was ubiquitous. It existed in virtually every major civilization in the history of humans: Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, China, the Islamic world, Africa, and the Americas, North and South America.

We should also say something about another big topic, which is the Atlantic slave trade. It was surprising to me—the statistic I wasn't aware of, and I would venture to say most Americans probably don't know—is that only 4% of African slaves were brought to North America, to the United States.

Brazil is the main destination.

Brazil—the Caribbean was over 90%: 4.9 million in Brazil, 4 million in the Caribbean. Brazil was also the last of the Americas to abolish the slave trade. So only 4% of the Atlantic slave trade went to the United States.

The story of human slavery reaches deep into our history and, geographically, is much larger than we often study in the context of the United States.

One thing the war—the Civil War, which I'll just call the war for the rest of our discussion—did was end slavery in 4 years in the United States. Whereas in the absence of that war, it might have gone on for decades. I think the United States would have had the ignominious distinction of being the last place to get rid of slavery. It would have been after Brazil and after Spanish Cuba, because slavery was thriving in the United States in 1860.

It was making the transition from cash-crop agriculture to industrial and other applications, not growing just cotton, rice, and sugar. There was a time in the literature when people argued that the war was needless, that the Civil War was needless because slavery was on its way out. That's absolutely wrong. It was not on its way out. It was thriving.

Lincoln said at one point he thought it might have lasted another 50 years. I don't know how many years it would have lasted, but I think it would have lasted longer than it did in either Cuba or Brazil if the war hadn't taken place.

So slavery was flourishing in the United States—

Flourishing.

—from an economics perspective, especially.

The wealthiest part—the 1860 census is our friend, and it tells us that the people who controlled the most wealth in the United States were slaveholders. Their property in slaves alone, not their other holdings, not their land holdings, was valued at about $3 billion. The value of all industries, all railroads, all of that put together, was fewer than $2.5 billion. So the people who controlled the most wealth, by far, were the slaveholding class.

So it was the most valuable industry in the United States, and perhaps it is the reason—again, a bit out of scope, but maybe it helps lay out the land—let's look at the 19th century. Most slave-owning societies of the era were able to abolish slavery without people dying at the mass scale that we'll discuss.

Britain freed 800,000 slaves in 1833—

By buying their freedom. Russia freed 23 million serfs in 1861 with a decree, so legally. Brazil, which imported more than 10 times as many enslaved Africans as the United States, abolished slavery in 1888 through basic, ordinary legislation. No violence.

Why did the U.S. have a Civil War, with an estimated 750,000 people dead, in order to abolish slavery?

Yes. Let's talk just for a second about the 750,000 dead soldiers we're talking about. The number for years was 618,000, and that's been revised lately. I think we're certainly more than 700,000. It was by far the bloodiest war in our history. As a percentage of the population, it was off the charts—by far the bloodiest.

I think there's a big difference between Great Britain doing it and the United States doing it. Great Britain did it in other places. There weren't millions of enslaved people in Great Britain at the time. For them, it might have been a little bit easier to free enslaved people who didn't live among them than it was in the United States.

In the United States, the ante is up for the Confederacy because the enslaved people lived here. I think a lot of them were afraid of what would happen if they weren't enslaved anymore.

The war doesn't begin as a war to end slavery. There's a major shift in the war that begins in the summer of 1862, where you add to the war aim. The war aim for the United States initially is to suppress the rebellion, which is what they called it. They didn't call it the Civil War for the most part during the war. It was the War of the Rebellion. That's the goal initially.

As the war goes on and becomes costlier and more all-encompassing, they decide that they're not going to be able to suppress the rebellion unless they also strike at slavery, because slavery underpins the Confederate war-making capacity. You have enslaved labor that keeps the economy going and allows the Confederacy to mobilize between 85% and 90% of all its white military-age males. It's an astonishing mobilization. It's only possible because enslaved labor keeps the economy going. If you take that enslaved labor away, it deals a significant blow to the Confederate economy and, by extension, to its ability to wage a 19th-century war.

So the Emancipation Proclamation was in part a military strategy.

Abraham Lincoln based it entirely on his war-making power as commander in chief in a time of open rebellion. He's often been criticized for not including the soaring language he was capable of in the Emancipation Proclamation. One historian likened it to a bill of lading. It had all the soaring language of a bill of lading.

He did that on purpose. He did it because he doesn't have the power to strike at slavery in the absence of a war. The president doesn't. And he did it because he knew that he couldn't win the war with only Republicans in the army. He needed to keep Democrats on board with the war as well. They're not in favor of emancipation.

The one way that they might accept it is as a tool to help achieve Union. To do that, we've got to strike at the rebels this way—strike at slavery. That will hurt their war effort, and it will also punish the people who brought on the war.

Lincoln hoped that by basing it strictly on his war power, it might be more widely accepted across all parts of the loyal states and not as controversial as it was. It was still intensely controversial. It alienated many Democrats when he issued it, who said, "You're changing what this war is about. We're willing to shed our blood and maybe risk our lives to restore the Union of the founders. I'm not going to risk my life to free a Black person."

That's a very, very common attitude among Democrats.

So what did the Emancipation Proclamation actually do? It emphasized the freeing of slaves in the South.

It's even more complicated than that. The only place that Lincoln said he had the power as the war leader to strike at slavery was where the rebels were actually still in rebellion and in control. Any place where the U.S. Army was in control, he said, was in essence United States territory. "I can't free them there because I don't have the power. I can only free them where we don't have the power."

So he exempted parts of states and areas in the South where it didn't apply as of the moment he signed it. Going forward, any place that the United States Army went where it hadn't been on January 1, 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation applied, and enslaved people would be freed by it.

At the time he signed it, he literally didn't free anybody, because he was only saying, "I can free them where we're not in control. We have to be in control for this to have effect and for it to have power."

So in part, this is why the army was the boundary where the freeing was happening.

It's absolutely the boundary. Congress had already passed what was called the Second Confiscation Act. It passed this in July of 1862, and it announced that all enslaved people belonging to rebels were free. It didn't apply to people who could prove they were Unionists living in the South and owned slaves.

Lincoln didn't make that distinction in the Emancipation Proclamation. His proclamation is broader than the Second Confiscation Act was.

Okay. There are so many tangents we can take, but let's zoom out once again. There's a difference between cause, as you've talked about, and motivation.

Absolutely.

Quite a large number of people volunteered to fight.

In fact, a majority of all the soldiers who fought on both sides were volunteers during the Civil War. About 3 million served: 2.2 million in the United States, and 800,000 or 900,000 in the Confederacy.

Again, I talk about things that are hard to get students to understand. This is one of them. They have to separate causation and motivation. They are often conflated, and not just by students, but also by lots of talking heads on newscasts in the United States who don't know anything about United States history, but know what they know.

In terms of causation, if you take slavery out of the picture, there is no Civil War. Period. That's not a long conversation you need. You ask the question. That's the answer. Let's go to the next question.

The next question is: Were most white people motivated to put on blue uniforms because they wanted to kill slavery? The answer to that is no, they were not. They were motivated to put on blue uniforms to salvage the Union, which they saw as a unique gift that the founding generation, based on the bloodshed in the American Revolution, had bequeathed to successive generations.

The 2 key parts of what the Union meant for them were, number 1, you had a voice in your own government. Someone will always say now to me, "Well, but women couldn't vote." That's right. The people who could vote by our standards were limited in the 19th century, but within the context of the Western world in 1860, the United States had by far the broadest franchise. By far.

They argued that's one thing the Union gives us, and it also gives us the chance to rise economically. It doesn't guarantee that you can succeed, but it means you're not doomed to be what your father was. Those are worth fighting for.

I will put on a uniform so the slaveholding aristocrats and oligarchs—which is what they called them—of the South, who they said didn't really believe in democracy. It's an oligarchy in the South. It's a slavery-based oligarchy, and we know which way Europe is going, they said. The revolutions of the 1840s failed in Europe. Europe's going the wrong way. They're going toward more aristocracy, more oligarchy, and we are the last hope.

When Lincoln spoke of the "last best hope of Earth," which he did in one of his most memorable phrases, he meant that the United States is a beacon of small-d democracy in a Western world that seems to be turning the other way.

To those soldiers, it meant it was that important to them. They are citizens in a republic that people shed blood to establish, and we can't let it go. Part of the compact is: I'm a citizen. I derive these benefits from this republic, from the Union. I can have a voice in government. I can rise economically, or have the chance to. I owe my service to that republic.

That's what most of them would've said if you'd pressed them on why they were doing it. It doesn't mean everybody was on fire with ideology that way. Some guys would say, "Well, you know what? I'm broke, and I'm going to get fed and clothed in the army."

But this sense of exceptionalism—exceptionalism is unpopular now in the United States—but Americans had a sense of themselves as a truly exceptionalist society within the context of the Western world.

As a small aside, terminology-wise, blue is the Union, or what we think of as the United States, and red is the Confederacy.

Yes. On the maps, the Confederate units are red blocks, and the United States units are blue blocks. That's right.

And, uh—

That is correct.

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

Let me have a very brief rant on North and South. I prefer to see this as a war between 2 mid-19th-century republics, 1 of which didn't last very long and spent its whole life in the midst of a great war.

There were 15 slaveholding states in 1860. Only 11 of them seceded from the United States.

Even though there are 13 stars. We'll talk about that.

We'll talk about that demented notion of things in just a minute, but only 11 leave. So there are 4 slaveholding states in the United States: Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, and Delaware remain in the United States.

It's not just North versus South. Those states are all part of the South. It's the United States versus the Confederacy.

But see how you referred to it as the United States. So the Union is also referred to as the United States.

That's correct. Yes, yes.

But the Confederacy was, as you write about, a set of people who also had a sense of nationalism and pride.

Well, they took their founding document. I mean, it took the whole summer of 1787 in Philadelphia—that hot, steamy, humid summer of 1787—to come up with the Constitution.

The Confederates did it quickly because they basically had the U.S. Constitution here, a blank piece of paper over here, and copied most of the Constitution over here. They just changed the parts that they needed to make sure slavery was protected, and that they didn't have the wrong kind of tariffs and so forth. That's 1 reason they could do it so quickly.

It's absolutely based on the government they've been thriving under, which is under the United States Constitution. Both sides claimed they were the true inheritors of the revolutionary generation. That was 1 of their—

They all—Jefferson Davis loved the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration is Abraham Lincoln's favorite document. They just liked different parts of it.

So we should think of this as 2 republics.

I argue that. That makes many people very angry.

I will make many people angry today.

They say that I am conferring legitimacy on the Confederacy that they don't deserve. My response to that is: They have a national government. They have a Senate. They have a Congress. They have an army. They have a navy. They have departments. It walks like a duck. It quacks like a duck.

In the end, it's a slaughtered duck, faster than it would've been because the United States military forces crushed it.

We should say that you are respected, admired, and loved by most people on both sides, from a perspective sense. You're deeply respected by historians of the Civil War and just historians of American history.

But of course, when you do your job well on a controversial topic in a controversial period of human history, you're going to get, hopefully, an equal amount of critics on both sides. That's when you do your job well. So sometimes when we speak today, some of the controversial, quote-unquote controversial, things that you express are controversial from that small minority of folks on both sides, for different reasons.

Yes. I won't be—

One of my favorite pieces of hate mail I got was an email from this guy. He was upset that I referred to the Confederacy as a slaveholding republic, and he said that he hoped I would develop virulent pancreatic cancer and die a horrible death.

Not just regular pancreatic cancer. He wanted virulent pancreatic cancer. Then he signed his name and said he'd be happy to talk to me anytime I wanted to.

Yeah, I'm sure that would be a wonderful conversation.

But there's also really strong senses throughout the United States—of the United States—of this diversity of opinion about what the United States is.

Of course. Yes.

And that's where the passion is really rooted.

Both sides claim—In the election of 1860, Douglas talked about how much he loved the Union. Lincoln talked about how much he loved the Union. Breckinridge talked about how much he loved the Union. And John Bell, who's the Unionist, the Constitutional Union candidate, that's all he talked about.

They just had different versions of what the Union was.

And that's why I love this country. I think it's the greatest country on Earth, and it has a bunch of people who very strongly disagree with each other. Hopefully, it will never again escalate to the degree that it did during this period of time.

So we talked about the blue people on the map and the red people on the map. It may be a silly thing to ask, but sticking with the motivation, why would, let's say, a farm boy in Ohio want to die for the Union?

That is the most important question, and I didn't even ask you to ask it. That's the hardest thing—

Let's be honest. You paid me a lot of money to ask that question.

I didn't think it was so much.

Okay. I'm sorry. Go ahead. I won't distract.

No. I tell my students at the beginning of my Civil War class that if they couldn't explain—I didn't use Ohio. I said, "If you can't explain why a farmer from Vermont would put on a blue uniform and pick up a musket to make South Carolina come back in, why didn't he just say, 'Great. South Carolina's gone. I never liked them anyway. This is a better Union'?"

If you can't explain that, then you can't understand the Civil War. The key to that, I'll come back to it, is Union.

He would've said, "If we allow South Carolina to go, that means that other places could go, and you could dismantle the Union. The only reason they're going is because they didn't like who was elected president. They didn't say that Lincoln was corrupt. They didn't say Republicans bought the election. They just didn't like who won the election."

If the republic is so fragile that it can't have an election without having the people who didn't like who won leave, then the founders had wasted their time, the Revolution was for nothing, and all that bloodshed meant nothing.

You had to step up and save this precious republic that had been put in place by the revolutionary generation and gave its citizens the benefits that I've already talked about. That's why they would put on a uniform and risk their life, because they believed—These are citizen soldiers.

We don't understand that as much now because we have a professional military establishment. I mean, even when I was younger, there was still a draft, but that's gone now. And so we don't understand the concept of the citizen soldier: that you owe something back to the republic that has conveyed these things to you, and that's why the guy from Vermont or New Hampshire or Ohio would put on a uniform and go into military service.

Is it possible for us to understand that level of love of nation and belief in nation? Is this very distant from what America is today?

I actually think many people probably still feel that way, but they're not the ones who are on television most of the time. Republicans in the midst of the war commented about the fact that even with this gigantic conflict going on, immigration continued at a high level. People were coming into a nation that was in the middle of a great war, and they said, “This is a testament to the promise of the United States.”

I think that promise continues. As with so many things, Americans have no sense of history. They believe we've never argued about immigration before. We've always argued about immigration, with some people always saying, “Shut the door. They're ruining us. The Italians are ruining us. The Irish are Catholics. They're ruining us. God, the Southern Europeans are even worse than the Irish were.”

The people change; the arguments stay very much the same. I think it's really telling that in the midst of the war, people would say, “Look at our republic. It offers so much to people that even in the midst of this great war, they're still coming to the United States.”

And like you said, both sides, both these republics claimed, for example, George Washington.

Yes. They both claim George Washington. I'll leave it at that. They both claim George Washington. They wanted to be right with the man, which is what George Washington was. He's the indispensable man, no question. Both sides wanted him on their side.

They both quoted Thomas Jefferson, although Confederates were a little more leery of Jefferson because he's too complicated for them sometimes. But no, they wanted to be right with the founders and claimed to be right with the founders. The Confederates would say, “The Constitution allowed slavery. What are you talking about? We're out of step with the Constitution? We're in step with the Constitution. You're the ones who are out of step with the Constitution.”

What about the topic of states' rights? At the very least—

I love states' rights. I love the way people use it with the Civil War. They associate it solely with Southern states, of course. States' rights is always available in United States history for somebody who's not happy with what the federal government is doing.

During the War of 1812, it was New England that most often talked about resorting to states' rights. They had a convention where they sort of wandered over toward secession territory in the Hartford Convention. We think of it as states' rights because, as you lead up to the Civil War, you hear white Southerners talking about it all the time: “We need our states' rights.”

I always love to ask people who say that, “What are all the states' rights that the white South is concerned about? Give me the top 3. No, really, just give me the top 2.” There's only 1. The states' right that they're worried about is the right of their state to interpose its power between a federal government that might try to interfere with slavery and a state government that wants to maintain it. That's the states' right that matters then.

Northern states also resorted to states' rights during the ramp-up to the Civil War, with what were called personal liberty laws. They tried to interpose their state power between a federal government that would use its power to force escaped enslaved people back into slavery. It's whoever's unhappy with the federal government. The concept of states' rights is available, and both sides used it.

And of course, the beautiful, dark, ironic hypocrisy was illustrated by the Confederacy when they were the first to pass a national draft in American history.

Irony is wonderful in history. Another thing that I love to teach is that the most intrusive central government in American history by far, until deep into the 20th century, was the Confederate central government. It had to do things to keep the war going that it couldn't have done unless the central government stepped in, such as passing the first national conscription law in American history.

The U.S. government never forced people into uniform before the Civil War. The Confederates did it first. They did it in the spring of 1862. They passed a national graduated income tax. When taxing didn't work, when their money became so devalued, they then passed what they called the tax in kind. They would take a percentage of your crop. They allowed the government to impress horses and mules and enslaved labor to work on fortifications.

All of these were intrusions from the central government that drove true states' rights people crazy in the Confederacy. Confederates didn't have political parties because they said the founders didn't want them, so they wouldn't have them. But what they did have was a sort of nationalist attitude: “We're going to let the central government do whatever it needs to do.” That's Jefferson Davis' wing, and Robert E. Lee's over there, too.

There were people like the vice president, Alexander Stephens, who said, “You can't do all this stuff because the states should have more power.” The only reason the war lasted as long as it did is because the central government did things no one ever would have believed it would do. It also got rid of habeas corpus, just like Abraham Lincoln did in selected situations.

And of course, we should really emphasize that on both sides—on the Confederate side, there's a very large number of people, percentage-wise, who volunteered to fight. And then I believe the volunteer period was 1 year, and then there was all kinds of funky stuff that the government started doing to trap those people into then serving and—

Here's what the Confederacy did. Nobody thinks the war's going to last a long time in the spring of 1861. So if you enlist for a year, that's probably plenty of time to finish this war.

Well, a year goes by, and a significant percentage of the Confederate men under arms are due to get out. So what the Confederate Congress did was pass conscription: “We're going to make everybody liable to 3 years' service.” In the midst of doing that, all you guys who volunteered for 1 year are now in for 2 more years.

That outraged people. “You're breaking faith with us,” they said. They didn't stop there. Later, they revised it when the war kept going on and the 3-year guys were going to get out. Then Congress stepped in and said, “You're in for the duration.”

The bottom line is, if the Confederacy ever gets you in uniform, you don't get out because they keep changing the rules on you. National conscription was considered a fundamental abridgment of individual rights by many people. That's something the government should never do: force a citizen into uniform. A citizen should volunteer their service.

The U.S. government waited a year, then it did it in the spring of 1863, although it always respected original terms of enlistment. It never made it for the duration of the war the way the Confederacy did.

There are so many different directions we can go, but I am somebody who believes that individuals can steer the direction of history. So one angle to look at here is some of the legendary historical figures from this time.

