The Civil War, Jeremi Suri argues, never actually ended

Jeremi Suri, a historian at the University of Texas at Austin, tells Lex Fridman about a set of people he did not know enough about until he wrote his latest book: more than 100,000 former slaves who fled plantations and joined the Union Army. They had no schooling and had never been anything but enslaved, and they became some of the most courageous soldiers in the war. The reason, in his research and in other historians' work, is simple. They knew what they were fighting for.

The book is Civil War by Other Means: America's Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy. Its claim is that the Civil War did not really end; it changed weapons. Arguments today over institutions, elections, guns, and race sit on that same line. Suri also hears in those soldiers something he wants treated as a story of courage: a desire for freedom and self-improvement that generations of bondage did not put out. None of us, he says, is starting from slavery.

Asked for the main case of the book, Suri starts with praise. American democratic institutions have many virtues in their design; they improve society and allow innovation. They also have flaws, as anything built by human beings does, and those flaws go back to judgments people made in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. The flaws still hinder innovation and growth. He groups the ones he emphasizes under exclusion.

First, institutions shut people out — not only African Americans, but many groups who were never counted as full participants. Second, they give power to people who have position rather than skill, intelligence, or quality: birth, title, family, seniority. Third, and most of all, they embed myths that keep a society from getting the knowledge it needs to improve. The shared result is what he calls false reverence: treating institutions as objects of worship so that reform looks like betrayal.

The myth, Fridman asks, is which one? That if you love your country it is wrong to criticize its institutions. Suri does not accept the equation. If you love your country, you want the institutions to get better. He loves the university where he works and wants it better; he loves his family and tells family members how they can be better. That, he says, is what knowledge leadership is about. Not cheerleading.

Fridman pushes the other pole. Loving America can sound naive or partisan; a healthy skepticism of institutions is useful; a paralyzing cynicism is not. Suri agrees that both extremes are ahistorical. The work of a historian, as he describes it, sits in the middle. Institutions are necessary. There is a reason government exists and a reason the Union was created, which is what Lincoln was fighting for. Intelligent, well-intentioned people worry him when they learn to live around the flaws instead of using their skills to correct them.

Fridman's neighbor, the writer Michael Malice, is an anarchist at least as a thought experiment. If institutions are flawed, one twentieth-century answer was to burn them and start on a blank slate; the other is to fix from within, slowly. Historically, Suri says, the urge to start over almost never works. Destroy the institutions and you are in a jungle, and in a jungle the most powerful get the most control. Institutions exist in part to put limits on the strongest. Revolutionaries, who are usually the vulnerable, tend to become the victims. That is the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution on the ledger.

The record for working through institutions is much better. The caution that comes with it is capture: as you work inside, you can become of the institution. That is the tension he has written about in this book and in his book on Henry Kissinger. The move he wants is not demolition and not cheerleading. It is staying in and keeping an outside eye.

Suri's name for the stance is inside outsider: you care about what is happening inside, and you bring ideas from outside. He thinks most of Fridman's listeners aspire to that. Fridman is less sure they stay there. Human nature, he says, pulls people toward insider-insiders. You enter a circle, the people around you are friends, you compete on the same track, you get promoted, you get excited, more power opens. It is not even a dark race. It is fun, which is how you forget that the rules of the game were made collectively and do not have to look like this. Wall Street is the clean example: a set of rules everyone agrees to play, and almost no one asks whether they have to.

Being anti-establishment on everything also draws a crowd, and it is just as cheap. The hard place is being just anti-establishment enough to see what should change and willing to do the work of changing it. Suri likes the word iconoclast: serious about ideas, never comfortable with consensus. Half Jewish and half Hindu, he does not want to live in a society where everyone agrees, because his guess is they will come after people like him. He wants pluralism.

How do you actually move someone? Not with a megaphone. Get them out of a defensive crouch, let them see you are on the same side, brothers and sisters, and then raise one small question that lands. He has watched it over and over: months later the doubt has percolated. In political fights people rarely have someone on their own side they trust as a fellow human being to challenge them. Contrary views get sorted into the other tribe. The scarce skill is staying in the conversation long enough for a small thought to grow.

That is what Suri says Lincoln was really fighting for, and what the Civil War and the book are about: institutions that encourage different modes of thought, respect them, and work through disagreement. A democratic society should not be a place where everyone agrees. It should be a place where people disagree and can still work together. That is the Lincoln vision.

You get there, he thinks, with historical perspective. No matter which room you are in, including a room of very smart people, there are things they are missing. Historians know no one is clairvoyant. The iconoclast looks for the silences. Seeing them is not enough. Fridman says he often occupies that role and people do not like to hear it. Even those who seem open-minded, once money and reputation are on the line, do not want otherwise. Harder than being an iconoclast is persuading people who are afraid of your ideas.

