Gary Gallagher’s The Union War opens with the Grand Review of the Armies of the United States presided over by President Johnson and General Grant on May 23-24, 1865. Gallagher notes the absence of Black soldiers in units of US Colored Troops (which he claims was benign coincidence rather than an intentional slight) and takes it as a jumping off point to explore “the meanings of Union, emancipation, black military service, and citizen-soldiers in the Civil War era and their legacy for Americans today.”
Gallagher, a top Civil War historian, makes his books both more interesting and more credible by taking issue with other historians, often by name. This allows Gallagher to present insights that are fresh and crisp and memorable. Offering a convincing challenge to claims that the North fought explicitly to free slaves made by leading historians like Eric Foner along with a variety of lesser known but influential historians is one of the reasons why The Union War is one of the best Civil War books I’ve yet read.
Gallagher shares three insights that I found especially interesting, all polemical and differing from received wisdom but yet all backed up by good support and evidence:
1. Popular vs Academic History: Both are Incomplete
Popular history as retailed by Civil War buffs is concerned only with battles and generals and doesn’t care much about politics. By contrast, academic history looks down on battles and commanders and shifts the focus to revisionist topics like the impact of civilians from “self-liberated” Black Southerners to women and immigrants on the war’s outcome are incomplete.
For Gallagher, either approach is flawed. To understand the Civil War and why Northerners fought, you can’t just talk about battles and generals but you also can’t forget about them either. They made their own huge impact on the outcome of the war and emancipation.
For example, slaves could only self-emancipate if the Union army was nearby. Otherwise, no matter how much they yearned for freedom, if they were stuck in the Confederate interior policed by the usual slave patrols but now on high alert for trouble, their chances to escape were slim.
2. Cause of the War vs. Why Northerners Fought
Though the war was certainly caused by slavery (despite claims of Lost Cause liars) most Northerners didn’t fight to free slaves as an end goal, but merely as a means to save the Union. And saving the American republic with its territory intact was a good enough goal for them, whether slavery was ended or not.
After the first couple years of the war, most Northerners did come to accept that attacking Southern slavery would help win the war. And then they later accepted that abolishing slavery completely would remove the main cause for sectional conflict and help prevent another outbreak of civil war in the future.
But outside of abolitionists, Northerners agreed with Lincoln’s famous letter to Horace Greeley that he would save the Union with all, some, or no slaves freed.
3. The Problem of Re-writing History with Presentism
That gets to another point on method and historiography. Today, saving the Union doesn’t appeal to many Americans, including historians. So we tend to project into the past that saving the Union cannot have been a good enough reason for Northerners to fight. They must have really fought for a cause that seems much more important to us, racial equity. If not at the beginning of the war, then at least by its end — right?
But Gallagher shows how that’s just not true, according to the evidence from letters that soldiers wrote home, newspaper articles and regimental histories. From beginning to end, and even for two or three decades afterwards, Northerners said that they were fighting to preserve the integrity of the nation, not to free slaves. Freeing slaves, and later trying to protect their civil rights, was just a way for Northerners to beat white Southerners in battle and then keep former slaveowners from winning the peace.
Implications of Union Over Slavery
First, for me, an interest in promoting racial equity today and learning about the history of race to support a more fair and equitable future led me to care about the Civil War in the first place. For years, I focused on abolitionists like Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips. I shared some of their inspiring quotes on social media. And frankly, I tried to imagine that many northerners agreed with these great leaders and also wanted to promote racial justice.
However, ultimately, I came to see that this was just wishful thinking. My education on this issue owes much to Gallagher’s book.
To understand history accurately, we have to accept that most Northerners were far less concerned with race than Americans today. And if we’re doing history rather than propaganda, then we have to avoid judging them for it. Black people represented such a small minority of the population of most northern states (usually 1% or less) that most white people didn’t know any personally and, understandably, thought about them little.
Understanding this helps explain why the last 150 years, starting with Reconstruction, unfolded the way they did. Race was always going to be maddeningly hard to deal with after the end of slavery. There wasn’t some magic moment right after the war or during Reconstruction when white Americans could’ve “gotten race right” given how prejudiced all white Americans were, North and South, in the period 1860-1880. Instead, white Northerners only went as far as they did with Reconstruction laws and amendments because white Southerners pushed back so hard against accepting the consequences of abolition. In the end, it was all still about Union.
Second, understanding how much Northerners valued Union and why raises the question of whether the unity of the United States might be worth something today too. In the Civil War, Northerners saw the American republic as an experiment in democracy unique in world history worth preserving but incredibly fragile in a world of kings, despots and aristocrats. The biggest threat to that noble experiment were the oligarchs of the South, the planters who presided over an economy and social system based on racial and class hierarchy and diametrically opposed to the free-labor system of the North, a system necessary for democracy to flourish.
Might we also start to question oligarchy in today’s America? Might white and Black Americans, and citizens of all other colors, have more in common across racial lines than today’s focus on race might make us think? For the 99% of Americans of all races who are not billionaires, might our interests align in making the economy more balanced by closing huge disparities in wealth between the very rich and the rest of us? And might the American state, represented by the starry banner that thrilled the hearts of loyal Unionists during the Civil War, not be the enemy, as generations of small-government propaganda from the corporate right combined with post-Vietnam malaise from the far left have taught us?
This is a powerful book that encourages a new view of conflict, nationalism and race in the America of Lincoln, Andrew Johnson and Grant. It might also encourage a reader to consider those same issues in a new light in the America of Obama, Trump and Biden.
As he starts with Grant at the Grand Review, so Gallagher gives Grant the last word at the end of the book. The meaning of the war for the Northern commander was that citizen-soldiers, not the type of professional armies found in Europe, volunteered to save American democracy from destruction by southern oligarchs because those ordinary citizens thought that the Union was valuable in itself:
“What saved the Union,” Grant told an audience of Americans in Germany during his world tour after the war, “was the coming forward of the young men of the nation. They came from their homes and fields, as they did in the time of the Revolution, giving everything to the country. To their devotion we owe the salvation of the Union. The humblest soldier who carried a musket is entitled to as much credit for the results of the war as those who were in command. So long as our young men are animated by this spirit there will be no fear for the Union.”
