If You Take Slavery Out of the Picture, There Is No Civil War

Lex Fridman opens with the question every Civil War conversation starts with: what caused it, and could it have been avoided? Gary Gallagher, a historian of the conflict at the University of Virginia, refuses the word inevitable. Conditions were in place by the winter of 1860–61, he says, and those conditions were all related to slavery and its effects in both the states that allowed it and the states that did not. The 1850s had not been a national debate about abolition. Among the white people who made the political decisions, the fight was whether slavery would be allowed to expand into federal territories.

Abolitionists were a tiny minority even in the North. The Liberty Party's high-water mark, in 1844, was about two and a half percent of the vote. Gallagher guesses that true abolitionists, people who wanted slavery destroyed immediately and everywhere, were around three percent of the white population on the eve of the war. They were widely despised even above the Mason-Dixon Line, seen as agitators who roiled the Union. Nearly four million African Americans lived in the United States in 1860, about three and a half million of them enslaved in the South, and they would have embraced freedom instantly. They were not the ones casting the ballots.

The Republican Party that emerged in the mid-1850s after the Whigs foundered on slavery did not campaign to abolish the institution where it already existed. Its key plank was no expansion into the territories. When Lincoln won in 1860 on that platform, white Southerners read a death sentence: they were doomed to become an ever-smaller minority, and a federal government dominated by free states would eventually tamper with slavery at home. Lincoln and William Henry Seward had both said the nation could not remain half slave and half free. Seven of the fifteen slaveholding states seceded between South Carolina's departure on December 20 and the end of February. Gallagher's causal claim needs no footnote. Take slavery out of the picture and there is no Civil War.

Gallagher asks listeners to sit in the mind of 1860. The census counted a shade more than thirty-one million Americans, about four million of them African American. The free states were more than ninety-eight percent white. Attitudes toward slavery and attitudes toward race were not the same thing. By modern standards the overwhelming majority of white Northerners were deeply prejudiced, and you could oppose slavery while remaining hostile to Black people. About forty-five percent of free-state residents were Democrats, and most Democrats had no problem with the institution itself. They opposed expansion because they thought it would circumscribe white economic opportunity in the territories.

In the white South, a large majority of families owned no slaves at all. Neo-Confederate talking points love that fact. Gallagher's reply is that every white Southerner had a stake in slavery, first as labor control and more importantly as social control. They knew, whatever they later claimed in the Jim Crow era about happy enslaved people, that Black people did not want to be enslaved. Haiti sat in the back of their minds. In some coastal districts of South Carolina, ninety percent of residents were enslaved. A modest farmer without a cotton gin used his wealthy neighbor's, then took his turn on the slave patrol. Reciprocity bound the whole white society to the institution.

Slavery in the United States in 1860 was not dying. It was thriving, making the transition from cash-crop agriculture into industrial and other applications, with cotton, rice, and sugar still strong. Lincoln once guessed it might last another fifty years. Gallagher thinks that without the war the United States would have had the ignominious distinction of being the last place on earth to get rid of slavery, after Brazil and Spanish Cuba. The 1860 census is the friend of anyone who wants the economic picture. Property in slaves alone, not counting land, was valued at about three billion dollars. All American industry, all railroads, all of that put together came to fewer than two and a half billion. Mississippi and South Carolina, the states with the highest proportions of enslaved people, were the wealthiest per capita in the white United States.

Other slaveholding societies of the era got out without a slaughter. Britain freed eight hundred thousand people in 1833 by buying their freedom; those people did not live in Britain. Russia freed twenty-three million serfs in 1861 by decree. Brazil, which had imported more than ten times as many enslaved Africans as the United States, abolished slavery in 1888 through ordinary legislation. Only the United States fought for four years, at a cost Gallagher now puts well above seven hundred thousand dead soldiers. Britain, he says, was freeing people who did not live among the people doing the freeing. In America the enslaved lived next door, and white Southerners were afraid of what would happen if they were not enslaved anymore.