3. Lincoln

Let's talk about some of the key figures of the Civil War. We have Abraham Lincoln, of course, the president of the United States who held the Union together and turned the war into a fight for a new birth of freedom; Jefferson Davis, who you mentioned, president of the Confederacy; Ulysses S. Grant, somebody we'll talk about quite a bit, general in chief of the Union armies; and Robert E. Lee on the other side, the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, somebody who you have studied for decades now. We'll talk a lot about him.

There's Sherman, there's Stonewall Jackson, there's Frederick Douglass, there's McClellan, and there's John Brown, a militant abolitionist. There are many more figures, but let's look at 3 at first. Let's look at Lincoln, Grant, and Lee. Lincoln first.

So Abraham Lincoln

we have this backwoods lawyer with a single year of schooling who somehow outgrew every polished man around him and became one of the most consequential leaders in human history. What do we need to understand? What can we possibly understand at a 10,000-foot level about Lincoln that made it all possible? What was it about Lincoln's mind that made this man do what he did?

Almost nobody continues to go up in my estimation as I get older and older, but Lincoln is one of the people who does. Lincoln is, quite frankly, a mystery to me. I don't see how you get Abraham Lincoln out of someone who came from his very poor background.

You said he had a year of schooling. You're being very generous to him there. He didn't even really have a year of formal schooling. And you end up with a person who is the most eloquent president we've ever had by a very wide margin, and I think even more eloquent than Jefferson, who is able to distill into the fewest possible words the most complex ideas and topics imaginable and just have them ring in a way that almost no one is able to do.

He had an ego, but I think one of his real gifts was the ability to put his ego aside and keep his eye on the goal. He was able to focus, and he focused relentlessly on, number one, suppressing the rebellion and restoring the Union. He hated the institution of slavery. He’s not an abolitionist, but he hated the institution of slavery, and he was very happy to see that slavery was added to the roster of what the United States would insist on at the end of the war.

He was able to let all the other things go. He can pay attention to many things, but he never loses his principal focus: “How do I maintain this great war?” And it’s an all-encompassing war. It’s really hard to get people to understand the scope of the Civil War. There were 31 million people in the United States then. About a shade more than 3 million put on uniforms.

It would be as if we had 35 to 40 million people under arms now. For the Confederates, it would be more like having 55 million people under arms as a percentage of the population. The dead would be between 6 million and 7.5 million, depending on how you count it. The scope is just enormous. During the Gulf Wars, The New York Times put a picture of every United States service person who was killed in the paper over the course of those wars, and that is about as many people as were shot in a few hours at Antietam.

It’s just very difficult to get students now to understand the different scale, and that’s what Lincoln was dealing with. How do I keep the focus on a war that is becoming far more costly than anyone imagined and eating up our young manpower at a rate that no one had ever seen? There had never been anything in our history to prepare the United States for this. Winfield Scott captured Mexico City with an army of fewer than 15,000 during the war with Mexico. U.S. Grant has 120,000. The whole scale is just so different that it’s hard to come to terms with it.

And that’s what Lincoln was dealing with. I think the fact that he was willing to surround himself with really able counselors is important. Who does he put in his cabinet? He puts his main rivals in the cabinet. He put William Henry Seward in his cabinet, who was the most famous Republican in the country. He puts Salmon P. Chase, who’s a very smart, effective, and ambitious person from Ohio, in his cabinet.

He surrounds himself with people who are capable and energetic and have their own ambitions. He’s not afraid to do that, all of whom had far better educations than he had and didn’t have a rural backwoods accent like he did. It’s also a measure of how confident he was. He didn’t pretend to talk in a fashion that he didn’t actually talk. He would have pronounced words in ways that anybody who went to Harvard would just sneer at. He didn’t, and he knew they sneered, and he didn’t care.

Eventually, all of them, except the ones with only a 20-watt bulb, figured out that Lincoln was actually probably smarter than they were, had a better grasp of things than they did, and brought them around. He really brought Seward around, which is very impressive.

Yeah, there are so many fascinating things about Lincoln. The backwoods of Kentucky—and Kentucky is a very important state in this story—and the right words, the right speeches, the right debates at this moment in history. It really does make me wonder if Lincoln didn’t exist, if certain humans in history didn’t exist, whether everything could have turned out very differently.

The notion of history that the great forces are all that matters and individuals don’t really matter is ridiculous, I think. Individuals really matter. For the United States, Lincoln and Grant matter beyond calculation in this war. On the Confederate side, if you take Lee out of the picture, the war doesn’t last nearly as long as it does. In fact, we’ll talk about this later, probably, but I think it could have ended early in the summer of 1862 with slavery still intact.

In a perverse way, Lee furthers the cause of emancipation because he extends the war long enough that the United States says, “We have to do this. We’ve got to get rid of slavery to defeat the rebels.”

And also, on the psychological side, Lincoln is a fascinating study because he carried deep depression all his life.

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

And so, for somebody who has to go through an all-encompassing war, to be able to survive through that, to think through that, without an education, without any acquired skill that enables him to be a commander-in-chief during a time of war—he’s got nothing in the toolbox, and yet he steps up.

If you looked at his résumé and Jefferson Davis’s in 1860 and said, “Okay, here are the 2 guys who are going to be your respective commanders-in-chief. Who do you want on your team?” Lincoln had no administrative experience beyond running a little law office. He had 1 2-year term in the House of Representatives in terms of national government. He had no military service to speak of, just a little while in the Black Hawk War as a junior officer. He didn’t check any of the education boxes, as you said.

Jefferson Davis was a graduate of West Point. He’d commanded more men in the war with Mexico than most of the men who commanded armies during the Civil War. He’d chaired the Senate Committee on Military Affairs. He’d been Secretary of War and had a lot of administrative experience. He checked every box. Lincoln checked none of the boxes, and yet you got Lincoln as a commander-in-chief. It’s really quite remarkable.

He could listen to people that he thought knew more about something than he did. That’s a quality that all of our presidents, to put it mildly, have not had. Lincoln did have that. He could listen. He could admit when he was wrong and change his mind about things, and he could put up with obnoxious behavior on the part of people that he thought might deliver the goods.

A perfect example of this is George Brinton McClellan, whom we’ll talk about later, who was general-in-chief for a while and commanded the Army of the Potomac. In 1861, Lincoln and his Secretary of State, William Henry Seward, went to McClellan’s house to talk to McClellan. The commander-in-chief goes to McClellan’s house. McClellan wasn’t there. The butler or somebody put them in a side room.

McClellan came home and was told Lincoln was there. He went upstairs and then told the person who worked for him to go tell the president that he’d be happy to talk to him some other time. Lincoln just left. He never went back to see McClellan again, didn’t pitch a fit, and filed that away: “Okay, McClellan’s an ass, but I think he might win the war.”

He had that ability to put aside that kind of behavior on the part of someone if he thought they would deliver. He has a number of qualities, I think, that are very unusual to find in someone. And as you say, he did have depressive moments. We talk about what bad days presidents have. Lincoln would have said, “I’ll take that president’s worst day every day rather than the days that I get,” for the most part. It’s hard to imagine the burdens that he carried.

And at the right time, just a handful of words expressed something that no military could possibly do.

Explain what the war was about, why it was worth fighting, and what it meant: his second inaugural address. When people went to hear the president give his second inaugural address on that cold day in 1865, what they wanted to hear was that they had finally beaten the rebel scum, from their point of view. Let’s have some retribution here. What are we going to do to them? How are we going to make these people who brought this great war pay for this?

What does Lincoln tell them? He tells them slavery caused it. Everybody knows, somehow, that that’s the truth, and we’re all implicated in it. He didn’t tell them anything that they wanted to hear that day. It took great courage, I think, to do that at that moment—to tell an audience what they didn’t want to hear. And he did it in the most eloquent language that any president has ever used. That’s the greatest speech in American history, the second inaugural, in my view.

“With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan; to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Allen Guelzo

And we’re all complicit in this because we all countenanced slavery. I mean, that’s all in that 1 speech. And it’s a short speech. The whole speech probably only lasted 8 or 9 minutes. He also pays tribute to the citizen soldiers at the beginning of it because he says that the war is going well and we all know that everything depends on what our soldiers do. By that he meant saving the Union, killing slavery—it all depends on them. Then he comes back and finishes with his tribute to the soldiers at the end.

And I have to say, the Gettysburg Address.

Allen Guelzo

Oh, no, you can’t.

If I may, it’s only maybe 200 words:

“Four score and 7 years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

“We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

“But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract.”

The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.

That's a big statement about what this country is about. It's about freedom.

And he comes back to, when most people read that, the very last part of it, they emphasize the prepositions: of the people, by the people, for the people.

Allen Guelzo

Lincoln, it's not about the prepositions. It's about the people. He earlier in the war referred to this as a people's contest. It's the people that are the key, the people who make up the republic, the people who will derive the freedoms and liberties that the— I mean, it's an amazing statement. It probably took you 2 minutes to read that. He was finished before most people knew he had started at Gettysburg. Almost nobody heard him say that.

The one thing wrong about it is when he said no one would remember very long what he said there. It's been remembered pretty well.

4. Grant vs Lee

And let's talk about the 2 other figures which we'll return to time and time again: Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee. So who was Grant?

This is a man who failed at farming, failed at business, and failed at his role in the peacetime army. Then, when the war came, the war revealed a genius.

He'd known a lot of failure and a lot of setbacks, and his wartime record shows that he'd learned to deal with those things. He had a great, tremendous relationship with his wife, a very strong family life, and a family he loved. I think that was the rock for him.

But during the war, what he exhibited was an absolute willingness to break rules, to take risks, to take responsibility for what he was doing, whether it was a success or a failure, and not to be cast down by things that didn't work. If something didn't work, he'd say, "Okay, that didn't work. Now let's do this."

He very famously, when he got to Virginia in 1864 and took over the Army of the Potomac, had all these subordinates who were saying, "What if General Lee does this? What if General Lee does that?" He finally said, "Why don't we stop worrying about what General Lee is going to do and let General Lee worry about what we're going to do?" He was unflappable under stress. He was the perfect person to end up heading the Union armies, and Lincoln realized that. He proved indispensable.

But he has this reputation as a butcher, Grant the Butcher. That's something that former Confederates and some Democrats in the North fastened on him. His preferred way of fighting wasn't just to slug it out.

It's really interesting to compare his record in the war with Lee's record in the war before they wound up opposing each other in Virginia in a really bloody overland campaign. Grant's total casualties in all his great battles before they met were 37,000. Lee's were over 98,000 in the same period. The bloodiest general in U.S. history, by far, in terms of how many of his men got shot, is Robert E. Lee.

The most careful demographic study of any Civil War army is one done of Lee's army by a scholar named Joe Glatthaar. Joe figured out that if you were a soldier in Robert E. Lee's army, you had a 73% chance of becoming a casualty. Seventy-three percent. Grant's casualties get high when he runs into Robert E. Lee, just like everybody else's. So the butcher tag is completely unfair about Grant.

He's also known as a drunk, and people have gone back and forth on that, whether he just had a weakness and couldn't hold his alcohol very well, or was okay as long as his wife was around and he had a key staff officer to help him. The point is, alcohol never got in the way of anything Grant did during the war, and he had a superlative record of delivering victories when the United States needed them. Lincoln figured that out.

The absolute proof of his stature is that in March 1864, Congress decided to dust off the rank of three-star general, lieutenant general, and give it to Grant. The only person who'd ever had that rank was George Washington—the man. I mean, he is the man. They were saying, "Okay, Grant, you get the rank the man had," and that shows there's never been anyone else who got it. You're the first.

He would also be the first to get a four-star rank in the United States Army. There couldn't be a better indication of his stature than that he got Washington's rank. Winfield Scott had had it by brevet. Grant got the actual rank.

So, in part, the Grant the Butcher label was from the Overland Campaign that we'll talk about—

It is from the Overland Campaign.

—as the military decisions made there.

Allen Guelzo

Yep.

Many would argue that those are critically important for the success of the war.

Allen Guelzo

Yes. He and Lee are often compared, but for the last year of the war, they're operating on—it's not apples to apples—because Grant is general-in-chief and is managing the entire war effort. He's managing what Sherman's doing, what Sheridan's doing, and what Nathaniel Banks is doing. Lee is an army commander. He can recommend things to Jefferson Davis, but he never commands more than an army, and so he never operates at the level that Grant did. Very late in the war, he was made general-in-chief, when it was so late that it didn't matter.

So who was Robert E. Lee? In April 1861, Lee was offered command of the Union Army—

Allen Guelzo

He was.

—and chose Virginia instead.

Allen Guelzo

He did.

What was he actually choosing in that decision? Was he choosing home? Was he choosing honor? Was he choosing slavery? Maybe, just zooming out, what do we need to understand in the early steps about Robert E. Lee? Who was the man?

Lee is the antithesis of Grant in some ways. Lee is from an aristocratic family. Grant was from a solidly middle-class family. Lee was from an aristocratic family at the very top of the Virginia aristocracy.

Two of his uncles signed the Declaration of Independence. His father was a famous commander under George Washington. His father was the one who said that Washington was first in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen. Lee's father was later a prominent Virginia politician.

Lee's idol was George Washington. He patterned himself on Washington. He differed from him in some ways, but he patterned himself on Washington. He considered Washington the most admirable person in United States history. And then, of course, he almost undoes the work that George Washington put in place during the American Revolution.

He chose Virginia. He didn't resign his commission in the United States Army to go with the Confederacy. He resigned his commission in the United States Army to go to Virginia, which wasn't in the Confederacy yet, and become the head of the state forces in Virginia. But then, when Virginia went into the Confederacy, he took his Confederate commission and ended up as the third-ranking officer in Confederate service.

He makes an easy transition to a Confederate loyalty. I think it's his loyalty to Virginia and what that means. That means his family, and of course that means slavery. That's part of what that loyalty is. He's devoted to the slaveholding South as well as to Virginia. Virginia's a subset of that. All of that is in one bundle with Lee.

But he also had been an ardent U.S. nationalist earlier in his career and a very successful military officer. Winfield Scott thought he was the greatest soldier in the army. Scott probably really thought, "Except for me." Scott was a great soldier, but people don't remember him that way because he became kind of a Jabba the Hutt figure by the time of the Civil War. He was enormous, weighed 350 pounds, and had to be winched onto his horse. But he was a very smart guy, and he thought very highly of Lee. Lee was a superb soldier, as he would show during the war, but he was on the wrong side.

Maybe just to throw in a few more characters, I do think the folks on both sides who are of the more radical persuasion are quite interesting. Somebody you spoke about—I'm not sure where; I think it might have been in your lecture series—was Thaddeus Stevens.

Yes, Thaddeus Stevens. Thaddeus Stevens was one of the most radical of the Radical Republicans. He was a congressman from Pennsylvania. People think people say harsh things now in Congress. Thaddeus Stevens just eviscerated people.

He was way out there. He was an ardent abolitionist and supported equal rights for women in many ways. He picked up a number of causes and championed them.

I think in your lecture you mentioned this thing which I just love: the slime line.

This is his kind of line. He's sitting in the House of Representatives, and one of his opponents starts to come down to the floor. He says—and this is a paraphrase—"I'm going to pause while my colleague, from wherever he was from, slinks across the floor of this House and adheres to his seat by his own slime."

Yeah. Beautiful.

Allen Guelzo

That's a great line. Impromptu. Women used to ask famous people for locks of hair, and he was completely bald and wore a full wig. He had a woman stop him on the steps to the Capitol and ask for a lock of his hair. He took his whole wig off and said, "Madam, have them all."

Which is brilliant.

Allen Guelzo

No, it's very good.

But he was of the radical persuasion.

Allen Guelzo

Oh, absolutely. Yes, he defined it. The character of Stoneman, the evil Radical Republican, in The Birth of a Nation is patterned on Thaddeus Stevens.

5. Could the Civil War have been avoided?

If we can, let's talk about the buildup to the war. What were the key states on both sides that were debating? What were the ones that were certainly going to be firmly on one side or the other, and maybe what were the ones that were critical at the borderline?

The states that were in the forefront of the secession movement were the Deep South states, and South Carolina was ground central for what was going on there. It just so happened that the Democrats had their national convention in Charleston in 1860, which is the worst place in the world they could have had it if they wanted a quiet, rational discussion of anything. South Carolina was the first state to secede, and then it was quickly followed. You can just go across the tier: Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, and Texas. That's 7 states. The Deep South states went out in that initial secession.

But there's a long period after that, and they gathered in Montgomery, Alabama, to establish a new government, with Montgomery as the capital of the Confederacy. Delegates from those states set up a provisional government that was going to last a year and call for the first national elections in 1861. There were only 7 states there, and really only 6 for a lot of it because Texas got there late. It was the last of the first 7 to secede.

But the states that hadn't seceded yet were the ones with the most people: Virginia, which was the most populous; North Carolina; Tennessee; Kentucky; and Missouri. 8 states had not gone out. 8 slaveholding states had not gone out. The most important one among those that had not gone out was Virginia. The question was, could they find some resolution to all of this, or was it going to get more serious, and were those states going to go?

It came into focus once again on Charleston, South Carolina, and a federal installation in Charleston Harbor: Fort Sumter. Much United States property and installations had just been given over to the Confederates. The question was, could they do it with this one as well? This was a very difficult decision to make, and it came down to what was going to happen in Charleston Harbor.

In the end, Jefferson Davis believed that he couldn't allow it to remain a federal installation because it was actually in the Confederacy, from their point of view. Lincoln was not conceding the right of states to secede. They were temporarily out of our power, but he believed that we had to maintain power there. He decided in the end not to reinforce it, but to resupply it with needed supplies. And that's what triggered it.

Then the ball was in Jefferson Davis's court: “Okay, they're going to resupply it. What do we do?” They decided they needed to insist that it surrender, and if it wouldn't surrender, they needed to fire on it. The Confederates fired the first shots. They would have said, “We were forced to fire the first shots by what Lincoln did.” Nobody wanted to be the ones who fired the first shots. But in the end, it was the Confederates who fired the first shots.

Once that shot was fired, the key thing was not the firing on Sumter itself, but what it set up: Lincoln's call for volunteers to suppress the rebellion. He was going to ask each state to supply people. The Upper South states, most of them, had said, “We're not going to secede,” but the states that were gone had the right to secede, and you couldn't do anything to make them come back. Lincoln seemed to be making them do things to come back.

And so 4 more states went out. Virginia went out. Arkansas went out. Tennessee went out. Then North Carolina went out. Now you had an 11-state Confederacy rather than 7. But more than that, you had Virginia.

The city of Richmond had 40% of all the industrial capacity in the entire Confederacy, what became the Confederacy. Virginia was the most populous state, had the largest slave population, and the largest white population. It supplied the most important military leaders, and the capital ended up in Richmond. They moved from Montgomery to Richmond in acknowledgment of how important Richmond was, that this was the key state.

The key states that didn't go out were Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri. Delaware didn't either, but who cares? The other 3 didn't go out, and that really mattered because they were more populous. But 11 were gone, and 4 remained in the Union.

And to lay out some more context, going to Perplexity here: by total enslaved population on the eve of the Civil War, looking at the top 5 states, we have Virginia, as you said, with the most slaves—490,000. Then Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina, all with over 400,000 slaves.

