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

This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #499 with Gary Gallagher. The timestamps in the transcript are clickable links that take you directly to that point in the main video. Please note that the transcript is human generated, and may have errors. Here are some useful links:

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Episode highlight

Gary Gallagher (00:00:00) You cannot control what a great military event can set loose. More battle casualties than US forces had suffered in every war combined down to that point happened in two 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 gonna be on a totally different scale. He added a psychological twist. What Grant envisioned his doing, and Sheridan actually did it in the Shenandoah Valley before Sherman did it in Georgia, is go into an agriculturally productive area, burn the mills, kill the livestock, destroy the crops, lay waste to it so that it can’t be a logistical support of the Confederacy anymore.
Gary Gallagher (00:00:50) Sheridan did it in the Shenandoah Valley, and then Sherman did it in Georgia. But Sherman said, “But I’m also going to break them psychologically. I’m gonna 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 “great forces are all that matters and individuals don’t really matter” notion of history, I think, is ridiculous. Individuals really matter. For the United States, Lincoln and Grant matter beyond calculation- … in this war. And 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.

Introduction

Lex Fridman (00:01:29) The following is a conversation with Gary Gallagher, a historian of the American Civil War. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so on. And now, dear friends, here’s Gary Gallagher.

What caused the Civil War?

Lex Fridman (00:01:52) 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?
Gary Gallagher (00:02:04) 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-
Gary Gallagher (00:02:11) … by the winter of 1860, ’61, and the conditions that made it possible were all related to the institution of slavery and its effects both in the states where slavery was allowed and the states where it was not allowed. And there had been a series of tensions that grew in the decade preceding the 1850s. It’s not that one side wants to get rid of slavery and the other side wants to protect slavery. I’m talking about the white people in the United States now who would be making the political decisions. It’s 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 two sections in the 1850s, even in the late 1840s.
Gary Gallagher (00:02:57) The issues that came to most perilous a point in the view of many people then had to do with whether slavery would be allowed only where it already existed, or would it be allowed to expand. If it could expand, then it seemed that it might be conceivable at some point even that the slaveholding states could end up with a majority. They were in a minority by 1860, ’61 and feeling beleaguered, feeling threatened. They’d long since lost the population race to the free states. Early in the nation, the most powerful states were slaveholding states. Virginia was by far the most important state. Four of the first five presidents were from Virginia, all slaveholders, all prominent members of the slaveholding class. Those days were long gone by the late 1850s.
Lex Fridman (00:03:45) So that’s an important thing to say. It wasn’t before the Civil War a discussion about abolishing slavery. It’s about whether slavery, the institution of slavery, should be expanded.
Gary Gallagher (00:03:56) Allowed to expand into federal territories. There is a portion of the white population that is adamantly in favor of getting rid of slavery immediately. The abolitionists, they… There was even a political party called the Liberty Party that ran a candidate in 1840 and they got a handful of thousand votes. They reached their high point in 1844. They got about two and a half percent of the vote. The abolitionists are a tiny minority even in the North, tiny minority among the white people of the United States. The African American population, nearly four million of them by 1860, of course, would have embraced it instantly and yearned for it. But in the white population, the abolitionists are a tiny minority.
Gary Gallagher (00:04:40) They are 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.
Lex Fridman (00:04:52) So how did this escalate to a civil war, this almost policy discussion about the institution of slavery? How did it actually escalate?
Gary Gallagher (00:05:00) It escalated into a civil war because in the presidential election of 1860… There’d been, there’d been two party s- systems in the United States. The first party system, the Republicans, the Jeffersonian Republicans versus the Federalists. After that, there was, the two parties were the Whig Party against 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 has a wing in the Northern free states that can handle the issue of slavery? The Democrats managed to do that.
Gary Gallagher (00:05:41) The Whigs could not do it, and so the Whig Party ran their last candidate in 1852, presidential candidate, significant candidate. And the Republican Party emerged in the mid-1850s, took most of the old Whigs into the Republican ranks and one of the Republican, the key Republican platform plank was no expansion of slavery into the territories. Not abolish slavery, no expansion. That was the key in 1856 when they ran their first candidate. In 1860, that is again the key plank in the Republican platform. The Republican platform in 1860 says where slavery exists it will continue, but it cannot expand into the territories.
Gary Gallagher (00:06:20) When white Southerners saw that, that meant that they were doomed to become an increasingly minority section in the nation, and 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, and that is tamper with the institution of slavery in the South. The presidential election of 1860 brought the destruction of the last national party, which were the Democrats. They couldn’t even settle on a candidate, so you end 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 Democrat platform.
Gary Gallagher (00:07:03) You had a Unionist candidate running who just didn’t wanna 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 Lincoln winning. Here’s a guy who has said that he doesn’t think slavery would expand, but he’d said more than that. He scared the white South more because in 1858, both Lincoln and William Henry Seward, these are two prominent Republicans, had said basically in separate speeches, the House Divided Speech on Lincoln’s part, the Irrepressible Conflict Speech on Seward’s part, that the nation could not continue in the long term half slave and half free. And everybody in the South knew which way they wanted it to be. They would want it to be no slavery.
Gary Gallagher (00:07:47) And so Lincoln’s election scared the white South enough so that seven of the 15 slave-holding states seceded in response to Lincoln’s election. They seceded between December 20th, when South Carolina went out, and the end of February. You had the deep South went out.
Lex Fridman (00:08:06) What was the general view amongst the populace towards slavery? Let’s kind of lay it out. Let’s, you know, for the audience looking back, let’s put ourselves in the mind space of how people saw the world, how people saw slavery, how people saw African Americans.
Gary Gallagher (00:08:24) Well, the baseline among the white Americans, there were about 31, shade more than 31 million Americans in 1860 for the census of 1860. About four million of them were African Americans, three and a half million of those enslaved in the South. Anyway, among the white population, the average attitude toward Black people is what we would call profoundly prejudiced. Doesn’t matter whether you… A lot of people think this is a Southern white thing. They’re 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 towards slavery and attitudes toward race are not necessarily the same.
Gary Gallagher (00:09:13) I mean, you could be against slavery and still be prejudiced against Black people. By our standards, many abolitionists were prejudiced against Black people. They… But the overwhelming majority of the white North… In the North, often had 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 are 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.
Gary Gallagher (00:10:02) About 45% of the people who lived in the free states were Democrats. Most Democrats had no problem with slavery. I mean, absolutely no problem with the institution of slavery. There would be more problems among Republicans, especially with extension of slavery, although many Democrats, white Democrats in the North were against that as well. The white South was overwhelmingly in favor of slavery. You often read the argument, the kind of neo-Confederate argument that they’ll talk about how most Confederate soldiers didn’t own slaves. That’s true. A large majority of families in the South did not own a single slave. But all white Southerners had a stake in slavery.
Gary Gallagher (00:10:42) 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 of how happy Black people were in the institution of slavery, they knew 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 in the backs of their minds Haiti. Is that what’s gonna… 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 gonna remain under the control of the white people.
Gary Gallagher (00:11:24) So all white people in the South had a stake in slavery, not just some. 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 more wealthy neighbor had a gin, could gin your cotton there, and then you would take your turn on the slave patrols. So there’s a reciprocity in that regard.

Slavery

Lex Fridman (00:11:50) 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, the Americas, North and South America. We should also say something that, as I was looking into this, another big topic, which is the Atlantic slave trade. And it was surprising to me, the stat I wasn’t aware of, I would venture to say most Americans probably don’t know, that only 4% of African slaves were brought to North America, to the United States.
Gary Gallagher (00:12:37) Brazil is the main destination.
Lex Fridman (00:12:39) Brazil, the Caribbean was over 90%, 4.9 million in Brazil, 4 million in the Caribbean, and it 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. So there’s– the story of human slavery is one that reaches deep into our history and geographically is much larger than we often study in the context of the United States.
Gary Gallagher (00:13:09) One thing the Civil War, which I’ll just call the war for the rest of our discussion, I mean, one thing it did was end slavery in four 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, would have been after Brazil, would have been after Spanish Cuba, because it was thriving in the United States in 1860. It was making the transition from cash crop agriculture-
Gary Gallagher (00:13:42) … to other, to industrial applications and other applications growing of non not growing, growing just cotton and rice and sugar. It was– There was a time in the literature when people argued that the war was needless, 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 fifty years, and 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 it hadn’t, if the war hadn’t taken place.
Lex Fridman (00:14:17) So slavery was flourishing in the United States from-
Gary Gallagher (00:14:20) Flourishing.
Lex Fridman (00:14:21) … from an economics perspective- … especially.
Gary Gallagher (00:14:24) 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, and their property in slaves alone, not their other holdings, not their land holdings, just property in slaves were valued at about three billion dollars. The value of all industries, all railroads, all of that put together, fewer than two point five billion dollars. So the people who controlled the most wealth, by far, were the slaveholding class.
Lex Fridman (00:14:58) 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 nineteenth century. So most slave-owning societies of the era were able to abolish slavery without people dying at the mass scale that we’ll discuss. So Britain freed eight hundred thousand slaves in 1833- … By buying their freedom. Russia freed twenty-three million serfs in 1861 with a decree, so legally. Brazil, which imported more than ten times as many enslaved Africans as the United States, abolished slavery in 1888 through basic ordinary legislation. No violence. Why did US have a civil war with an estimated seven hundred and fifty thousand people dead in order to abolish slavery?
Gary Gallagher (00:15:55) Yes. That’s– The, let’s talk just for a second about the seven hundred and fifty thousand dead soldiers we’re talking about. The, the number for years was six hundred and eighteen thousand, and that’s been revised lately. I think we’re probably certainly more than seven hundred thousand. By far the bloodiest war in, in our history as a percentage of the population off the, off the charts, by far the bloodiest. I think one… I think there’s a big difference between Great Britain doing it and the United States doing it, is Great Britain did it in pla- in other places. There weren’t millions of enslaved people in Great Britain at the time. It’s– I think it’s, for them, it might have been a little bit easier to free enslaved people who don’t live among you than it…
Gary Gallagher (00:16:38) In the United States, the ante is up for the Confederacy because they, the enslaved people lived here, and I think they were, a lot of them were afraid of them and what would happen if they weren’t enslaved anymore. It– The war goes from… It doesn’t begin as a war to end slavery. There’s a major shift in the war, begins in the summer of 1862, where you add to the war. The war aim for the United States initially is to suppress the rebellion, which is what they called this. They didn’t call it the Civil War for the most part during the war. It’s the War of the Rebellion. That’s the goal initially.
Gary Gallagher (00:17:12) As the war goes on and becomes costlier and more all-encompassing, they decide that they’re not gonna 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 eighty-five and ninety percent of all their white military-aged 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 nineteenth century war.
Lex Fridman (00:17:51) So the Emancipation Proclamation was in part a military strategy.
Gary Gallagher (00:17:57) Abraham Lincoln based it entirely on his war-making power as commander-in-chief in a time of open rebellion. His inclination, there’s no– 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 knows that he can’t win the war with only Republicans in the army. He needs to keep Democrats on board with the war as well. They’re not in favor of emancipation.
Gary Gallagher (00:18:38) The one way that they might accept it is as a tool to help achieve union, and 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, and that would make… So 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 gonna risk my life to free a Black person.” That’s a very, very common attitude among Democrats.
Lex Fridman (00:19:25) So what did the Emancipation Proclamation actually do? It emphasized the freeing of slaves in the South.
Gary Gallagher (00:19:35) 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 is where the rebels were actually still in rebellion and in control. So any place where the US Army was in control, any place– He said that it is in essence United States territory now. 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 that it didn’t apply to as of the moment he signed it. Going forward, any place that the United States Army went where it hadn’t been on January 1st, 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation applied and enslaved people would be freed by it.
Gary Gallagher (00:20:21) At the, literally at the time he signed it, he didn’t free anybody because he’s 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 this to have power.”
Lex Fridman (00:20:31) So in part, this is why the army was the boundary which the freeing was happening.
Gary Gallagher (00:20:39) It’s absolutely the boundary, and Congress had already passed what was called the Second Confiscation Act. It passed this in July of 1862 that 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.
Lex Fridman (00:21:07) Okay. There’s so many tangents we can take, but let’s zoom out once again. There’s a difference between cause, as you’ve talked about, cause and motivation.
Gary Gallagher (00:21:16) Absolutely.
Lex Fridman (00:21:17) Quite a large number of people volunteered to fight.
Gary Gallagher (00:21:21) 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, 800, 900,000 in the Confederacy. It’s, 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 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.
Gary Gallagher (00:22:04) The next question is, okay, so 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 the successive generations. And the two key parts of what the Union meant for them was, number one, you had a voice in your own government, and 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.
Gary Gallagher (00:22:54) And so they argued that’s one thing the Union gives us, and it also gives us the chance to rise economically. Doesn’t guarantee that you can succeed, but it means you’re not doomed to be what your father was. And those are worth fighting for. And so I will put on a uniform so the slave-holding aristocrats and oligarchs, which is what they called them, of the South, they said they’re not… They don’t really believe in democracy. It’s an oligarchy-
Gary Gallagher (00:23:18) … in the South. It’s a slavery-based oligarchy, and we know which way Europe’s 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, more… 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’s meaning that the United States is a beacon of small D democracy in a Western world that seems to be turning the other way. And those soldiers, it meant, 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.
Gary Gallagher (00:24:08) 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’re doing 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 gonna get fed and clothed in the army.” But this sense of exceptionalism, exceptionalism’s 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.
Lex Fridman (00:24:40) And as a small aside terminology wise, blue is the Union or what we think of as the United States, and red is the Confederacy.
Gary Gallagher (00:24:49) Yes. On the maps, the Confederate units are red blocks and the United States units are blue blocks. That’s right.
Lex Fridman (00:24:56) And, uh…
Gary Gallagher (00:24:57) That, that is correct.
Lex Fridman (00:24:58) And the North and the South is another way we’ll refer to it just to clarify.
Gary Gallagher (00:25:03) And let me have a very brief rant on North and South. I prefer to see this as a war between two mid-19th century republics, one of which didn’t last very long and spent its whole life in the midst of a great war. There were 15 slave-holding states in 1860. Only 11 of them seceded from the United States.
Lex Fridman (00:25:23) Even though there’s 13 stars. We’ll talk about that.
Gary Gallagher (00:25:25) We’ll talk about that demented notion of things in just a minute, but only 11 leave. So there are four slave-holding states in the United States: Kentucky, and Missouri, and Maryland, and Delaware remain in the United States. So it’s not just North versus South. Those states are all part of the South. It’s the United States versus the Confederacy.
Lex Fridman (00:25:44) But see how you referred to it as the United States. So the Union is also referred to as the United States.
Gary Gallagher (00:25:50) That’s correct. Yes, yes.
Lex Fridman (00:25:52) But the Confederacy was, as you write about, a set of people who also had a sense of nationalism, pride.
Gary Gallagher (00:25:59) Well, and 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 ’cause they basically had the US Constitution here, a blank piece of paper over here,
Gary Gallagher (00:26:16) … copied most of the Constitution over here, just changed the parts that they needed to make sure slavery was protected, and you didn’t have the wrong kind of tariffs and so forth. That’s one 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 one 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.
Lex Fridman (00:26:48) So we should think of this as two republics.
Gary Gallagher (00:26:52) I argue that. That makes many people very angry.
Lex Fridman (00:26:55) I will make many people angry today
Gary Gallagher (00:26:57) They say that I am conferring legitimacy on the Confederacy that they don’t deserve, and 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. They… It’s… 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
Lex Fridman (00:27:21) We should say that you are respected, admired, loved by most people on both sides in, from a perspective sense. You’re deeply respected by historians of 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.
Gary Gallagher (00:27:52) I-
Lex Fridman (00:27:52) And 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
Gary Gallagher (00:28:07) Yes. I won’t be… One of my favorite pieces of hate mail I got was an email where this guy, I had… He was upset that I referred to the Confederacy as a slave-holding republic that was… 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 And then he signed his name and said he’d be happy to talk to me anytime I wanted to
Lex Fridman (00:28:33) Yeah. I’m sure that would be a wonderful conversation
Gary Gallagher (00:28:36) Yeah
Lex Fridman (00:28:36) But there’s also really strong senses throughout the United States of this diversity of opinion of what is the United States
Gary Gallagher (00:28:51) Of course. Yes
Lex Fridman (00:28:52) And that’s where the passion is really rooted
Gary Gallagher (00:28:56) 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. They’re all… And John Bell, who’s the Unionist, the Constitutional Union- That’s all he talked about. They just had different versions of what the Union was
Lex Fridman (00:29:18) And that’s why I love this country. I think it’s the greatest country on Earth, and it has a bunch of people that very strongly disagree with each other. Of course hopefully never again escalating 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-
Gary Gallagher (00:29:49) Yeah
Lex Fridman (00:29:50) … want to die for the Union?
Gary Gallagher (00:29:53) That is the most important, and I didn’t even ask you to ask that question. That’s the, that’s the hardest thing-
Lex Fridman (00:29:58) Let’s be honest. You paid me a lot of money to ask that question, yeah
Gary Gallagher (00:30:00) I didn’t think it was so much
Lex Fridman (00:30:03) Okay. I’m sorry. Go ahead. I won’t distract
Gary Gallagher (00:30:04) 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.” And the key to that, I’ll come back to it, is union because he would’ve said, “If we allow South Carolina to go, that means that other places could go and you could dismantle. And the only reason they’re going is because they didn’t like who was elected president.
Gary Gallagher (00:30:41) 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. And so 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, all that bloodshed meant nothing. You had to step up and save this precious republic that was 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 a citizen… These are citizen soldiers. We don’t know what that means so much now because we have a professional military establishment now.
Gary Gallagher (00:31:28) Not– I mean, even when I was younger, there was still a draft, but that’s gone now. And so we don’t understand what the concept of citizen soldier was, 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.
Lex Fridman (00:31:52) 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?
Gary Gallagher (00:32:02) 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 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.” And I think that promise continues. I mean, we’ve argued about… 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.
Gary Gallagher (00:32:47) God, the Southern Europeans are even worse than the Irish were.” The people change, the arguments stay very much the same, and 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.”
Lex Fridman (00:33:09) And like you said, both sides, both these republics claimed, for example, George Washington.
Gary Gallagher (00:33:16) Yes. They both claim… 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 ’cause 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 Con- You’re the ones who are out of step with the Constitution.”
Lex Fridman (00:33:51) What about the topic of states’ rights? At, at the very least-
Gary Gallagher (00:33:54) I love state rights. State rights… I mean, I love the way people use it with the Civil War. They associate it solely with Southern states- … of course. State 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 state rights. They had a convention where they sort of wandered over towards secession territory in the Hartford Convention. We think of it as state rights because as you lead up to the Civil War, you hear white Southerners talking about it all the time. “We need our state rights.” I always love to ask people who say that, “What are all the state rights?
Gary Gallagher (00:34:35) Give me– List the state rights that the white South is concerned.”
Gary Gallagher (00:34:38) You know, “Give me the top three. No, really, just give me the top two.” There’s only one. The state 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 state right that matters then. Northern states also resorted to state rights during this, the ramp-up to the Civil War, with what were called personal liberty laws. They tried to interpose their state power in 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 state rights is available, and both sides used it.
Lex Fridman (00:35:21) 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.
Gary Gallagher (00:35:34) Like, 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, because 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 government, the US 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. And 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.
Gary Gallagher (00:36:20) They allowed the government to impress horses and mules and enslaved labor to work on… All of these were intrusions from the central government that drove true state rights people crazy in the Confederacy. Confederates didn’t have political parties because they said the founders didn’t want them, so we won’t have them. But what they did have was a sort of nationalist, “We’re gonna let the central government do whatever it needs to do.” That’s Jefferson Davis’ wing, and Robert E. Lee’s over there, too. And the 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 they would do.
Gary Gallagher (00:37:02) He also got rid of habeas corpus just like Abraham Lincoln did in selected situations.
Lex Fridman (00:37:07) And of course, we should really emphasize that on both sides, those volunteers, on the Confederacy, there’s a very large number of people percentage-wise that volunteered to fight. And then I believe the volunteer period was one year, and then there’s all kind of funky stuff that the government started doing to trap those people into then serving and-
Gary Gallagher (00:37:30) Here’s what the Confederacy did. They… Nobody thinks the war’s gonna 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 gonna put every- make everybody liable to three-year service. And in the midst of doing that, all you guys who volunteered for one year are now in for two more years.
Gary Gallagher (00:38:01) Well, that outraged… I mean, “That’s, you’re breaking faith with us,” they said. They didn’t stop there. Later they revised it when the war kept going on and then the three years guys were gonna get out, then the Congress stepped in and said, “You’re in for the duration.” The bottom line is, the Confederacy ever gets you in uniform, you don’t get out because they keep changing the rules on you. And that was considered, national conscription was considered a fundamental abridgment of individual rights by many people. That’s something the government should never force a citizen into uniform. A citizen should volunteer their service. US government waited a year, then it did it in the spring of 1863, although it always respected original terms of enlistment.
Gary Gallagher (00:38:44) Never made it the war for the duration the way the Confederacy did.
Lex Fridman (00:38:48) Quick pause for a bathroom break if it’s okay. Quick 10-second shout-out to our sponsors. Check them out in the description. It really is the best way to support this podcast. Go to lexfridman.com/sponsors. And now, dear friends, back to my conversation with Gary Gallagher. All right, we’re back. There’s 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.

