Response To Gallagher's The Union War

In The Union War, Gallagher discusses emancipation, slavery, and states rights and how they shaped post civil war America for the gory conflict they ahead. To Gallagher it was obvious why the south seceded and fought the war; he wanted to let his readers know why the north fought the war instead of letting the confederacy go. “The mid-nineteenth-century northerners felt a great deal of nationalism, when they learned of the secession they were outraged.” (Pg.78) He framed much of his book on the work of other authors like Orville Burton, Eric Foner, Walter McDougall, and David Williams. He was set out to not only write about how the white northerners fought the war but also how they won it. In Gallagher’s writing he concentrates the readers

George B. McClellan’s failure to capture the confederate capitol Richmond, is the reason the northerner’s choose to act against slavery and promote emancipation. If the union had stronger military tactics and generals then there’s a chance that emancipation wouldn’t have been as big as it was. Gallagher writes: “Much recent civil war scholarship obscures the importance of Union for wartime generation. Two interpretive threads run through such literature. The first and more prominent suggests the Union of 1860-61 scarcely deserved to be defended at the cost of any bloodshed. The second argues that a major shift in war aims occurred when northerner’s realized that only emancipation made their sacrifice worthwhile. In both instances, modern sensibilities distort our view of how participants of a distant era understood the war.” The Union War is an equal but opposite companion of The Confederate War, which describes in detail the confederate nationalism. The two volumes easily help the reader understand the two republican-minded peoples lives as they experience a seemingly never-ending war. The Union War reminds military historians to think more widely about their

How did the foundation for such a deep commitment to the Union and the army develop, especially given the decentralized nature of federalism and the relatively small size of national institutions like the army prior to the war? If the war was less transformative of Northern views of slavery and race than previous scholars have supposed, does this suggest that Radical Reconstructionist hopes were largely stillborn? How, then, do we explain the political transformation from a pre-war Thirteenth Amendment that, if ratified, would have all but guaranteed slavery's permanency to a series of postwar amendments that not only ended the institution but expanded civil rights and the franchise to include freedmen? Answering these difficult questions requires an appreciation of the diverse approaches needed to account for the complex intersections of racial ideas and the institution of slavery with republican institutions and political practices. The Union War calls for a reassessment of some of the foundational assumptions that we bring to these and other questions. Before the war, slavery powerfully affected the concept of self-government. Many citizens in the union identified democracy as a white privilege, a position embraced by the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott v Sandford case of 1857. Which is why the transformation the Civil War brought on America was so remarkable. As George William