Causation and motivation, Gallagher tells his students, are constantly conflated, including by television commentators who know what they know. About three million men served, 2.2 million in United States forces and eight to nine hundred thousand in the Confederacy, and a majority on both sides were volunteers. Were most white Northerners putting on blue uniforms because they wanted to kill slavery? No. They were trying to salvage the Union, which they saw as a unique gift the founding generation had bequeathed in the blood of the Revolution. Union meant two concrete things: a voice in your own government, and a chance to rise economically. The franchise was limited by today's standards, but in the Western world of 1860 the United States had by far the broadest. You were not doomed to die as your father had lived.

Those were worth fighting for against what soldiers called the slaveholding aristocrats and oligarchs of the South, a slavery-based oligarchy that did not really believe in democracy. The European revolutions of the 1840s had failed. When Lincoln spoke of the last best hope of earth, Gallagher says, he meant that the United States was a beacon of small-d democracy in a Western world turning the other way. Gallagher's classroom test is simple. If you cannot explain why a farmer from Vermont would pick up a musket to make South Carolina come back, you cannot understand the war. Why not just say good riddance? Because if one state can leave because it disliked an election result, other states can leave, and the republic comes apart. South Carolina did not claim Lincoln was corrupt. It just did not like who won.

Gallagher prefers to describe two mid-nineteenth-century republics at war, not a simple North versus South. Fifteen slaveholding states existed in 1860; only eleven seceded. Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, and Delaware stayed in the United States. The Confederates copied most of the U.S. Constitution in a hurry and changed the parts that protected slavery. Both sides claimed George Washington and the founding generation. States' rights, Gallagher notes, is always available to whoever is unhappy with the federal government. New England talked that language during the War of 1812. Ask a Lost Cause advocate to list the top three states' rights the white South cared about. There is only one: the right of a state to interpose its power between a federal government that might interfere with slavery and a state government that wanted to keep it. Northern states used the same doctrine in personal liberty laws to block the return of escaped enslaved people.

Irony, Gallagher says, is wonderful in history. The Confederacy was founded to resist central power. It became, until deep into the twentieth century, the most intrusive central government the United States had ever seen. It passed the first national conscription law in American history, in the spring of 1862, before the United States ever forced men into uniform. It passed a national graduated income tax. When the currency collapsed, it levied a tax in kind and took a percentage of the crop. It impressed horses, mules, and enslaved labor. It suspended habeas corpus, as Lincoln did in selected situations. True states' rights men inside the Confederacy went crazy.

Confederates refused political parties because they said the founders had not wanted them. In practice they split into nationalists, Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee among them, who would let the central government do whatever the war required, and men like Vice President Alexander Stephens, who insisted the states should keep more power. Gallagher's conclusion is unsparing. The only reason the war lasted as long as it did is that the Confederate central government did things no one ever would have believed it would do.

The draft itself manufactured fury. In the spring of 1861 nobody thought the war would last, so a one-year enlistment seemed plenty. A year later a large share of Confederate soldiers were due to go home. Congress made everyone liable for three years and rolled the one-year volunteers into two more years of service. Soldiers called it a broken faith. When the three-year men came due, Congress put them in for the duration. Once the Confederacy got you in uniform, Gallagher says, you did not get out, because they kept changing the rules. The United States waited until the spring of 1863 to draft, and it always respected original terms of enlistment.

Almost nobody, Gallagher says, continues to rise in his estimation as he gets older. Lincoln does, and Lincoln remains a mystery. Fridman had given him a year of schooling; Gallagher says that was generous. Out of a poor background came the most eloquent president the country has ever had, able to distill the most complex ideas into the fewest words and make them ring. Put Lincoln's 1860 resume next to Jefferson Davis's and the answer seems obvious. Lincoln had run a small law office, served one two-year term in the House, and seen a little junior service in the Black Hawk War. Davis was a West Point graduate, had commanded more men in Mexico than most Civil War army commanders later would, had chaired the Senate Committee on Military Affairs, and had been secretary of war. Davis checked every box. Lincoln checked none. Lincoln became the commander-in-chief.