Lincoln

Lex Fridman (00:39:24) 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. 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 is McClellan, there is John Brown, a militant abolitionist. Many more figures, but let’s look at three at first. Let’s look at Lincoln, Grant, and Lee. Lincoln first.
Lex Fridman (00:40:18) 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. So 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?
Gary Gallagher (00:40:48) Almost nobody continues to go up in my estimation as I get older and older, but Lincoln is one of the people who does. And 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, and 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 is someone…
Gary Gallagher (00:41:37) 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 really focus, and he focused relentlessly on, number one, suppressing the rebellion and restoring the Union, but also getting… 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’s able to let all the other things go. He can pay attention to many things, but he never loses his… his principal focus was, “How do I maintain this great war?” And it’s an all- it’s really hard to get people to understand the scope of the Civil War.
Gary Gallagher (00:42:29) There are 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 like having more like 55 million people-
Gary Gallagher (00:42:44) … 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… During the Gulf Wars, New York Times put a picture of every United States service person who was killed, put a picture in the paper over the scope of those wars, and that is about as many people as were shot in a few hours at Antietam. It’s just very different to get students now to understand the different scale, and that’s what Lincoln’s 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… There’s never been anything in our history to prepare the United States for this.
Gary Gallagher (00:43:32) Winfield Scott captured Mexico City with an army of fewer than 15,000 during the war with Mexico. US Grant has 120,000. I mean, the whole scale is just so different that it’s hard to come to terms with it.
Gary Gallagher (00:43:45) 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’s the most famous Republican in the country. He puts Salmon P. Chase, who’s a very smart and 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 a way he… to talk in a fashion that he- … didn’t actually talk.
Gary Gallagher (00:44:31) He would’ve 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. Because eventually, all of them, except the ones with only a 20-watt bulb, figured out that Lincoln was actually probably smarter than they were and had a better grasp of things than they did and brought them around. He really brought Seward around, which is very impressive.
Lex Fridman (00:44:56) Yeah, there’s so many fascinating things about Lincoln. So 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, you know, if Lincoln didn’t exist, if certain humans in history didn’t exist, that everything could have turned out very differently.
Gary Gallagher (00:45:27) The great forces are all that matters and individuals don’t really matter notion of history I think is ridiculous. Individuals really matter. For the United States, Lincoln and Grant matter beyond calculation- … in this, in this war. And 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, I think it could have ended early in the summer of 1862 with slavery still intact. I mean, 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 gotta get rid of slavery to defeat the rebels.”
Lex Fridman (00:46:08) So, and also on the psychological side, Lincoln is a, this is a fascinating study because he carried deep depression all his life.
Gary Gallagher (00:46:16) He had black, black moods in his life, yes, he did.
Lex Fridman (00:46:20) And so for somebody that has to go through an all-encompassing war, to be able to sort of 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.
Gary Gallagher (00:46:46) If you looked at his resume and Jefferson Davis’s-
Lex Fridman (00:46:51) Right
Gary Gallagher (00:46:51) … in 1860 and said, “Okay, here, here are the two guys who are gonna be your respective commanders-in-chief. Who do you want on your team?”
Gary Gallagher (00:46:57) Lincoln had no administrative experience beyond running a little law office. He had one two-year term in the House of Representatives in terms of national government. He had no military service to speak of, a little while in the Black Hawk War as a junior officer in the Black Hawk War. 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, 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.
Gary Gallagher (00:47:42) 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. And a perfect example of this is George Brinton McClellan, whom we’ll talk about later, his young… who was general-in-chief for a while, 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. Went to McClellan’s house. The commander-in-chief goes to McClellan’s house. McClellan wasn’t there.
Gary Gallagher (00:48:27) The butler or somebody put them in a side room. McClellan came home, 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. And so Lincoln just left. He never went back to see McClellan again, didn’t pitch a fit, filed that away. Okay, McClellan’s an ass, but I think he might win the war. I mean, he had that ability to do that, to put aside that kind of behavior on the part of someone if he thought they would deliver. He just has a number of qualities, I think, that are very unusual to find in someone. And as you say, he did have depressive moments, and he– we talk about how, what bad days presidents have.
Gary Gallagher (00:49:11) Now, 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. I mean, he– it’s hard to imagine the burdens that he carried.
Lex Fridman (00:49:22) And at the right time was just a handful of words expressed something that no military could possibly do.
Gary Gallagher (00:49:30) Explain what the war was about, why it was worth fighting, what it meant, his second inaugural address. I mean, people went– when people went to hear the president give his second inaugural address on that cold day in 1865, what they wanted to hear, they finally beat 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? And what does Lincoln tell them? He tells them slavery caused it. Everybody knows that somehow that’s the truth, and we’re all implicated in it. I mean, he didn’t tell them anything that they wanted to hear that day. And it was– and it took great courage, I think, to do that at that moment, to tell an audience what they didn’t want to hear.
Gary Gallagher (00:50:16) And he did it in the most eloquent language that any president’s– that’s the greatest speech in American history, the second inaugural, in my view.
Lex Fridman (00:50:25) 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.
Gary Gallagher (00:50:54) And we’re all complicit in this because we all countenanced slavery. I mean, that’s all in that one speech. And it’s a short speech. The whole speech probably only lasted eight or nine minutes. And 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. And by that he meant saving the union, killing slavery, it all depends on them. And then he comes back and finishes with his tribute to the soldiers at the end.
Lex Fridman (00:51:25) And I have to say the Gettysburg Address.
Gary Gallagher (00:51:27) Oh, no, you can’t.
Lex Fridman (00:51:30) If I may, it’s only maybe 200 words. Four score and seven 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.
Lex Fridman (00:52:36) 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.
Gary Gallagher (00:53:31) 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. 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– and it probably took you two 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.

Grant vs Lee

Lex Fridman (00:54:19) And let’s talk about the two other figures which we’ll return to time and time again: Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee. So who was Grant? So this is a man who failed at farming, failed at business, failed at his role in the peacetime army. Then when the war came, the war revealed a genius.
Gary Gallagher (00:54:43) So he’d known a lot of failure, he’d known 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, 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, he had all these subordinates who were saying, “Well, what if General Lee does this?
Gary Gallagher (00:55:26) What if General Lee does that?” He finally said, “Why don’t we start– let’s not worry about what General Lee is gonna do and let General Lee worry about what we’re going to do?”
Gary Gallagher (00:55:35) I mean, he just had… He was unflappable under stress. He was the perfect person to end up heading the Union armies, and he and Lincoln– And Lincoln realized that, and 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 kind of slug it out. It’s really interesting to compare his record in the war and 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-
Gary Gallagher (00:56:20) … in the same period. The bloodiest general in US history by far in terms of how many of his men get 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, and Joe figured out that if you were a soldier in Robert E. Lee’s army, you had a 73% chance of becoming a casualty. 73%. Grant’s casualties get high when he runs into Robert E. Lee, just like everybody else. 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, 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.
Gary Gallagher (00:57:07) 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, and Lincoln figured that out. And the absolute proof of his stature because of this is that in the March of 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, Jorge. I mean, he is the man. And so they are 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. And then he would also be the first to get a four-star rank in the United States Army. That…
Gary Gallagher (00:57:54) There couldn’t be a better indication of his stature than that he got R- Washington’s rank. Winfield Scott had had it by brevet. Grant got the actual rank.
Lex Fridman (00:58:06) So in part, the Grant the Butcher label was from the Overland Campaign that we’ll talk about-
Gary Gallagher (00:58:11) It is from the Overland Campaign
Lex Fridman (00:58:12) … as the military decisions made there.
Gary Gallagher (00:58:14) Yep.
Lex Fridman (00:58:15) Many would argue that those are critically important for the success of the war.
Gary Gallagher (00:58:20) 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 and what Sheridan’s doing and what Nathaniel Bank… 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.
Lex Fridman (00:58:51) So who was Robert E. Lee? In April 1861, Lee was offered command of the Union Army-
Gary Gallagher (00:58:58) He was
Lex Fridman (00:58:59) … and chose Virginia instead.
Gary Gallagher (00:59:01) He did.
Lex Fridman (00:59:02) What was he actually choosing in that decision? Was he choosing home? Was he choosing honor? Was he choosing slavery? And maybe just zooming out, what do we need to understand in the early steps about Robert E. Lee? Who was the man?
Gary Gallagher (00:59:16) Well, Lee is sort of the antithesis of Grant in some ways. Lee is from an aristocratic family. Grant was from a solidly middle-class family. Lee’s from an aristocratic family at the very top of the Virginia aristocracy. The Lees are all… He has uncles who were prominent, two signed the Declaration of Independence. His father was a famous commander under George Washington. He’s– His father’s the one who said that Washington was first in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen. That’s Lee’s father, who was later a prominent Virginia politician. Lee’s idol is George Washington. He patterns himself on Washington. He differs from him in some ways, but he patterns himself on Washington.
Gary Gallagher (00:59:56) 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 leave… 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, become the head of 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, and he makes an easy transition to Confederate loyalty. I think it’s his loyalty to Virginia and what that means.
Gary Gallagher (01:00:41) That means his family, and of course that means slavery. That’s part of what that loyalty is. He’s devoted to the slave-holding South as well as to Virginia. Virginia’s a subset of that. All of that is in one bundle with Lee. It’s all… But he also had been an ardent US nationalist earlier in his career, and a very successful military officer. Winfield Scott thought he was the greatest soldier in the army, and Scott, he probably really thought, “Except for me.” But Scott is a great soldier that people don’t remember that way because he became a kind of Jabba the Hutt figure by the time of the Civil War. He’s enormous, weighs 350 pounds, has to be winched onto his horse. But he was a very smart guy and he thought very highly of Lee.
Gary Gallagher (01:01:24) Lee was a superb soldier, as he would show during the war, but he’s on the wrong side.
Lex Fridman (01:01:30) Maybe just to throw in a few more characters, I do think the folks on both sides that are of the more radical persuasion are quite interesting. Somebody you spoke about, I’m not sure where, I think it might’ve been in your lecture series, about Thaddeus Stevens.
Gary Gallagher (01:01:47) Yes, Thaddeus Stevens.
Lex Fridman (01:01:48) He’s a-
Gary Gallagher (01:01:48) Thaddeus Stevens was one of the most radical of the radical Republicans. He’s a congressman from Pennsylvania who… People think people say harsh things now in Congress; Thaddeus Stevens just eviscerated people. And he was way out… I mean, he was an ardent abolitionist and for equal rights for women in many ways and he picked up a number of causes and championed them.
Lex Fridman (01:02:11) I think in your lecture you mentioned this thing which I just love, the slime line.
Gary Gallagher (01:02:17) He had a- This is his kind of line. He’s sitting in the House of Representatives and one of his opponents- … and he’s speaking, and one of his opponents starts to come down to the floor and he says, and this is a paraphrase, “I’m gonna 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.”
Lex Fridman (01:02:38) Yeah. Beautiful.
Gary Gallagher (01:02:39) That’s a great line. Impromptu. He had a… Women used to ask for locks of hair as, from famous people, 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, took his whole wig off and said, “Madam, have them all.” And c-
Lex Fridman (01:02:57) Which is brilliant.
Gary Gallagher (01:02:57) … no it’s very good.
Lex Fridman (01:02:59) But of the radical persuasion.
Gary Gallagher (01:03:01) Oh, absolutely. Yes, he defined it. He is the character in Birth of a Nation that Stoneman, the character in Stoneman, the evil radical Republican named Stoneman, is patterned on Thaddeus Stevens.

Could the Civil War have been avoided?