Yes. Mississippi and South Carolina had the highest proportion of enslaved people of any of the states. And this is an interesting little fact from the 1860 census: when you're talking about white people in the United States, those were the 2 wealthiest states per capita in the United States—South Carolina and Mississippi in 1860.

Boy, the complicated history of this great nation of ours.

It's hard to overstate the resources. The states that sent the most men into the Confederate Army were Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia. 3 of those came in this second wave of secessions—3 of the 4. Only Georgia among the original ones was in those top 4 states. And so you would have had a much, much smaller pool of manpower for that earlier version of the Confederacy. It's inconceivable to me that you would have had the war we had with just that version.

So, just to linger on it, it does feel like there was a lot in the balance here. There were a lot of different decisions that could have been made, even on the political side, that could have turned the tides.

For example, there's a secession convention in Virginia. It voted twice against secession. Twice. It was only after Sumter that they came back for another vote. It was a Unionist vote in that convention in Virginia. And then it was still so divided that a big chunk of Virginia decided to leave. That's how you get West Virginia. West Virginia essentially seceded from Virginia in the course of the Civil War.

Wow. And given the industrial capacity of Virginia, that was a critical state. So it could have been—Virginia could have changed. We could have avoided the Civil War with Virginia alone.

It would have really changed. Virginia was the key. Virginia was the key because of the manpower, the industrial capacity, the food production, and Virginia gave you Lee, Jackson, and Jeb Stuart, and the most soldiers of any state in the Confederacy. It was a real game changer to get Virginia.

Plus, it also gave you these unbelievable ties to the Revolutionary generation. Hey, it's George's home state. It was now in the Confederacy with his big statue on the Capitol grounds of George Washington. It gave you Washington, the ties to Jefferson, and the ties to Madison. All of this came in with Virginia.

So I think a lot of historians have said that the Civil War was inevitable. You're really painting a picture here where it perhaps was not inevitable.

I don't think it's inevitable. Things happen in a sequence. I was at an academic conference once where they were trying to decide what the important dates were, and they concluded that no dates are more important than any other, that dates are an artificial construction. That is so obviously preposterous. Things happen in a sequence. They don't just sort of happen.

Lincoln is elected, then South Carolina secedes, then other states secede. Things happen as a consequence of what happened before, and you have various things that have to happen before the next thing does. And then we end up with a war that seems to be inevitable, but it's not. It's just the way things played out. All of these factors are in motion, and you end up with the sequence that gets you to where people start shooting each other.

Yeah. When you read history and look back, it seems inevitable. But if we were to place ourselves in that moment of time, do you think there are decisions that could have been made?

The decision to not let Fort Sumter go—that's a big decision to make. If Lincoln had just said, “Go ahead and take Fort Sumter,” then maybe. What would it have taken to trigger the departure of those Upper South states? That would have changed that whole equation. But Lincoln decided you just couldn't keep giving them everything that they wanted if you didn't concede that they had the right to do what they did.

Yeah, there would have been continued heated political debates about the expansion of slavery, but it would not have caused rebellion to escalate into a full-on hot war.

I think that's conceivable. I don't think the war was inevitable. But I think the conditions were present for it to happen, obviously. I mean, that's stating the obvious because it did happen. But I think it's very tricky to just say that it was inevitable. That's starting at the end of the story and just saying, “Let's look at the factors that got us here. We know it was going to happen, and these are the things that pointed in this direction.”

6. The bloodiest war in US history

Can we linger on the nature of war? Over 700,000 people died. How do we make sense, in that context, of our capacity as Americans to kill—sometimes literally—our brothers?

Yes, sometimes literally our brothers.

How is that even possible?

Well, one thing it tells me is that things are pretty important to people on both sides if you're going to continue a war for that long. There was a period in the scholarly literature in the 1980s and into the 1990s when they argued that the Confederacy wasn't a nation, and the proof was that they didn't try very hard—that they...

If they’d really thought of themselves as a nation, they would have tried harder and fought longer. They lost between 4.5% and 5.5% of their entire population, which is more than Great Britain, France, Germany, or Russia during World War I. They had a higher percentage loss than any of the powers in World War I. The US lost about 1.8% of its population from the war, while the US in World War II lost three-tenths of 1% of its population.

They lost more than 30% of their entire white military-age males in the war. It would be the equivalent of about 18 million Americans being killed now in a war. That seems to me that they were pretty serious about something there.

It means that’s one of the largest percentages of loss. If that’s a measure of dedication—

If that’s your measure of dedication, yes, and it seems to me that it should be one of the metrics that you bring to bear: they just keep at it. They didn’t give up easily.

What can we say about the motivation? On the psychological side, did the members of the Confederacy hate the members of the Union?

That escalated on both sides during the war. As more and more losses came, they did. There was more and more hatred directed toward the enemy. This notion that they were all brothers and not really mad at each other just doesn’t hold up.

There are places where the soldiers fraternized with one another and traded tobacco for coffee and that kind of stuff, but no, the bitterness increased as the war went on and there was greater loss on the home front. As the war became more all-encompassing and really went after the entire civilian side of the Confederacy, which was not shielded from it, the bitterness increased and increased and increased.

There was a lot of unhappiness with the war behind the lines in the Confederacy, absolutely, and unhappiness with the government. There was desertion. About 15% of Confederate soldiers deserted, and about 12% of United States soldiers deserted. So there was desertion on both sides.

There was war-weariness, but the war went on because I think if you had been able to poll most white Southerners, even late in the war, and say, “Okay, here are your choices. You either have Jefferson Davis in the government and the war goes on, or you’re going back into the United States and the Lincoln government will be in charge and you won’t have slavery. Which one do you pick?” they were going to pick the first one. That’s why the war went on as long as it did.

But at the same time, to fast-forward, maybe that teaches you something about the nature of war. After the war, maybe some of the decisions that Grant made allowed people to rediscover the brotherhood.

You mean at Appomattox you’re talking about—

Appomattox.

—the terms at Appomattox.

Yes.

Yes, and those were not decisions that he just reached up in the air and made up. He met with Lincoln shortly before Appomattox. Sherman was there. One top naval officer was there, as were Grant and Lincoln, and Lincoln said, “This is what I want. This is the kind of peace I want.”

The whole point of this war is to put the nation back together, and a good start on that is—if it’s just a rebellion, what do you do with traitors and rebels? You hang them. You don’t bring them back. You don’t treat them as prisoners of war, which the United States did during this.

But the goal is to put the nation back together, and Lincoln said, “This is a good start. Make them sign a parole. Make them accept the end of slavery and the fact that they’re back in the Union. If they do that, they get to go home and resume their lives.” It hadn’t been decided yet whether they would get to vote, but let them go home. Don’t imprison them. Don’t execute them. Don’t execute their leaders. That was the decision.

From the perspective of the Union, what do you think about that kind of forgiveness?

I think that it was a nod toward the direction of forgiveness, but I don’t think real forgiveness was there. There were still extremely hard feelings on both sides, and Lincoln’s assassination upped the ante on that, especially for a while in the United States.

Two words that often come into play in terms of the aftermath of the war are reunion and reconciliation. Those are two things that are often conflated. Reunion is literally putting the nation back together. That happened. True reconciliation is much, much, much tougher, and I don’t think that came anytime soon for millions of people on both sides.

We’ll probably talk in multiple ways about how that is something that’s still going on.

Oh, there are echoes of the Civil War all over the place. It’s not still being fought, but you can see resonances of the Civil War because it’s such a profoundly disruptive event that gets right at the heart of what the republic means.

There’s nothing else like it in US history, and it’s a great moment of truth. Its residual aftermath and effects lingered for decades and are still present in some ways, I think.

So in 1859, most Americans were just living their lives. Did they have a sense of what was on the horizon?

It’s what I like to call the Appomattox Syndrome, which starts at the end of the story and says, “Of course there was going to be a war because the war was inevitable, and of course the United States was going to win and slavery was going to be destroyed,” because they were. So let’s find out how we got right here.

But no, most people didn’t wake up in Iowa in 1857 and have their first thought be, “Boy, I hate the South. Those slaveholders, they’re really…” No. People got on with their quotidian lives. They went to the farm or to their business. Nobody knew that they were living in the antebellum era or that those great antebellum years were about to come to an end.

It’s hard to get people to understand that this wasn’t all anybody was thinking about. They were thinking, “There’s a lot of other stuff going on.” There’s a big gold rush in Colorado. More people go to Colorado than went to California for a while.

There were tremendous technological changes coming about in the 1850s, including the real expansion of railroads and the real expansion of the telegraph. There was a shrinking of time and space that was remarkable for people at the time. It seemed dizzying to them.

There were a lot of things to think about other than how much I hate Yankees if I was in South Carolina, or how much I hate slaveholders if I lived in New Hampshire. But periodically, there were events that popped up and refocused attention on the differences between the sections.

You had the Kansas-Nebraska Act. You had Dred Scott. You had the caning of Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate. You had Uncle Tom’s Cabin earlier in the decade, in 1852, and the impact that had on attitudes toward slavery. It didn’t create a bunch of abolitionists, but it created a bunch of people who rethought their thoughts about slavery.

Sorry to ask the big question about history, but we’re living today, in 2026, and there’s a sense that every day you wake up, the possibilities before us are endless—for the good, for the bad, for the truly destructive.

There’s an eerie sense that the possibility of a world war exists in different kinds of ways, whether it’s sparked in the Middle East, in China and Taiwan, in Ukraine and Russia, or somewhere else totally surprising in the world. It may be related to nuclear weapons or not. There’s a sense that everything is possible.

Of course, when history is written about the 21st century, it will all be obvious.

It’s always obvious in retrospect. That’s right.

What can we learn from the Civil War about how history unfolds, I suppose, for the modern day?

I think that the potential threats now are different from the potential threats in the mid-19th century. There’s the nuclear dimension and the possibility of some kind of really brutal use of pathogens. There are lots of things that could happen now that couldn’t happen then, at least not because humans were making them happen.

But to me, one of the things to take away from the Civil War is really the resiliency of this republic, which I still think is a resilient republic. We’re living in a wacky time, but I have a great faith in the resiliency of the nation. I really do. I have a great faith in the resiliency of the United States.

I think it’s been through much tougher times than we’re in now, and I think that we will weather this, although everybody will have some scar tissue. There might even come a time when our leadership class actually leads, which would be interesting. I’m talking about both sides of the fence here.

To me, this is the supreme test of a republic that had been put in place in the late 18th century. Can that late-18th-century republic adjust, including adjusting to deal with the profoundly disruptive issue of slavery, in a way that allows it to go forward? The answer is yes.

It was a war that brought slaughter on an unimaginable scale and brought social disruption in the former slave-holding states on an unimaginable scale. It just couldn’t be more profoundly disruptive if you were a Confederate. There’s no slavery anymore, you lost the war, and a third of your military-age white men are dead. Wow, that’s a bad 4 years for our team. What’s going to happen here?

The Republic emerged from that and worked it out. To me, it goes back to the intelligence of the founding generation that put in place documents that actually allowed the Republic to deal with something like this. It’s sort of a miracle to me that from a nation that was as prejudiced, racially prejudiced, as the United States was, you get the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments out of this.

It’s just mind-boggling that that happens.

Yeah, I think resilience and adaptive innovation often look like chaos in the moment.

It absolutely does. But then when you really get to the end of that story, you look, and there you are: Oh, it’s okay, the nation is still intact, and the 13th Amendment is in place. Wow, we didn’t think that was going to happen in 1861, when secession started.

Another lesson is that you cannot control what a great military event can set loose. Things that nobody imagined would happen—including expansion of central power in ways that no one would have imagined—you don’t get to ratchet that back and say, “Well, that’ll never happen again.” No, you know what? It happened, and maybe it will happen again because we’ve seen it happen. Nobody imagined that.

The federal budget in 1860 was $63 million. That was the entire federal budget. The federal budget in 1865 was $1.2 billion, and if you throw in the Confederate side of that, it gets you over $2 billion, which means federal expenditures in 1860 would’ve lasted about 11 days in 1865. Nobody foresaw that. Absolutely nobody foresaw that.

The war brought a lot, including education legislation that would create the great land-grant colleges and universities. I think most of the things that have happened through the hard periods of our country’s history, nobody could have really foreseen, and then we somehow figure it out, and that gives me a lot of hope.

This kind of extreme division—the arguments, the people basically speaking in the harshest of ways against each other—is like the engine of brainstorming and figuring problems out that, in the long arc of history, create progress. But in the short term, it feels like a dumpster fire.

It does. And to me, the arc of US history has been—and Lincoln talked about this too—an expansion of freedoms and liberties. That’s the long arc, with very problematical places along the way. But again, the documents allow for that, and the process allows for that, and I think that’s one of the remarkable things about Philadelphia in the summer of 1787.

Those guys, a lot of whom owned slaves, put together something that’s proved to be resilient and adaptable and changeable, and it has evolved in a way that is in the right direction, although there are always problems.

I love this country. I will never stop saying how much I love this country. It’s an incredible experiment. This year, we’re celebrating its 250th birthday. I can’t wait for the next 250 years. This is such a fascinating study of human civilization.

And it is complicated. What we want now is a sort of cartoon version of what we Americans want. As you watch popular culture, we want a 30-second view of whatever. Well, who should I like? Who are the good guys? Who are the bad guys? I want a 30-second version of the Civil War. What do I—

History is not that way. I’ve spent my whole life studying history, and maybe the main thing I’ve learned is that however complicated I thought something was when I really started to explore it, it’s more complicated than I thought it was. People aren’t simple. They’re complicated.

You have to at least appreciate it. You don’t have to embrace the complexity. I guess you can’t make people do that, but you have to at least concede that things are—they’re just—there’s not a 20-second version of anything in the past. The past is complicated because humanoids are involved in it. They’re complicated.

Yeah, when you look at the system as a whole. But as individual humans, we like to do the black-and-white thing where we just see everything as good and evil, and then we bicker.

Of course.

7. Robert E. Lee

And then we get together at Thanksgiving dinner, and we yell at each other, and then people lose their shit and stop talking to each other for a year. Then they make up and all this, because this is just how humans interact with each other. But as a system, especially with the increasing levels of freedom, with the freedom of speech and being able to speak out about your feelings, even when they’re intense feelings, that somehow works as a system.

And it’s very messy.

Yeah, yeah.

The more freedom, the messier it is. Really, the messier it is.

And your job as a historian is a difficult job, as you said, because the more you learn, the more you come to understand, the more complicated the picture appears.

Yep, and the more you learn, the more you learn that you don’t know as much as you thought you did.

So some humility will take you a long way.

Yes. You want more of Grant than McClellan on that humility score. Grant would score high on humility. McClellan—every day, the first thought was, “What about me? Who is going to not appreciate how wonderful I am today?” That’s the thought that nagged at him: “Somebody might not know how great I am.” That’s an aside.

8. How the Confederate Army could've won

Okay, let’s start with the first shots fired at Fort Sumter, as you mentioned, and this thing starts brewing and escalating toward a full-on war. What are the different advantages of each side from a military perspective?

Here is one of the great misconceptions about the Civil War. Among the people who know anything about it—which, in the US, is a very small percentage—if they know anything, they know that United States’ victory was inevitable. The United States had 22 million people. The Confederacy had 5.5 million white people and 3.5 million enslaved people. The United States’ economy was infinitely more powerful than the Confederate economy. The United States had the United States Army. The United States had the United States Navy. Really, who’s going to win this war? The US. It’s inevitable. Next question.

It’s not true at all. The US did have those advantages, but the Confederacy had compensating advantages. One of those advantages was that it had a much lower bar to cross for success. It didn’t have to invade the United States. It didn’t have to capture Washington. It didn’t have to project its military power into New England. All it had to do was convince a majority of the civilian population of the loyal states that it wasn’t worth the cost to make these rebel states come back into the Union.

These are two democratic republics at war, and in the end, the civilian sector decides. We have the perfect example: Vietnam. The United States was not defeated militarily in Vietnam, and it didn’t matter, because when the people said, “We’re not going to support this war anymore,” the war was going to come to an end.

The smart people in the Confederacy understood this. They understood it at the time. Lee understood it. Jefferson Davis understood it. You had key people at the time saying, “There’s no way that a nation as large as ours and a population as large as ours has ever been subjected to a war like this. A tie is as good as a win for the Confederacy.” And they came very close to that in the summer of 1864.

The other thing is that the sheer size of the Confederacy is a huge advantage to them. It’s huge, with a very poor transportation and communication infrastructure in many ways. To move a large army deep into the Confederacy is a huge logistical problem. The same thing had happened to the British both during the American Revolution and the War of 1812. They confront this: The Confederacy is as big as all of Western Europe. That’s a problem.

It’s also a problem that the Confederates are literally fighting to defend their homes. That’s always, almost always, a stronger factor than trying to impose your will on somebody else. All of these factors help the Confederacy.

The US did have an army. The army had 15,000 men in it in 1860—15,000. The Navy had fewer than 50 vessels, most of them on overseas stations. There were exactly 3 vessels available to blockade the Confederacy at the beginning of the war. The Confederate coastline is 3,600 miles long. Probably not going to be able to shut down a lot there.

So the point is that there are factors that help both sides. To me, the conditions for victory are the most important factor that favors the Confederacy. We just have to make it painful enough for the United States that they’re going to say, “Let them go. We never liked South Carolina anyway. Just let them go. It’s not worth it. It’s killing too many of our boys. It’s costing too much money, and we don’t have to worry about slavery in the territories if they’re gone, because they’ll be gone. And our territories will be free of slavery.”

So again, the Union is the invading force.

Yes.

Geography comes into play, as you mentioned.

Immediately, yes.

Vast land. And so, in some sense, it’s a miracle that the war lasted as long as it did and that there was as much motivation.

Yes, that they stuck to it.

Because again, victory for the Confederacy was to stop the war.

Stop the war. Neither side has an advantage in terms of its leadership. The generals all come from the same background. You often used to read that the Confederates had better generals than the—

But this is the first war where West Pointers are in charge. They were subalterns in Mexico. West Point is the United States Military Academy, where the professional officer corps gets its training. It was established under Jefferson. It’s the premier engineering school in the United States, and West Point-trained engineers are very, very prominent when they get out of the Army and even when they’re in the Army. But by the time of the Civil War, it is West Pointers who were lieutenants and captains in the war with Mexico who are now going to be the people in charge.

Almost every army commander, almost every corps commander, which is the next level, is a West Point graduate. They took the same classes from the same professors, read the same textbooks, and served under either Winfield Scott or Zachary Taylor in Mexico. They brought the same background and body of doctrine and training to the table. It would've been weird if one side or the other had an inherent advantage in leadership.

The one place where the United States ends up with an advantage is that, over the course of the war, it found, in my view, 4 men who could command armies effectively: Grant, Sherman, Philip Henry Sheridan, and George H. Thomas. The Confederacy only ever found 1, and that's Lee. They had more than 1 army, so that's a problem. If you have more than 1 army but only 1 really good army commander, that puts you at a disadvantage.

