#499 – Gary Gallagher: American Civil War, Slavery, Lincoln, Grant & Lee
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The following is a conversation with Gary Gallagher, a historian of the American Civil War. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description or at lexfreedman.com/sponsors. It is in fact the best way to support this podcast. We got Upwork for hiring quality freelancers, NetSuite for business management software, Shopify for selling stuff online, Element for electrolytes, BetterHelp for mental health, and a new sponsor, Plaud. New as a sponsor, but I've been using them for a long time. It's the amazing AI powered note taking device. And, of course, our frien
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 by the winter of eighteen sixty sixty one. 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 eighteen fifties. 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 the white people
So that's an important thing to say. It wasn't before the civil war discussion about abolishing slavery. It's about whether slavery the institution of slavery should be expanded.
Allowed to expand into federal territories. There there is a 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 among the even in the North, tiny minority among the the white people of The United States. The African American population, nearly 4,000,000 of them by 1860
So how did this escalate to a civil war? This almost policy discussion about the institution of slavery, how did it actually escalate?
It escalated into a civil war because in the presidential election of eighteen sixty, there'd been there'd been two party 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 North
You had the the the Deep South went out. What was the general view amongst the populace towards slavery? Let's kinda 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.
Well, the baseline among the white Americans, there were about 31 shade more than 31,000,000 Americans in 1860 for the census of 1860. About 4,000,000 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 are prejudiced. By our standards, the overwhelming majority of people in the free states were also deeply prejudiced. I
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