Gallagher lists the gifts. Lincoln had an ego and could put it aside. He hated slavery without being an abolitionist, and he was glad to see it added to the roster of war aims, but he never lost the principal focus: how to maintain a war whose scale no American history had prepared anyone for. Thirty-one million people, a shade more than three million in uniform, deaths that would scale to six to seven and a half million today. Winfield Scott had taken Mexico City with fewer than fifteen thousand men; Grant would have a hundred and twenty thousand. Lincoln put his main rivals in the cabinet, Seward and Salmon P. Chase among them, men with far better educations and no backwoods accent. He knew they sneered. He did not care. Eventually all but the ones with a twenty-watt bulb figured out that he was smarter than they were. He could listen, admit he was wrong, and put up with obnoxious behavior from people who might deliver.

Individuals matter, Gallagher insists; the idea that only great forces count is ridiculous. For the United States, Lincoln and Grant matter beyond calculation. On the Confederate side, take Lee out of the picture and the war does not last nearly as long. In a perverse way Lee furthered emancipation, because he extended the fighting long enough that the United States decided it had to destroy slavery in order to defeat the rebels. Gallagher thinks the war could have ended in the early summer of 1862 with slavery still intact.

The McClellan story is the exhibit. In 1861 Lincoln and Seward went to the general's house. The commander-in-chief waited in a side room. McClellan came home, went upstairs, and sent word that he would be happy to talk some other time. Lincoln left, never went back, and did not pitch a fit. File that away: McClellan is an ass, but he might win the war. On a cold day in 1865, the crowd at the second inaugural wanted retribution. Lincoln told them slavery had caused the war and that everyone was implicated because everyone had countenanced it. Gallagher calls it the greatest speech in American history, eight or nine minutes long, opening with a tribute to citizen soldiers and closing with malice toward none and charity for all. The Gettysburg Address, which Fridman recites in full, is usually read for the prepositions at the end. Gallagher says Lincoln's emphasis is on the people. The one thing Lincoln got wrong that day was that the world would little note nor long remember what was said there.

Ulysses S. Grant had failed at farming, failed at business, and failed in the peacetime army. The war revealed what those failures had taught him. He would break rules, take risks, and take responsibility whether the result was success or failure. If something did not work, he did something else. When subordinates in Virginia in 1864 kept asking what Lee might do, Grant finally said they should stop worrying about Lee and let Lee worry about them. Former Confederates and some Northern Democrats fastened the butcher label on him. Gallagher answers with numbers. Before the two men met in Virginia, Grant's total casualties in all his great battles were thirty-seven thousand. Lee's in the same period were over ninety-eight thousand. Joe Glatthaar's demographic study of Lee's army, the most careful of any Civil War force, found that a soldier in that army had a seventy-three percent chance of becoming a casualty. Grant's losses got high when he ran into Lee, just like everybody else's. Alcohol, Gallagher adds, never got in the way of anything Grant did during the war. In March 1864 Congress dusted off the three-star rank of lieutenant general, held before only by George Washington, and gave it to Grant.

Lee is Grant's antithesis in background. He came from the top of the Virginia aristocracy. Two uncles had signed the Declaration of Independence. His father, a famous commander under Washington, coined the line that Washington was first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen. Lee's idol was Washington. He patterned himself on Washington, then almost undid the work Washington had put in place. In April 1861 he was offered command of the Union army. He resigned from the United States Army not to join the Confederacy but to go to Virginia, which was not yet in the Confederacy, and take command of state forces. When Virginia went in, he took a Confederate commission. Loyalty to Virginia meant family, and it meant the slaveholding South. Those things came in one bundle. Winfield Scott thought Lee the greatest soldier in the army, except perhaps Scott himself, who by 1861 weighed three hundred and fifty pounds and had to be winched onto a horse. Gallagher's verdict is one sentence. Lee was a superb soldier. He was on the wrong side.

The Deep South went first. South Carolina was ground zero; the rest of the first seven followed, and they set up a provisional government in Montgomery. The states that had not yet seceded were the ones with the most people: Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri. Virginia's convention voted against secession twice. The hinge was Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. Lincoln would not concede the right to secede; he chose to resupply rather than reinforce. Jefferson Davis decided the fort could not remain a federal installation inside what he considered the Confederacy. Confederates fired the first shots. The key event was not the firing itself but Lincoln's call for volunteers to suppress the rebellion. Four more states went out, Virginia among them. Richmond held forty percent of all the industrial capacity in what became the Confederacy. Virginia supplied the most soldiers, the most important military leaders, and the capital, which moved from Montgomery to Richmond. West Virginia essentially seceded from Virginia in the course of the war. Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri stayed in. Delaware did too, Gallagher adds, but who cares.