In what ways were the 2 sides balanced militarily, equal militarily? The passion, like we mentioned, of the fighting force—the soldiers, the dedication to the fighting.

Both brought the same notions of how to fight a war to the table because the officer corps on both sides had been trained in the same way. Neither side had a real advantage in terms of technology. Both sides used the railroad. Both sides used the telegraph.

The United States could have used repeating weapons but decided not to. The Confederacy didn't have the industrial capacity to produce them. So the war was fought by infantrymen, for the most part, carrying muzzle-loading, single-shot muskets—rifle muskets. That's the weapon that inflicted 85% to 90% of the casualties in the Civil War, and they both had exactly the same thing. They had the same kinds of artillery pieces.

The United States Navy was much bigger, but the Navy is important, and armies really decide the war. The armies were organized exactly the same way. They got officers the same way. They were very similar.

So what was the actual fighting like? Like you mentioned, most of it was with muskets. What was the experience of it like?

It was linear formations, shoulder-to-shoulder kinds of formations that would allow you to maintain unit integrity on a battlefield, which is one reason casualties were high. They'd line up and fight each other. As the war went on, they resorted more and more to entrenchments.

One of the developments was that field entrenchments became very common by 1864. Both armies, if they stopped for the night, would entrench. They'd throw up fieldworks, which gave the defenders much greater power vis-à-vis the attacking force. They came to decide that you needed about a 3-to-1 advantage in numbers to have a successful attack once field entrenchments were in place.

It was an infantryman's war overwhelmingly, and the infantryman's experience was similar on both sides. The United States side was a little better supplied. Union soldiers ate a little better for the most part, and they got regular issues of clothing a little more regularly than the Confederates did.

Their uniforms all kind of looked the same. The Confederates would have had a more motley look. But the Confederates didn't lose any battles because they didn't have enough shoes, and they didn't lose any battles because they didn't have enough powder. They never had a problem with that. So it was a war where each side looked like the other side in terms of what the armies actually looked like. If we had wandered through the armies or watched them in battle, they would have looked the same to us.

But it wasn't just about bullets. There was also dysentery and disease.

2 out of every 3 soldiers who died died of disease. It depends on what unit you're in. If you're in the Irish Brigade, God love them. Just point us toward something and let us indulge in self-immolation, for God's sake.

The Irish Brigade had the reverse: They had 2 men who died from battle wounds for every man who died from disease. But overall, 1 man died from battle wounds and 2 died from disease. Overall casualties—killed, wounded, and prisoners of war—were about 1.5 million in the Civil War.

There's this idea that a big part of the American spirit is the Scots-Irish spirit, the fighting spirit. Do you think there's some truth to that?

The songs are Irish songs that both sides sing with different words, and there are a lot of Irish soldiers in the Union Army. But in the entire military-age white population of the loyal states in 1860, just about a third were born somewhere other than the United States. They made up about a quarter of all the soldiers. So they're actually underrepresented in the United States Army.

There was a far lower percentage of foreign-born soldiers in the Confederate Army, but there they're a little bit overrepresented. So there were lots of foreign-born soldiers in the army. The largest group were not Irish; they were Germans, on the United States side. The Irish were second, and then you'd go way down the line for the others.

So we talked pretty thoroughly about slavery. Can we talk about immigration? What was the view at the time of immigrants?

Well, I think you know the answer to that. We need to have all that stuff done, but we don't especially like the people doing it.

Oh, America.

The anti-Irish sentiment—and a lot of it was bound up with anti-Catholic sentiment. The Irish were changing the nature of the country. The country was a Protestant, British country, and here came all these Irishmen. Especially in the 1840s and 1850s, my Gallaghers came in the late 1850s. They were changing the nature of the country, and they took over. Look at them. They didn't know their place. Pretty soon they were taking over cities, and they all cheated when they voted. We know that. You could buy an Irish vote for 1 drink.

This all sounds familiar, right?

The cartoons were brutal in depicting African American characters, but they also depicted the Irish as sort of simian characters, often with a jug of whiskey in 1 hand. There was profound prejudice. There was also prejudice against the Germans, whom they called the Dutch. That was what the soldiers would call the German regiments—Dutch regiments. There was a lot of ethnic prejudice.

You mentioned Protestants, so both sides were primarily Protestant Christians.

Overwhelmingly.

At that time, it was a very religious country.

Yes, yes.

So the religious sentiment was pretty strong.

Units had chaplains, and there were Catholic priests with Catholic units. Yes, there was a very big presence.

Was Christianity used to justify—

Of course it was. Both sides used it, yes. I don't mean to jump on your question, but yes, they did.

How was it used to justify fighting for a nation?

There's a lot of fighting in the Bible, a lot of people killing other people in the Bible. As long as you're doing it for the right reasons, you can use it in different ways. You can deal with setbacks by saying, "Well, God tests us. We're being tested." What do you do when God tests you? You don't give up when God tests you. You try harder when God tests you.

The very top leaders—this is interesting—the top leaders on the Confederate side, the most famous ones, Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jeb Stuart, were much more overtly religious than people like Grant, Sherman, and Philip Sheridan. Much, much more. Lee was an Episcopalian. Jackson was a Presbyterian. Their official reports and correspondence were filled with allusions to religion much more than Grant's or Sherman's.

What about African Americans in the army?

There were about 200,000 Black men who served in what were called United States Colored Troops, or USCT, units.

It was on the Union side.

Yes. Let's just dispense with the hallucination that there were a lot of Black men in the Confederate Army. That is such total—

Ridiculous nonsense—

—utterly unsupported by any evidence that anyone would consider credible. This whole notion—I mean, it's just preposterous. It's ridiculous, and I'm really managing my language right here. I'm not saying what I really think it is.

I've seen estimates as high as 100,000 Black men in the Confederate Army.

Really? No, no. Were there Black men with the Confederate armies? Yes. There were enslaved Black men doing all kinds of nonmilitary things in the army to free more white men to shoulder muskets and shoot at Yankees. That's what's going on in the Confederate Army.

There were a lot of Black men around Union armies before they became soldiers as well. But 200,000 Black men joined the military service during the war. They were in the Navy and in the Army. They'd always been in the Navy.

The United States Navy did not segregate them in the way that they could be segregated in the Army. You had integrated crews on naval vessels, although they were separated in some ways. There had always been Black sailors in the Navy. The Army, no. That was a big thing: to put Black men in uniform.

For a Confederate, it was bad enough if you announced emancipation, but then you started arming Black men. That, to Confederates, was urging a widespread slave rebellion, basically.

Black regiments on the Union side enraged the Confederate side.

Yes. They had white officers overwhelmingly. There were a few Black officers, but overwhelmingly, the USCT units had white officers leading them.

But symbolically, that is a really powerful thing, right?

It's hard for modern Americans to understand just how jarring that would be to a Confederate: that not only would you have enslaved people no longer enslaved, but you would have men in uniform carrying muskets.

So, as a historian, you've looked at every layer of this, including diaries. What was motivating? What was going through the minds of African Americans who were fighting for the Union side?

I think what you would expect is going...

I mean, they would talk about the Union occasionally, but what that means to them is a union without slavery. Of all the people who can have a direct impact on what's going on with slavery, there's nothing more direct than picking up a musket and firing at the people who are defending a slavery-based society. It doesn't get more direct than that.

At the same time, you are not only doing that; you are also establishing an unimpeachable claim to citizenship. The whole point of a citizen soldier is that you do your bit for the nation that's helping you, and the nation does these things for you. If I'm picking up and risking my life with a musket in my hand, are you gonna tell me I can't vote after I do? I thought that's the whole point of this—I'm protecting the right to vote by doing my citizen's role as a soldier.

That was a big debate in Congress. That really changed the equation of that debate as well. How are you gonna treat people after they've served in United States units? Can you tell them they can't vote? You're not gonna give the vote to them?

How many people in the Black regiments, but also folks like Frederick Douglass, saw that Black Americans and white Americans should have equal rights?

Well, Douglass saw that, of course. But even within their context, their notion of equal rights was that this doesn't mean Black women are gonna vote, just as for white people, it didn't mean white women would vote. But in terms of the context of the time, yes, equal rights should come out of this.

Abolishing slavery is the first step of this. It's not the end game. The end game is equal rights for everybody.

Did many people see that?

No. A tiny percentage of people saw that. There's a notion that's very common that somehow the white North turned its back on Black people after the war, and it should've tried harder during Reconstruction to force the white South to convey full equal rights to Black people. The assumption there is simply flawed.

Most white people in the North didn't believe that. They believed, first, save the Union, and yes, we'll need to kill slavery as well. Those are the 2 things on the list. Check, check, we've done those. Full equal rights for Black people is not on their list.

And they were not willing to do the things that it would've taken to do that. The white soldiers in uniform wanted out of the army after the Confederates surrendered, and if you had said, “Well, now we need the army to make the white South do the right thing vis-à-vis Black people,” they would've said, “What are you talking about? I signed on to do this. We did it. Send us home right now.”

I think that's one of the lessons you learn from human history across the different places where slavery was abolished: abolishing slavery is not the end of a journey. It's the beginning of a journey. It sometimes takes—quite often takes—at least 100 years to go from that to something you would identify as equal rights.

And then maybe even beyond that, there's a complicated story about, even outside of rights, just how society sees different people.

Allen Guelzo

It's the beginning.

There's a difference between passing—I mean, the Great Society passed most of the—I mean, you got the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act. You got all of this legislation that does a lot of the legal stuff, but it's what's in people's heads that takes longer and is a more frustrating process.

It remains, as has appeared in human history, potential fuel for the division to rise up again.

Of course. And then people can exploit that. It's waiting to be exploited, and people exploit it.

This is something we do as humans. We like to otherize certain groups.

Good to have an enemy.

And the Civil War for our country is a story of this. So understanding the Civil War is in part extremely important for understanding the division, maybe the dormant division that's there.

Yes. And even before the war, there were notions about the other side that, for a lot of people in the free states looking South, white Southerners were lazy and violent. They didn't wanna talk out a problem. They'd do what Preston Brooks did to Charles Sumner—they'd beat him over the head with a cane—and they're used to this because they have slavery, and they're used to brutalizing Black people. That's just how they approach things.

The white South would look North and say they don't care anything about family. They're all just lusting after money. All they care about is material things. They don't have any sense of kinship or family. That's what Yankees are.

It doesn't even matter whether any of that is true, of course. There was a sense that perceptions are more important than reality with human beings, and the perceptions on the eve of the Civil War were that the other side was different in a lot of ways.

They also had profound commonalities. They had a common language, a common religion, a common history, and these founding documents. All of that would pull things, pull people together. But they found ways to see differences and divided some of the churches. Protestant churches divided over slavery.

9. Key battles of the Civil War

And many of these themes continue today. Let's talk about the different theaters of the war, the Eastern Theater and the Western Theater. You mentioned the navies and the geography. How does geography come into play? What are the different parts here?

Allen Guelzo

There's 3 main theaters of the war. The Eastern Theater is the theater that features Washington and Richmond. It plays out in Virginia, a little bit of Maryland, and a little bit of Pennsylvania. That's where the Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac fight for the most part. That's the Eastern Theater.

And that's the theater that maybe is most glorified and mythologized.

Allen Guelzo

It's by far the most famous of the theaters. There are famous battles in the other theaters, but that's the one, and it's mainly because of the presence of Lee and then of Grant.

The Western Theater is a much larger one. It goes from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River, east to west, and would go from the Gulf to the Ohio River, so it's huge and involves Tennessee. Then, beyond the Mississippi River, is the descriptively named Trans-Mississippi, part of Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, and so forth.

In terms of commitment of resources and effect on the outcome of the war, it's by far the least important. Some people get very upset when I say that, say that the Trans-Mississippi is basically, “Who cares about what's going on out there?” But that's the 3rd theater: the Trans-Mississippi, the Western Theater, and the Eastern Theater.

But I think you've argued that the Western Theater is really important for the war.

Allen Guelzo

Very important, and it's where we get Grant. The soldiers who won the war for the United States all come out of the Western Theater. Grant—he brings Sherman, Philip Sheridan, and George Thomas. Those are all in the Western Theater.

So at the very beginning, the first real battle, at First Manassas in July 1861, I think one interesting aspect of that, as you've talked about, is that people gathered for a picnic.

They came out to watch from Washington. They brought the carriages out, set up on a little ridge that let them look down over the battle.

So that kind of gives you a sense that people of the time, first of all, didn't think this was going to scale to the size that it did or last as long as it did, but also didn't understand the seriousness of the situation.

Allen Guelzo

They're clueless about what's actually going on. To even think that you should go observe a battle like that is ridiculous, but they did. There was a strong belief, and Lincoln was part of this at the beginning, that there's probably gonna be 1 battle. It's not gonna last. He asked for 90-day volunteers to suppress the rebellion right after Fort Sumter.

William Tecumseh Sherman reacted to that by saying that you might as well try to put out a fire with a squirt gun. It's ridiculous. They're not thinking about what this war could easily be: take years, take hundreds of thousands of men, maybe—not 1 battle.

When did the dark cloud, the reality of the war, come in?

Well, First Bull Run, or Manassas. Each side—many battles have 2 names, one that the United States soldiers used and one that the Confederates used. Usually, the Confederates would pick the nearest town, and the United States often picked terrain features. So you get Bull Run, which is a creek or stream—that's what the Union soldiers called it. Manassas is what the Confederates called it. Antietam, a creek in Maryland, is what the Union called it. Sharpsburg is what the Confederates called it. There are several of those.

That brought a little sense of reality to people in the United States, especially. They'd expected it to be over, and it didn't go the way they thought it would go, so it's gonna take more men. The summer of 1861 was spent—hundreds of thousands of men went into uniform in the summer of 1861. The whole supply situation became more evidently imperative, but not much happened for the rest of the year.

There's a pretty big battle called the Battle of Wilson's Creek that takes place in Missouri, but the rest of 1861 doesn't have much. The real fighting begins in the spring of 1862, and what really brought home, in a way that no one had imagined, what could be in store was 1 battle in the East and 1 battle in the West.

The one in the West is Shiloh, which happened in early April. U.S. Grant on the United States side and General Albert Sidney Johnston on the Confederate side. But at Shiloh, in 2 days, there were upwards of 25,000 casualties. That's more battle casualties than U.S. forces had suffered in every war combined down to that point, and it happened in 2 days.

Two and a half months after that—George B. McClellan’s army engaged with Lee’s army in what came to be called the Seven Days’ Battles at Richmond: 36,000 casualties. So those two together just showed that this was going to be on a totally different scale, and it was going to involve sacrifices and allocation of resources that no one had imagined before.

Since you mentioned Missouri, you’ve talked about how that was the most brutal guerrilla warfare of the conflict. Can you speak to what you mean by guerrilla warfare? What kind of war was that? And then contrast it with the structure and dynamics of battles elsewhere in the war.

Allen Guelzo

Yes. Guerrilla war is more what I think most Americans can imagine when they think of guerrilla war. It involves much smaller numbers of actors on both sides. Guerrilla bands might have a few dozen members. They might have a few hundred at different times. There are no real battles between guerrillas.

There is a lot of bushwhacking, which is what they called it: ambushing people, terrorizing civilians, killing livestock, killing some civilians, killing prisoners after you’ve captured them, and hanging some people. There are a few semilarge-scale ones. There was a Confederate guerrilla named Quantrill who led a raid against Lawrence, Kansas, where they burned parts of the town, executed more than 150 men in the town, and terrorized the place.

There’s a relationship in many places between elevation and guerrilla activity. The more mountainous or hilly an area is, the more likely there will be guerrillas operating. They operate in the mountains of East Tennessee, western North Carolina, and southwestern Virginia. There’s even some activity in parts of Texas, but Missouri and Kentucky have the worst guerrilla warfare.

It was present throughout the whole war, probably involved maybe 50,000 men out of the 3 million who were in action during the war, and was very nasty—no rules. One reason that rules of war were codified was because Henry Halleck, who was a Union general in Missouri, was dealing with this guerrilla activity, and he said, “We need to get some rules about who’s a civilian and who’s not a civilian. How do you deal with this kind of situation and that kind of situation?”

What should we take away from the fact that most of the fighting had the rules of war behind it? So it was more structured?

Allen Guelzo

I think what we take away from that supports my argument that this is a war between two mid-19th-century nation-states that have a sense of how you fight a war. You fight a war with national armies that are led by professional soldiers and who understand that there are limits to what you do in a war. The war’s limits expand as it goes on, but it doesn’t reach the point where you have indiscriminate killing of civilians and so forth. There’s an argument about whether it’s a total war or not. It all depends on how you define total war.

As you’ve mentioned, in terms of how encompassing it was, it was as total a war as it gets because the entirety of society was involved in it.

Allen Guelzo

When there’s wide-scale targeting of the economic infrastructure of your opponent that can be used to support the war effort—which is what you get increasingly as the war goes on, and officially when Grant is in charge as general-in-chief—then certainly that’s a total war.

If you’re a farmer who experiences an army coming by and taking or killing all your livestock and destroying your crops, that’s pretty much like a total war, even if they don’t kill you.

So the war escalates.

Allen Guelzo

Yes, the war does escalate. In ’62, it takes a quantum leap. In the spring and early summer of 1862, the signals are clear: this is something that we had not counted on before. The armies are going to be much bigger. The Army of the Potomac has more than 100,000 men. There’s never been an army like that in U.S. history—nothing like that.

What do we understand from the diaries of soldiers coming, for the first time, face-to-face with this scale of war? We’re talking about a year. They’ve been volunteering for a year, like you mentioned, in the spring and summer of ’62.

Allen Guelzo

There are so many themes in soldiers’ letters, and it’s an incredible gift to people such as myself who study this that a very large majority of the men on both sides were literate. So we have this mass of testimony. They sent millions of letters from the armies home and back to the armies on both sides. So we have this trove of firsthand evidence, and many, many diaries, too.

You can see in real time how attitudes are changing and hardening. You can see the hardening process in soldiers: at first, they don’t have any idea what being a soldier is; then they do, and they don’t like a lot of things about it. They talk a lot about food, clothing, and officers they don’t like.

One thing they don’t try to do, which is really fascinating, is explain to people behind the lines exactly what it’s like to be in a battle, because they understand that the people back home won’t understand what they’re talking about. They’ll say things like, “It was awful,” and, “Words just can’t convey what it was,” and then perhaps tell more about their individual experience.

There’s a real sense that what a veteran knows about being in the military and what the people back home will understand are two different things, and you just can’t explain it to them.

And so that takes us into the fall of the Battle of Antietam. Can you walk me through what happened at the battle and why it mattered?

Allen Guelzo

George B. McClellan, whom I’ve already referred to dismissively a couple of times, was in charge of the Army of the Potomac by this point. He’d been general-in-chief for a brief time and was commanding the Army of the Potomac. He finally approached Richmond. He got literally within 5 miles of Richmond.

He was opposing an officer named Joseph E. Johnston, whose first thought every day was, “What a great day to retreat. Where could I go? I could go that way, or I could go that way.” He and McClellan were a match made in heaven. McClellan didn’t want to go anywhere, and Johnston only wanted to retreat.

