Gary Gallagher's The Union War: Challenging academia on the war's true purpose

Examiner
VERBATIM POST
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Gregg Clemmer

The Union War by Gary W. Gallagher

Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA 2011

215 pages, $27.95

Of the more than one hundred and fifty names applied to the conflict that tore apart our nation a century and a half ago, Gary Gallagher’s new book, The Union War, makes a strong case that his title is perhaps one of the more accurate we can ascribe to our most uncivil war.

Shedding the evolved, often comfortable (and yes, PC) reinterpretations that 15 decades hence have burdened on modern America, Gallagher explores the motives and musings of contemporary accounts, rediscovering what the Boys in Blue wrote home, what the headlines heralded, what the speeches touted. And what the President really said.

In a robust challenge to established academia, Gallagher notes that “beginning in the 1970s, historians embarked on a massive reevaluation of emancipation and black military participation as elements of the Union war effort." (and concluded that) "The effect has been to illuminate many hitherto hidden dimensions of the war while at the same time creating a new set of distortions.”[1]

In the very next sentence, Gallagher reminds us of our roots, offering both warning and wisdom to all who follow this path: “Any attempt to comprehend the roles of slavery and emancipation must differentiate between the war’s causes and goals for which most loyal citizens fought.”[2]

For those needing a reminder on what the war’s true purpose was, Gallagher cites Lincoln’s famous 1862 reply to Horace Greeley:

My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery.[3]

Indeed, contemplate what might have happened had Robert E. Lee not resigned and joined the Confederate war effort, but instead accepted Washington’s offer to lead the Union army? Or if George McClellan had taken Richmond in 1862? Victory then would have restored the Union … but kept slavery intact.

Still, what about Union war aims post Emancipation Proclamation? As late as the summer of 1864, Lincoln, enduring enormous stress and with just eight months to live, bluntly restated his war purpose to visiting Wisconsin Governor Alexander Randall and journalist Joseph T. Mills:

My enemies say I am now carrying on this war for the sole purpose of abolition. It is & will be carried on so long as I am President for the sole purpose of restoring the Union. But no human power can subdue this rebellion without using the Emancipation lever as I have done.[4]

Gallagher keeps us focused on the reality of those years:

Eventually, most loyal citizens, though profoundly prejudiced by twenty-first century standards and largely indifferent toward enslaved black people, embraced emancipation as a tool to punish slaveholders, weaken the Confederacy, and protect the Union from future internal strife.[5]

Using what is regarded today as the war’s most famous speech to make his point, Gallagher criticizes a number of mainstream academia's most prominent, warning us for example, that in Garry Wills’ Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America, Wills’ "soaring claims for the Gettysburg Address can seduce the unwary into connecting the speech to wartime conceptions of what was at stake. In fact, Wills allocates almost no attention to contemporary reaction."

Gallagher levels similar critiques at James Oakes, Douglas L. Wilson, and especially Eric Foner, citing numerous sources that show "none of these authors established any direct connection between Lincoln’s remarks at Gettysburg and the loyal citizenry’s ideas about the war’s overarching purpose."[6]

Might Gallagher be exposing a classic example of historians reshaping history to fit perceived contemporary needs?

The Union War is a breath of fresh air, a balanced, documented reminder to all Americans of this conflict's primary purpose, drawing upon the words not only of the commander-in-chief, but the soldiers and citizens themselves to tell us what it was they were fighting for.

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[1] Gallagher, Gary. The Union War, (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2011), 78

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid., 50.

[4] Roy P. Basler, ed. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, (New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers University Press, 1953), Vol. VII, 506-7.

[5] Gallagher, Union War, 2.

[6] Ibid., 82, 84.

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Gary Gallagher's The Union War