Would a seven-state Confederacy have produced the war we know? Gallagher finds it inconceivable. Virginia gave manpower, food, industry, Lee, Jackson, and Jeb Stuart, plus the revolutionary pedigree of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison. If Lincoln had let Sumter go, the upper South calculus might have changed. Gallagher will not start at the end of the story and call the sequence inevitable. Things happen as a consequence of what happened before. Most Americans in 1859 were not living in the antebellum era in their own minds. They farmed, they went to work, they watched railroads and the telegraph shrink time and space. Periodically Kansas-Nebraska, Dred Scott, the caning of Charles Sumner, and *Uncle Tom's Cabin* yanked attention back to the sectional rift. Nobody in Iowa woke up in 1857 thinking first about how much they hated slaveholders.

The slaughter that followed is the measure Gallagher uses against an older scholarly claim that the Confederacy was not a nation because it did not try hard enough. Confederates lost between four and a half and five and a half percent of their entire population, more than Britain, France, Germany, or Russia in World War I. They lost more than thirty percent of white military-age males, the equivalent of about eighteen million Americans now. The United States lost about 1.8 percent of its population; in World War II the figure was three-tenths of one percent. Bitterness increased as the war went after the Confederate home front. About fifteen percent of Confederate soldiers deserted, about twelve percent of United States soldiers. If you had polled most white Southerners late in the war and offered Jefferson Davis and continued fighting versus Lincoln, reunion, and no slavery, Gallagher thinks they would have picked the first. That is why the war went on.

Among Americans who know anything about the war, Gallagher says, the great misconception is that United States victory was inevitable: twenty-two million people against five and a half million white Confederates, a vastly stronger economy, an army and a navy. The Confederacy had compensating advantages. It did not have to invade the North or take Washington. It only had to convince a majority of civilians in the loyal states that the cost of forcing the rebel states back was not worth paying. A tie was as good as a win. The Confederacy was as large as Western Europe, with poor transportation, and its soldiers were literally defending their homes. The U.S. Army in 1860 had fifteen thousand men; the Navy had fewer than fifty vessels, exactly three available to blockade a 3,600-mile coast. The Confederacy came very close in the summer of 1864. Leadership was not a Confederate monopoly. West Pointers commanded on both sides, the same classes, the same textbooks, the same Mexican War. Over the course of the war the United States found four men who could command armies effectively: Grant, Sherman, Philip Sheridan, and George H. Thomas. The Confederacy found one, Lee, and it had more than one army.

Civilians rode out from Washington with picnic baskets to watch First Bull Run in July 1861. Lincoln asked for ninety-day volunteers. William Tecumseh Sherman said that was like putting out a fire with a squirt gun. Reality arrived in the spring of 1862. At Shiloh in two days there were upwards of twenty-five thousand casualties, more battle casualties than United States forces had suffered in every previous war combined. Two and a half months later, McClellan's army and Lee's fought the Seven Days outside Richmond: thirty-six thousand casualties. Those two together showed that the scale was going to be different. Two of every three soldiers who died died of disease. Overall casualties, killed, wounded, and prisoners, ran to about a million and a half. About two hundred thousand Black men served in United States Colored Troops. Gallagher dismisses as unsupported nonsense the claim that large numbers of Black men fought in the Confederate army. Enslaved men were there doing non-military labor so more white men could shoulder muskets.