Anyway, they finally ended up at Richmond. Johnston got wounded—he was hit by a shell fragment outside Richmond in the Battle of Seven Pines—and was replaced by Robert E. Lee. McClellan, in his usual perceptive way, observed that this was great because he knew that Lee was too timid to ever be an effective presence on the battlefield. So he read him exactly the way that McClellan would.

McClellan ended up fighting Lee, and in the Seven Days’ Battles, McClellan was pushed away from Richmond. He shouldn’t have been, but he was. That was considered a great victory. Lee’s reputation went up after that.

Then Lee followed that up with the campaign of Second Bull Run, which reoriented the war from Richmond to Manassas, the old First Manassas battlefield in northern Virginia. Stonewall Jackson played a key role in it. He won the Battle of Second Bull Run in late August 1862, and then invaded the loyal states for the first time.

He crossed into Maryland in early September with an army that was broken down in terms of supply. Lee had tremendous straggling and desertion problems. He moved across the army with about 50,000 men. When they finally came to battle at Antietam, in western Maryland, he only had about 35,000 soldiers on the field. McClellan had about 80,000 on the other side.

McClellan had captured a copy of Lee’s entire orders for the whole campaign: Special Orders Number 191. They had gone through an old Confederate camp and found a copy of Lee’s orders. And still McClellan didn’t move quickly. I won’t bash McClellan. They fight.

The bloodiest single day in U.S. history was Antietam, with 23,000 casualties in 1 day. It was a very close thing. Lee hung on by just the narrowest margin, sat on the battlefield for another whole day—which he shouldn’t have done. He was being way too bold there—and then retreated and got back across the Potomac River.

The Confederates looked at this whole thing as a drama in three acts: save Richmond, reorient the war to northern Virginia, and cross into the United States. They saw it as a success. Richmond was no longer threatened. Lee’s reputation had gone way up. McClellan had frustrated Lincoln immeasurably, and as a result, Lincoln removed McClellan from command.

He waited until the day after the elections in November because McClellan was popular among Democrats, and Lincoln was an adept politician. He fired him the day after the elections and replaced him with a guy named Ambrose Burnside.

So what can you say about what makes a great general and what makes a poor general in all of this?

Allen Guelzo

Well, McClellan was a very smart guy, and he was on Winfield Scott’s staff in Mexico, as was Lee, which is a sign that you’re a pretty bright officer. He built the Army of the Potomac. He did a brilliant job building the Army of the Potomac. The troops loved him. There was never a bond with any other commander the way they had with McClellan.

But what he couldn’t do when the moment came was risk things. He was risk-averse. He had a chance to capture Richmond against Lee. He should have, and he didn’t. He withdrew.

You almost never had a chance to destroy another army in the Civil War. He had a chance to destroy Lee’s army at Antietam, and he didn’t. He pulled back. He didn’t even use 20,000 of his men. They never fired their muskets at Antietam.

If you’re in Lee’s army, you’re going to fire your musket. If you’re in McClellan’s army, maybe, maybe not. He didn’t at Antietam. He let Lee get away. It frustrated Lincoln immensely, and Lincoln finally fired him because of that. It was a flaw. He lacked what they would have called in the mid-19th century the moral courage to risk everything.

Grant had it. Lee had it. McClellan didn't have it.

Allen Guelzo

One of the components of a great general is the willingness to risk it all—obviously with good advice, with intelligence, but—

Which he had.

Allen Guelzo

…risk failure.

The whole war changed in this arc between the Seven Days and Antietam, and it changed in this way: McClellan's defeat at the Seven Days, in late June and early July 1862, convinced both Congress and Lincoln that slavery was going to have to be put on the table. The war was going to be moral. McClellan could have won the war with slavery intact.

He didn't, so Congress passed the Second Confiscation Act in late July, which I mentioned earlier, and which strikes at slavery. Then Lincoln decided—he told his cabinet toward the end of July—that he was going to issue a proclamation of emancipation. He was persuaded that he couldn't just do it in the wake of a defeat; he should wait until he had a victory.

He got another defeat at Second Bull Run. He finally got a victory at Antietam because Lee retreated, and then that's when he announced the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. The key battle here isn't Antietam. The key battle is the Seven Days and McClellan's defeat that persuaded Lincoln to do this. Antietam gave him the occasion to do it, and he issued his preliminary proclamation 5 days after the battle, on September 22, 1862.

Can you elaborate on why it became obvious that slavery had to be on the table as the motivation, as the driving motivation, for the war at that time?

Allen Guelzo

People believed the war was almost over at the end of May 1862, and they were right. The war had been a catastrophe for the Confederacy in the Western Theater. They had lost New Orleans, the biggest city in the Confederacy by far—160,000 people, 4 times bigger than the next biggest Confederate city—and the most important port.

New Orleans was the key to the Mississippi River Valley as an economic artery. If you don't control New Orleans, the Mississippi isn't an economic river for you. New Orleans was gone in April. Nashville was gone, the key city and capital of Tennessee. Memphis was gone in June.

The whole state of Tennessee, except mountainous East Tennessee, was basically not a Confederate state anymore by May 1862. There was a Union army of 100,000 in northern Mississippi by the end of May. Catastrophic.

George B. McClellan's army was within 5 miles of Richmond, the national capital. I don't think the Confederacy could have absorbed the loss of Richmond at that point. I think it would have been over, and emancipation was not yet on the table in an official way.

The fact that Richmond didn't fall convinced people in the North that the war was going to last a lot longer. It convinced them that the Confederates were going to be harder to beat, and it convinced Europe of the same thing. By Europe, I mean France and England. That's what mattered.

So they decided that they were going to have to take more extreme measures, and the key extreme measure was to strike at slavery—to strike at it directly as a war measure.

And as a war measure, it does what? It attacks the economic infrastructure of the Confederacy.

Allen Guelzo

It attacks the economic infrastructure that enables the Confederacy to maintain the largest possible army in the war.

So this is not about the ethics, the morality of slavery.

Allen Guelzo

It is for the abolitionists who saw it that way, and Frederick Douglass realized that this was good. Some abolitionists realized early on, even in 1861. Charles Sumner, for example, saw the Union defeat at First Bull Run and thought, “Yes, it's bad that we lost, but the longer the war goes, the more likely that we can get slavery on the table, get emancipation on the table.”

Frederick Douglass believed the same thing. A longer war made that more likely, and McClellan handed them that gift by not being as aggressive as he should have been at Richmond in 1862.

But we should say, and correct me if I'm wrong, that only a tiny minority of Americans were abolitionists at that time.

Allen Guelzo

We'll never know exactly. I think if you guessed 3% were really abolitionists—people who wanted to destroy it now, destroy it completely, with no compensation for rebel owners or any owners, kill it in Kentucky, kill it in Missouri, kill it in Maryland—yes, I think 3% would be in the ballpark.

So, of course, now we venerate those folks and mythologize them, and so they become bigger in our minds. But we should remember that they're a tiny percentage.

Allen Guelzo

They're a tiny percentage, and there are other factors pushing forward the process that leads to the 13th Amendment. It's not just people who hate slavery so much that they'll do anything to kill it. In fact, most of them aren't. That's not what they are. We wish they were, but they're not.

Lincoln is in a tough position. Lincoln hates slavery personally, but he's president trying to win a war, and he can't win the war with just Republicans. He has to try to keep Democrats on board.

The Constitution protects slavery in Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, and Delaware. They're still in the nation, and the Constitution still applies. Congress, by the end of June, had already gotten rid of slavery in the only 2 places where it could: the federal territories and the District of Columbia.

There was no compensation in the territories, but there were hardly any enslaved people there, and there was some compensation in the District of Columbia.

You said that Lincoln hates slavery. Can we take that tangent? From some perspectives, there's a hypocrisy in pushing for a policy of colonization.

Allen Guelzo

Colonization, yes. In the summer of 1862, Lincoln met with a group of Black leaders and tried to convince them to support colonization. Colonization meant that if you freed enslaved people, then they would go somewhere else—they'd go out of the United States. It's why Liberia exists.

That is probably the least attractive element of his total thinking on race. He genuinely didn't believe that white people would ever accept Black people as equals. He told the leaders that when he met with them, and he said, “You wouldn't want it that way. I wouldn't either. It's the way it is. It's a reality.”

Do we know he believed that, or is this a pragmatic politician understanding the lay of the land?

Allen Guelzo

I think for someone who was born in Kentucky and reared in Southern Indiana and Southern Illinois, he was never around anything but a level of intensity on race. He probably never saw or was around white people who he could see accepting Black people as fully equal. I do believe that.

And still, it is a country where the words “All men are created equal” are on the page.

Allen Guelzo

They're right there on the page, waiting for that to be made good on. Yes, that's correct. Lincoln was also capable of growth.

Well, he seemed to have evolved quite a lot in the years of the war.

Allen Guelzo

He did.

And it's very possible that, were he not assassinated, he would have arrived at a very different worldview.

Allen Guelzo

We'll never know, but we do know that he was a lot smarter, a lot more adaptable, and a lot more politically adept than Andrew Johnson, so it certainly would have looked different. Well, it's true.

No, I just—

Allen Guelzo

Yes, it is true.

10. Best and Worst Presidents

I think I vaguely remember you saying somewhere that Andrew Johnson is the second-worst president in America's history.

Allen Guelzo

Yes, he's right. He has the glory of being above James Buchanan. I said that a few years ago, yes.

I think you said something about Buchanan. There's a basement below the basement.

Allen Guelzo

Sub-basement. He's in the sub-basement.

He's in the sub-basement. I put that in the category of poetic commentary.

Allen Guelzo

He's in a little corner of the sub-basement all by himself with one candle.

So can we take that tiny tangent of why they were terrible presidents? A tangent on a tangent: why was Andrew Johnson such a terrible president, and Buchanan as well?

Allen Guelzo

I think Andrew Johnson was a terrible president because he was extremely prejudiced. He had all kinds of grievances stacked up. He had the poor white man's grievance from being in a slaveholding society.

He hated his slaveholders; they were part of his enemies when he was growing up, and then he embraced them after the war. He couldn't get beyond his most profound lifelong prejudices. He was not malleable in any way.

He thought what he thought, and that's what he was always going to think. He was just not the right person to be in place.

Well, why is Buchanan the worst president in America's history?

Allen Guelzo

If you had a dictionary that had the word “hack” in it, it should have a picture of James Buchanan by it. He was an absolute political hack who made his way up by staying alive and doing everything that you should do as a party hack as you went along.

Then, he ended up as president in 1856 because the person he was running against was from a party that was running a candidate for the first time. His way of dealing with the secession crisis was basically hiding under his desk and hoping the roof didn't fall in before he got out of Washington.

He's just horrible.

I think from that I get a sense that what you admire in a leader and a president is a kind of backbone—to be able to, again, take risks and to stand behind political savvy, yes, but also a backbone behind that savvy.

Allen Guelzo

Yes, and to actually change a position if you're persuaded by both events and good counsel that you had the wrong position before. Go ahead and do that.

So some kind of balance of a backbone behind principles and malleability based on the information, knowledge, and wisdom that you gain, versus changing for convenience or out of fear.

Allen Guelzo

There's an apocryphal story about Lincoln that I think gets at his willingness to row against the tide if he needed to.

They're discussing something in a cabinet meeting, and he says, “Well, let's vote. Let me get your sense.” They went around the table, and every cabinet member voted no. Lincoln said, “Well, that's 6 nos and 1 yes. Mine, the ayes have it.” He listened to them, but he's willing to do something that's unpopular. He'll do it, and that's a quality not everybody has either.

Who's the greatest president in the history of the United States?

Allen Guelzo

In my view? In my view, it's neck and neck between Washington and Lincoln. Without Washington, there's no United States, so it's sort of hard to go against him. He set all kinds of precedents that were really important.

Just giving away power.

Allen Guelzo

Twice. He did it twice. The Europeans couldn't wrap their minds around that. He gave it away after the Revolution. In other words, his message is, “I'm not Caesar. I'm not Cromwell. I'm not Napoleon.” There hadn't been a Napoleon yet, but anyway, he wasn't one. “I had power, and I gave it back.”

Then he stepped down. He would've been president for life if he wanted to be. He did 2 terms. That's enough. Let somebody else do it. Who does that? He embodies the notion of what a citizen-soldier does. He comes forward at a time of crisis, he does his duty, and when the crisis is over, he is Cincinnatus.

He goes back to his farm when this is over because the point is, he'd done what small-r republican virtue dictated, and then he went back. That image was invoked over and over and over again. The small-r republican virtue of disinterested service to your republic—this has nothing to do with the Republican Party—is what Washington embodied.

He's crucial. What's always been fascinating to me, Lex, is you have this guy surrounded by this freakishly talented group of people in this little nation. You have Madison and Hamilton and Jefferson and Franklin, all these people who are probably smarter than Washington. They've certainly read more Greek and Latin than Washington, and yet nobody's concerned about who the man is. It's Washington. He's the guy.

We're smarter. It's like what Sherman said about Grant one time. Sherman's smarter than Grant, probably. Sherman said, “I know more about strategy than Grant. I know more about tactics. I know more about supply. I know more about everything than U.S. Grant does. But where he beats me and where he beats the world is he don't give a damn what the enemy is doing out of his sight, and that scares me like hell.”

In other words, Grant could just let the background noise go away, focus on his thing, and do what he was going to do, and Sherman couldn't do that. Grant liberated Sherman to become a great general because he had Grant over him taking responsibility.

It's really fascinating. Washington, whatever faults he had, could take responsibility and was aware that he was setting precedents as the first president of this new republic almost every time he did something. What did Washington do? Well, he gave up his uniform, and then he gave up the presidency.

Just from studying history and understanding how difficult it is to give away power in the way that Washington did, I have to put him as number 1.

Allen Guelzo

Yeah, because without him, the rest doesn't happen. That's my bottom line on it, and I really do believe that. Without him, the rest doesn't happen. I don't know what—if they hadn't had Washington to persuade people that a stronger central government might be possible because Washington was going to be president, who else would they agree could be trusted? There's Washington, and then there's everybody else.

I think America's a truly positive force in human history. So the fact that whatever ideas were created at that time, and that Washington was the foundation of that, is a great gift to humanity.

Allen Guelzo

Lucky to have him, lucky to have Lincoln. We've been lucky in our leaders, indeed. We're lucky to have FDR in World War II. We've been lucky to have people at moments of real crisis.

But we need the basement, too. We need the full variety.

Allen Guelzo

Well, we've got them. And you never know when we might need a new sub-basement. So it's just complicated and an ongoing story.

Man, it is a beautiful theater, a beautiful drama, and I, like you, have faith in the resilience of the people to deal with the full mess of it. Quick bathroom break, if it's okay.

Allen Guelzo

Yeah.

Allen Guelzo

I used to run around Town Lake, or what was Town Lake. I guess it's Lady Bird Lake now. Is that what they call it? We used to run 6 miles a day at noon for years when I worked at the LBJ Library. We had a little group of us who went.

Just run?

Allen Guelzo

Just ran. We'd do 6 miles in 38 minutes.

It's actually a really hard problem to solve: how to note memories. I'm just really happy this exists. My smartphone was being a pain in the ass, like writing it down. It's been a hard problem for me to solve. You listen to audiobooks, or no? Or do you just read?

Allen Guelzo

All the time on my walks. I don't run anymore, but I walk 6 or 7 miles a day, and I listen to Audible all the time. That's what I do. I love Audible.

Just out of curiosity, taking that tangent, do you listen to history books? Or do you want to escape?

Allen Guelzo

I listen to a mixture. I listen to some history books, but I also listen to some mysteries and some fiction.

So fiction is also—

Allen Guelzo

Oh, fiction? Oh, yeah. And some books that I think I should listen to and haven't ever gotten around to reading. I did Moby-Dick that way.

Mm-hmm. So the classics also?

Allen Guelzo

Oh, yeah. But I've never read War and Peace, and I don't think I ever will. I think I would've done it by now if I was going to.

We're making a statement today. I like short books.

Allen Guelzo

I do, too. I write short books. A lot of long books would make good short books, and a lot of short books would make good essays, I think.

Can you—I'm sorry to be taking so many tangents, because you've written so many excellent books. How much of it is editing? What does it take to write a good history book? What's the process?

Allen Guelzo

For me, it's having either a question that you want to answer or having some strain in the literature that you think is wrong, and you need to address it. For me, The Union War was trying to rescue something that I thought people just don't understand anymore: what union meant to that generation.

A war fought to end slavery makes sense to us now. Of course, it's a monstrous institution, so you fight a war against it, but that's not what it was about for most of the people. To get at what it was about is a harder pull, explaining what union then meant to an era where it doesn't mean anything to us.

I mean, union as they understood it doesn't exist in our vocabulary anymore. It has to do with labor relations now. But to say, “What does the concept of union mean?” gets crickets.

Is it basically a strong sense of nation? Can we pull that apart? There are different states, and Americans have always had a sense of, “I'm from this state”—pride in being from the state.

Allen Guelzo

Absolutely. You have different loyalties. You have state pride and maybe even regional pride. I wrote a little book where I talked about Robert E. Lee in that regard. He has a sense of loyalty to the nation, to the state, to the slaveholding South, and so forth.

But union is composed of individual states, which engender loyalties among the people who live in them. The parts make a greater whole, and that's what the union is. You have to have the whole—

To get all the benefits.

Allen Guelzo

That is what people thought then. They tied it to the Revolution, of course, and to earlier sacrifice. They had an eye on what was going on in Europe. The Western world was their world. They didn't care that much about the rest of the world.

But I think they believed things were going the wrong way in much of Europe, that all the revolutionary fervor of the 1840s had seemed to run into a cliff of oligarchy, aristocracy, and monarchy. They saw the United States as a bulwark against that for small-d democracy.

I think having faith in a nation is a beautiful thing. It's a narrative that unites a people, and I think that in itself has power. You can make an economic argument, you can make a freedom argument—all these arguments you can make—but I think what makes a nation is a bunch of people believing in a narrative.

It's like what makes a great company: there's a mission. The power of humans when they together believe in a thing is remarkable. So that belief in itself is really powerful.

Allen Guelzo

That clearly was there among many people. Not everybody, of course, but it was widespread. And Lincoln articulated it perfectly, and he did it again and again, talking about giving a person a chance to rise, and talking about the last best hope of Earth. I mean, he got it, and he distilled it, and he conveyed it. It's not as if he's telling people things they don't already know, but he's reaffirming things in ways that are eloquent and memorable.

All right. So we were talking about—

Allen Guelzo

Where are we?

Antietam.

Allen Guelzo

Okay.

—the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, where it's like, okay, slavery has to be a central part of the Civil War. And so where does that take us? Also, a very bloody battle. The generals, McClellan—the end of the McClellan chapter—and that takes us to Fredericksburg. So what happened at Fredericksburg?

Allen Guelzo

Fredericksburg was another victory for Lee. It's an easy victory for Lee. He has a very strong position on high ground across the Rappahannock River from the Union forces, who are opposite Fredericksburg. His opponent is a guy named Ambrose Everett Burnside, who's a very affable guy, kind of a nice guy, who gave us the word sideburns.