Lex Fridman (01:03:14) All right. If we can, let’s talk about the buildup to the war. What were the key states on both sides that were debating? What are the ones that were certainly going to be firmly on one side or the other? And maybe what are the ones that were critical at the, at the borderline?
Gary Gallagher (01:03:33) The states that were in the forefront of the secession movement were the Deep South states, and South Carolina was kind of 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’ve had it if they wanted a quiet, rational discussion of anything.
Lex Fridman (01:03:56) Yeah.
Gary Gallagher (01:03:56) South Carolina is the first state to secede, and then is quickly followed. You can just go the tier across Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, Texas. That’s the re- It’s seven states. The Deep South states go out in that initial… But there’s a long period then, and they gather in Montgomery, Alabama, to establish a new government with Montgomery as the capital of the Confederacy.
Gary Gallagher (01:04:18) Delegates from those states do. And they set up a provisional government that’s gonna last a year and call for the first national elections in 1861. There are only seven states there, and really only six for a lot of it ’cause Texas got there late. It was the last of the first seven to secede. But the states that haven’t seceded yet are the ones with the most people. Virginia, which is the most populous, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri. Eight states have not gone out. Eight slave-holding states have not gone out. The most important one is Virginia among those that-
Gary Gallagher (01:04:51) … that have not gone out. The question is, can they find some resolution to all of this, or is it gonna get more serious, and are those states gonna go? And it came to focus, once again, on Charleston, South Carolina, and a federal installation in Charleston Harbor, Fort Sumter. Much United States property and installations had been just given over to the Confederates.
Gary Gallagher (01:05:17) And the question is, can we do it with this one as well? This is a very difficult decision to make, and it comes down to what’s gonna happen in Charleston Harbor. And in the end, I mean, Jefferson Davis believed that he couldn’t allow it to remain a federal installation ’cause it’s actually in the Confederacy from their point of view. And Lincoln, who’s not conceding the right of states to secede, they’re, they’re temporarily out of our power, but we have to maintain… He decided in the end to maintain power there, not to reinforce it, but to resupply it, needed supplies. And that’s what triggers it. Then, then the ball’s in Jefferson Davis’ court: “Okay, they’re gonna resupply it.
Gary Gallagher (01:05:56) What do we do?” And they decided we need to insist that it surrender, and if it won’t surrender, we need to fire on it. And the Confederates fired the first shots. They would’ve said, “We were forced to fire the first shots by what Lincoln did.” N- nobody wanted to be the ones who fired the first shots. But in the end, it’s the Confederates who fired the first shots. And once that is fired, the key thing, the key thing is not the firing on Sumter in the end, but that sets up the key thing, which is Lincoln’s call for volunteers to suppress the rebellion, and he is gonna ask each state to supply people. And the Upper South states, most of them have said, “We’re not gonna secede, but you can’t… But the states that are gone had the right to secede-
Gary Gallagher (01:06:40) … and you can’t do anything to make them come back.” Lincoln is seeming to make them do things to come back. And so four more states went out. Virginia went out. Arkansas went out. Tennessee went out. Then North Carolina went out. And now you have an 11-state Confederacy rather than seven. But more than that, you have Virginia. The city of Richmond has 40% of all the industrial capacity in the entire Confederacy, what became the Confederacy. Virginia is the most populous state, has the largest slave population, the largest white population. It supplies the most important military leaders. And the capital ends up in Richmond. They move from Montgomery to Richmond in acknowledgment of how important Richmond is, that this is the key state.
Gary Gallagher (01:07:26) The key states that didn’t go out were Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri. Delaware didn’t either, but who cares? The other three didn’t go out, and that really mattered because they were more populous. But 11 are gone. Four remain in the Union.
Lex Fridman (01:07:40) And to lay out some more context, going to Perplexity here, by total enslaved population on the eve of the Civil War, we have looking at the top five states, Virginia, as you said, with the most number of slaves, 490,000. Then Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, all with over 400,000 slaves.
Gary Gallagher (01:08:04) Yes. And Mississippi and South Carolina have 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 are the two wealthiest states per capita in the United States, are South Carolina and Mississippi in 1860.
Lex Fridman (01:08:23) Boy, the complicated history of this great nation of ours.
Gary Gallagher (01:08:27) It’s hard to overstate the resources. The states that sent the most men into the Confederate Army are Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia. Three of those come in this second wave of secessions. Three of them, three of the four. Only Georgia among the original ones was in those top four 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.
Lex Fridman (01:08:56) So it does feel, just to linger on it, like there was a lot on the balance here. Like there was a lot of different decisions that could have been made, even on the political side, that could have turned the tides.
Gary Gallagher (01:09:12) For example, there’s a secession convention in Virginia. It goes in… It votes twice against secession. Twice. It’s only after Sumter that they come back for another vote. I mean, it’s a Unionist vote in that convention in, in Virginia. And it’s only after Fort Sumter. And then it’s still so divided that a big chunk of Virginia decide that’s how you get West Virginia. West Virginia essentially secedes from Virginia- … in the course of the Civil War.
Lex Fridman (01:09:42) 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.
Gary Gallagher (01:09:52) It would have really changed. I mean, Virginia is the key. Virginia is the key because of the manpower, the industrial capacity, the food production, and Virginia gives you Lee, Jackson, Jeb Stuart. I mean, and the most soldiers of any state in the Confederacy. It’s just, it’s a real game changer to get Virginia. Plus, it also gives you these unbelievable ties to the revolutionary generation. Hey, it’s George’s home state. It is now in the Confederacy with his big statue on the Capitol grounds of George Washington. I mean, gives you, you get Washington, the ties to Jefferson, the ties to Madison. All of this comes in with Virginia.
Lex Fridman (01:10:32) So I think a lot of historians have said that the Civil War was inevitable. It… You’re really painting a picture here where it perhaps was not inevitable.
Gary Gallagher (01:10:41) I don’t think it’s inevitable. Things happen in a sequence. I was at an academic conference once when they were trying to decide what important dates were, and they concluded that no dates are, dates are an artificial construction. No date is more important than any other.
Gary Gallagher (01:10:57) That is so obviously preposterous. I mean, things happen in a sequence. They don’t just sort of happen. Lincoln’s elected, then South Carolina secedes, then other states secede, then… I mean, things happen as a consequence of what happened before, and you have these 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.
Lex Fridman (01:11:28) 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’s decisions that could have been made?
Gary Gallagher (01:11:36) The decision to not let Fort Sumter, I mean, that’s a big decision to make. If they had just, if Lincoln had just said, “Go ahead and take Fort Sumter,” okay, then maybe… Then 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 can’t keep giving them everything that they want if you don’t concede that they have the right to do what they did.
Lex Fridman (01:12:01) Yeah, there would be continued heated political debates, intense political debates about the expansion of slavery, but it would not cause rebellion to then escalate into a full-on hot war.
Gary Gallagher (01:12:16) 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… ‘Cause it did happen. But I think it’s very tricky to just say that it was inevitable. That’s kind of starting at the end of the story and just saying, “Let’s look at the factors that got us here. We know it was gonna happen, and these are the things that pointed this direction.”

The bloodiest war in US history

Lex Fridman (01:12:39) Can we just actually linger on this, on the nature of war? Over 700,000 people dead. How do we make sense of our capacity as, in that context, Americans? To kill sometimes literally our brothers…
Gary Gallagher (01:12:55) Yes, sometimes literally our brothers.
Lex Fridman (01:12:57) How is that even possible?
Gary Gallagher (01:12:58) Well, one thing, it tells me things are pretty important to people on both sides if you’re gonna continue for a war that long. I mean, there was a period in the literature, in the scholarly literature in the 1980s and into the 1990s where 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. Well, they lost between four and a half and five and a half percent 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.
Gary Gallagher (01:13:40) US, in World War II, three-tenths of 1% of its popula-… That seems… They lost more than 30% of their entire white military-age males in the war. It’d be the equivalent of about 18 million Americans being killed now in a war. That seems to me that they’re pretty serious about something there.
Lex Fridman (01:13:58) It means that’s one of the largest percentages of loss. That’s… If that’s a measure of dedication-
Gary Gallagher (01:14:05) 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 play that it’s… They just keep at it. They didn’t give up easily.
Lex Fridman (01:14:15) What can we say about the motivation? On the psychological side, did the members of the Confederacy hate the members of the Union?
Gary Gallagher (01:14:25) Well, that escalated on both sides during the war. As more and more loss came, they did. There was more hatred directed toward the enemy more and more. This notion that it’s they’re all brothers and not really mad at each other and… That 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 as the war went on, and there was greater loss on the home front, and as the war became more all-encompassing and really went after the entire… the civilian side of the Confederacy was not shielded from it, the bitterness increased and increased and increased.
Gary Gallagher (01:15:02) And there’s a lot of unhappiness with the war behind the lines in the Confederacy, absolutely, unhappiness with the government. There’s desertion. About 15% of Confederate soldiers deserted. About 12% of United States soldiers deserted. So there’s desertion on both sides. There’s war-weariness, but the war goes 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’re gonna pick the first one, and that’s why the war went on as long as it did.
Lex Fridman (01:15:46) But at the same time, to fast-forward, and that maybe teaches you something about the nature of war, but after the war, maybe some of the decisions that Grant made, people were able to rediscover the brotherhood.
Gary Gallagher (01:16:02) You mean at Appomattox you’re talking about-
Lex Fridman (01:16:03) Appomattox
Gary Gallagher (01:16:04) … the terms at Appomattox. Yes, the… And those were… And he didn’t just reach up in the air and say, “I’ve got some terms.” The… Lincoln very specifically… He met with Lincoln shortly before Appomattox. Sherman was there. One top naval officer was there, 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…” I mean, if it’s just a rebellion, what do you do with traitors and rebels? You hang them.
Gary Gallagher (01:16:33) You don’t bring them back. You don’t treat them as prisoners of war, which the United States did during this. You, he… 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.” Hadn’t been decided yet whether they’ll get to vote, but let them go home. Don’t imprison them. Don’t execute them. Don’t execute their leaders. That’s the decision.
Lex Fridman (01:17:02) From the perspective of the Union, what do you think about that kind of forgiveness?
Gary Gallagher (01:17:05) Well, I think that it was sort of a nod toward the direction of forgiveness, but I don’t think the real… I don’t think real forgiveness was there. It was still extremely hard feelings on both sides, and Lincoln’s assassination upped the ante on that, especially for a while in the United States. The forgiveness… Two things in terms of the aftermath of the war, two words that often come into play are reunion and reconciliation. Those are two other things that are often conflated. Reunion is literally putting the nation back together. That happened. Reconcile, true reconciliation, that’s much, much, much tougher, and that didn’t come anytime soon on the part of millions of people on both sides, I think.
Lex Fridman (01:17:51) And we’ll probably maybe talk about in multiple ways how maybe that is something that’s still going on.
Gary Gallagher (01:17:59) 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. I mean, and so it’s… There’s nothing else like it in US history, and it’s a great moment of truth, the residual aftermath and effects of which lingered for decades and are still present in some ways, I think.
Lex Fridman (01:18:27) So in 1859, most Americans were just living their life. Did they have a sense what was on the horizon?
Gary Gallagher (01:18:39) It’s what I like to call the Appomattox Syndrome, which starts at the end of the story and says, “Of course there was gonna be a war because the war was inevitable, and of course the United States was gonna win and slavery was gonna 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 their first thought was, “Boy, I hate the South.” “Those slaveholders, they’re really…” No. People got on with their quotidian lives and they got to the farm or they went to their business and they did… They weren’t… Nobody knew that they were living in the antebellum era, and that those great antebellum years were about to come to an end.
Gary Gallagher (01:19:17) They… That is something that it’s hard to get people… To just put it out of your mind that that’s all anybody is thinking about. They’re thinking, “There’s a lot of other stuff going on.”
Gary Gallagher (01:19:28) There’s a big gold rush in Colorado. More people go to Colorado than went to California for a while. There is… And you have these tremendous changes coming about, technological changes of the 1850s where you have the real expansion of railroads, the real expansion of the telegraph. There’s a shrinking of time and space that’s remarkable for people at the time. It seemed dizzying to them at the time. There are a lot of things to think about other than how much I hate Yankees if I’m in South Carolina, or I hate slaveholders if I live in New Hampshire. But periodically, there are these events that pop up that refocus on the differences between the sections. And you have the Kansas-Nebraska Act. You have Dred Scott.
Gary Gallagher (01:20:14) You have the caning of Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate. You have Uncle Tom’s Cabin earlier in the decade in 18– and what… And the impact that that had on attitudes towards slavery. Doesn’t create a bunch of abolitionists, but it creates a bunch of people who rethink their thoughts about slavery.
Lex Fridman (01:20:32) Sorry to ask the big question about history. But, you know, we’re living today, 2026, and there’s the 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 in different kinds of ways, whether it’s sparked in the Middle East or sparked in China and Taiwan, or sparked in Ukraine-Russia, or elsewhere totally surprising in the world, may be related to nuclear weapons or not. There’s a sense that everything is possible. And of course, when history is written about the 21st century, it will all be obvious.
Gary Gallagher (01:21:23) It’s always obvious in retrospect. That’s right.
Lex Fridman (01:21:25) What can we learn about… from the Civil War about how history unfolds itself, I suppose, for the modern day?
Gary Gallagher (01:21:35) Well, I think that the potential threats now are different from the potential threats in the mid-19th century. The nuclear dimension, some kind of really brutal use of pathogens. I mean, there are lots of things that could happen now that couldn’t happen then, at least not because humans were making them happen. But I mean, to me, one of the things to take away from the Civil War is really the resiliency of this republic, which I still think it’s a resilient republic. We’re living in a sort of wacky time.
Gary Gallagher (01:22:10) But I believe that the… I think that… I have a great faith in the resiliency of the nation, I really do, 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. And I’m saying, you know, I’m talking about both sides of the fence here. But it is… That, 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?
Gary Gallagher (01:22:59) And the answer is yes. In a war that brings slaughter on an unimaginable scale and brings social disruption in the former slave-holding states on an unimaginable… It just couldn’t be more profoundly disruptive if you’re a Confederate. There’s not slavery anymore, and we lost the war, and a third of our military-age white men are dead. Wow, that’s a bad four years for our team. What’s gonna happen here? The Republic emerged from that and worked it out, and I think it is… It goes back to me, the intelligence of the founding generation that put in place documents that actually allowed the Republic to deal with something like this.
Gary Gallagher (01:23:36) And 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 kind of mind-boggling that that happens.
Lex Fridman (01:23:56) Yeah, I think resilience and adaptive innovation often looks like chaos in the moment.
Gary Gallagher (01:24:05) It absolutely does. It absolutely does. But then when you really get to the end of that story, you look, and there you are, and oh, it’s okay, the nation is still intact. And the 13th Amendment is in place. Wow, we didn’t think- … that was gonna happen in 1861- when secession started. I mean, it really… One, another lesson is that you cannot control what a great military event can set loose.
Gary Gallagher (01:24:32) I mean, no, 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. And education legislation that would create the great land grant colleges and universities and it’s… The war, the war brought a lot
Lex Fridman (01:25:26) And I think most of the things that has 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.
Gary Gallagher (01:25:39) We-
Lex Fridman (01:25:39) That this kinda like extreme division, the arguments, the people basically speaking in the harshest of ways against each other, that 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.
Gary Gallagher (01:26:06) It does. And to me, the arc of US history has been, and Lincoln talked about this too, it’s 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. I mean, those guys, a lot of whom own 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.
Lex Fridman (01:26:52) I love this country. I will never stop saying how much I love this country. It’s an incredible experiment. I’m we’re this year celebrating 250th birthday. I can’t wait for the next 250 years. This is such a fascinating study of human civilization.
Gary Gallagher (01:27:12) And it is complicated. What we want now is a sort of cartoon version of what we Americans, 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.
Gary Gallagher (01:27:33) I’ve spent my whole life studying history, and maybe the main thing I’ve learned is 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. And you have to at least appreciate, 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, ’cause humanoids are involved in it. They’re complicated.
Lex Fridman (01:28:07) Yeah, the… when you look at the system as a whole. But as individual humans, we like to do the, the black and white thing where-
Gary Gallagher (01:28:13) Of course.
Lex Fridman (01:28:14) … we just see the good, everything as good and evil, and then we bicker.
Gary Gallagher (01:28:16) ‘Cause it’s easier.
Lex Fridman (01:28:17) And then we get together at Thanksgiving dinner, and we yell at each other, and then people lose their shit, and they stop talking to each other for a year, and then they make up and all this ’cause this is just how humans interact with each other. And but as a system, especially with the increasing levels of freedom, with the freedoms of speech and be able to speak out about your feelings, even when they’re intense feelings, that somehow works as a system.
Gary Gallagher (01:28:40) And it’s very messy.
Lex Fridman (01:28:42) Yeah, yeah.
Gary Gallagher (01:28:42) The more freedom, the messier it is. Really, the messier it is.
Lex Fridman (01:28:46) And your job as a historian is a difficult job, and as you said, because the more you learn, the more you come to understand, the more complicated the picture appears.
Gary Gallagher (01:28:56) Yep, and the more you learn, the more you learn that you don’t know as much as you thought you did.
Lex Fridman (01:29:02) So some humility will take you a long way.
Gary Gallagher (01:29:06) Yes, you want more of Grant than McClellan in that, on that humility score. Grant would score high on humility. McClellan, every day, every day the first thought was, “What about me?” “Who is gonna not appreciate how wonderful I am today?” thought George B. McClellan. That’s the thought that nagged at him. “Somebody might not know how great I am.” That’s an aside.
Lex Fridman (01:29:29) Reminds me of somebody. But anyway. Quick ten-second shout-out to our sponsors. Check them out in the description. It really is the best way to support this podcast. Go to lexfridman.com/sponsors. And now, dear friends, back to my conversation with Gary Gallagher.