George B. McClellan was brilliant at building the Army of the Potomac. The troops loved him as they loved no later commander. He had been on Winfield Scott's staff in Mexico, as Lee had. What he could not do was risk things when the moment came. He got within five miles of Richmond against Joseph E. Johnston, a general whose first thought every morning was what a great day it was to retreat. Johnston was wounded at Seven Pines and replaced by Lee. McClellan decided this was excellent news, because Lee was too timid to be effective. Lee pushed him away in the Seven Days. At Antietam, the bloodiest single day in United States history, twenty-three thousand casualties, Lee had about thirty-five thousand men on the field against McClellan's eighty thousand, and Union soldiers had found a copy of Lee's entire campaign orders, Special Orders No. 191. McClellan still did not move quickly. Twenty thousand of his men never fired a musket. He let Lee sit a day and then recross the Potomac. Lincoln waited until the day after the November elections, because McClellan was popular among Democrats, and fired him. Gallagher's nineteenth-century word for what McClellan lacked is moral courage. Grant had it. Lee had it. McClellan did not.

The Seven Days, not Antietam, is the battle that put slavery on the table as official war policy. By the end of May 1862 the Confederacy had already lost New Orleans, Nashville, and Memphis; most of Tennessee was gone, and McClellan was five miles from Richmond. Gallagher does not think the Confederacy could have absorbed the loss of its capital then. McClellan's failure convinced Lincoln and Congress that more extreme measures were required. Congress passed the Second Confiscation Act in late July. Lincoln told his cabinet he would issue an emancipation proclamation, waited for a victory so it would not look like a shriek of defeat, and announced the preliminary proclamation five days after Antietam, on September 22, 1862. He based it strictly on his war power as commander-in-chief, writing it, one historian said, with the soaring language of a bill of lading, because he could not win the war with Republicans alone. Democrats might accept emancipation as a tool to restore the Union. At the moment he signed the final proclamation he freed nobody, because it applied only where rebels still held control. The army became the boundary of freedom.

After Antietam came Fredericksburg, an easy Lee victory against Ambrose Burnside, the affable man who gave English the word sideburns. Burnside fed brigades one at a time into entrenched Confederates: about twelve and a half thousand United States casualties against fifty-five hundred Confederate. Watching the slaughter, Lee said it was well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it. Lincoln replaced Burnside with Joseph Hooker, who built the Army of the Potomac into what he called the greatest army on the planet, about 135,000 men, reorganized the medical service, and planned to swing around Lee's left, get behind him, and force a retreat to Richmond or a fight on bad ground. Continuity at the top favored the Army of Northern Virginia. The Army of the Potomac had already burned through McClellan and Burnside.

Gallagher is writing a short book on Chancellorsville, often called Lee's masterpiece and the last battle Lee and Stonewall Jackson fought as a team. Hooker's plan worked until the moment of truth. He got more than seventy thousand men to the Chancellorsville crossroads; Lee did not grasp what was happening until the end of April. Lee then divided his army, left ten thousand to watch forty thousand Federals at Fredericksburg, and turned to meet Hooker. They collided near Zoan Church on May 1. At two in the afternoon Hooker ordered a retreat into the Wilderness and handed Lee the initiative. The next day Jackson marched all the way around the Union right and crushed Oliver Otis Howard's Eleventh Corps, which had a large German element and became a target of ethnic scorn from other Union troops. Jackson was wounded that night by his own men and died on May 10. Hooker, still sitting between the two parts of Lee's army in an ideal position, kept thinking about defense.

On the morning of May 3, Lee's halves fought their way together around the Chancellorsville clearing. An artillery round hit a pillar Hooker was leaning against; he was concussed, vomiting, and went to the rear. As Union troops fell back, Lee rode into the middle of his men, and Gallagher describes a spontaneous outpouring unmatched in the war, the emotional binding of a year. There was no way Lee should have won. He was outnumbered two to one, 135,000 to about 64,000. He lost thirteen thousand men, Hooker about 17,500, a higher proportion of Lee's smaller army. Gallagher calls it the complete dominance of one personality over another. Afterward Lee and his army became the Confederacy's most important national institution, the way Washington and the Continental Army had been: if they were still in the field, independence was still possible. The North remembered the battle by airbrushing it out. In Lost Cause iconography, a lithograph of Lee and Jackson's last meeting before the May 2 attack hung in Southern homes, offices, and courthouses, the two greatest Confederate soldiers at high tide, before Gettysburg, never mind Appomattox.