He wore whiskers that came down and came up. It wasn't a beard; they were called burnsides at the time. The Burnside cut, which was transposed into sideburns. Everybody liked him. He just wasn't very bright in some ways. He's a politician after the war, so he went into the right field.

It wasn't his original plan, but in the end he launched frontal assaults one brigade at a time against very strongly entrenched Confederates, and it was a butchery. It was another horrible defeat for the Army of the Potomac. Lincoln was really cast down by it, and it just seemed that in this Eastern theater, he could not get any good news. He's getting good news from the West. He's not getting any good news here, and he has this revolving door of commanders.

Burnside tried another march in late January 1863. He was going to get around Lee's flank, but he had horrible weather. His army literally got stuck in the mud. Then it was lampooned as the Mud March, and Lincoln removed him from command. So now he has another commander in the Army of the Potomac. You've had McClellan and Burnside, and now a guy named Joseph Hooker. You have no continuity at the top in that army. You have complete continuity at the top in the Army of Northern Virginia, which is a huge advantage to the Army of Northern Virginia.

So this is where the famous words of Robert E. Lee were. He was watching the slaughter. He said, “It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.” What did he mean by that?

He was watching his soldiers butcher Union soldiers and, I guess, kind of enjoying it. He's in a really strong position with really good artillery supporting his infantry, and the Union troops are just attacking them and not having any success. And so there he is. He's up there with James Longstreet and other people, watching it.

Unlike McClellan, he was willing to risk, obviously, piling up casualties in every battle. He didn't have that many at Fredericksburg. There were about 12,500 U.S. casualties at Fredericksburg and about 5,500 Confederate casualties because they were so well-protected in their defensive lines.

So you are working on a manuscript on Chancellorsville. It's a legendary battle for many reasons. Can you break down some of the military details of what made up that battle to give us a sense of, in general, what battles were like?

Allen C. Guelzo

This is often described as Lee's most successful battle. It's him against Joseph Hooker. It's the last battle that Lee and Stonewall Jackson fought as a team, with Stonewall Jackson as his principal subordinate.

Hooker had replaced Burnside. Hooker had maneuvered to get rid of Burnside. He wanted to be in command of the army. He had made a statement that what the nation needed was a dictator to make sure it won. In one of the best letters a president ever wrote to a military commander, Lincoln wrote to Hooker, and he said, basically, “I know everything you're saying. You're talking about all the things you're going to do. The only way you get to be a dictator is if you have victories, and I'm willing to risk a dictatorship to get victories. And so I know I've got you figured out, Joe.” And he did.

Hooker made a lot of blustery talk. He had a great start. He built the army into what he called the greatest army on the planet—about 135,000 men. It was beautifully supplied, and he reorganized its medical service. He did everything that you should do to get an army in shape, and then he started a campaign.

Lee was still at Fredericksburg, and Hooker's plan was to get around Lee's left flank, come in behind him, and force Lee to either retreat to Richmond or fight him on unfavorable ground. Everything went well with Hooker. He got going in late April, and then the moment of truth came. The moment of truth came on May 1, 1863, when Lee, instead of retreating, left part of his army to watch one part of Hooker's and turned around to meet Hooker head-on near a crossroads called Chancellorsville, a few miles west of Fredericksburg.

As soon as the fighting started, Hooker lost his nerve and pulled into a defensive position. The upshot was that after Lee and Jackson carried off a very successful flank attack, although it left Hooker still in a very strong position, Hooker in the end retreated. It was another victory for Lee in a battle he never, ever should have won. He was outnumbered two to one—135,000 to about 64,000. When the moment of truth came, Joseph Hooker just lost his nerve. I really do believe that.

I had fun working on this book. A lot of books on campaigns are very long and detailed. I wanted a short book that would introduce interested readers who didn't really know that much about the battle. There's one of the maps.

So there are different positions—the different troops' positions. There's Hooker.

Yes. That is how the battle played out on May 1, 2, and 3. There's the opening of the campaign. You can see the Rappahannock River and Fredericksburg. The armies are facing each other there.

Hooker's plan was to leave part of his army to hold Lee's attention and move the rest up the river, up the Rappahannock, cross the Rappahannock and then the Rapidan, and get behind Lee so that Lee would be caught in a vise. He'd have Hooker in his rear and the anvil of other Union troops at Fredericksburg, and he thought that would force Lee to retreat toward Richmond and that he could then harass him.

They get around and get behind Lee. They do exactly what Hooker wanted to do. He got to Chancellorsville. He had more than 70,000 men at Chancellorsville, and Lee doesn't find out until the very end of April what's going on. Then he decides to divide his army, leave 10,000 men to watch 40,000 Federals at Fredericksburg, and he and Stonewall Jackson head back toward Chancellorsville to meet Hooker.

They meet on May 1. The fighting starts on May 1. Everybody's upbeat in the Army of the Potomac. They've gotten around Lee's flank. They know they're behind him. Everything seems to be going very well. Hooker said, “This is it. We've done it. We've done exactly what I wanted to do.”

They march toward that place called Zoan Church. You can see there, it's just a little bit east of Chancellorsville. They collide at about 11:00 in the morning. At 2:00 that afternoon, Hooker orders a retreat. Everybody retreats back into this wilderness. It's a kind of cut-over, woodsy area that has very few roads, and he just hunkers down around Chancellorsville, handing the initiative to Lee.

The next day, Jackson and Lee decide to send Jackson all the way around the right flank, and you see the flank march there. They come and strike a Union corps that's exposed, commanded by a man named Oliver Otis Howard. Howard University is named after him. He headed the Freedmen's Bureau later in the war.

They strike and crush the 11th Corps, which has a very high German element in it, and there's a lot of ethnic prejudice that comes into play there by the other soldiers. But the day ends with Lee actually in worse shape than he was before. He's got 2 divisions over here under Anderson and McLaws on the lower right. He's not even in touch with Jackson's corps.

Jackson was wounded that night by his own men and carried from the field. He'd die a few days later. And Hooker still is in an ideal position, although he's in between these 2 parts of Lee's army. He's still just thinking about the defense.

On the morning of May 3, the 2 parts of Lee's army fight their way together around the Chancellorsville clearing, and Hooker then retreats toward the north. You have this amazing moment on May 3 where Hooker, who's been stunned by an artillery round that hit a pillar he was leaning against at Chancellorsville—he had a concussion, he was vomiting—retreated to the rear.

As the Union troops retreated from that clearing near Chancellorsville, Lee's army had fought itself together, and Lee rode into the middle of his troops. There was this amazing moment, a spontaneous outpouring of emotion on the part of the Confederates. That's the moment when Lee and his men finished this period of bonding during a year that was unmatched in the Civil War.

See, there’s no way Lee should’ve won this battle. There’s one more day of action a little farther to the east. But in the end, Hooker retreats. He never should’ve retreated. He was in an impregnable position, but he did retreat. Lincoln was absolutely beside himself after this.

Everybody knew what the numbers were. The newspapers had talked about it: Lee had only half as many men as Hooker. Once again, the Army of the Potomac, the largest and most important army of the Republic, had been defeated by this smaller army. Lee’s legend grew in the North and in the South.

By this point, he and his army were the most important national institution in the Confederacy. People looked to them to see whether there was still a chance for victory. It’s like Washington and the Continental Army during the Revolution: if they’re still in the field, there’s still a chance for victory. This victory at Chancellorsville cemented that position for Lee in the minds of Confederates and made him a kind of bugaboo to people in the North. They were just thirsty for someone to defeat Lee and capture Richmond.

So this, in some sense, created the legend of Robert E. Lee.

Allen C. Guelzo

It certainly helped solidify it. It went a long way toward doing it. A long way.

So you write about the difference between reality and memory. How does the North remember this battle, and how does the South remember this battle?

It’s really fascinating. The North remembers this battle by not remembering it very much.

Yeah, ignoring it.

Allen C. Guelzo

They airbrush it out of their memory of the war. For the Confederates, in the iconography of the Lost Cause, Lee and Jackson had their last meeting ever here, just before the fighting on May 2 got going. There was a famous painting of that by an artist named Everett B. D. Julio, which was then reprinted as a lithograph that hung in innumerable homes, offices, and courthouses in the South.

It’s Lee and Jackson at high tide. Gettysburg hasn’t happened, never mind Appomattox. These are the 2 greatest Confederate soldiers at their greatest moment of success. It became hugely important in the Lost Cause telling of the war. On the Union side, they didn’t want to talk about Joseph Hooker that much. They’d rather talk about other things.

Yeah, it’s probably one of the most humiliating battles of the war from the Union side.

I think it’s really just amazing that Hooker lost this. It’s just amazing. It shows the complete dominance of one personality over another personality, in my view.

So Stonewall Jackson was shot and killed?

Shot by his own men while out trying to reconnoiter, keep the battle going, and exploit his successes. He was carried back to the rear, and he died 8 days later, on May 10.

So what impact did that have, Stonewall Jackson’s death?

There was unbelievable mourning across the Confederacy about that. Interestingly, there have even been some positive comments in the North about how he had been a soldier. He was misguided, but a very religious guy and all of this stuff. But they were quietly thinking, “That’s really good news for the United States that Stonewall Jackson is dead, and really bad news for the Confederacy.”

Outside the myth, did it actually have a practical impact on the war?

I don’t think so, and the people who love Stonewall Jackson would disagree with me. But I don’t see where he would’ve changed the larger contours of the war. He was a very good soldier at what he did, and Lee used him very well. They were a good partnership, but I don’t see how he would’ve changed the larger contours of the war. I don’t.

If we zoom out and look at Robert E. Lee, somebody you’ve written about quite a bit and studied a lot, do you think we can use this battle to try to understand the military genius of the man and, in general, who he was?

I do, and it shows both why he was successful and why some of the reasons he was successful opened the way for what should’ve been big defeats but weren’t. Lee’s personality was, at heart, aggressive. His first impulse was always to take the war to the opponent. He said, “They outnumber us. If we just sit and wait for them to come to us, they’re going to have all the advantages. We need to try to disrupt them and look for openings.”

What this campaign showed was his audacity. He divided his army 3 times in the course of this campaign in the face of a much more powerful opponent, which showed his audacity. It also highlighted the overall culture that he created in his army, which was a culture of risk-taking and of seeking to inflict the greatest possible harm on your opponent.

It’s the antithesis of the culture that McClellan created in the Army of the Potomac, which was a culture of caution, of not taking risks, of not doing anything until everything was just right. Any adult knows everything is never just right, so if you’re waiting for that, you’ll never do anything. The 2 cultures are absolutely antithetical to one another.

In the end, it shows Lee and what he had accomplished: he had created an army that was willing to absorb casualties because it won all the time. They realized that this was making it more likely that their whole war effort would be successful. There are only a few times during the war when you get a scene like the one you got on May 3, when this whole army sees the old man ride into their midst.

I think they decided at that point, the soldiers, that he was always going to win, and Lee looked at them and thought, “They can do whatever I ask them to do.” If you want to understand Gettysburg, if you want to understand Pickett’s Charge, you need to look back to May 3 at Chancellorsville, when Lee just decided that his infantry could do anything he wanted them to do.

You asked me earlier about what the soldiers’ letters said. The letters from Lee’s army absolutely didn’t even contemplate losing to the Army of the Potomac. They just didn’t think they would lose to it.

What do you attribute that to? Is that due to Robert E. Lee?

Allen C. Guelzo

It’s due to Lee and the fact that they won these victories under Lee, that they took these chances, and that everybody tried. They always knew that they were outnumbered, and yet they were still winning. The closest the numbers had ever been was during the Seven Days, when the armies were about the same size. But after that, Lee was always at a significant disadvantage in numbers, and yet he seemed to be victorious.

So Lee’s aggressiveness, as you’ve mentioned, produced staggering casualties.

Staggering casualties. He lost 13,000 men here, and Hooker about 17,500. A much higher proportion of Lee’s army was lost than of Hooker’s army. But this should’ve been a disaster for Lee. Hooker should have crushed Lee here. He absolutely should have crushed Lee, but he didn’t.

So there are 2 cases: Lee’s audacity being the South’s best hope of winning the war, but the other case is that he was actually bleeding the South dry.

Yes, and historians have criticized him for not just being on the defensive all the time. I think Lee understood better than many of his critics now understand that the key was Northern civilian opinion. He said it more than once: “If we win victories, it will depress their morale. If their morale is depressed, the Democrats will do better. If the Democrats get into office, it’s good for the Confederacy.”

He also knew that he was in a race between, “Am I going to run out of men before they run out of morale in the United States?” I think he understood that, and I think that was the best chance for the Confederacy to win. In the end, I’m very happy to report, the Confederacy ran out of men before the Union ran out of morale, and so the war went the way it did.

I think Lee was very perceptive in that regard. He understood how important, politically, what happened militarily was. He had a much better understanding of that than a lot of people had at the time, and a better understanding, I think, than a lot of historians have now.

This is a horrible time for the United States because, behind the lines, Democrats are unhappy with the Emancipation Proclamation. Just 2 months before this, Congress passed the Conscription Act. Democrats are very unhappy about that. They’re saying that Lincoln is a tyrant, that he’s forcing people into a war that wasn’t the war they wanted to fight anyway.

Union morale is very fragile. Civilian morale at this point is very fragile, and this makes it much, much worse. The draft riots in New York City—the first draft numbers were pulled in New York City in July. The draft riots come right after Gettysburg, but that is symptomatic of what was happening. Desertions went up in the Army of the Potomac after the Emancipation Proclamation.

So at this point, the Confederacy is arguably very close to winning the war.

I think this is one of the more optimistic points for the Confederacy: the late spring and early summer of 1863. Yes, I do.

If Robert E. Lee is correct that it’s all about morale, which seems like a valid argument, then this feels very close to breaking the morale of the Union.

Allen C. Guelzo

In the Eastern Theater, I think it is. But in the Western Theater, we have our boy Grant, who’s operating against Vicksburg at this point. So there are 2 big campaigns going on at this time, and Vicksburg is the other one.

Can you speak to Vicksburg? This is 1863.

11. The most important battle of the Civil War

Yeah, this is 1863, and Vicksburg is the last major Confederate citadel on the Mississippi River. They’ve already lost New Orleans. They’ve lost the river. It’s not a Confederate river anymore. But they still have a strong point at Vicksburg, and another one at Port Hudson in northern Louisiana.

Grant has been operating against Vicksburg since the winter of 1862, and he’s finally, through a series of trials, errors, and failures, found a way that he thinks he can get to the city.

He takes great risks. He crosses the Mississippi River after having the Union Navy run past all the batteries, the artillery batteries there at Vicksburg, and he invests the city from the east. He's laying siege to Vicksburg while he's just getting his campaign to do that started, as Hooker is at Chancellorsville.

In May, he invests the city and begins a siege that will end just as the Battle of Gettysburg ends. It's 1 of the most impressive campaigns in US military history: Grant's campaign against Vicksburg. He cuts loose from his supply lines. Nobody understands what he's doing. Sherman doesn't get what he's doing. Lincoln doesn't get what he's doing. In the end, they go, "Oh, that's what you were doing." And it worked.

In the end, he captures Vicksburg, which surrenders on July 4, 1863. And if you don't think that religious people read divine intervention into having that happen on July 4, 1863, you would be incorrect. That's the same day that Lee retreated from Gettysburg.

What? Really?

Allen C. Guelzo

God's not putting a thumb on the scales here? Huge victories in the West, huge victory in the East on the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

Well, that takes us to Gettysburg.

Allen C. Guelzo

Here we are at Gettysburg.

Here we go.

Allen C. Guelzo

Which everybody knows, Lex, is the turning point of the Civil War.

Or is it? Okay.

Allen C. Guelzo

No.

All right.

Allen C. Guelzo

Short answer.

Well, that's first—before we analyze its role as a turning point or not—

Allen C. Guelzo

Yes, yes.

What is Gettysburg? July 1863.

Okay.

Walk me through the 3 days of Gettysburg.

Joe Hooker retreats across the Rappahannock. Lee is frustrated because he hasn't dealt more damage to Hooker, and this is what he decides to do. He decides to move north for a 2nd time. His army is strengthened. He builds it up to 75,000. This is his army at its absolute apogee as he gets ready to go north. It's confident. It's well-supplied, well-led.

And so they head north in the 2nd week in June, and here's what his goal is. He has 2 main goals. He wants to take the war out of Virginia so that the agricultural sector isn't subject to the presence of the army, to let agriculture recover a little, and he wants to provision his army off the rich Cumberland Valley in Pennsylvania. He wants to siphon fodder, food, and animals while he's north of the Potomac, and he wants to stay up there for a long time to keep the war out of Virginia.

He doesn't want to—he has no— The movie Gettysburg says he wants to capture Washington. No, he doesn't want to capture Washington. He knows it's too strong. He has no idea of doing that, but he knows he'll pull the Union Army after him and simply reorient the war, and he knows it'll be bad politically for Lincoln if Lee is actually operating in the United States. So off he goes to the north.

He gets north of the river. His cavalry under Jeb Stuart is not doing its job because poor Jeb, who is a very good cavalryman but has a sort of adolescent streak where he has to be praised all the time, fights the biggest cavalry battle of the war near Culpeper, Virginia: the Battle of Brandy Station on June 9. He almost loses, and it hurts his little feelings.

So he decides that he needs to do something dramatic so the newspapers will love him again. He decides to ride all the way around the Army of the Potomac, which he did when McClellan was in command. It's easier to do it when McClellan's in command because he's never moving. He decides he'll do it again here. Just as he gets east of the Army of the Potomac, the Army of the Potomac starts to move north, and so Stuart is trapped and can't communicate with Lee.

Lee doesn't know what's going on because his cavalry isn't doing its job. He spreads his army across southern Pennsylvania and then finds out from a sort of civilian spy, a guy named Harrison, that the Army of the Potomac is actually following him and is much closer. At the end of June, Lee orders his army to concentrate near Gettysburg and not to bring on a battle, and they concentrate. Most of them come together.

There's a little clash on June 30, but on July 1, the armies make contact to the west of Gettysburg in a meeting engagement, with more troops coming on each side. It builds into what turns into the biggest battle of the Civil War. It's not something Lee had planned, and it wouldn't have happened if his cavalry had been doing its job, but they weren't, and so here they come. There's a battle that goes for 3 days.

Lee takes the tactical offensive every day. He does the attacking. The Federals do the defending. Lee's army is 75,000. The other army is about 85,000 to 88,000. The terrain is famous: Little Round Top, Round Top, Devil's Den, the Peach Orchard, all these famous places.

It ends on the 3rd day. Lee comes close on the 2nd day, and it was a huge victory for the Confederates on the 1st day. On the 3rd day, Lee is frustrated, and he decides to let his infantry take care of it for him. The result is what most people call Pickett's Charge. Pickett was just a part of the charge. 12,500 infantry in a direct assault, and it fails completely. He retreats the next day.

I think you can draw a straight line between May 3 at Chancellorsville, when his infantry fought their way together, and July 3 at Gettysburg. He admits it, too, as he writes letters to both his wife and Jefferson Davis, saying, "I asked too much of my infantry. No fault is on them. All the fault is on me." And he was right. All the fault was on him.