Suri's one-word answer is story. The leaders he has studied — politicians, social activists, technologists — get people in with a story. People do not respond to an argument. American schooling trains students as debaters: this half of the room take this position, that half take the other. The exercise has value; it forces you to see another side. It almost never converts the other side. What converts is a story someone can identify with, an argument brought to life in human terms. Lincoln was a master of that. He told stories, disarmed people, and moved them without their quite realizing they were being moved.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy, after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, did not persuade the world with a new argument about Russia. Views of Russia were already set. He made Ukrainian suffering visible and made Russian behavior visible, and that moved opinion. Fridman adds that sometimes the story told about a person matters more than the story the person tells, and that this is also how propaganda works. The image that stayed with him from Ukraine was Zelenskyy remaining in Kyiv in the early days, against advice from his inner circle, the United States, the West, NATO — and, Fridman assumes, against Russian expectations that he would run. Foolishness or heroism, he does not know. The picture bound a country together.

Suri calls it the most basic of human stories, the story of courage. He remembers Zelenskyy's social feed: standing outside in Kyiv, not even in a bunker, naming ministers who were still there, saying they were not corrupt, not American stooges, staying because they cared about Ukraine. Children grow up seeing their parents as courageous. Courage and evil are the two extremes that make war, conflict, and struggle tellable. He studies and writes history because the world dumps data and information on us, and information is easy to manipulate. Stories supply structure, morality, political value. History is more stories about more people.

How did the American Civil War start? Because of flawed institutions, Suri says. The founders had mixed views of slavery and wanted a system that would, over time, open to more people of more kinds — not necessarily equality, but a more open democracy. The actual machinery gave slaveholders in particular states disproportionate power, through the Senate, the Electoral College, and other arrangements still argued over. That part of the country was, in Lincoln's words as Suri uses them, holding the rest of the country hostage.

Lincoln himself was a casualty of the arrangement. Born in Kentucky, making his way in Illinois, a poor white man, he saw slavery as an evil twice: morally, and as a theft of democratic opportunity. Why would anyone hire poor Abe if they could get a slave for free? An economy of opportunity for him had to be an open economy without slavery, especially in the new states coming into the Union. He was one of the creators of the Republican Party, dedicated to making new territory open to any man willing to work for pay — free labor, free soil, free men, basic capitalism. Southern plantation owners were an aristocracy that wanted the opposite: slavery expanded into the new territories.

The clash, then, was institutions that could not adapt and that kept delivering extra power to those plantation owners. The Supreme Court was dominated by them. The Senate was dominated by them. The Republican Party came in as a critique of that. Confederate Southerners, unwilling to accept the change, went to war with the Union.

The Union was much larger: about 22 million people, roughly the states north of Virginia as we would recognize them now. The Confederacy sat south of the Mason-Dixon line, Virginia and south and west through Tennessee; Texas in, Missouri a border state. It was a smaller entity, about nine million people plus about four million enslaved, an agricultural economy against a more industrializing North. In some ways the Confederate states were more international, exporters of cotton and tobacco with strong ties to Great Britain. Before the war the United States was the world's largest cotton source; English textiles ran on Southern cotton. Egypt filled some of the gap during the fighting.

Confederate wealth was land and slaves, held by landed families. The North was predominantly small business owners plus large financial interests such as the banks in New York. The Union also outnumbered the Confederates in the field, often by three to one. The constitutional wrinkle is easy to miss: there is no conscription in the Constitution. The democracy was formed on the presumption that people should not be forced into the military. Most democracies today still require service. The United States has rarely done it.

In the first months and years Lincoln had to go to governors and ask for volunteers. Northerners who took up arms early were volunteers. The South conscripted. As the war went on, the Union passed the conscription acts of 1862 and 1863, which for the first time gave Lincoln presidential power to force men into the army, and which led to draft riots in New York and elsewhere.

Fridman, recording in Texas, reads the Second Amendment and asks what it is doing in this story. The American population was already armed before the war. Union and Confederate armies manufactured and bought weapons, but civilians already had them. The presumption, Suri says, was that citizens would not be forced into a national army, Prussian-style, and would serve in militias to protect their own property and communities. For him as a historian, the key clause is "a well regulated militia." Americans have been gun owners throughout their history — not AK-47 owners — for community self-defense. Antonin Scalia, even in a gun case, drew a line: you have a right to defend yourself, not a right to an Uzi, not a right to a tank.

Fridman jokes that tanks may sit in a gray area; theoretically a person might own one. Suri laughs that you might then be breaking vehicle-width laws. The turn back to Ukraine is more serious. Early in that war, Kyiv handed out rifles to anyone who would take them, and crime went down — a social experiment Fridman wants studied, because a country with a history of corruption handing out guns might have been expected to produce robberies and assaults. Suri's instinct is that it can work in wartime and that after the war you have to take the guns back, at which point people may be very upset. That, he says, is precisely the problem.