How the Confederate Army could’ve won

Lex Fridman (01:29:47) Okay, let’s at the start, first shots fired at Fort Sumter, as you mentioned, and this thing starts brewing and escalating towards a full-on war. What are the different advantages of each side from a military perspective?
Gary Gallagher (01:30:07) 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, but if they know anything, they know United States’ victory was inevitable. Because the United States had 22 million people. The Confederacy had five and a half million white people- … and three and a half 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.
Gary Gallagher (01:30:39) Really, who’s gonna 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. And one of those advantages was it had a much lower bar to cross for success. It didn’t have to invade the United States, 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. Somebody my age can… We have the perfect example, Vietnam. The United States was not defeated militarily in Vietnam, and it didn’t matter.
Gary Gallagher (01:31:29) ‘Cause when the people said, “We’re not gonna support this war anymore,” the war’s gonna 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 as populous as, a population as large as ours has ever been subjected in 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 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. And to move a large army deep into the Confederacy is a huge logistical problem.
Gary Gallagher (01:32:16) The same thing had happened to the British both during the American Revolution and the War of 1812. They confront this… The Confederacy’s as big as all of Western Europe. That’s a problem. It’s also a problem that the Confederates are fighting, 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 three vessels available to blockade the Confederacy at the beginning of the war. The Confederate coastline’s 3,600 miles long. Probably not gonna be able to shut down a lot there.
Gary Gallagher (01:33:05) 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 to the United States that they’re gonna say, “Let them go. We never liked South Carolina anyway. Just let them go. We’re not… 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, ’cause they’ll be gone. And our territories will be free of slavery.”
Lex Fridman (01:33:38) So again, the Union is the invading force.
Gary Gallagher (01:33:41) Yes.
Lex Fridman (01:33:42) Geography comes into play, as you mentioned.
Gary Gallagher (01:33:44) Immediately, yes.
Lex Fridman (01:33:45) Vast land. And so in some sense, it’s a miracle that the war lasted as long as it did, and then there was as much motivation-
Gary Gallagher (01:33:54) Yes, that they stuck to it…
Lex Fridman (01:33:55) … because again, victory for the Confederacy was stop the war.
Gary Gallagher (01:33:59) Stop the war. Neither side has an advantage in terms of its leadership. The generals all come… You often used to read frequently Confederates had better generals than the… And, but this is the first war where West- where West Pointers are in charge. They were subalterns in Mexico. The 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 I mean, 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 are now gonna be the people in charge.
Gary Gallagher (01:34:44) Almost every army commander, almost every corps commander, which is the next level, are West Point graduates. They took the same classes from the same professors, read the same textbooks, served under either Winfield Scott or Zachary Taylor in Mexico. They bring 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 US ends up with an advantage is that over the course of the war, it found, in my view, four men who could command armies effectively: Grant, Sherman, Philip Henry Sheridan, and George H. Thomas. The Confederacy only ever found one, and that’s Lee. And they had more than one army, so that’s a problem.
Gary Gallagher (01:35:30) If you have more than one army but only one really good army commander, that puts you at a disadvantage.
Lex Fridman (01:35:35) In what ways were the two sides balanced militarily equal militarily? So the, the passion, like we mentioned, of the, of the fighting force, the soldiers, the dedication to the fighting.
Gary Gallagher (01:35:49) Both brought the same notions of how to fight a war to the table because the officer corps had been, on both sides, had been trained in, in the same way. Neither side has a real advantage in terms of technology. Both sides use the railroad. Both sides use the telegraph. The United States could have used repeating weapons but decided not to. The Confederacy didn’t have the industrial capacity to produce. So the war is fought by infantrymen, for the most part, carrying muzzle-loading single-shot muskets, rifle muskets. That’s the weapon that inflicts 85 to 90% of the casualties-
Gary Gallagher (01:36:25) … in the Civil War, and they both have exactly the same thing. And they have the same kinds of artillery pieces. The United States Navy’s much bigger, but it’s… And the Navy is important, but armies really decide the war, and the armies are… They’re organized exactly the same way. They get officers the same way. They’re very similar.
Lex Fridman (01:36:47) So what was the actual fighting like? Like you mentioned, most of it was with muskets. What was the experience of it like?
Gary Gallagher (01:36:54) It’s 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. One of the developments was the field entrenchments became very common by 1864. And both armies, if they would stop for the night, they would entrench. They’d throw up field works-
Gary Gallagher (01:37:20) … which gave the defenders a much greater power vis-a-vis the attacking force. They came to decide that it– you needed about a three-to-one advantage in numbers to have a successful attack once field entrenchments were in place. But it is… It’s a, it’s an infantryman’s war overwhelmingly, and the infantryman’s experience on both sides. The United States side was a little better supplied. Union soldiers ate a little better for the most part. They got regular issues of clothing a little more regularly than the Confederates did. Their uniforms all kinda 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 ’cause they didn’t have enough powder.
Gary Gallagher (01:38:05) They never had a problem with that. So it’s a war where each side looks like the other side in terms of what the armies actually… If we had wandered through the armies and, or watched them in battle, they would have looked the same to us.
Lex Fridman (01:38:19) But it wasn’t just about bullets. There was also dysentery and disease.
Gary Gallagher (01:38:23) Two out of every three soldiers who died, died of disease. It depends on what unit you’re in. If you’re in the Irish Brigade, God love them. You know, just point us towards something and let us indulge in self-immolation, for God’s sake. The Irish Brigade had the reverse. They had two men who died from battle wounds for every man who died from disease. But overall, it’s one man died from battle wounds and two died from disease. Overall casualties, killed, wounded, prisoners of war, about a million and a half- … casualties in the Civil War.
Lex Fridman (01:38:59) You know, there’s this idea that a big part of the American spirit is the Scots-Irish spirit, the fighting spirit. You think there’s some truth to that?
Gary Gallagher (01:39:08) Well, the songs are Irish songs that both sides sing with different words, and I mean, 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. And they made up about a quarter of all the soldiers. So they’re actually underrepresented in the United States Army. Far lower percentage of foreign-born soldiers in the Confederate Army, but there they’re a little bit overrepresented. So there are lots of foreign-born soldiers in the army. The largest group are not Irish. They’re the second largest group. The largest group are Germans on the US side. The Irish are second, and then you’d go way down the line for yet others.
Lex Fridman (01:39:53) So we talked pretty thoroughly about slavery. Can we talk about immigration? What was the view at the time of immigrants?
Gary Gallagher (01:40:03) 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. That’s basically the… Well, I mean, the-
Lex Fridman (01:40:14) Oh, America
Gary Gallagher (01:40:15) … the anti-Irish, and a lot of it is bound up with anti-Catholic sentiment. ‘Cause the Irish are changing the nature of the country. The country’s a Protestant, British country, and here come all these Irishmen. And especially in the ’40s and ’50s, the– My Gallaghers came in the late ’50s. They are changing the nature, and they take over. Look at them. They don’t know their place. They’re-
Lex Fridman (01:40:38) Right
Gary Gallagher (01:40:38) … pretty soon they’re taking over cities, and they all cheat when they vote. We know that. You can buy an Irish vote for one drink.
Lex Fridman (01:40:44) This all sounds familiar, right?
Gary Gallagher (01:40:47) The cartoons were brutal on depicting African American characters, but they also depicted the Irish as sort of simian characters, often with a jug of whiskey in one hand. I mean, it’s very… There’s profound prejudice. And prejudice against the Germans, whom they called the Dutch. That was what the soldiers would call the German regiments, Dutch regiments. And yeah, there’s a lot of ethnic prejudice.
Lex Fridman (01:41:09) So to mention, you mentioned Protestants, so both sides were primarily Protestant Christians.
Gary Gallagher (01:41:16) Overwhelmingly.
Lex Fridman (01:41:17) At that time, it was a very religious country.
Gary Gallagher (01:41:20) Yes, yes.
Lex Fridman (01:41:20) So the religious sentiment was pretty strong.
Gary Gallagher (01:41:23) Units had chaplains, and there were Catholic priests with Catholic units. Yes, a very big presence.
Lex Fridman (01:41:29) Was Christianity used to justify-
Gary Gallagher (01:41:31) Of course it was. Both sides used it, yes.
Lex Fridman (01:41:34) So it’s-
Gary Gallagher (01:41:34) I don’t mean to jump on your question, but yes, they did.
Lex Fridman (01:41:36) I mean, how was it used to justify fighting for a nation?
Gary Gallagher (01:41:42) Yeah, there’s a lot of fighting in the Bible, a lot of people killing other people in the Bi- As long as you’re doing it for the right reasons-
Gary Gallagher (01:41:48) … you can… And you could use it different ways. I mean, 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, Jeb Stuart, they were much more overtly religious than people like Grant, Sherman, Philip Sheridan. I mean, much, much more. Lee is an Episcopalian. Jackson was a Presbyterian. But they talked– I mean, their official reports, their correspondence, it’s filled with allusions to religion much more than Grant’s or Sherman’s.
Lex Fridman (01:42:35) What about African Americans in the army?
Gary Gallagher (01:42:38) African Americans made up… There were about 200,000 Black men served in what were called United States Colored Troops units, USCT.
Lex Fridman (01:42:46) It was on the Union side.
Gary Gallagher (01:42:48) On the U- Yes. Okay, 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 of… I mean, it’s just, it’s preposterous. It’s ridic- and I’m really managing my language right here. I’m not saying what I really think it is. So, so just… I’ve seen estimates of as high as 100,000 Black men in the Confederate Army.
Lex Fridman (01:43:24) Not true.
Gary Gallagher (01:43:25) Really, really, no. No. Were there Black men with the Confederate armies? Yes. There are enslaved Black men who are doing all kinds of non-military 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 are a lot of Black men around Union armies before they became soldiers as well. But there are these… 200,000 Black men join the military service during the war. They’re in the Navy and in the Army. They’d always been in the Navy. The US Navy… And they’re not segregated in the Navy in the way that they can be in the Army. They’re just in Bl- you have integrated crews-
Gary Gallagher (01:44:02) … on naval vessels, although they’re separated in some ways, but there’ve always been Black sailors in the Navy. The Army, no. That was a big, it’s a big thing to put Black men in uniform. And for a Confederate, it’s bad enough if you announce emancipation, but then you start arming Black men. That, to Confederates, is urging a widespread slave rebellion, basically.
Lex Fridman (01:44:27) Black regiments on the Union side was enraging the Confederate side.
Gary Gallagher (01:44:32) Yes. And they have white officers overwhelmingly. There are a few Black officers, but overwhelmingly the USCT units have white officers leading them.
Lex Fridman (01:44:43) But symbolically, that is a really powerful thing, right?
Gary Gallagher (01:44:45) Oh, 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 the men in uniforms carrying muskets.
Lex Fridman (01:45:01) So you as a historian, you’ve looked at every layer of this, including diaries and- … what was motivating? What was going through the minds of African Americans who were fighting for the Union side?
Gary Gallagher (01:45:15) I think what you would expect is going… I mean, they would talk about Union occasionally, but what that means to them, it’s a union without slavery. They have the most… Of all the people who can have a direct impact on what’s going on versus 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… And 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. Well, okay, 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?
Gary Gallagher (01:45:57) I thought that’s the whole point of this, when I’m protecting the right to vote by doing my citizen’s role as a soldier. And 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?
Lex Fridman (01:46:16) How many people in the Black regiments, but also, you know, folks like Frederick Douglass, saw that Black Americans and white Americans should have equal rights?
Gary Gallagher (01:46:25) Well, Douglass saw that, of course. But even within their context, their notion of equal rights is that that doesn’t mean that Black women are gonna vote, just like 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.
Lex Fridman (01:46:46) Did many people see that?
Gary Gallagher (01:46:47) 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 two things on the list. Check, check, we’ve done those. Full equal rights for Black people is not on their list. That it…
Gary Gallagher (01:47:21) And they were not willing to do the things that it would’ve taken to do that, including the white soldiers in uniforms who wanted out of the army after the Confederates surrendered and 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.”
Lex Fridman (01:47:41) I think that’s one of the lessons you learn from human history across the different places where slavery was abolished, is abolishing slavery is not the end of a journey. It’s the beginning of a journey.
Gary Gallagher (01:47:52) It’s the beginning.
Lex Fridman (01:47:53) And 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 the different people.
Gary Gallagher (01:48:09) 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, is a more frustrating process.
Lex Fridman (01:48:27) Remains, as has appeared in human history, potential fuel for the division to rise up again.
Gary Gallagher (01:48:36) Of course. And then people can exploit that. It’s, it’s waiting to be exploited, and people exploit it.
Lex Fridman (01:48:43) This is something we do as humans. We like to otherize certain groups.
Gary Gallagher (01:48:46) Good to have an enemy.
Lex Fridman (01:48:47) And the Civil War for our country is a story of this. It’s… So understanding the Civil War is in part extremely important for understanding the, the division, maybe the dormant division that’s there.
Gary Gallagher (01:49:03) Yes. And there, and even before the war, there were- There were notions about the other side that sort– for, for a lot of people in the free states looking South, they said white Southerners are because of they’re lazy, they’re violent, they, they don’t wanna talk out a problem. They’ll do what Preston Brooks did to Charles Sumner. They’ll 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. And 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. They’re… That’s what Yankees are.
Gary Gallagher (01:49:46) It doesn’t even matter whether any of that is true, of course. There was a sense 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 profoundly commonalities. They had a common language, a common religion, a common history, 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. I mean, Protestant churches divided over slavery.
Lex Fridman (01:50:19) And many of these themes continue to today.