He and Grant are alike that way. They accept responsibility, not like McClellan. His 1st reaction is, "It's not my fault," to pick a general at random who did this. "It's not my fault. It must be somebody else's fault." Lee took responsibility. He expected too much from his infantry. His subordinates had not been doing that good a job, and they lost the biggest battle of the war.

What was the military mistake there? What could Robert E. Lee have done differently?

Allen C. Guelzo

I think what he could have done—the most perceptive Confederate soldier who wrote about the war was a guy named Edward Porter Alexander, who was the most gifted artillerist in Lee's army. He wrote after the war that Lee won a great victory on July 1 at Gettysburg, smashed 2 Union infantry corps, and had a very strong position. He should have just hunkered down and said, "Okay, attack me. See what you can do."

He didn't do that. He almost certainly would have won the battle if he had done that, but this is where his aggressiveness gets him in trouble. He was pushing for a more aggressive, more decisive outcome right then, and he ended up losing probably 25,000 men at Gettysburg—at least 1/3 of his army.

More than that, he went across the Potomac with 52 generals in his army. 17 of them became casualties. He lost 1/3 of his entire corps of generals—killed, wounded, or captured—in the Gettysburg Campaign. It's a really bloody, costly campaign for him, and he ends up retreating back into Virginia.

Lincoln is at first very happy about it. There's yet another general in command on the Union side. Hooker's gone. A guy named George Meade is in, and Meade does what McClellan did after Antietam. He lets Lee get away and doesn't really harass him, and Lincoln is beside himself with disappointment.

He writes a letter to Meade, thanks him for his great victory, and then says, "You've let him get away. The war is gonna continue indefinitely," says Lincoln. Then he doesn't send the letter to Meade, but he gets another guy to tell Meade what's in it—a guy named Halleck, who's the general-in-chief at that point.

Lincoln certainly did not think Gettysburg was the great turning point of the war. He probably thought it should have been, but it wasn't because Lee got away with his army intact. After the battle, Lee said, "Well, you'll see." He said, "They lost a lot too, and they're gonna be—there's not gonna be another big battle." He said, "They'll be as quiet as a sucking dove for 6 months."

In fact, it's 10 months before there's another big battle in the Eastern Theater, until Grant gets there.

Yeah, so how does Grant come from the West to change the theater from the Western Theater to the Eastern Theater?

Allen C. Guelzo

Gettysburg's a really important victory for the United States.

Yeah, but it's not the turning point.

Allen C. Guelzo

No, and it's not as important as Vicksburg, because Lee gets away. Grant captured an entire rebel army at Vicksburg. Pemberton's whole army surrendered, and that's the 2nd time Grant had forced an army to surrender. He forced 1 at Fort Donelson back in February of 1862.

His victory is—there are no equivocations about it. It's a victory. The Mississippi is now all controlled by the United States Navy, but Lee got away, so that puts a little cloud over Gettysburg at the time.

Grant wins 1 more victory in the West after this. He wins the Battle of Chattanooga in late 1863. That then puts him in position for Lincoln to decide that he not only should be in charge of everything in the West, he should be general-in-chief. That's what brings Grant to the fore.

In March 1864, he's now general-in-chief, with the new rank of lieutenant general. He's got 3 stars on his shoulders now instead of 2.

12. The final showdown of the Civil War - Grant vs Lee

And then where does that take us? That takes us to '64 with the Overland Campaign. That story, plus Atlanta, Sherman's March.

That sets up—Grant is now planning for how the whole war is gonna go. He envisions 5 components. The 2 most important are that he's gonna move against Lee, and his plan is to lock up with Lee, inflict the greatest possible damage on Lee, prevent Lee from sending reinforcements anywhere else, and, if all goes well, Richmond would fall.

But he's not mainly interested in Richmond. He's interested in Lee's army, which is what Lincoln has been trying to get his generals to be interested in the whole time.

Destroy Lee's army, and of course Richmond falls.

So how is he thinking about the clash with Lee—Grant versus Lee?

Grant versus Lee is just: confront him. They're still near Fredericksburg, on the Rappahannock River front, where they engaged with each other, and what they ended up with was a period of 6 weeks of continuous combat that began with the Battle of the Wilderness on May 5 and 6.

The old pattern in the Civil War, Lex, was that you fight a battle, one side retreats, and it might be weeks or months before you fight again. What happened here is that Lee and Grant fought the Battle of the Wilderness: 12,000 Confederate casualties and 18,000 Union casualties—30,000 casualties at the Wilderness. They marched for 1 day and started another battle, Spotsylvania Court House.

There were 12,000 more Confederate casualties and 18,000 more Union casualties. So now you've had 60,000 casualties in 2 battles with no interval. That continues through May. At Cold Harbor, they end up near Richmond in early June. Grant launches frontal assaults there, and they come to nothing. Many of his men are butchered.

The bottom line is that in the 6-week campaign, Grant suffers 65,000 casualties, which is as big as Lee's whole army had been. Lee suffers 35,000, which is a higher percentage of his army than Grant lost—or about the same percentage, actually. But it is a kind of continuous campaign no one had seen before, and it shatters both armies. It eviscerates the officer corps in both armies.

A lot of soldiers just break down. We would talk about PTSD now, probably. They just hadn't been used to something like this.

And this kind of continuous warfare—that's something we can attribute to Grant.

Yes. This is where the Grant the Butcher image comes in.

But also, probably, as hard as it is to say, it's an act of military genius, right?

Allen C. Guelzo

He's doing what he wanted to do. He's bleeding Lee's army and, at the same time, pushing it back toward Richmond. What it ends up in is the siege at Petersburg, Virginia, just south of Richmond, which controls the communications into Richmond. It's actually a siege of Petersburg and Richmond, and that is the thing that Lee feared the most. Grant had put him in exactly that position.

But the perception behind the lines in the United States is endless casualties. Who's winning? We can't even tell who's winning. We have these casualties, and so Union morale drops to its lowest point of the entire war in July and August 1864.

While this is going on, Sherman is moving against Atlanta. He is taking his time, not fighting these big battles, but he's not capturing Atlanta either. The whole summer goes by. Atlanta hasn't fallen. Richmond hasn't fallen. There's an election coming up in the fall in the United States.

Lincoln decides—the morale gets so bad that he calls his cabinet together in late August and makes them sign what's been called the Blind Memorandum. What the memorandum said is, "We're not going to be reelected, and we're going to have to win the war before the Democrats come in, because we know they won't win the war." Lincoln did not think they would win.

I think that United States civilian morale was at the lowest point of the war for the United States in July and August 1864. If we'd been able to stick our microphones in people's faces and say, "Well, but what about Gettysburg? That was the turning point of the war," they would've said, "What are you talking about? That was a year ago. This is now, and we're not winning, and it's not worth it, and we're just about ready."

McClellan, incidentally, was the Democratic nominee for president that year, so he's running against Lincoln.

So first of all, if Lincoln didn't win, do you think—

Allen C. Guelzo

We know it would've been good for the Confederates if Lincoln didn't win. But just—McClellan was running kind of against the Democratic platform. What the Democratic platform called for was basically negotiations, an armistice, and then negotiations. Many people believed that if they ever stopped fighting, they weren't going to start fighting again, and so there might have been some negotiated end to the war that could even yield a confederacy.

McClellan, to his credit—and I hate to give him credit—at least said that he wasn't up for that. He said, "We need to win the war, and then we'll have negotiations." But what's clear is that it would've been the end of emancipation, because emancipation—what became the 13th Amendment—had passed through the Senate in April of 1864, but the House voted against it. That isn't going to happen until early 1865.

How close was it that Lincoln won or lost?

Allen C. Guelzo

Lincoln won. Grant's fight against Lee was not going to reelect Lincoln. But other things that were part of Grant's overall plan as general-in-chief did: Sherman captured Atlanta in early September. That just changed everything.

That was the real turning point.

Allen C. Guelzo

That was a huge military turning point. Then, on the heels of that, Philip Sheridan won a series of crushing victories in the Shenandoah Valley, the last of which came just before the election. It was Sherman, and to a lesser degree Sheridan, that reelected Lincoln—not just Lincoln, but huge Republican majorities in both the House and the Senate in 1864.

And then the thing that broke the back of the Confederacy was Sherman's March: 60,000 men across Georgia to the sea, burning the infrastructure.

Allen C. Guelzo

Yes, as he said, "I'm going to go across and make Georgia howl," is how he put it. He added a psychological twist. What Grant envisioned Sherman doing—and Sheridan actually did in the Shenandoah Valley before Sherman did it in Georgia—was go into an agriculturally productive area, burn the mills, kill the livestock, destroy the crops, and lay waste to it so that it couldn't be logistical support for the Confederacy anymore.

Sheridan did it in the Shenandoah Valley, and then Sherman did it in Georgia. But Sherman said, "I'm also going to break them psychologically." He said, "I'm going to show them that my army can go wherever it wants to go, whenever it wants to go, and there's nothing Jefferson Davis can do about it." He said, "When they decide that, they'll give up."

It didn't exactly work that way, but he marched first to Savannah and then began his final campaign up through the Carolinas. He went through South Carolina and into North Carolina. Grant laid siege to Lee, and the Siege of Petersburg and Richmond lasted 9 months. Finally, Grant broke Lee's lines on April 1, 1865.

Lee started a retreat. Grant just gave him no pause, and he ran him to ground at Appomattox after about a week. Lee surrendered.

What do we know about the relationship between the 2 men?

Allen C. Guelzo

Grant and Lee? They basically operated in totally different worlds. They had both been in the war with Mexico, but they weren't with each other in Mexico. They had some awkward small talk at Appomattox before they got down to business. One said he remembered the other, and the other said he didn't remember him at all.

Grant was very generous. He gave 25,000 rations to Lee's army so they could survive. Lee began the retreat with about 60,000 men and ended up with fewer than 30,000. His army disintegrated in a week. He only surrendered 28,000 at Appomattox. They were allowed to sign a parole and go home.

But at the peak of Grant versus Lee, surely they were thinking about each other.

Allen C. Guelzo

They were, and I've always found this interesting. They tended to be very generous toward other opponents. But Grant pretended that Lee wasn't the best opponent he ever faced, and Lee pretended that Grant wasn't the best opponent he ever faced. It's ludicrous that they would've actually thought that. They clearly found out that that wasn't true.

It's interesting when people do that. I sometimes wonder, how is it possible? There are just a million examples of this. For example, Hitler just completely dismissed America as a military force.

Allen C. Guelzo

Oh, they're a bunch of—yes, they're soft. They'll never do anything.

I have to say, it's probably some silly psychological thing. You make up your mind for some stupid reason.

Allen C. Guelzo

And then you stick to it.

And you stick to it, almost against the facts. With a lot of great generals and leaders, you have to be stubborn in the face of facts sometimes—

Allen C. Guelzo

You do, yeah.

—because all the rational people will tell you. You get this with Napoleon: "What are you doing?" The generals, the wise, smart people around you will say, "Don't do this."

Allen C. Guelzo

Grant's a perfect example of that, Lex, at Vicksburg. His problem was to get his army on the same side of the river as the Confederates, where he could come against Vicksburg. The only way to do it was to have the Union Navy run past the Confederate guns.

He said to do it. "No, don't do it," said the Navy. "No, don't. No. Sherman, no. Don't." Everybody said no, and Grant said, "Do it." And it worked.

I mean, it has to do with—I guess you've criticized this guy named McClellan once or twice.

Allen C. Guelzo

I did, once or twice.

You do have to take risks. You have to take risks in order to win battles.

Allen C. Guelzo

And I'll finish—I can't resist getting one more shot. Lee is often quoted as saying that McClellan was the most talented general he ever faced.

Really? Hmm.

Allen C. Guelzo

Yeah, but what he actually said—and the quote started with his nephew, Fitzhugh Lee, who wrote it in a book after the war—was that Lee called McClellan the most intellectual general he ever faced. I think that is not a compliment. I think Lee is saying, "Yeah, he's an intellectual. He thinks about this, he thinks about that. He never does anything. He thinks about things." So I think it's actually a slight, not a compliment to McClellan. I really do.

Because he couldn't possibly have thought he was the most talented one he faced.

I think it's a polite wink and nod to criticize.

Allen C. Guelzo

It's a wink and nod.

All right. How does the war end? Clearly, there's the turning point with Atlanta and Sherman's March.

The election of 1864 is what drives the dagger into it. There's no question that the war will be pushed to the end because Lincoln and Grant are in charge, and they're not going to take their foot off the pedal. They're going to push it. So it's a question of time.

It drags on another 6 months. Lee surrenders on April 9th. They lay down their arms on April 12th. There are still tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers under arms in different places, but it's a measure of how important Lee and his army were that, for virtually everybody on both sides, that's the end of the war. Lee surrendered. There's no reason to push this any farther, and other surrenders came pretty quickly.

Jefferson Davis was one of the few people who didn't figure that out. He thought something was still possible, but it wasn't. That was the end of the war. The final surrenders are over in June, and that's it. Everybody gets the same terms that Grant offered to Lee. His friend Sherman tried to do more, and they had to rein Sherman in and say, "You can't do this. No. You're a general, not a politician. You can't do this."

Can we talk about April 9th? This is a really important moment in terms of how Grant treated the opposing army.

As I said earlier, he treated them the way that he knew Lincoln wanted them treated, and it may be that Grant thought exactly the same thing. But I think this is a measure of how Grant was a very—he's a soldier who knew his place. He has civilian superiors. Other generals didn't act that way. I know I'm beating up on McClellan. He's one. Joseph Johnston on the Confederate side is one. They didn't really defer to their civilian superiors. Ulysses S. Grant did, and this is one of those cases.

He sent the rations. He didn't know that Confederates supplied their own horses. If you're a Confederate cavalryman, the government didn't buy a horse for you. You had to supply your horse, and if a horse got killed, you had to buy another one or they'd make you an infantryman. When Grant found that out, he let them take their horses home with them. He said they'd need them for the planting and so forth.

He did everything in a generous way that you could reasonably think might happen in a situation like this. It's still an unconditional surrender. You are surrendering. You're going home. You're not an army anymore. But nobody's going to prisoner-of-war camps. Nobody's doing those things. You lay your arms down, you lay your flags down, and you lay your ammunition down, but that's it.

There are certain symbolic actions like this that can lay the groundwork for long-term peace.

Allen C. Guelzo

Yes. He didn't demand that Lee give him his sword. He didn't do that—none of those kinds of things that you could have done.

Sorry to linger on it, but there are certain elements of humiliation that prevent long-term peace. I have to go back to Hitler and what Germany experienced at the end of World War I.

You mean Versailles, the terms from Versailles. No question about it.

Some of it is economic, some of it is geopolitics, but some of it is just, on a basic human level, humiliation. People are just not good with humiliation. They remember.

No, and they can turn that around into something you don't want it to be to get back national pride. But Lincoln's bottom line was that the point is to put the nation back together. The good way to start that is not by imprisoning tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers. That's not the way to do it. Send them home. Make them accept the terms, but then send them home and leave them alone.

Andrew Johnson wanted to go after Lee after Lincoln's death, and Grant said, "I'll resign if you do, because we extended the terms. He's abiding by the terms. You can't change the rules here."

By the way, it should be said that that's not easy to do. You have just fought an extremely bloody battle. There's hatred.

There were lots of people who wanted Davis to swing and Lee to swing. "Kill them. Execute the rebels. They're rebels and traitors who almost destroyed the nation. Why are you being so easy on them?"

Thaddeus Stevens was on board that train. Lots of Radical Republicans were. "You need to punish them for what they did. You haven't punished them enough. You haven't punished them. Yes, you took slavery away from them, but that's not enough. They should be punished more for what they did. Confiscate their lands. Take their wealth away from them."

So what happened next in terms of reconciliation?

Well, Lincoln got assassinated just a few days after Lee's troops laid down their arms.

Can you talk about the assassination? He was shot 5 days after the surrender, right?

Yes, he was.

So who was Booth? Who was John Wilkes Booth? Why did he assassinate Lincoln, and what impact did that have?

He was the youngest in one of the most famous acting families in the United States. Junius Brutus Booth and Edwin Booth, his father and older brother, were very famous actors, and John Wilkes Booth was a very successful actor, too. He was good at jumping around the stage, and he was very athletic. He was an ardent pro-Confederate.

That's the more important aspect.

Not ardent enough to put on a uniform for the Confederacy, but ardent enough to argue for the Confederacy. He heard Lincoln make a statement about maybe Black soldiers getting the vote, and he said that was it for him—that somebody needed to kill the tyrant. This was after Lee had surrendered.

So he was on the Union side.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yes, he was.

But Lincoln was a tyrant in his eyes.

Lincoln was a tyrant because of his treatment of the white South. He had plotted earlier to kidnap Lincoln and hold him for ransom, and that didn't work out. So then he got this little group of losers around him to help—real misfits. Their plan was to kill Seward and Andrew Johnson. They were going to cut off the top leadership of the United States.

Yep.

Kill the president, kill the vice president, kill the secretary of state. That's what they wanted to do.

On the Johnson side, they chickened out.

That guy chickened out. A guy named Lewis Powell was sent to kill Seward. Seward had been in an accident and had his neck in a big brace. Powell slashed at Seward, leaving huge scars on the side of his face, but the knife hit the brace and didn't kill Seward. So Seward was disfigured, and his son was wounded.

The guy who was supposed to kill Johnson chickened out, and Booth killed Lincoln. There was a manhunt for Booth. It took a while, and he was shot in a barn rather than captured and put on trial.

Four of the conspirators were put on trial, including one woman, Mary Surratt, who ran a boarding house where some of them stayed. They were all hanged at Old Capitol Prison. The commandant of Andersonville Prison, the most infamous of the Confederate prisoner-of-war camps, was also put on trial and hanged.

It seemed that those hangings sort of took the edge off the "We need some retribution" attitude in the North. I think those things helped offset Lincoln's assassination in a sort of odd way because the temperature went down after that.

You talk about, maybe as a bit of an aside, how we Americans like to spin up conspiracy theories about the assassinations of our presidents.

We do.

That's certainly very true, maybe truer than most in the case of Lincoln's assassination.

There was a long literature, actually. It began with a chemist named Otto Eisenschiml many decades ago. It implicated Secretary of War Stanton and blamed the radicals who were unhappy with Lincoln for not being harsher on the former Confederates.

What they wanted to do was get Lincoln out of the way. They thought they could manipulate Andrew Johnson if they got him in charge. Then they would pose these questions: How come no one was guarding Lincoln that night? How come the only bridge over the Anacostia that wasn't guarded was the one Booth escaped across? How come Grant didn't go to the play with Lincoln?

The Lincolns asked them, but they didn't go because Mrs. Grant didn't like Mrs. Lincoln. There are answers to all the questions. But they put all these together, added 2 and 2, got 5, and said that it was a plot on the part of the radical wing of the Republican Party to get rid of Lincoln because Lincoln didn't want to be harsh enough on the South.

It's difficult to believe that dramatic, sometimes catastrophic things happen for seemingly random reasons.