It is part of the American story after Appomattox in 1865. Many Southern soldiers went home with their guns and used them to shoot and intimidate formerly enslaved people who were now citizens. Suri writes about Memphis in 1866: former Confederate soldiers, police officers, and judges, in a two-day spasm, responsible in his account for hundreds of rapes and the destruction of an entire African American community, able to do it because they had brought the weapons home. He does not stop at gun control. Underneath the guns is hatred, and an inability to see another human being as having equal value.

The election of 1860 was bitterly divided, the start of a run of contested elections that Suri stretches from 1860 to 1896. It was the first time a Republican became president. Lincoln won with less than 40 percent of the vote because Democrats split. One faction was out to defend the slave South; another wanted compromise while still keeping slavery, most famously Stephen Douglas and "popular sovereignty," letting each state decide. Traditional Whigs, the party that had preceded the Republicans, also ran someone. Four candidates, Lincoln a plurality.

He won because the anti-slavery or anti-expansion states were not a majority but were a plurality, and the rest of the country had factionalized too hard to put up a united front. The live issue was not whether to abolish slavery where it already existed. It was whether slavery would follow into new territory. Lincoln's correspondence is clear: during the campaign he wanted no one on his side saying he was arguing for abolitionism, even though he personally supported it. The message was no new slave territories. Was he clearly for abolition? No. He was intentionally unclear.

Fridman asks how much vision it takes to see an evil everyone else treats as weather. Factory farming, he suggests, might look like mass torture of animals to people a hundred years from now, and people living inside it — especially people in charge — have trouble waking up. Did Lincoln wake up? In some ways yes, Suri says, in some ways no. To us slavery is obviously a horror. To people who grew up watching it, imagining a different world was hard. Lincoln's imagination, like everyone else's, was limited by his time. Suri does not think Lincoln imagined a world of equality between the races. He had come to see that slavery was horrible.

Historians differ on how he got there. Part of Suri's account is a father who treated him like a slave: a struggling farmer trying to control his son's life. Early correspondence shows how much Lincoln hated that. He learned in his own skin how it feels when someone else commands your labor and denies you choices. He was also a pragmatist, which is what made him a great politician. He wanted to work through institutions, not burn them. He famously said that if he could preserve the Union by allowing slavery to stay in the South, he would; by eliminating it in the South, he would; by buying the enslaved and sending them somewhere else, he would. The criterion was the Union. What he ran on was that the territories west of Illinois would be for free poor white men like him.

The hinge, for Suri, is 1863, the second year. Under war pressure Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation: the property of Southerners — that is, their slaves — would be freed and brought into the Union Army. Southerners had treated enslaved people as property; the Union borrowed the legal language and called those who reached its lines "contraband," then put them in uniform. That changed the nature of the war. The enslaved had already been voting with their feet, leaving plantations as soon as they could, moving toward Union lines. The proclamation made an existing fact into national policy.

He does not think it is a war about slavery. He thinks it is a war about freedom. Call it a war about slavery and it sounds like an argument between slave masters and other white men who did not want slavery to exist. That argument existed. The war, especially after 1863, was larger. Call it a war about freedom and the protagonists change: people walking off plantations, into recruiting stations, picking up guns, acting as agents of their own liberation. That is how the war ends, with abolition as a fact on the ground. It is also, he says, why he wrote the book. The political argument now is still how to open the society to more freedom for more people.

Stepping back, Fridman asks what thousands of years of slavery teach about human nature. Suri files two reports. The pessimistic one: human beings can do enormous harm and brutality to one another; genocide in the present is evidence; with the right stimuli and incentives people can enslave. The optimistic one: with proper leadership and governance they can resist those urges and put the energy into uses that help other people. The second does not come naturally. Leadership and institutions tame us. We can civilize ourselves. The verb went out of fashion; he still believes in it, and in the civilizing role of government, the way Lincoln did and the way Franklin Roosevelt did. Education is part of it. So are laws — few of them, but laws — that incentivize and penalize going to the dark side. Take that away, or put leaders in who encourage the dark side, and a society can go down a deep tunnel faster than most people think.

Fridman adds a game-theory gloss. In a jungle, doing good is punished; extreme selfishness, greed, violence, and manipulation pay. That is not, he thinks, how most people actually want to live. Institutions let you do what you want: good for the world, good for others, and in doing that, good for yourself. They protect a decent instinct. Suri says the historical record is very strong on exactly that claim. It is the classic liberal position in the nineteenth-century sense: the belief that human beings can be civilized through institutions.