Letters from Lee's army did not contemplate losing to the Army of the Potomac. They had been outnumbered and still winning, taking chances, absorbing casualties because victory made the larger war seem winnable. Gallagher thinks you cannot understand Pickett's Charge without May 3, the day Lee decided his infantry could do anything he asked. Critics say his aggressiveness bled the South dry. Gallagher answers that Lee understood better than many modern historians that the key was Northern civilian opinion. Win victories, depress morale, help Democrats, and the Confederacy's odds improve. It was a race between running out of men and the Union running out of will. Gallagher is happy to report that the Confederacy ran out of men first. In the late spring of 1863, though, with Democrats raging against emancipation and conscription, desertions up in the Army of the Potomac, and New York's draft riots only weeks away, it was one of the Confederacy's more optimistic seasons. In the West, Grant was operating against Vicksburg.

Vicksburg was the last major Confederate citadel on the Mississippi. New Orleans was already gone, the Confederacy's largest city at 160,000, four times the next, the key to the river as an economic artery. Grant had been trying since the winter of 1862. He finally had the navy run past the batteries, crossed, and invested the city from the east, cutting loose from his supply lines. Sherman did not understand. Lincoln did not understand. Everybody said no. Grant said do it. Vicksburg surrendered on July 4, 1863, the same day Lee retreated from Gettysburg. A religious people, Gallagher notes, did not fail to read divine intervention into a double victory on the anniversary of the Declaration. It was Grant's second capture of an entire rebel army; the first had been at Fort Donelson in February 1862. The Mississippi was thereafter a United States river.

Fridman says everyone knows Gettysburg is the turning point. Gallagher's answer is no. After Chancellorsville, Lee went north a second time with seventy-five thousand men, his army at its apogee, confident, well supplied, well led. He wanted the war out of Virginia so agriculture could recover, and he wanted to live off Pennsylvania's Cumberland Valley for a long time. The film *Gettysburg* has him aiming at Washington; Gallagher says he knew the city was too strong. Jeb Stuart, an excellent cavalryman with an adolescent need for praise, had nearly lost the war's biggest cavalry fight at Brandy Station, then rode around the Army of the Potomac to make the newspapers love him again. The Union army started moving, Stuart was trapped, and Lee did not know where the enemy was until a civilian spy named Harrison reported they were close. Lee ordered a concentration near Gettysburg and told his officers not to bring on a battle. On July 1 the armies blundered into a meeting engagement west of town that grew into the war's biggest battle. It would not have happened if the cavalry had been doing its job.

Lee had seventy-five thousand, the Federals about eighty-five to eighty-eight thousand. He attacked every day; they defended. Confederate triumph on the first day, a near miss on the second among Little Round Top, Devil's Den, and the Peach Orchard, and on the third Lee lost patience and let his infantry solve it. What most people call Pickett's Charge, Pickett commanding only part of it, sent twelve and a half thousand men in a frontal assault that failed completely. Gallagher draws a straight line from May 3 at Chancellorsville to July 3. Lee wrote his wife and Jefferson Davis that he had asked too much of his infantry; the fault was all his. Edward Porter Alexander, Lee's gifted artillerist and the most perceptive Confederate soldier who wrote about the war, thought Lee should have hunkered down after smashing two Union corps on July 1 and dared Meade to attack. He almost certainly would have won. Aggressiveness cost him about twenty-five thousand men, at least a third of the army, and seventeen of fifty-two generals killed, wounded, or captured. George Meade, newly in command after Hooker, let Lee recross the Potomac the way McClellan had after Antietam.

Lincoln wrote Meade a letter thanking him for a great victory and then telling him he had let Lee get away and the war would continue indefinitely. He did not send the letter; he had Henry Halleck convey the contents. Lincoln did not think Gettysburg was the turning point. He probably thought it should have been. Lee predicted the Eastern theater would be as quiet as a sucking dove for six months; it was ten months until Grant arrived. Gettysburg was an important United States victory. It was not as important as Vicksburg, because Lee got away with his army intact.