It's not satisfying. You want a more satisfying explanation, and a big conspiracy is better. There are all these forces at work to get rid of Lincoln, not just the fact that the one guy assigned to guard Lincoln—there was no Secret Service then—went across the street to get a drink.

Booth had played in that theater many times. He knew exactly the layout. He'd come in earlier. It just worked out that way.

I have to say, it's kind of interesting. I have to be honest with my own mind: I love a good conspiracy. My brain does.

Almost everybody does.

I think it's maybe depressing or heartbreaking to know that so much destruction can be caused by random events. You want there to be a larger system at play that makes you feel like there's a meaning to this whole thing, as opposed to the tides of history turning on a stupid actor shooting one of the greatest, if not the greatest, president in history.

That's correct.

Killing him, jumping out of the presidential box, breaking his leg when he hit the stage, limping off, and getting away. Yep.

Over 700,000 people dead, these epic battles, all of that. Lincoln survives all of it, and then there’s—

When they had the grand review in Washington, when Sherman’s armies and the Army of the Potomac marched over two days, this amazing display of the troops that had won the war, one of the most common comments was, “Lincoln’s not here. Of all people who should’ve been here, Lincoln should’ve been here, and he doesn’t get to watch this. He’s not in the presidential box watching this.” And the soldiers talked about it too.

It’s heartbreaking, really. I would’ve loved to see his evolution as a leader, as a human being, and the words he may have found to direct us as a country in the Reconstruction.

Yep. It would’ve been different. We can’t tell how different, but it would’ve been different, and I think it would’ve worked more smoothly.

What was Reconstruction? How rocky was it?

13. Lost Cause and Confederate Monuments

The white South liked to talk about the occupation of the South and how they were under the boot heel. There was never an occupation of the former Confederacy because there never were enough troops available to do it. The most that were ever in the former Confederacy, which is three-quarters of a million square miles in size, was 30,000 men, and that was for a very short period. By 1870, there were only about 10,000 men left.

And the reason there wasn’t an occupation is because the Northern population wasn’t willing to either pay for it or keep men in uniform long enough to make the white South do something that they didn’t really care about, which was give full equal rights to formerly enslaved Black people. The white North just wasn’t willing to do that.

They were willing, largely because of Andrew Johnson’s intransigence in the summer of 1865, when he started to act like the South hadn’t even quite lost, to push far enough to get the 14th Amendment and the 15th Amendment. That, to me, is sort of miraculous, considering what the attitudes among white people were in the United States. You got the vote given to African American men, and you got the 14th Amendment. That’s kind of amazing.

And those don’t go away. They’re still there on the books to be interpreted correctly down the line somewhere, even though Jim Crow was a long and ugly episode of what came after. I mean, the Confederates just weren’t confused about being defeated. They were crushed, and so they vastly scaled back what they wanted.

They had wanted a slaveholding republic. They scaled back to just having white supremacy, and that’s what happened. You ended up with white supremacy and Jim Crow intact, which is a lot different than keeping slavery intact.

And that set off the whole process of the Civil Rights Movement that lasted decades.

I mean, Jim Crow is the clearest expression of the white South’s reaction to defeat at Appomattox. “Okay, what can we get out of this? We can’t get what we wanted. This is the next best thing, and that’s what we’ll get. We’ll get Jim Crow.”

When you walk the ground of some of these battles—Gettysburg—is there something you can only experience when you’re there?

In my experience, you cannot replicate in a classroom what you can do at a historic site, a really historic site. You get people to a place like that—I’ve given untold tours on battlefields and other historic places—and you can talk about so much more than what you can see.

First of all, you can understand what happened on the battlefield better than by reading about it or looking at maps, because the terrain makes it much clearer. But you can also talk about, “Okay, what are the men like in the armies who are here? Why are they in the service? What’s the status of the war now? What are the political situations behind the lines? What difference will this battle make? What will happen if the Federals prevail or if the Confederates prevail?”

Or you can use, at a place like Gettysburg, the memorial landscape as a wonderful way to talk about memory from the war. Look at the inscriptions on the monuments. What was important when they put these up? The opportunities for a teacher on one of these sites are just almost unlimited.

And I don’t want to be too woo-woo, but I also believe, from some of the experience I’ve had, that the land has a kind of memory. I don’t know what it is.

They have a speech in the cemetery at Gettysburg on the anniversary of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address every year, and I was asked to do that a few years ago. It was amazing to me. There have been very few things in my career that are like that.

We stopped in different parts of the cemetery. There were 1,000 people there. It was an extremely cold, windy November 19th, and it was just—talk about feeling the ghosts of the past. It was really something that I’ve only felt a few times in my life. It was really interesting, really interesting.

You’ve mentioned the Lost Cause a few times. What was the Lost Cause? Who created it, and what did it claim?

The Lost Cause is the Confederate memory stream of the war. Let me just say very briefly, I think there are 4 main ways the generation that experienced the war remembered it.

The one remembered by the most people, the majority of white Northerners, is what I call the Union Cause. The greatest outcome of the war was putting the nation back together. It’s also good that slavery was killed. That’s important, but the most important thing was putting the nation back together.

The Emancipation Cause memory of the war is, yes, it’s a good thing that the Union was saved, but the most important thing is that you killed slavery. You got rid of this monstrous institution that had mocked the language in the founding documents. So those are both the winners’ versions of the war.

The Confederate version—the Confederates are in a tough spot. How do we make something palatable out of this catastrophic decision we made in 1861? We did this to save slavery, and 4 years later, slavery’s dead, and a third of all our white military-age boys are dead.

So here’s what we’re going to do. First of all, it wasn’t about slavery. Let’s pretend it wasn’t about slavery. It was about high constitutional principles. It was about states’ rights—

States’ rights—

—as opposed to central authority oppressing people.

Right, right, right.

And second, we never could have won. It was a hopeless fight against long odds, and so it was a gallant effort in pursuit of constitutional rights. Okay, that gets us off the hook there.

And who are we going to look to? Should we talk about Jefferson Davis? No, we didn’t even like him during the war. I know who we’ll talk about. Let’s talk about Robert E. Lee. He won victories against the odds.

So these are the main tenets of the Lost Cause: It wasn’t about slavery. We never could have won. There’s no loss of honor in losing a battle you never could have won, but that you waged for high constitutional principle. And let’s talk about Lee because we don’t want to talk about Jefferson Davis, and there’s almost no one else to talk about except maybe Stonewall Jackson. Those will be our 2 boys that we talk about the most.

That is basically the short form of the Lost Cause. The fourth way that people remembered, and this came a little bit later, was the reconciliation cause. This is white Northerners and white Southerners agreeing not to talk about slavery. Don’t talk about emancipation. Let’s talk about shared American virtues of courage and so forth.

So some of that still persists with us today. We look at the Confederate flag. Some historians argue for the long, quote-unquote, “long Civil War.”

Sure, and it’s really long. It’s the Civil War that never ends, kind of, and I certainly think that there are ramifications from the Civil War that have never ended.

But I think the Civil War ended, and I think it ended in the early summer of 1865, with the destruction of the Confederate government and the absolute dissolution of all the Confederate military forces. I think that is the end of the Civil War. People at the time thought it was, too.

What comes afterward—the long coda, Reconstruction—is a 12-year coda to a 4-year war that works out some of the difficulties of how you put the nation back together. Beyond that, you have these different memory streams that have been contending with one another, some of which still reverberate today.

That includes what you’re going to do with the Confederate flag. There are a lot of nitwits around. They don’t even know what the Confederate flag was. They fly a rectangular version of the St. Andrew’s cross. That is not the Confederate flag.

They call it the Confederate flag. The Confederate flag that had a St. Andrew’s cross wasn’t a rectangle; it was a square. The actual Confederate flag had 3 big bars and then stars up in the corner. It looks kind of like the United States flag. They don’t even know that, and they go around flying it everywhere. It’s a symbol, and they pretend that it represents all kinds of things.

The Confederate flag cannot be divorced from all the times that version of it—the St. Andrew’s cross version—was used. Every Ku Klux Klan group flew it. You just can’t sanitize it.

I mean, I saw Confederate flags in Britain and Ireland. I mean, it’s become a sort of up-yours symbol, I think, in some places—just a sort of rebellion, not necessarily tethered specifically against authority and institutions and the ruling class.

But here it has a very specific meaning, and you just can’t separate it. People should quit trying.

So you taught at UVA and lived through Charlottesville in 2017. Can you tell me what Charlottesville was? What did it mean?

It’s really interesting because the day just before that, I did a long interview with Katie Couric, who was working on a documentary about Confederate monuments. She and I spent 2 hours talking and walking around the UVA campus, talking about the Confederate monuments that were there. She was a student at UVA. She said, “I didn’t even know these were here.” I said, “Well, most people don’t know they’re here. They’re not aware of this part of the landscape.” We had no idea.

Her film crew went out the next day and filmed what was going on when they actually had the violence and the crowd at the Lee statue, which was downtown. I didn’t go down to watch any of that.

What’s your view on Confederate monuments? You know, the monuments that capture these periods, these complicated periods of our history.

Well, I have complicated views, but my first reaction to that is they’re not all the same. They’ve all been treated as if they’re all exactly the same, and they’re not. There’s the Silent Sam monument, which was on the campus at UNC for years. Some of the rhetoric when they dedicated that is really horrific. It’s horrible rhetoric, and I can understand why that needed to go. There’s what was called the Battle of Liberty Place Monument in New Orleans, which was very definitely a white supremacist monument.

I think local places should decide these. Wherever the monument is, I think that’s who should decide. I think there should be a process for how they decide it. Let people have a public hearing. But they did that in Charlottesville, actually; they had a public hearing. I went and talked at it. Lots of other scholars and local people talked at it, and then they had a commission that they had set up.

The commission voted to keep the monuments in place, but re-examine them with text that put them in context, and then put up new monuments to previously ignored groups. The city council then came in and overrode that and decided to take them all down in Charlottesville. They also took down the Lewis and Clark monument. They took down all the monuments that had been put up.

I think many of the Confederate monuments—the kind on courthouse lawns and so forth that were put up by the Confederate generation, that is, the veterans themselves and the women who were alive during the war—tend to be monuments to the common soldiers, that lost generation of young men. The later wave of monuments came from other groups that were not the Confederate generation; they’re not really Confederate monuments. The ones that were put up in the 1920s and 1930s were another wave. A third wave was put up in reaction to the civil rights activities in the 1950s and early 1960s, and then a fourth wave went up after the movie Gettysburg and Ken Burns’s series.

They’re complicated, and I see them as historical records. I understand the arguments on both sides. I understand people who just say they’re hateful. They bring up hateful remembrances. We should get rid of all of them, every one of them. I used them as teaching tools in Charlottesville for years with groups of teachers and students.

There were 5 monuments in Charlottesville: 2 that were put up by veterans, 2 that were put up by groups later—the Lee and Jackson statues were those—and then there were 2 bronze plates on the side of the Rotunda that just listed UVA graduates who died in Confederate service. They had about 500 names on them. Those were all of the Confederate statues there. I used them to talk about different strains of memory.

The main tenor of the Lee statue when it went up was this reconciliationist Lee. Lee wanted the nation back together—Lee at Appomattox, that kind of stuff. It didn’t have anything to do with Jim Crow or white supremacy, although we would clearly consider all the people who put them up racist. They were in favor of white supremacy. But you don’t need statues in the postwar South and the Jim Crow South. You have the police force, state law, local law, state troopers. That’s what enforces white supremacy, not statues.

The historian in me likes to use them as part of the historical record, interpret them, and use them to explain different parts of U.S. history. That’s how I used them. Having said all that, I did and still do believe that it should be a local issue. If a locality decides they don’t want them up anymore, then don’t have them up anymore.

I think if we ignore history, we’re going to be doomed to repeat it. I think that’s why we should never censor books. We should read books. We should read Mein Kampf. We should read books that capture a certain moment in history, even if it’s a hateful moment in history, even if it’s a destructive moment in history. We need to understand—

Or have them read texts written at the time that have language that we wouldn’t use now. It helps you understand the time. There are a lot of hard edges in the past. There are a lot of nice edges too that make you feel good, but there are a lot of really hard edges in the past, and if you’re going to be serious about coming to terms with history, you need to accept that and deal with them and talk about them and not just try to erase them, I think.

There are a lot of books that people won’t read now. I taught a graduate seminar at one point on foundational 19th-century texts, and one of the texts I was going to assign in the class was Huckleberry Finn. A lot of the students said they wouldn’t read Huckleberry Finn because they knew it had language in it that they didn’t want to see.

Even just reading about slavery, American and otherwise, is hard. It’s really difficult. But we’re capable of that. We humans are capable of that. This doesn’t somehow go away because we agree for it to go away. We can always return back to that, maybe in other forms, in other ways. We can do evil things unto each other.

I personally believe all of us are capable of doing evil things unto each other. The dark reality of that is we too readily convince ourselves that we’re doing good.

Yeah, because if you’re doing good, you can do anything, and it’s justified if it’s good. If the end is good, all bets are off. You can do anything that you want to do.

And reading history to realize that we need to think deeper and more critically about our actions, and also that history is complicated and there are a bunch of different forces, is really important. And also to realize that individuals can turn the tides of history, can lead to progress, can stop evil from happening. All of those things. The power of the individual is immense.

Yes. Coming back to the monuments for a minute, it’s also worth talking about the fact that even at the time there were people who opposed them. A lot of Union veterans were against putting up Confederate monuments. Frederick Douglass had a problem with the Emancipation Memorial in Lincoln Park on Capitol Hill and talked about why he had a problem with it: “Why is this the image that you chose for that monument?”

Union veterans had a hard time with Confederate monuments, and I just think that almost everything can be a teaching tool. But it bothers me that certain books would be proscribed because they have some language that might bother somebody. I mean, the language should bother you.

I think history truly should bother you. It should be difficult. It should be a painful process to study human history, because if it’s not painful, you’re not really understanding the full range of what we’re capable of.

14. Extreme political division in US

But anyway, people in the modern day casually talk about the new Civil War in America. As somebody who studied the Civil War, do you think our country today is divided to a degree that’s on the verge of something like the Civil War of the 19th century?

No, I really don’t. I don’t mean to play down the degree to which we are divided. We are divided. We do resemble the 1850s now in that I think the first impulse on the part of people on either side of the political spectrum is to attribute the worst to the other side, to not acknowledge any good on the other side, to attribute the worst possible characteristics to the other side, and to have inflammatory rhetoric coming from various directions that really seeks to stir up as much unhappiness and controversy as possible. I think we’re like the 1850s in that way.

But in terms of whether we’re really at the point where the kind of actions that I’ve dealt with in my study of the Civil War—I don’t think we’re anywhere near that. I really don’t. If we get there, that will be heartbreaking, but I just don’t see it. I don’t see physical assaults against members of Congress on the floor of Congress.

States talk about seceding if things don’t go their way. Texas talked about seceding when Obama was elected. California talked about seceding when Trump was elected. But neither one of them called a secession convention and had delegates go to it. When Lincoln was elected, they called conventions, they voted to secede, and they left the nation. So that’s different to me from talking about it and threatening it and posing different scenarios.

Are there genuine structural parallels between that time and now, if you can linger on that?

The states, structurally, can call a convention if they want to and talk about whatever they want to talk about. So I suppose that structure is still in place, but I haven’t seen any serious movement toward doing something like that.

Yeah. And I think there's a real cohesion and resilience to the Union, as we've talked about. I think people are, despite the discourse and the bickering, there's a real love of nation that's maybe not often expressed explicitly.

But there is a sense that we're all in this together, and that we're yelling at each other. It's like you have a family Thanksgiving dinner where there's very passionate yelling and arguing, but there's an assumption that we're still a family. At least, that's the hope.

You know, one of the questions that the Civil War asked is, “What is America?” So I have to ask you, from over 50 years of studying the Civil War: What do you think? What is this country? What is this Union? What is the core that makes us who we are?

Well, I think in a lot of ways, it's much of what it was in the mid-19th century. I still think it's a magnet for—I mean, we're far more diverse now as a people than we were during the Civil War because we continue to attract people in the same way as we did in the Civil War, only they're not Germans. People come from everywhere here now. I mean, they literally come from everywhere here now.

Everybody doesn't find a nice, easy road here by any means, and there are lots of things wrong with the United States. But I still think the United States has a role in the world that's unlike—I won't say any other place, but I can't think of a place that's quite like it—that has so many people coming from so many places who somehow manage to fit into this mosaic.

And I think most people do have a way to fit into the mosaic. Then they become part of the old mosaic when the next group of people who are not like them come in, and those are the ones who are the new ones fitting in.

Yeah. Sometimes I think about—and I'm sorry to romanticize it—but I do think that Barack Obama was one of the great speechmakers of my lifetime. And I sometimes imagine what Lincoln would have thought if he could attend an Obama speech, if he saw that Obama became president, that an African American became president of the United States of America.

It seems like such a trivial thing to say, but I think it's not trivial at all. It's one of the great accomplishments of our country.

I think one of Lincoln's great attributes was his humanity. It comes through in so many things that he wrote: his real appreciation for people who faced long odds, worked against the odds, didn't begin with advantages in their favor, and so forth.

I think he, and his ability to grow, would have handled that actually pretty well—much better than many other people I can think of from the mid-19th century. I think he had genuine humanity. I don't think you can read all the things he wrote and not come to that conclusion.

But does he check all our boxes now? Of course he doesn't. Was he prejudiced by our standards in some ways? Of course he was. But I think he would have handled that pretty well, and he still would have been really tall. Even in our time, he'd be way taller than most people.

Yeah. You know, 250th birthday: What gives you hope about the future of America?

What gives me hope? I'm a grouchy, not optimistic person in a lot of ways.

Are you?

Yeah, I am.

You had some moments of optimism today.

I do have moments of optimism, and one of them is the resiliency of this republic. I really do have genuine optimism. I'm not just saying that.

I know a lot of people will think that it's naive, but I've seen what it's been through, and it's emerged and gone forward. The trajectory—and this is something that Obama has commented on, as have many others—the trajectory is in the right direction. With lots of things you wish were different, but the overall trajectory is in the right direction.

I really do believe that, and that's why I tend to be, in that regard, optimistic.

I think there's a few folks on the internet who talk about the decline of the American empire, even using the word “empire.” I'm one of the folks who thinks that America's flourishing. It is a beacon of hope and freedom in the world, and there's a lot to criticize—the militarism and a lot of different aspects that are hypocritical—and it's not always living up to the great ideals that it supposedly represents. But at least it's striving toward that.

It is still a home for the great diversity of humans, as you've mentioned. That, I think, is one of the great, beautiful aspects about this country.

And the full mess of it—the drama, the arguments, the heated passion, the chaos, the thing that feels like chaos but I think ultimately will lead to progress—I love all of it. I think it is the greatest nation on Earth.

So on this 250th birthday, I hope there's 250 years more, and I'm truly grateful that there's somebody like you studying our great history. I'm grateful for this wonderful conversation today.

I appreciate the invitation. It's been fun.

Thank you, Gary.