Key battles of the Civil War

Lex Fridman (01:50:22) Let’s talk about the different theaters of the war, the Eastern Theater and the Western Theater. You mentioned the navies, the geography. How does geography come into play? What are the different parts here?
Gary Gallagher (01:50:32) There’s three main theaters of the war. The Eastern Theater is the theater that features Washington and Richmond. Plays out in Virginia, a little bit of Maryland, and a little bit of Pennsylvania. That’s– it’s where the Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac fight for the most part. That’s the Eastern Theater.
Lex Fridman (01:50:49) And that’s the theater that maybe is most glorified and mythologized.
Gary Gallagher (01:50:54) It’s by far the most famous of the theaters.
Lex Fridman (01:50:56) Famous.
Gary Gallagher (01:50:56) 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. And, and then beyond the Mississippi River is the descriptively named Trans-Mississippi River, 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 said that, say that, that the Trans– you know, it’s basically who cares about what’s going on out there.
Gary Gallagher (01:51:41) But that’s the third theater, the Trans-Mississippi, the Western Theater, and the Eastern Theater.
Lex Fridman (01:51:47) But I think you’ve argued that the Western Theater is really important for the war.
Gary Gallagher (01:51:51) Very important, and it, 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, George Thomas. Those are all in the Western Theater.
Lex Fridman (01:52:07) So at the very beginning, the first real battle at the First Manassas in July 1861, I think one interesting aspect of that, as you’ve talked about, is that people gathered for a picnic.
Gary Gallagher (01:52:21) 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.
Lex Fridman (01:52:29) So that kind of gives you a sense that people of the time, first of all, didn’t think this would– this is going to scale to the size that it did or last as long as it did, but also not understand the seriousness of the situation.
Gary Gallagher (01:52:44) 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. And there was a strong belief, and Lincoln was part of this at the beginning, that there’s probably gonna be one 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. I mean, it’s ridiculous. They’re not thinking about what this war could easily be. Take years, take hundreds of thousands of men maybe, not one battle.
Lex Fridman (01:53:22) When did it, the dark cloud, the reality of the war come in?
Gary Gallagher (01:53:28) Well, First Bull Run and Star or Manassas, each side, many battles have two names, one that the United States soldiers used and one… And 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… Sharpsburg is what Confederates called it. Anyway, 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, and so it’s gonna take more men.
Gary Gallagher (01:54:09) The summer of ’61 was spent, hundreds of thousands of men went into uniform in the summer of ’61. The whole supply situation became more evidently imperative, but not much happened for the rest of the war. 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… The real fighting begins in the spring of ’62, and what really brought home in a way that no one had imagined what could be in store was one battle in the East and one battle in the West. The one in the West is Shiloh, which happened in early April. US Grant on the United States side and General Albert Sidney Johnston on the Confederate side.
Gary Gallagher (01:54:51) But at Shiloh in two days, there were upwards of 25,000 casualties, and that’s more battle casualties than US forces had suffered in every war combined down to that point happened in two 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 gonna be on a totally different scale, and it was gonna involve sacrifices and allocation of resources that no one had imagined before.
Lex Fridman (01:55:30) Since you mentioned Missouri, you’ve talked about how that was the most brutal guerrilla warfare of the conflict. And maybe can you speak to what do you mean by guerrilla warfare? What kind of war was that? And then contrast with the structure, the dynamics of battles elsewhere in the war.
Gary Gallagher (01:55:48) Yes. Guerrilla war is more of what I think most Americans can sort of imagine what guerrilla war is. It involves small, much, much smaller numbers of actors, obviously, 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, hanging some people. There are a few semi-large scale ones.
Gary Gallagher (01:56:28) There’s a Confederate guerrilla named Quantrill 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. That is going on in the… There’s a relationship in many places between elevation and guerrilla activity. The more mountainous or hilly, the more likely there’ll be guerrillas operating. They operate in the mountains, East Tennessee, western North Carolina, southwestern Virginia, central… There’s even some activity in parts of Texas, but Missouri and Kentucky have the worst guerrilla warfare. It’s present through the whole war, probably involves maybe 50,000 men out of the 3 million who were in action during the war, and was very nasty, no rules.
Gary Gallagher (01:57:15) 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, who’s not a civilian. How do you deal with this kind of situation and that kind of situation?”
Lex Fridman (01:57:34) 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, it was–
Gary Gallagher (01:57:42) 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 who are led by professional soldiers and who understand that there are limits to what you do in a war, and all the 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. You just don’t… I mean, there’s an argument about whether it’s a total war or not. It all depends on how you define total war.
Lex Fridman (01:58:14) As you’ve mentioned, in terms of how encompassing it was, as total a war as it gets because the entirety of the society was involved in it.
Gary Gallagher (01:58:23) 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… If you’re the farmer who experiences an army coming by and they take or kill all your livestock and destroy your crops, that’s pretty much like a total war, even if they don’t kill you.
Lex Fridman (01:58:53) So the war escalates.
Gary Gallagher (01:58:55) Yes, the war does escalate. ’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. And the armies are gonna be much bigger. The Army of the Potomac’s more than 100,000 men. There’s never been an army like that in US history, nothing like that.
Lex Fridman (01:59:15) 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, you know, in the summer, in the spring and the summer of ’62.
Gary Gallagher (01:59:32) There’s so many themes in soldier letters, and it’s an incredible gift to people such as myself who study this, is that almost, that a very large majority of the men on both sides were literate. And so we have this mass of testimony. And they sent millions of letters from the armies home and back to the armies on both sides. So we have this trove of first-hand evidence and diaries too, many, many diaries. But so you can see in real time how attitudes are changing, hardening. You can see the hardening process in soldiers who, they don’t have any idea what being a soldier is, then they do, and they don’t like lots of things about it. They don’t…
Gary Gallagher (02:00:17) They talk a lot about food, talk a lot about clothing, talk a lot about officers they don’t like. They don’t talk… what one thing, it’s really fascinating, the thing they don’t try to do is explain to people behind the lines exactly what it’s like to be in a battle because they understand the people back home won’t understand what they’re talking about. And so they’ll say things like, “It was awful,” and, “Words just can’t convey what it was,” and then maybe tell more about their individual experience. But 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.
Lex Fridman (02:00:56) 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?
Gary Gallagher (02:01:05) George B. McClellan, whom I’ve already referred to dismissively a couple of times… He was-
Gary Gallagher (02:01:12) … he was in charge of the Army of the Potomac by this point. He’d been general in chief for a brief time and commanding the Army of the Potomac. And he finally approached Richmond. He got within, literally within five miles of Richmond. He was opposing an officer named Joseph E. Johnston, who just, his 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 wanna go anywhere, and Johnston only wanted to retreat. Anyway, they finally ended up at Richmond. Johnston got wounded, got hit by a shell fragment outside Richmond in the Battle of Seven Pines, and he’s replaced by Robert E. Lee.
Gary Gallagher (02:01:52) And 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 just exactly the way-
Gary Gallagher (02:02:02) … that McClellan would. He ends up fighting Lee, and in the Seven Days’ Battles, McClellan is pushed away from Richmond. He shouldn’t have been, but he was. That was considered a great victory. Lee’s reputation goes up after that. Then Lee follows that up with the campaign of Second Bull Run, which reorients the war from Richmond to Manassas, the old First Manassas battlefield in northern Virginia. Stonewall Jackson plays a key role in it. He wins the Battle of Second Bull Run in late August 1862, and then invades the loyal states for the first time. He crosses into Maryland in early September with an army that is broken down in terms of supply. He has tremendous straggling problems and desertion problems, Lee did, in … He moved across the army with about 50,000 men.
Gary Gallagher (02:02:55) When they finally came to battle at Antietam, which is in western Maryland, he only had about 35,000 soldiers on the field. McClellan had about 80,000 on the other side. And 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.
Gary Gallagher (02:03:18) And still McClellan didn’t move quickly. I won’t bash McClellan. They fight. The bloodiest single day in US history is Antietam, the battle of 23,000 casualties in one day there. Very close thing. Lee hangs on by just the narrowest margin, sits on the battlefield for another whole day, which he shouldn’t have done. He was being way too bold there, and then retreated, got back across the Potomac River. Confederates looked at this whole thing as a drama in three acts: save Richmond, reorient the war to northern Virginia, cross into the United States—and they saw it as a success. Richmond’s no longer threatened.
Gary Gallagher (02:03:55) Lee’s reputation has gone way up. McClellan has frustrated Lincoln immeasurably, and as a result, Lincoln removes McClellan from command. He waits till the day after the elections in November ’cause McClellan’s popular among Democrats, and Lincoln is an adept politician. He fires him the day after the elections and replaces him with a guy named Ambrose Burnside.
Lex Fridman (02:04:18) So what can you say about what makes a great general and what makes a poor general in all of this?
Gary Gallagher (02:04:23) Well, McClellan is 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, when the moment came, he couldn’t risk things. He was risk-averse. He had a chance to capture Richmond against Lee. He should have, and he didn’t. He withdrew. He had a chance … 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.
Gary Gallagher (02:05:11) They never fired their muskets at Antietam. If you’re in Lee’s army, you’re gonna 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’ve called in the mid-19th century the moral courage to risk everything. Grant had it. Lee had it. McClellan didn’t have it.
Lex Fridman (02:05:38) One of the components of a great general is to, the willingness to risk it all, obviously with, with good advice, with intelligence, but-
Gary Gallagher (02:05:47) Which he had-
Lex Fridman (02:05:47) … risk failure.
Gary Gallagher (02:05:49) 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, this is in late June and early July ’62, convinced both Congress and Lincoln that slavery was gonna have to be put on the table. The war’s gonna be moral and con- McClellan could’ve won the war with slavery intact.
Gary Gallagher (02:06:14) He didn’t, so Congress passed the Second Confiscation Act in late July, which I mentioned earlier, which strikes at slavery. And then Lincoln decided, he told his cabinet toward the end of July that he was gonna issue a proclamation of emancipation, and he was persuaded that he couldn’t just do it then 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 proclamation. The key battle here isn’t Antietam. The key battle is the Seven Days and McClellan’s defeat that persuades Lincoln to do this. Antietam gives him the occasion to do it, and he issued his preliminary proclamation five days after the battle on September 22nd, 1862.
Lex Fridman (02:06:59) Can you elaborate why it became obvious that slavery has to be on the table as, as the motivation, as the driving motivation-
Gary Gallagher (02:07:07) Yes-
Lex Fridman (02:07:07) … for the war at that time?
Gary Gallagher (02:07:08) Because people believed the … And they were right. The war was almost over at the end of May 1862. It had been a catastrophe for the Confederacy in the Western Theater. They had lost New Orleans. New Orleans was surrender- the biggest city in the Confederacy by far, 160,000 people, four times bigger than the next biggest con- the most important port. 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 the mountainous East Tennessee, was basically not a Confederate state anymore by May 1862.
Gary Gallagher (02:07:56) There was a Union army of 100,000 in northern Mississippi by the end of May. Catastrophic. And George B. McClellan’s army was within five miles of the national capital in Richmond. I don’t think the Confederacy could have absorbed the loss of Richmond at that point. I think it would’ve been over, and emancipation was not on the table yet in an official way. The fact that Richmond didn’t fall convinced people in the North that the war was gonna have to last a lot longer. The Confederates were gonna be harder to beat, convinced Europe of the same thing. By Europe, I mean France and England. That’s what mattered. And so they decided that they were gonna have to take more extreme measures, and then the key, more extreme measure is strike at slavery. Strike at it as a war measure directly.
Lex Fridman (02:08:47) And as a war measure, it what? Attacks at the economic infrastructure of the Confederacy.
Gary Gallagher (02:08:54) It attacks the economic infrastructure that enables the Confederacy to maintain the largest possible army in the war.
Lex Fridman (02:09:01) So this is not about the ethics, the morality of slavery. It’s the-
Gary Gallagher (02:09:06) It is for the abolitionists who see it, and Frederick Douglass realized that this is good. The abolitionists realized early on, even in 1861, some of them, Charles Sumner, for example, saw the Union defeat at First Bull Run. “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’ve been at Richmond in 1862.
Lex Fridman (02:09:40) But we should say, and correct me if I’m wrong, that only a tiny minority of Americans were abolitionists at that time.
Gary Gallagher (02:09:49) We’ll never know exactly. I would say if you… I think if you guessed 3% were r- I mean, really abolitionists, destroy it now, destroy it completely, 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 about the ballpark.
Lex Fridman (02:10:08) So of course, now we venerate those folks, and we mythologize them, and so they become bigger in our minds. But it sh- we should remember that they’re a tiny percentage.
Gary Gallagher (02:10:21) They’re a tiny percentage, and there are other factors that are 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. The… in fact, most of them aren’t. That’s not what they are. We wish they were, but they’re not. And 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, so he has to… I mean, and the Constitution protects slavery. In Kentucky and Missouri and Maryland and Delaware. They’re still in the nation. The Constitution still applies. Congress, by the time, by the end of June, had already gotten rid of slavery in the only two places where it could.
Gary Gallagher (02:11:04) And that is in the federal territories and the District of Columbia. No compensation in the territories, but there were hardly any enslaved people there, and there was some compensation in the District of Columbia.
Lex Fridman (02:11:17) You said that Lincoln hates slavery. Can we just take that tangent and from a perspective of some, there’s a, there’s a hypocrisy there in pushing for a policy of colonization.
Gary Gallagher (02:11:32) Colonization. Yes, colonization. In the summer of 1862, Lincoln met with a group of Black leaders and tried to convince them to support colonization, which colonization meant if you freed enslaved people, then they would go somewhere else. They’d go out of the United States. It’s why Liberia exists. And Lincoln, that is probably the least attractive element of his total thinking on… 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.”
Lex Fridman (02:12:08) Do, do we know he believed that, or is this a pragmatic politician understanding the lay of the land?
Gary Gallagher (02:12:14) 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 that he probably didn’t ever see, wasn’t ever around white people who he could see accepting Black people as fully equal. That’s- … I do believe that.
Lex Fridman (02:12:35) And still, it is a country that where the words “All men are created equal” is on the page.
Gary Gallagher (02:12:40) They’re right there on the page, waiting for that to be made good on. Yes, that’s correct. Well, it’s true. And Lincoln cha- I mean, Lincoln also was capable of growth.
Lex Fridman (02:12:54) Well, he seemed to have evolved quite a lot in the years of the war.
Gary Gallagher (02:13:01) He did. No, he did. He did.
Lex Fridman (02:13:03) And it’s very, very possible were he not assassinated, he would’ve arrived at a very different worldview.
Gary Gallagher (02:13:10) We’ll never know, but we do know that he was a lot smarter and a lot more adaptable and a lot more politically adept than Andrew Johnson, and so it certainly would’ve looked different. Well, it’s true.
Lex Fridman (02:13:22) No, I just-

Best and Worst Presidents

Gary Gallagher (02:13:23) Yes, it is true.
Lex Fridman (02:13:23) … I think I vaguely remember you saying somewhere that Andrew Johnson is the second worst president in America’s history.
Gary Gallagher (02:13:32) Yeah, he’s right. He has… the glory of being above James Buchanan. I said that a few years ago, yes.
Lex Fridman (02:13:37) I think you said something about Buchanan is… There’s like a basement, there’s like a basement below basement. I think-
Gary Gallagher (02:13:44) Sub-basement. He’s in the sub-basement.
Lex Fridman (02:13:45) … He’s in the sub-basement. And this, this I put that in the category of the slime- … poetic commentary.
Gary Gallagher (02:13:51) He’s in a little corner of the sub-basement all by himself with one candle.
Lex Fridman (02:13:55) So can we take that tiny tangent of why they were terrible pr- tangent on a tangent, why was Andrew Johnson such a terrible president, and Buchanan as well?
Gary Gallagher (02:14:03) I think he 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 slavehold. He hates… His slaveholders were part of his enemies when he was growing up, then he embraced them after the war. He was… 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 gonna think. And he just was not the right be- person to be in place.
Lex Fridman (02:14:38) Well, why is Buchanan the worst president- … in America’s history?
Gary Gallagher (02:14:41) 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. And then, oh, I ended up as president in 1856 because there’s a… The person I’m running against is from a party, this is the first time they’re running a candidate. 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, he’s just horrible.
Lex Fridman (02:15:14) I think from that I get a sense that what you admire in a leader and a president is a kind of backbone-
Gary Gallagher (02:15:20) Yes.
Lex Fridman (02:15:21) … to be able to, again, take risks and to stand behind political savvy, yes, but also a backbone behind that savvy.
Gary Gallagher (02:15:29) 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.
Lex Fridman (02:15:38) So some kind of balance of a backbone behind principles and malleability based on the information, knowledge, and wisdom that you gain-
Gary Gallagher (02:15:48) Yes.
Lex Fridman (02:15:48) … versus for convenience or out of fear.
Gary Gallagher (02:15:51) There’s an apocryphal story about Lincoln that I think gets at his willingness to row against the tide if he needed to. He’s… They’re discussing something in a cabinet meeting, and he says, “Well, let’s vote. Let me get your sense.” And they went around the table, and every cabinet member voted no. And Lincoln said, “Well, that’s six nos and one yes. Mine, the ayes have it.” I mean, he’s… So he listened to them, and in that case, he’s willing to do something that’s unpopular and knows that he’s gonna get… But he’ll do it because… And that’s a quality not everybody has either.
Lex Fridman (02:16:24) Who’s the greatest president in the history of the United-
Gary Gallagher (02:16:26) In my view?
Lex Fridman (02:16:26) Yeah.
Gary Gallagher (02:16:27) In my view, it’s neck and neck with 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.
Lex Fridman (02:16:39) Just giving away power.
Gary Gallagher (02:16:40) 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.” And then he stepped down. He would’ve been president for life if he wanted to be. He did two terms. That’s enough. Let somebody else do it. Who does that?
Gary Gallagher (02:17:08) But he embodies the notion of what… This is 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 with, because the point is, he’d done what republic… small R republican virtue dictated, and then he went back. And that image was invoked over and over and over again. The small R repub- This has nothing to do with the Republican Party. Small R republican virtue of disinterested service to your republic. It’s… And Washington embodied that. He’s crucial. What’s always been fascinating to me, Lex, is you have this guy, he’s surrounded by this freakishly talented group of people in this little nation.
Gary Gallagher (02:18:00) 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.
Gary Gallagher (02:18:14) It’s Washington. He’s the guy. We’re smarter. He’s… 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 gonna do, and Sherman couldn’t do that. Grant liberated Sherman to become a great general because he had Grant over him taking responsibility.
Gary Gallagher (02:18:58) It’s really fascinating. And Washington, whatever faults he had, he 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. It’s a precedent. What did Washington do? Well, he gave up his uniform, and then he gave up the presidency.
Lex Fridman (02:19:19) Yeah, just from studying history, understanding how difficult it is to give away power in the way that Washington did, I have to put him as the number one.
Gary Gallagher (02:19:27) Yeah, because without him, the rest doesn’t happen. I mean, 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’s gonna be president, who else would they agree could be trusted? There’s Washington, and then there’s everybody else.
Lex Fridman (02:19:47) And I think America’s a truly positive force in human history. So the fact that whatever ideas that were created at that time, and that Washington was the foundation of that is a great gift to humanity.
Gary Gallagher (02:20:02) Lucky to have him, lucky to have Lincoln. We’ve been lucky in our leaders, Indy. We’re lucky to have FDR in World War II. I mean, we’ve been lucky to have- … people at moments of real crisis.
Lex Fridman (02:20:12) But we need the basement, too. We need, we need the full variety.
Gary Gallagher (02:20:17) Well, we’ve got them. And you never know when we might need a new sub-basement. That’s… So it’s just, it’s complicated and an ongoing story.
Lex Fridman (02:20:25) 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. I wanted to mention to you just as a plug but also as a big thank you that I don’t know how many hours, it must be maybe over 50 hours I’ve enjoyed listening to your Great Courses. So you have two on the American Civil War and on Robert E. Lee. And so I just wanted to mention this thing that I’ve been using. It’s called Plaud. So what I do is I run along the river, and then I’ll use this Plaud thing where you just press the button, and then you leave a note, like what I’m saying now is being recorded. And then it transcribed. Those notes are then transferred.
Gary Gallagher (02:21:17) God, technology. Geez.
Lex Fridman (02:21:19) Yeah, this thing is great. So it’s great for just… It’s been running this whole time, too, so it’s transcribing automatically. It’s using AI to transcribe-
Gary Gallagher (02:21:25) Oh, so it’s doing every word, everything that we say?
Lex Fridman (02:21:27) Yeah. You know, transcribing it into text. And then it can summarize it for you, and then I organize and study the notes afterwards. This thing is great. Highly recommend it. It’s called Plaud.
Gary Gallagher (02:21:38) Plaud.
Lex Fridman (02:21:39) Plaud. It’s a clip.
Gary Gallagher (02:21:41) I used to run around Town Lake or what was, I guess it’s Lady Bird Johnson Lake now. Is that what they call it? We used to run six miles a day at noon for years when I worked at the LBJ Library. We had a little group of us who went.
Lex Fridman (02:21:55) Just run?
Gary Gallagher (02:21:56) Just ran. We’d do it in… We would do six miles in 38 minutes.
Lex Fridman (02:22:02) It’s actually a really hard problem to solve, of how to not take memory. I’m just really happy this exists. Okay. ‘Cause 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 you just read?
Gary Gallagher (02:22:22) All the time on my w- I walk… I don’t run anymore, but I walk six or seven miles a day, and I listen to audio, to Audible all the time. That’s what I do. I love Audible.
Lex Fridman (02:22:34) Well, just out of curiosity, just take that tangent. Do you listen to, like, history books? Like what… Or do you wanna escape?
Gary Gallagher (02:22:41) I listen to a mixture. I listen to some history books, but I also listen to some mysteries and some-
Lex Fridman (02:22:49) So fiction is also-
Gary Gallagher (02:22:50) Oh, fiction, oh yeah. 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.
Lex Fridman (02:22:58) Mm-hmm. So the classics also?
Gary Gallagher (02:23:00) 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.
Lex Fridman (02:23:08) We’re making a statement today. I like a person who’s not, not always, but I like short books.
Gary Gallagher (02:23:15) 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.
Lex Fridman (02:23:23) Yeah, can you… I’m sorry to be taking so many tangents ’cause you’ve written so many excellent books. How much of it is editing? Like how– or what does it take to write a good history book? What’s the process?
Gary Gallagher (02:23:34) Well, for me, it’s having either a question that you wanna answer or having some strain in the literature that you think is wrong, and you need to… For me, the Union War was trying to rescue something that I thought people just don’t understand anymore, is what union meant to that generation. It makes more sense… A war fought to end slavery makes sense to us now. That’s, of course, it’s a monstrous institution, fight a war, but that’s not what it was about for most of the people. And to get at what it was about is a harder pull, and explaining what union then meant to an era where it doesn’t mean anything. I mean, union as they understood it doesn’t– it’s not in our vocabulary anymore. It has to do with labor relations now.
Gary Gallagher (02:24:21) But to say, “What is– but what does the concept of union mean?” Get crickets.
Lex Fridman (02:24:27) Is it basically a strong sense of nation? So, like, what… Can we just kinda pull that apart? So there’s different states, and uh, Americans have always had a sense of, like, “I’m from this state” pride-
Gary Gallagher (02:24:44) Absolutely.
Lex Fridman (02:24:45) … being from the state.
Gary Gallagher (02:24:45) You have different loyalties. You have a state pride and a, and maybe even a regional pride. I think… I wrote a little book where I talked about Robert E. Lee in that regard as part of it, where he has a sense of loyalty to the nation, to the state, to the slaveholding South, and so forth. But union, I mean, it’s composed of individual states which engender loyalties among the people who live in them, but the parts make a greater whole, and that’s what the union is, and you have to have the whole- To get all the benefits.
Gary Gallagher (02:25:19) Because … And that is what people thought then, and they tied it to the revolution, of course, and tied it to earlier sacrifice, and tie- They had an eye on what’s going on in Europe. I mean, the Western world was their world. They didn’t care that much about the rest of the world. But the Western world, what’s going on there, and I think they believed things were going the wrong way in much of Europe, that the, all the revolutionary fervor of the 1840s had seemed to run into a cliff of oligarchy and aristocracy and monarchy, and they saw the US as a bulwark against that for small D democracy.
Lex Fridman (02:26:01) I think having a faith in nation is a beautiful thing. It’s a narrative that unites a people. And I think that in itself has power. It’s not … 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 you together believe in a thing is remarkable. And so that belief in itself is really powerful.
Gary Gallagher (02:26:33) That clearly was there among many, many, many, many. Not everybody, of course, but it was widespread. And Lincoln articulated it- … perfectly, and he did it again and again, talking about give the … You wanna give a person a chance to rise, a person… And talking about the last best hope of Earth, and talking… I mean, he got it, and he distilled it, and he conveyed it. And 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.
Lex Fridman (02:27:08) Quick ten-second thank you to our sponsors. Check them out in the description. It really is the best way to support this podcast. Go to lexfridman.com/sponsors. And now, dear friends, back to the conversation.