In March 1864 Grant became general-in-chief with three stars. He planned five operations; the two that mattered most were his own move against Lee and Sherman's against Atlanta. He wanted Lee's army, which is what Lincoln had been trying to get generals interested in all along. The old Civil War pattern was a battle, a retreat, weeks or months of pause. Grant and Lee fought the Wilderness on May 5 and 6, twelve thousand Confederate casualties and eighteen thousand Union, marched a day, and fought Spotsylvania Courthouse at the same butcher's bill. Sixty thousand casualties in two battles with no interval. At Cold Harbor in early June, Grant launched frontal assaults that came to nothing. In six weeks he suffered sixty-five thousand casualties, as large as Lee's whole army had been; Lee suffered thirty-five thousand, a comparable share of a smaller force. Both officer corps were eviscerated. Soldiers broke down in ways we would now call PTSD. Grant shoved Lee into the siege of Petersburg, the position Lee feared most. Behind the lines the perception was endless casualties and no one winning. Union morale hit its lowest point of the war in July and August 1864. Sherman was moving toward Atlanta too slowly to capture it. Richmond had not fallen. An election was coming.

In late August Lincoln called his cabinet together and had them sign what became known as the Blind Memorandum: they would not be reelected, and they would have to win the war before the Democrats came in, because the Democrats would not win it. Ask civilians that summer whether Gettysburg had been the turning point, Gallagher says, and they would have answered that that was a year ago and they were not winning now. McClellan was the Democratic nominee. The platform called for an armistice and negotiations; many people believed that if the fighting stopped it would not start again. McClellan, Gallagher admits with visible pain, at least said the war had to be won first. A McClellan victory would have been the end of emancipation. The measure that became the Thirteenth Amendment had passed the Senate in April 1864 and failed in the House. Grant versus Lee did not reelect Lincoln. Sherman's capture of Atlanta in early September did, and so, to a lesser degree, did Sheridan's crushing victories in the Shenandoah Valley, the last of them just before the election. Republicans took huge majorities in both houses.

Sherman said he would make Georgia howl. The economic logic, burn mills, kill livestock, destroy crops so a region cannot support armies, was Grant's, and Sheridan did it in the Valley first. Sherman added a psychological twist. He would show civilians that his army could go wherever it wanted, whenever it wanted, and Jefferson Davis could do nothing about it. When they believed that, they would give up. He marched to Savannah, then through the Carolinas. Grant broke Lee's Petersburg lines on April 1, 1865, gave him no pause, and ran him to ground at Appomattox in about a week. Lee had started the retreat with about sixty thousand men; the army disintegrated, and he surrendered twenty-eight thousand. Grant issued twenty-five thousand rations. When he learned that Confederate cavalrymen had supplied their own horses, he let them take the horses home for spring planting. He did not demand Lee's sword. Shortly before, Lincoln had told Grant, Sherman, and a senior naval officer what kind of peace he wanted: make them sign a parole, accept the end of slavery and reunion, and send them home. If it were only a rebellion, you hang traitors. The goal was to put the nation back together. After Lincoln's death, Andrew Johnson wanted to go after Lee. Grant said he would resign if the government changed the terms Lee was already honoring.

Five days after the surrender, John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln. Booth was the youngest member of America's most famous acting family, athletic, successful, ardently pro-Confederate, and not ardent enough to put on a uniform. He heard Lincoln speak of possible Black suffrage and decided the tyrant had to die. A kidnap plot had failed; he gathered what Gallagher calls a group of losers to kill Lincoln, Seward, and Johnson. Lewis Powell slashed Seward, whose neck brace saved his life and left him disfigured. The man assigned to Johnson chickened out. Booth was shot in a barn. Four conspirators, including boarding-house keeper Mary Surratt, were hanged by a military commission, as was the commandant of Andersonville. Those hangings, Gallagher thinks, took some of the retribution edge off Northern feeling. Conspiracy literature later blamed Secretary of War Stanton and the radicals. Why was Lincoln unguarded? There was no Secret Service; the assigned man went across the street for a drink. Why that bridge? Why did Grant skip the theater? Mrs. Grant did not like Mrs. Lincoln. They added two and two and got five. The unsatisfying answer is that an actor who knew the theater walked in, shot the president, broke a leg jumping from the box, and limped away. At the grand review in Washington, the most common comment was that Lincoln was not in the presidential box.