Robert E. Lee

Lex Fridman (02:27:23) All right. So we were talking about-
Gary Gallagher (02:27:25) Where are we?
Lex Fridman (02:27:26) … Antietam.
Gary Gallagher (02:27:26) Okay.
Lex Fridman (02:27:27) And how that was the moment when the Union realized-
Gary Gallagher (02:27:32) Preliminary Proclamation…
Lex Fridman (02:27:34) … Preliminary Proclamation, where it’s like, okay, slavery has to be a thing as a central part- … of the Civil War. And so where does that take us? Also very bloody battle. The generals, McClellan, the end of the McClellan chapter, and that takes us to Fredericksburg. So what happened at Fredericksburg?
Gary Gallagher (02:27:53) Fredericksburg was a … It’s 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 his whiskers that came down and came up and made, and- … it wasn’t a beard, and 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 became … He’s a politician after the war, so he went into the right field, but he was- His idea at Fredericksburg-
Gary Gallagher (02:28:36) … was to, in the end, it wasn’t his original plan, but he ended up launching frontal assaults one brigade at a time against very strongly entrenched Confederates, and it was a butchery for … And 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 gonna 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 he removed him from command.
Gary Gallagher (02:29:23) So now he has another commander in the Army of the Potomac. So 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.
Lex Fridman (02:29:40) So this is where the famous words of Robert E. Lee were … He was watching the slaughter. He said that “It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.” What did he mean by that?
Gary Gallagher (02:29:53) He was getting… I mean, he was watching his soldiers butcher Union soldiers and, I guess, kind of enjoying it. He’s in a really strong position with really guard 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 and watching it. And he, unlike McClellan, was willing to risk, obviously, piling up casualties in every battle. Didn’t have that many at Fredericksburg. There were about 12 and a half thousand US casualties at Fredericksburg and about 5,500 Confederate casualties because they were so well-protected in their defensive lines.
Lex Fridman (02:30:43) 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?
Gary Gallagher (02:31:04) This is often described as Lee’s most successful battle. It’s him against Joseph Hooker. It’s the last battle that Lee and Jackson fought as a team, Lee and Stonewall Jackson, with Stonewall Jackson as his principal subordinate. Hooker had replaced Burnside. Hooker had maneuvered to get rid of Burnside. He wanted to be in commander of the army. He had made a statement that he said what the nation needed was a dictator to make sure it won. And Lincoln, 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.
Gary Gallagher (02:31:41) You’re talking about all the things you’re gonna do.” And he said that, “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,” he’s saying, and he did. Hooker made a lot of blustery talk. He got a … He had a great start. He built the army into what he called the greatest army on the planet, about 135,000 men, beautifully supplied, reorganized the medical service in it. He did everything that you should do to get an army in shape, and then he started a campaign. His plan, Lee was still at Fredericksburg. He was gonna get around Lee’s left flank, come in behind him, force Lee to either retreat to Richmond or fight him on unfavorable ground.
Gary Gallagher (02:32:29) Everything went well with Hooker. He got going in late April until the moment of truth came. The moment of truth came on May 1st, 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. And as soon as the fighting started, McClellan lost his nerve-
Gary Gallagher (02:32:55) … pulled into a defensive position. And the upshot was after Lee and Jackson carried off a very successful flank attack, although it left Mc- Hooker still in a very strong position, Hooker in the end retreated, and 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. And when the moment of truth came, Joseph Hooker just lost his nerve. I mean, I really do believe that. I had fun working on this book. I wrote a … 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 perhaps to … There’s one of the maps.
Lex Fridman (02:33:38) So there are different, there’s different positions, the different troops’ positions. There’s Hooker.
Gary Gallagher (02:33:43) Yes. That is the … The battle played out on May 1st, 2nd, and 3rd. There’s the opening of the campaign. See the Rappahannock River, 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.
Gary Gallagher (02:34:08) He’d have Hooker in his rear and the anvil of other Union troops at Fredericksburg, and he thought that that would force Lee to retreat toward Richmond and that he could then harass him. They get around, they 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 till the very end of April what’s going on, and 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. And they meet on May the 1st. The fighting starts on May the 1st. Everybody’s upbeat in the Army of the Potomac. They’ve gotten around Lee’s flank. They know they’re behind him.
Gary Gallagher (02:34:54) Everything seems to go very well. Hooker said, “This is it. We’ve done it. We’ve done exactly what I wanted to do.” And then the fighting starts the next day on May 1st. They march toward that place called Zoan Church. You can see there, it’s just a little bit east of Chancellorsville. And the fighting, they collide about 11:00 in the morning. 2:00 that afternoon, Hooker orders a retreat. Everybody retreats back into this wilderness. It’s a kind of cut-over, woodsy area that it has very few roads, and he just hunkers down around Chancellorsville, hands 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.
Gary Gallagher (02:35:40) They come, they 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, they 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, it ends up, the day ends up with Lee actually in worse shape than he was before. He’s got two 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, carried from the field. He’d die a few days later. And Hooker still, although Hooker is in between these two parts of Lee’s army, he’s in an ideal position.
Gary Gallagher (02:36:26) He’s still just thinking about the defense even. Where on the morning of May 3rd, the two 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 the 3rd where Hooker, who’s been stunned by an artillery round that hit a pillar he was leaning against at Chancellorsville-
Gary Gallagher (02:36:48) … he had a concussion. He was vomiting. He retreated to the rear. And 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. And there was this amazing moment when this spontaneous outpouring of emotion on the part of the Confederates, that’s the moment when Lee and his men finished this period of bonding this year that was unmatched in the Civil War. See, there’s no way Lee should’ve won this battle.
Gary Gallagher (02:37:19) There’s one more day of action a little farther to the, to the east. But in the end, Hooker retreats. He never should’ve retreated. He was in an impregnable position, but he did retreat. And Lincoln was absolutely beside himself after this. He just couldn’t … Everybody knew what the numbers were. The newspapers had talked about it-
Gary Gallagher (02:37:37) … that Lee had only half as many men as Hooker, and once again, the Army of the Potomac, the largest and most important army of the Republic, has been defeated by this smaller army. It, Lee’s sort of legend in the North grew and in the South. He became, by this point, he and his army were the most important national institution in the Confederacy. People looked to them to see whether indep- 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 cemented that position for Lee, this victory at Chancellorsville did, 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.
Lex Fridman (02:38:22) So this, in some sense, created the legend of Robert E. Lee.
Gary Gallagher (02:38:25) It certainly helped solidi- Yes, it did. It went a long way toward doing it. A long way.
Lex Fridman (02:38:31) So you write about, you know, the difference between sort of reality and memory. How does the North remember this battle, and how does the South remember this battle?
Gary Gallagher (02:38:43) It’s really fascinating. The North remembers this battle by not remembering it very much.
Lex Fridman (02:38:47) Yeah, ignoring it.
Gary Gallagher (02:38:47) They sort of airbrush it out of their memory of the war. The Confederates, in the iconography of the Lost Cause, this … Lee and Jackson had their last meeting ever here just before the fighting on May 2nd got going, and there was a famous painting of that done by an artist named Julio that was then reprinted as a lithograph that hung in innumerable homes and offices and courthouses in the South. It’s Lee and Jackson at high tide, kind of. Gettysburg hasn’t happened, never mind Appomattox. These are the two 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 wanna talk about Joseph Hooker that much. They had … They’d rather talk about other things.
Lex Fridman (02:39:38) Yeah, it’s probably one of the most humiliating battles of the war from the Union side.
Gary Gallagher (02:39:41) I think it’s really just amazing that Hooker lost this. And it shows the complete dominance of one personality over another personality, in my view.
Lex Fridman (02:39:54) So Stonewall Jackson was shot, killed.
Gary Gallagher (02:39:56) Shot by his own men, out trying to reconnoiter and keep the battle going and exploit his successes, carried back to the rear, and he died on May 10th, died eight days later.
Lex Fridman (02:40:08) So what impact did that have, Stonewall Jackson’s death?
Gary Gallagher (02:40:13) Well, that had a hu- That, there was unbelievable mourning across the Confederacy about that, and even since, really interesting, even some positive comments in the North about how he’d been a sor- He was misguided, but a very religious guy and all of this stuff, but they’re quietly very, “That’s really good news for the United States that Stonewall Jackson is dead, and really bad news for the Confederacy.”
Lex Fridman (02:40:37) Outside the myth, did it actually have a practical impact on the war?
Gary Gallagher (02:40:43) 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 … He was a very good soldier at what he did, and Lee used him very well, and they were a good partnership, but I don’t see how he would’ve changed the larger contours of the war. I don’t.
Lex Fridman (02:40:59) If we zoom out and look at Robert E. Lee, somebody you’ve written about quite a bit, 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?
Gary Gallagher (02:41:12) 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 didn’t. I mean, 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 gonna have all the advantages. We need to try to disrupt them and look for openings.”
Gary Gallagher (02:41:39) What this campaign showed was his audacity. He divided his army three 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, 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 is a culture of caution, of not taking risks, of not doing anything until everything is just right.
Gary Gallagher (02:42:13) Any adult knows everything is never just right, so if you’re waiting for that, you’ll never do anything. The two cultures are absolutely antithetical to one another, and in the end, it shows Lee and how what he had accomplished, he had created an army that was willing to absorb casualties because it won all the time.
Gary Gallagher (02:42:35) And they realized that that was, they believed, making it more likely that their whole war effort would be successful. There are only a few times during the war where you get a scene like you got on May 3rd, where this whole army sees the old man ride into their midst, basically, and just has this … I think they decided at that point, the soldiers, that he was always gonna win, and Lee looked at them and thought, “They can do whatever I ask them to do.” I think if you wanna understand Gettysburg, if you wanna understand Pickett’s Charge, you need to look back to May 3rd at Chancellorsville, when Lee just decided that his infantry could do anything he wanted them to do.
Lex Fridman (02:43:11) But also from the infantry perspective, they believed in the-
Gary Gallagher (02:43:14) You asked me earlier about what did the soldiers’ letters say. The letters from Lee’s army, they absolutely didn’t even contemplate losing to the Army of the Potomac. I mean, they just didn’t think- They didn’t think they would lose to it.
Lex Fridman (02:43:27) What do you attribute that to? Is that, does it, Robert E. Lee, to him?
Gary Gallagher (02:43:31) It’s to Lee and the fact that they won these victories under Lee, and that they took these chances, and everybody tried. And they always knew that they were outnumbered, and yet they were still winning. The closest the numbers had ever been at the seven days when the armies were about the same size, but after that, Lee is always at a significant disadvantage in numbers, and yet he seems to be victorious.
Lex Fridman (02:43:53) So Lee’s aggressiveness, like you’ve mentioned, produced also staggering casualties.
Gary Gallagher (02:44:00) Staggering casualties. He lost 13,000 men here, and Hooker about 17,500. A much higher proportion of Lee’s army than Hooker lost in his army. But this should’ve been a disaster for Lee. Hooker should have crushed Lee here. Absolutely should have crushed Lee, but he didn’t.
Lex Fridman (02:44:18) So there’s two cases: Lee’s audacity being the South’s best hope of winning the war, but the other case is he was actually bleeding the South dry.
Gary Gallagher (02:44:29) 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.” And he also knew that he was … It’s a race between, “Am I gonna run out of men before they run out of morale-
Gary Gallagher (02:44:59) … in the United States?” I think he understood that, and I think that was the best chance for the Confederacy to win. And 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. But I think Lee was very perceptive in that regard. He understood how important politically what happened militarily was.
Gary Gallagher (02:45:25) Much better understanding of that than a lot of people had at the time, and better understanding, I think, than a lot of historians have now. And this is a horrible time for the US because behind the lines, people are in ra- Democrats are unhappy with the Emancipation Proclamation. Just two months before this, Congress passed the Conscription Act. Democrats are very unhappy about that. They’re saying that Lincoln is a tyrant. He’s forcing people into a war that’s not the war they wanted to fight anyway. Union morale is very fragile. Morale, civilian morale at this point, 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.
Gary Gallagher (02:46:09) The draft riots come right after Gettysburg, but that is symptomatic of what morale … Desertions went up in the Army of the Potomac after the Emancipation Proclamation.
Lex Fridman (02:46:18) So at this point, the Confederacy is arguably very close to winning the war.
Gary Gallagher (02:46:23) I think this is one of the more optimistic points for the Confederacy, is in the late spring and early summer of 1863. Yes, I do.
Lex Fridman (02:46:33) If Robert E. Lee is correct, in that it’s all about morale, which seems like a valid argument, then this feels like very close to breaking the morale of the Union.
Gary Gallagher (02:46:43) 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 two big campaigns kind of going on at this time, and Vicksburg is the other one.