White Southerners liked to talk about occupation under the boot heel. Gallagher says there was never an occupation of the former Confederacy, because there were never enough troops. The region covered three-quarters of a million square miles. The peak garrison was thirty thousand men, briefly; by 1870 about ten thousand remained. The white North would neither pay for a long occupation nor keep men in uniform to force full equal rights for formerly enslaved people, a goal that had not been on most Northern soldiers' list. Andrew Johnson's intransigence in the summer of 1865, acting as if the South had not quite lost, pushed Northerners far enough to pass the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which Gallagher still finds almost miraculous given white attitudes. Those amendments stayed on the books. Confederates, unconfused about defeat, scaled their aim from a slaveholding republic down to white supremacy. Jim Crow, Gallagher says, is the clearest expression of the white South's answer to Appomattox: we cannot have what we wanted, so we will take the next best thing.

Gallagher sorts wartime memory into four streams. Most white Northerners held the Union Cause: the greatest outcome was putting the nation back together; killing slavery was important, reunion more so. The Emancipation Cause reversed the ranking. Both are winners' memories. Confederates had to make a catastrophic choice palatable. First, pretend it was not about slavery; it was about constitutional principle and states' rights. Second, claim the fight was hopeless, a gallant effort against long odds, so there is no loss of honor. Third, talk about Lee, who won against the odds, and maybe Jackson, not Jefferson Davis, whom they had not even liked during the war. A fourth stream, reconciliation, came later: white Northerners and white Southerners agreeing not to talk about slavery or emancipation and to praise shared courage instead. The rectangular St. Andrew's cross that people fly as the Confederate flag is not the Confederate flag; the battle flag with that cross was square, and the national flag had three bars and stars. Every Ku Klux Klan group flew that cross. You cannot sanitize it. Abroad it can be an up-yours symbol of rebellion against authority. In the United States it has a specific meaning. People should quit trying to separate it.

Monuments, Gallagher argues, are not all the same, and treating them as identical makes the argument impossible. Silent Sam at Chapel Hill and New Orleans's Liberty Place monument carried horrific white-supremacist dedication rhetoric he understands removing. He wants local process and public hearings. Charlottesville had those; a commission voted to keep statues, add context, and raise new monuments to ignored groups. The city council overrode it and took everything down, including Lewis and Clark. First-wave monuments, raised by veterans and wartime women, tend to remember common soldiers, a lost generation of young men. Later waves came in the 1920s and 1930s, in reaction to civil rights in the 1950s and early 1960s, and after the film *Gettysburg* and Ken Burns. The Lee statue in Charlottesville went up in a reconciliationist key, Lee at Appomattox who wanted the nation back together. The people who raised it were, by our standards, racist. White supremacy in the Jim Crow South, Gallagher notes, was enforced by police, state law, and troopers, not by bronze. He used the statues as teaching tools. If a locality wants them down, they should come down.

Fridman asks whether the United States today is on the verge of another nineteenth-century rupture. Gallagher says no, without playing down the division. We resemble the 1850s in the reflex to attribute the worst to the other side and in inflammatory rhetoric. He does not see members of Congress assaulted on the floor. Texas talked secession after Obama; California talked secession after Trump; neither called a convention, voted, and left. When Lincoln was elected, they did. Asked what America is after fifty years in the archives, Gallagher still sees a magnet, far more diverse now, a mosaic that new people enter until they become the old mosaic for the next arrivals. Lincoln would not check all our boxes; he was prejudiced by our standards. Gallagher thinks his humanity and capacity to grow would have handled an African American presidency better than most mid-nineteenth-century men. The grouchy historian's genuine optimism is in the republic's resiliency. The federal budget went from sixty-three million dollars in 1860 to 1.2 billion in 1865, eleven days of 1865 spending by 1860 standards, plus land-grant colleges no one had imagined. You cannot control what a great military event sets loose, and you cannot pretend it never happened. The main thing a lifetime of study taught him is that whatever you thought was complicated is more complicated once you look. People are not simple. There is no twenty-second version of the past.