The most important battle of the Civil War

Lex Fridman (02:46:56) Can you speak to Vicksburg? This is ’63.
Gary Gallagher (02:46:59) Yeah, this is ’63, and Vicksburg is the last major Confederate citadel on the Mississippi River. They’ve already lost New Orleans. They’ve lost … So 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 ’62, and he’s finally, through a series of trial and errors and failures, he’s finally 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.
Gary Gallagher (02:47:39) He’s laying siege to Vicksburg while he’s just getting his campaign to do that started when Hooker is at Chancellorsville. In May, he invests the city and begins a siege that will end just as the Battle of Gettysburg ends, and it’s, it’s, it’s one of the most impressive campaigns in US military history, Grant’s campaign against Vicksburg. 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. And in the end they go, “Oh, that’s what you were doing.” And it worked. And in the end, he captures Vicksburg, which surrenders on July 4th, 1863.
Gary Gallagher (02:48:19) And if you don’t think that a kind of religious people didn’t read divine intervention into catching, having that happen on July 4th, 1863, you would be incorrect. That’s the same day that Lee retreated from Gettysburg. What? Really? 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.
Lex Fridman (02:48:45) Well, that takes us to Gettysburg.
Gary Gallagher (02:48:47) Here we are at Gettysburg.
Lex Fridman (02:48:48) Here we go.
Gary Gallagher (02:48:48) Which everybody knows, Lex, is the turning point of the Civil War.
Lex Fridman (02:48:53) Or is it? Okay.
Gary Gallagher (02:48:54) No.
Lex Fridman (02:48:55) All right.
Gary Gallagher (02:48:55) Short answer.
Lex Fridman (02:48:56) Well, that’s first … Before we analyze its role as a turning point or not-
Gary Gallagher (02:49:03) Yes, yes.
Lex Fridman (02:49:03) … what is Gettysburg? July 1863.
Gary Gallagher (02:49:05) Okay.
Lex Fridman (02:49:06) Walk me through the three days of Gettysburg.
Gary Gallagher (02:49:08) So 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 second 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 second week in June, and here’s what his goal is. He has two main goals.
Gary Gallagher (02:49:36) He wants to take the war out of Virginia so that the agricultural sector isn’t subject to the presence of the army, so to let agriculture recover a little, and he wants to provision his army off the rich Cumberland Valley in Pennsylvania, siphon fodder and 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 wanna– He has no… The movie Gettysburg, he says he wants to capture Washington. No, he doesn’t wanna 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-
Gary Gallagher (02:50:15) … if he’s 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, he fights the biggest cavalry battle of the war near Culpeper, Virginia, Battle of Brandy Station on June the 9th, and he almost loses, and it hurts his little feelings. And so he decides that he needs to do something dramatic so the newspapers will love him again. And 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 ’cause he’s never moving. He decides he’ll do it again here.
Gary Gallagher (02:51:00) And 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 with… and he can’t communicate with Lee. So Lee doesn’t know what’s going on ’cause his cavalry isn’t doing its job. He spreads his army across southern Pennsylvania and then finds out from a sort of civilian spy, guy named Harrison, that the Army of the Potomac is actually following him and is much closer, and Lee at the end of June 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 the 30th, but on July the 1st, the armies make contact to the west of Gettysburg in, in a meeting engagement and more troops coming on each side.
Gary Gallagher (02:51:47) It builds into what turns into the three-day 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 and there’s a battle that goes for three days. Lee has the– He takes the tactical aggressive every day. He does the attacking. The Federals do the defending. Lee’s army’s 75,000. The other army’s about 85,000, 88,000. And famous terrain, Little Round Top, Round Top, Devil’s Den, the Peach Orchard, all these famous places, and it ends on the third day. Lee comes close on the second day, a huge victory for the Confederates on the first day.
Gary Gallagher (02:52:29) Third day, Lee’s frustrated and he just decides to let his infantry take care of it for him and the result is what most people call Pickett’s Charge. Pickett was just a part of the charge. 12 and a half thousand infantry in a direct assault and it fails completely and he retreats the next day. I think you can draw a straight line between May the 3rd at Chancellorsville when his infantry fought their way together and July the 3rd 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.
Gary Gallagher (02:53:15) His first 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.
Lex Fridman (02:53:33) What was the military mistake there? What could Robert E. Lee done differently?
Gary Gallagher (02:53:37) 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. He’s in Lee’s army. He wrote after the war, Lee won a great victory on July 1st at Gettysburg, smashed two Union infantry corps, had a very strong position. He should’ve just hunkered down and said, “Okay, attack me. See what you can do.” He didn’t do that. He almost certainly would’ve won the battle if he had done that, but he, his, this, 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 costing… He lost probably 25,000 men at Getty, at least a third of his army.
Gary Gallagher (02:54:24) More than that, he went across the river, went across the Potomac with 52 generals in his army.
Gary Gallagher (02:54:31) 17 of them became casualties. He lost a third 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. It comes it, and Lincoln is at first very happy about it. There’s another, 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, 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…
Gary Gallagher (02:55:18) He writes it but doesn’t send it to Meade, but he gets another guy to tell Meade what’s in it, so he-
Lex Fridman (02:55:24) Mm-hmm.
Gary Gallagher (02:55:24) … 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’ve been, but it wasn’t because Lee got away with his army intact. And after the battle, Lee said, “Well, you’ll s- ” 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 six months.” And in fact, it’s 10 months before there’s another big battle in- … the Eastern Theater, till Grant gets there.
Lex Fridman (02:55:58) Yeah, so how does Grant come from the, to change the theater from the Western Theater into the Eastern?
Gary Gallagher (02:56:03) So Gettysburg’s a really important victory for the United States.
Lex Fridman (02:56:06) Yeah, but it’s not the turning point.
Gary Gallagher (02:56:07) 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 second time Grant had forced an army to surrender. He forced one at Fort Donelson back in February of 1862. His victory is, is … There’s, there are no, 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 one more victory in the West after this. He wins the Battle of Chattanooga in late 1863.
Gary Gallagher (02:56:46) And 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, and that’s what brings Grant to the fore. And in March ’64, he’s now general-in-chief with the new rank of lieutenant general on his … He’s got three stars on his shoulders now instead of two.

The final showdown of the Civil War – Grant vs Lee

Lex Fridman (02:57:07) And then where does that take us? That takes us to ’64 with the Overland Campaign. That story plus Atlanta, Sherman’s March.
Gary Gallagher (02:57:16) That sets up … Grant is now planning for how the whole war is gonna go. And he envisions five components. The two most important are he’s gonna move against Lee, and his plan is 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.
Lex Fridman (02:57:47) So how is he thinking about the clash with Lee? Grant versus Lee.
Gary Gallagher (02:57:50) Grant versus Lee is just confront him. And they’re still near Fredericksburg, where they, on the Rappahannock River frontier, engaged with him and what they ended up with was a period of six weeks of continuous combat that began with the Battle of the Wilderness on May the 5th and 6th. The old pattern in the Civil War, Lex, was you fight a battle, one side retreats. It might be weeks, might be months before you fight again. What happened here is Lee and Grant fought the Battle of the Wilderness. 12,000 Confederate casualties, 18,000 Union ca- 30,000 casualties at the Wilderness. They march for one day. They start another battle, Spotsylvania Court House.
Gary Gallagher (02:58:29) 12,000 more Confederate casualties, 18,000 more Union casualties, so now you’ve had 60,000 casualties in two battles with no interval. That continues through May. Cold Harbor, they end up near Richmond at Cold Harbor in early June. Grant launches frontal assaults there. They come to nothing. His men are, many of them are butchered. The bottom line is that in the six-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 in, 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.
Gary Gallagher (02:59:19) We would talk about PTSD now probably. They just hadn’t been used to something like this.
Lex Fridman (02:59:23) And this kind of continuous warfare, that’s … We can attribute that to Grant.
Gary Gallagher (02:59:28) Yes, this is … And this is where the Grant the Butcher image comes in.
Lex Fridman (02:59:33) But also probably, as hard as it is to say, it’s an act of military genius, right?
Gary Gallagher (02:59:40) Well, it’s … He’s doing what he wanted to do. He’s bleeding Lee’s army and at the same time pushing it back toward Richmond, and what it ends up in is the siege at Petersburg, Virginia, which is just south of Richmond and controls the communications into Richmond, and it’s a siege of actually Petersburg and Richmond, and that is the thing that Lee feared the most, and 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.
Gary Gallagher (03:00:22) Because while this is going on, Sherman is moving against Atlanta, and 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, and Lincoln decides … The morale gets so bad he calls his cabinet together in late August and makes them sign what’s been called the Blind Memorandum, and what the memorandum said is, “We’re not gonna be reelected, and we’re gonna 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. That’s in August.
Gary Gallagher (03:01:00) And so I think that United States civilian morale, the lowest point of the war for the United States is in July and August 1864. And if we’d been able to stick our microphones in people’s faces and said, “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.
Lex Fridman (03:01:30) So first of all, if Lincoln didn’t win, do you think-
Gary Gallagher (03:01:34) Well, we know it would’ve been good for the Confederates if Lincoln didn’t win, but just … McClellan still … It’s interesting. McClellan was running kind of against the Democratic platform. What the Democratic platform called for was basically negotiations, an armistice and then negotiations. And many people believed if they ever stop fighting, they’re not gonna start fighting again. And so some negotiated end to the war that might 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.”
Gary Gallagher (03:02:08) But what’s clear is… And it would’ve been, would’ve been the end of emancipation. Because emancipation, what became the 13th Amendment had passed through the Senate in April of ’64, but the House voted against it. That doesn’t, isn’t gonna happen till early ’65.
Lex Fridman (03:02:25) How close was it that Lincoln won/lost?
Gary Gallagher (03:02:31) Well, Lincoln won. Grant didn’t reelect Lincoln, ’cause he, Grant against Lee would not reelect Lincoln. But other Grants, other things that Grant, part of his overall plan as general-in-chief, Sherman captured Atlanta- … in early September. And that just changed everything.
Lex Fridman (03:02:48) That was the real turning point.
Gary Gallagher (03:02:50) That was a huge military turning point, and 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, and it was Sherman, and to a lesser degree Sheridan, that reelected Lincoln, and not just Lincoln, but huge Republican majorities- … in both the House and the Senate in 1864.
Lex Fridman (03:03:11) And then the thing that broke the back of the Confederacy, Sherman’s March, 60,000 men across Georgia to the sea, burning the infrastructure.
Gary Gallagher (03:03:20) Yes, as he said, “I’m gonna go across and make Georgia howl,” is how he put it. He added a psychological twist. What Grant envisioned doing, and Sheridan actually did in the Shenandoah Valley before Sherman did it in Georgia, is go into an agriculturally productive area, burn the mills, kill the livestock, destroy the crops, lay waste to it so that it can’t be a logistical support of the Confederacy anymore. Sheridan did it in the Shenandoah Valley, and then Sherman did it in Georgia.
Gary Gallagher (03:03:51) But Sherman said, “But I’m also going to break them psychologically.” That’s what he said, that, “I’m gonna 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.” Didn’t exactly work that way, but that’s what he—so he marched first to Savannah, and then the final campaign for Sherman was up through the Carolinas. He went up through South Carolina and into North Carolina. And Grant laid siege to Lee, and the siege lasted nine months, the Siege of Petersburg in Richmond, and finally Grant broke Lee’s lines on April 1st, 1865. Lee started a retreat. Grant just gave him no pause, and he ran him to ground at Appomattox after about a week, and Lee surrendered.
Lex Fridman (03:04:44) What do we know about the relationship between the two men?
Gary Gallagher (03:04:47) Grant and Lee? Well, it’s really interesting. I mean, they basically operated in totally different worlds. They were both in the war with Mexico, but they weren’t with each other in Mexico, and they had some awkward kinda small talk at Appomattox before they got down to business. One said he remembered the other one, the other one said he didn’t remember him at all, and it’s so… But Grant was very generous. He gave 25,000 rations to Lee’s army to survive. Lee began the retreat with about 60,000 men, only 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.
Lex Fridman (03:05:31) But at the peak of, you know, Grant versus Lee, surely they were thinking about each other.
Gary Gallagher (03:05:38) 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, and it’s ludicrous that they would’ve actually thought that. They clearly found out that that wasn’t true.
Lex Fridman (03:05:59) It’s interesting when people do that. I sometimes, like, wonder, how is it possible… There’s just a million examples of this. For example, Hitler just completely dismissed America as a military force.
Gary Gallagher (03:06:15) Oh, it’s nothing, they’re a bunch of… Yes, they’re soft. They’ll never do anything.
Lex Fridman (03:06:18) I have to say, it’s probably some silly psychological things. You make up your mind for some stupid reason.
Gary Gallagher (03:06:26) And then you stick to it.
Lex Fridman (03:06:27) And you stick to it, and you almost, like, against… I mean, with a lot of great generals and leaders, you have to be stubborn in the face of facts sometimes-
Gary Gallagher (03:06:38) You do, yeah
Lex Fridman (03:06:38) … because, like, all the rational people will tell you, you get this with Napoleon, like, “What are you doing?” Like, the generals, the wise, smart people around you will say, “Don’t do this.”
Gary Gallagher (03:06:48) Grant’s a perfect example of that, Lex, at Vicksburg, where his problem was to get his army on the same side of the river as the Confederates, where he could come against Vicksburg, and the only way to do it was have the Union Navy run past—and 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.
Lex Fridman (03:07:10) I mean, it has to do with the, with I guess you’ve criticized once or twice M- this guy named McClellan.
Gary Gallagher (03:07:16) I did, once or twice.
Lex Fridman (03:07:18) That, you know, you do have to take risk. You have to take risk in order-
Gary Gallagher (03:07:22) You do
Lex Fridman (03:07:22) … to win battles.
Gary Gallagher (03:07:23) 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.
Lex Fridman (03:07:31) Really? Hmm.
Gary Gallagher (03:07:32) Yeah, but that’s, but what he actually said, and the quote started with his nephew, Fitzhugh Lee, who wrote it in a book after the war. Lee called McClellan the most intellectual General he ever faced. And I think that is not a compliment. I think Lee is saying, “Yeah, he’s an intellectual. He thinks about this, he thinks about … 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 have possibly thought he was the most talented one that he faced.
Lex Fridman (03:08:02) I think it’s a polite wink and nod to criticize.
Gary Gallagher (03:08:05) It’s a wink and nod.
Lex Fridman (03:08:07) All right. How does the war end? So clearly there’s the turning point with Atlanta and Sherman’s March.
Gary Gallagher (03:08:14) And the election of ’64 is the– that drives the dagger into … I mean, there’s no question but that the war will be pushed to the end because Lincoln and Grant are in charge and they are not gonna take their foot off the-
Lex Fridman (03:08:25) Yeah
Gary Gallagher (03:08:25) … the pedal. They’re gonna push it. So it’s a question of time. It drags on, still drags on another six 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 everybody, virtually on both sides, that’s the end of the war.
Gary Gallagher (03:08:50) 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, and 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 … No. You’re, you’re a general, not a politician. You can’t do this.”
Lex Fridman (03:09:17) So can we talk about April 9th? I mean, this is a really important moment of what Grant did in terms of how he treated the opposing army.
Gary Gallagher (03:09:27) As I said earlier, he treated him the way that he knew that Lincoln wanted them treated and, 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. US Grant did, and he … 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.
Gary Gallagher (03:10:13) When Grant found that out, he let them take their horses home with them. He said they’ll 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 … 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.
Lex Fridman (03:10:41) Yeah, but there’s certain symbolic actions like this that can lay the groundwork for long-term peace.
Gary Gallagher (03:10:47) 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.
Lex Fridman (03:10:54) Sorry to linger on it, but there’s 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.
Gary Gallagher (03:11:05) You mean Versailles, the terms from Versailles. No question about it.
Lex Fridman (03:11:08) And some of it is economic, some of it is geopolitics, but some of it is just on a basic human level humiliation. And people are just not good with humiliation. They remember.
Gary Gallagher (03:11:19) 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 the point is to put the nation back together and you … 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. The president wanted to go after Lincoln’s death. Andrew Johnson wanted to go after Lee, and Grant said, “I’ll resign if you do … ” ‘Cause I … His term … We extended the terms. He’s abiding by the terms. You can’t change the rules here.
Lex Fridman (03:11:55) But by the way, like it should be said, is that that’s not easy to do. You have just fought an extremely bloody-
Gary Gallagher (03:12:01) Oh
Lex Fridman (03:12:01) … battle. There’s hatred.
Gary Gallagher (03:12:02) 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 … You haven’t punished them enough. You’re not punishing 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.”
Lex Fridman (03:12:32) So what happened next in terms of reconciliation?
Gary Gallagher (03:12:36) Well, Lincoln got assassinated just a few days after-
Lex Fridman (03:12:39) Yeah
Gary Gallagher (03:12:39) … Lee’s troops laid down their arms.
Lex Fridman (03:12:41) Can you talk to the assassination? He was shot five days after the surrender, right?
Gary Gallagher (03:12:46) Yes, he was.
Lex Fridman (03:12:47) So who was Booth? Who was John Wilkes Booth? Why did he assassinate Lincoln, and what impact did that have?
Gary Gallagher (03:12:54) Well, he was the youngest of the most famous acting family in the United States. Junius Brutus Booth and Edwin Booth, his father and older brother, were very famous actors, and he was a very successful actor, too, John Wilkes Booth was. He was good at jumping around the stage, and he was very athletic. And an ardent pro-Confederate.
Lex Fridman (03:13:16) Right. That’s the more important- … Aspect
Gary Gallagher (03:13:18) Not ardent, not ardent enough to put on a uniform for the Confederacy, but ardent enough to, you know— … argue for the Confederacy. He claims … I mean, not claims. 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 is very … This is after Lee had surrendered.
Lex Fridman (03:13:41) So he was on the Union side.
Gary Gallagher (03:13:44) Oh, yeah. Oh, yes, he-
Lex Fridman (03:13:45) But Lincoln was a tyrant in his eyes.
Gary Gallagher (03:13:48) Lincoln was a tyrant because of his treatment of the white South. And 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. I mean, real misfits. Their plan was to kill Seward, Andrew Johnson. They were gonna cut off the top leadership of the United States. Kill the vice, kill the president, kill the vice president, kill the secretary of state. That’s what they wanted to do.
Lex Fridman (03:14:18) On the Johnson side, they chickened out.
Gary Gallagher (03:14:20) 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, and he slashed at Seward, huge scars on the side of his face, but the knife hit the brace and didn’t kill Seward. So Seward was disfigured. His son was wounded. The guy who was supposed to kill Johnson chickened out, and Booth killed Lincoln.
Gary Gallagher (03:14:42) And there was a manhunt for Lincoln, or for Booth. It took a while, and he was shot in a barn rather than captured and put on trial. But four of the conspirators were put on trial, including one woman, a woman named Mary Surratt, who ran a boarding house where some of them stayed, and they were all hanged at Old Capitol Prison. And the combination of that hanging, they were tried by a military commission and hanged, but they also put on trial and hanged the commandant of Andersonville Prison, which was the most infamous of the Confederate prisoner of war camps. They hanged him as well. And it seemed that those hangings sort of took the edge, the sort of we need some retribution edge off attitudes in the North.
Gary Gallagher (03:15:27) I think those things helped offset Lincoln’s assassination in a sort of odd way because the temperature went down after that.
Lex Fridman (03:15:37) You talk about, as maybe a bit of an aside but that we Americans like to spin up conspiracy theories about assassinations- … of our presidents. So that’s certainly very true, maybe truer than most about Lincoln’s assassination.
Gary Gallagher (03:15:55) There was a long literature actually. It began with a chemist named Otto Eisenschiml many, many decades ago that implicated Secretary of War Stanton- … and blamed the radicals were unhappy with Lincoln for not being harsher on the former Confederates, and what they wanted to do was get him out of the way. They thought they could manipulate Andrew Johnson if they got Andrew Johnson in charge. So then they would pose these questions. How come no one was guarding Lincoln that night? How come the only bridge over the Potomac that wasn’t guarded is the one that Booth escaped across? All of these.
Gary Gallagher (03:16:31) How come Grant didn’t go to the play with Lincoln? The Lincolns asked them. Well, they didn’t ’cause Mrs. Lincoln didn’t like… I mean, Mrs. Grant didn’t like Mrs. Lincoln. I mean, there are answers to all the questions. But they put all these together, added two and two and got five, and said that it was a plot on the part of the radical wing of the Republican Party to get rid of Lincoln ’cause Lincoln didn’t wanna be harsh enough on the South.
Lex Fridman (03:16:55) Yeah, it’s difficult to believe that dramatic, sometimes catastrophic things happen for seemingly… That, that like the random, as you said, loser…
Gary Gallagher (03:17:07) It’s not satisfying. You want a more satisfying, and that is a big conspiracy is better. There are all these forces at work to get rid of Lincoln, not just that the one guy assigned to guard Lincoln—there’s no Secret Service then—went across the street to get a drink. And Booth had played in that theater many times. He knew exactly the layout. He’d come in earlier. He’d arrange… I mean, it just, that’s the way it worked out.
Lex Fridman (03:17:30) And I have to say, it’s kinda interesting. I have to be honest with my own mind that, like, I love a good conspiracy. My brain does.
Gary Gallagher (03:17:39) Almost everybody does.
Lex Fridman (03:17:40) I think it’s, what is it? It’s maybe depressing or heartbreaking to know that so much destruction 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 can turn on a stupid actor shooting one of the greatest, if not the greatest president in the history
Gary Gallagher (03:18:16) 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.
Lex Fridman (03:18:26) Over 700,000 people dead, these epic battles, all of that. Lincoln survives all of it, and then there’s…
Gary Gallagher (03:18:36) 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, and troops who had run 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.
Lex Fridman (03:19:00) It’s heartbreaking, really, especially I would’ve loved to see his evolution as a leader, as a human being, and the words he may have, he may have found to direct us as a country, you know, in the, in the Reconstruction.
Gary Gallagher (03:19:18) Yep. 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.

Lost Cause and Confederate Monuments

Lex Fridman (03:19:27) What was Reconstruction? How rocky was it?
Gary Gallagher (03:19:32) 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 ’cause 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.
Gary Gallagher (03:20:14) The White North just wasn’t, they weren’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, they were willing to push far enough to get the 14th Amendment and the 15th Amendment. And 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. So 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 is a long and ugly episode of what comes. I mean, the Confederates just, they weren’t confused about being defeated.
Gary Gallagher (03:21:01) They were crushed, and so they vastly scaled back what they wanted. They had wanted a slave-holding republic. They scaled back for just having white supremacy and the, and the North, and, and that’s what happened. You ended up with white supremacy and Jim Crow intact- … which is a lot different than keeping slavery intact.
Lex Fridman (03:21:22) And that set off the whole process of the Civil Rights Movement that lasted decades.
Gary Gallagher (03:21:29) I mean, Jim Crow is the clearest expression of the White South’s reaction to defeated Appomattox. “Okay, what, 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.”
Lex Fridman (03:21:47) You know, when you walk the ground of some of these battles, Gettysburg, is there something you can only experience when you’re there?
Gary Gallagher (03:21:54) In my experience, you cannot replicate in a classroom what you can do at a historic site, I mean a really historic site. You get people to a place like that, I’ve given untold tours on battlefields and other historic places. You can talk about so much more than just what you can s- First of all, you can understand what happened on the battlefield better than reading about it or looking at maps ’cause the terrain makes it much clearer.
Gary Gallagher (03:22:19) But you can also talk about, okay, what are the men like in the armies who are here? Why are they in the ser- A lot of the things we’ve talked about today, 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? And the later monuments, it’s … The opportunities for a teacher on one of these sites are just almost unlimited.
Lex Fridman (03:22:58) 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.
Gary Gallagher (03:23:06) 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, and it was just… It was amazing to me. I mean, there have been very few things in my career that are like that, and we talked, we stopped in different parts of the cem- There were a thousand 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.
Lex Fridman (03:23:44) You’ve mentioned the Lost Cause a few times. What was the Lost Cause? Who created it, and what did it claim?
Gary Gallagher (03:23:49) The Lost Cause is the Confederate memory stream of the war, and let me just say very, very briefly, I think there are four main ways the generation that experienced the war remembered it. The one remembered by the most people would be the majority of white Northerners is what I call the Union Cause and that 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 you killed slavery. You got rid of this monstrous institution that had mocked that language in the founding documents.
Gary Gallagher (03:24:29) 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 ca- catastrophic decision we made in 1861? We’ll do this to save slavery, and four years later, slavery’s dead, and a third of all our white military-age boys are dead. So here’s what we’re gonna 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-
Lex Fridman (03:24:59) States’ rights…
Gary Gallagher (03:24:59) … as opposed to central authority oppressing people.
Lex Fridman (03:25:02) Right, right, right.
Gary Gallagher (03:25:03) 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 gonna 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 kind of 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 ’cause we don’t wanna talk about Jefferson Davis, and there’s almost no one else to talk about except maybe Stonewall Jackson.
Gary Gallagher (03:25:44) Those will be our two boys that we talk about the most. And 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 where you… This is kind of 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.
Lex Fridman (03:26:07) So some of that still persists with us today. We look at the Confederate flag. So some historians argue for the long, quote, “long Civil War.”
Gary Gallagher (03:26:16) 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, 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 four-year war that works out some of the difficulties of how you put the nation back together. And then beyond that, you have these different memory streams that have been contending with one another that still…
Gary Gallagher (03:26:58) Some of which still reverberate today, including what are you gonna do with the Confederate flag, which most of… 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, and the actual Confederate flag had three big bars and then stars up in… 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 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.
Gary Gallagher (03:27:43) Every Ku Klux Klan group flew it. Every… It’s… You just can’t sanitize it. And 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- … of just sort of rebellion, not necessarily- … tethered specifically-
Lex Fridman (03:28:01) Rebellion against institutions.
Gary Gallagher (03:28:03) … against authority and institutions- … and the ruling class and the… But that’s… But here it has a very specific meaning, and you just can’t separate it. It’s… People should quit trying.
Lex Fridman (03:28:13) So you taught at UVA and lived through Charlottesville in 2017. Can you tell me what Charlottesville was? What did it mean?
Gary Gallagher (03:28:25) 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. And she and I spent two hours talking, walking around the UVA campus, talking about the Confederate monuments 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, 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.
Lex Fridman (03:29:08) What’s your view on Confederate monuments? You know, the monuments that capture these periods, these complicated periods of our history.
Gary Gallagher (03:29:20) Well, I have complicated views, but my main… But my first reaction to that is they’re not all the same. They’ve all… They’re treated as if they’re all exactly the same, and they’re not. There’s some… There are the, the Silent Sam… which was on the campus at UNC for years. It had… 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 the… what was called the Battle of Liberty Place monument in New Orleans that, that was a white supremacist monument very definitely that. I think that local places should decide these. Wherever the monument is, I think that’s who should decide, if the local… And I think there should be a process how they decide it.
Gary Gallagher (03:30:06) Let people have a public hearing. But they did that in Charlottesville actually, 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, and the commission voted to keep the monuments in place but re-examine them with text that put them in context and then put up monuments, new monuments to previously ignored groups. The city council then came in and overrode that and decided they took them all down in Charlottesville. They also took down the Lewis & Clark monument, and there’s a… They took down all the monuments that had been put up.
Gary Gallagher (03:30:47) I think many of the Confederate monuments, the kind of ones 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, that just kind of lost generation of young men. The later wave of monuments that came are… were put up by other groups that were not… They’re not really Confederate monuments. They’re put up by… The ones that were put up in the ’20s and ’30s. A third wave were put up in reaction to the civil rights activities in the ’50s and early ’60s, and then a fourth wave went up after the movie Gettysburg and Ken Burns’ series. But they’re complicated, and I see them as historical… And I understand the arguments on both sides.
Gary Gallagher (03:31:34) 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 five monuments in Charlottesville: two that were put up by veterans, two that were put up by groups later—the Lee and Jackson statues were those—and then there were two bronze plates on the side of the rotunda that just listed UVA graduates who died in Confederate service. Had about 500 names on them. Those were all of the Confederate statues there, and it– I used them to talk about different strains of memory and used recon– They’re– The Lee, the main tenor of the Lee statue when it went up was this reconciliationist Lee.
Gary Gallagher (03:32:20) He, Lee wanted the nation back together. Lee at Appomattox, that kind of stuff. Didn’t have anything to do with Jim Crow or white supremacy, although all the people who put them up probably would’ve– Clearly, we would consider them racist. They were in favor of white supremacy. But you don’t need statues in the post-war 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, use them to explain different parts of U.S. history. That’s how I used them. Having said all that, I did, I do, did, and still do believe that it should be a local issue.
Gary Gallagher (03:33:05) If a locality decides they don’t want them up anymore, then don’t have them up anymore.
Lex Fridman (03:33:09) I think if we ignore history, we’re gonna be doomed to repeat it. I think that’s… 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-
Gary Gallagher (03:33:29) Or have them read texts written at the time that have language that we wouldn’t use now. It helps you understand the ti- It’s, it’s-
Gary Gallagher (03:33:39) 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 gonna 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 gonna… that I assigned in the class was Huckleberry Finn. And a lot of the students said they wouldn’t read Huckleberry Finn because they knew it had language in it that they… And they didn’t wanna see those words.
Lex Fridman (03:34:18) Even just reading about slavery, American and otherwise, is hard. It’s really difficult. But, like, we’re capable of that. We humans are capable of that. And this doesn’t somehow go away because we agree for it to go away. We’re always can return back to that, maybe in other forms, in other ways. We can do evil things unto each other. And I personally believe all of us are capable of doing evil things unto each other. And the dark reality of that is we too readily convince ourselves that we’re doing good.
Gary Gallagher (03:34:58) Yeah, because if you’re doing good, you can do anything-
Lex Fridman (03:35:00) You can do anything
Gary Gallagher (03:35:00) … and it’s justified if it’s good. If the end is good- … all bets are off. You can do anything that you wanna do.
Lex Fridman (03:35:08) 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’s a bunch of different forces is really important. And also to realize that individuals can turn the tides of history, can like, can lead to progress, can stop evil doing when it’s happening. All of those things. Like, the power of the individual is immense.
Gary Gallagher (03:35:44) Yes. I mean, coming back to the monuments for a minute, it, it’s also worth talking about that even at the time there were people who… A lot of Union veterans were against putting up Confederate monuments. Frederick Douglass had a problem with the Emancipation Monument that was in Emancipation Park on Capitol Hill and talked about the reasons why he had a pro- “Why is this the image that you chose for that monument?” Union veterans, they had a hard time with Confederate monuments, and I just think that it is… Almost everything can be a teaching tool, un- but it bothers me that certain books would be proscribed because they have some language that might bother somebody. And, and, and it… You need to… I mean, the language should bother you. So-
Lex Fridman (03:36:31) I think history truly should bother you. It, it, the, 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.

Extreme political division in US

Lex Fridman (03:36:54) But anyway, you know, people in the modern day, I have to ask you about this, kinda casually talk about the new Civil War in America.
Gary Gallagher (03:37:02) Yes.
Lex Fridman (03:37:03) 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?
Gary Gallagher (03:37:14) No, I really don’t, and I’m not… And I don’t mean to play down the degree to which… that 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 and 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 sort of stir up as much unhappiness and controversy as possible. I think we’re like the 1850s in that way.
Gary Gallagher (03:37:56) 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. And I mean, I really don’t. If we get there, that will be heartbreaking, but I just don’t, I just don’t see it. I don’t see physical assaults against members of Congress on the floor of the Congress. I don’t see… It’s… States talk about seceding if things don’t go… Texas talked about seceding when Obama was elected. California talked about seceding when Trump was elected. But you know what? 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.
Gary Gallagher (03:38:41) So that’s different to me than talking about it and threatening it and posing different scenarios.
Lex Fridman (03:38:49) Are there genuine structural parallels between that time and now, if you can linger on that?
Gary Gallagher (03:38:55) Well, I mean, the states structurally, a state can call a convention if it wants to, and to talk about whatever it wants 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.
Lex Fridman (03:39:15) 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 maybe is not often expressed- … explicitly. But there is a sense that we’re all in this kinda together, and that we’re yelling at each other. Kinda like you have a family Thanksgiving dinner where there’s very passionate yelling and arguing, but there’s a kinda 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, from over 50 years of studying the Civil War… like what, what do you think? What is this country? What is this union? What are, what is the core that makes us who we are?
Gary Gallagher (03:40:24) 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 in an unbelie- we’re far more diverse now as a people than we were during the Civil War because we continue to act in the same way as it did in the Civil War, only they’re not Germans and Ir- people come from everywhere here now. I mean, they literally come from everywhere here now. And 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 acts…
Gary Gallagher (03:40:59) Has a, 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 then I think most people do have a way to fit into the mosaic, and 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.
Lex Fridman (03:41:25) Yeah, sometimes I think about, I’m sorry to romanticize it, but because I do think that Barack Obama was one of the great speech makers of my lifetime. And I, 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’s, 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.
Gary Gallagher (03:42:04) I think one of Lincoln’s great attributes was his humanity comes through 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, I think he would have handled that actually pretty well. Much better than many other people I can think of from the mid-19th century.
Gary Gallagher (03:42:33) I think he had genuine humanity. I think, I don’t think you can read all the things he wrote and not come to that conclusion. He also… But, so does, 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 that he, I think he would have handled that pretty well, and he would have been, still been really tall. Even in our time- … he’d be way taller than most people.
Lex Fridman (03:43:01) Yeah. What you know, 250th birthday what gives you hope about the future of America?
Gary Gallagher (03:43:10) What gives me hope? I’m, and I’m a grouchy, not optimistic person in a lot of ways.
Lex Fridman (03:43:16) Are you?
Gary Gallagher (03:43:16) Yeah, I am. I am.
Lex Fridman (03:43:18) You had some moments of optimism today.
Gary Gallagher (03:43:20) I was just gonna say, but I do have moments of optimism, and one of them I have is in the resiliency of this republic. I really do have… And it’s genuine optimism. I’m not just… And I know a lot of people will think that it’s naive, but I really… Because I see what it’s been through, and it’s emerged- … and it’s gone forward. And the trajectory, and this is something that Obama has commented on, and 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.
Lex Fridman (03:44:00) I think there’s a few folks on the interwebs that 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 is not always living up to the great ideals that it supposedly represents, but at least is striving towards that. And 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.
Lex Fridman (03:44:48) 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, and I’m grateful for this wonderful conversation today.
Gary Gallagher (03:45:18) I appreciate the invitation. It’s been fun.
Lex Fridman (03:45:21) Thank you, Gary. Thank you for listening to this conversation with Gary Gallagher. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description, where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so on. And now, let me leave you with some words from William Tecumseh Sherman, a United States Army general in the Union Army during the Civil War. “I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell.” Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.