The Union War. By Gary Gallagher. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Pp. 1, 215, ISBN 978-0-674-04562-0

 

In this provocative book, Garry Gallagher insists the North prosecuted a war against the Southern Confederacy solely to preserve and perpetuate its political Union. Such a statement seems self-evident upon initial consideration, but the past four decades of scholarship on the American Civil War privilege long neglected issues such as emancipation, race, and the agency of African Americans in the conflict. Gallagher lauds this literature and notes its remarkable achievements since the era of Civil Rights, but believes (and hence this new book) that such issues obscure the centrality of Union to the northern war effort: “A portrait of the nation,” Gallagher writes, “that is dominated by racism, exclusion, and oppression obscures more than it reveals” (4). The United States in the nineteenth century, according to the author, afforded the broadest, most remarkable political franchise available to Westerners in all the world, and the rank and file of the Union war effort went to war to preserve the integrity and legitimacy of that political franchise.

Gallagher opens with a recounting of the Grand Review of United States forces in Washington on 23-4 May 1865. The Review receives treatment from other historians in the field, but according to Gallagher, only in as much as it helps to illustrate burgeoning American nationalism, the militant American character, or, dimensions of racial oppression and gender exclusion. But Gallagher deploys it here to buttress his view that a multitude of historical considerations obscure the importance of the Review to the cause of Union. The Review featured men from across the nation, men of like faith, economy, and interest, marching together under the banners of their distinct native states yet bound together under the banner of Union. The Review celebrated and thrust into public spectacle the citizen soldier. Thus, in Gallagher’s mind, it offers the appropriate vantage point from which to understand more clearly such issues as emancipation, the power of Union, the citizen soldier, and African American agency.

Drawing from soldiers’ own words, their letters, contemporary print culture, contemporary visual culture, and even from song, Gallagher demonstrates the centrality of Union to the northern cause against the oligarchs of the southern planterocracy. In Gallagher’s view, the cause of Union remained a constant and consistent theme in northern political and cultural discourse from the years 1860 to 1865. Soldiers wrote often and with clarity on their desires to protect the government of their inheritance. Envelopes bore the intensely religious symbols—the signs and seals—of the American nation, “Union!” emblazoned across the paper in distinctive script. The North marshaled language even from Andrew Jackson: “Our Union. It must be preserved.” Posters and lithographs depicted the resolute citizen-soldier, sabre raised, under the glorious banner of the Union. George Root’s legendary Battle-Cry of Freedom, perhaps the crown jewel of Civil War song, affirms the cause of Union. Its author penned the piece in response to Lincoln’s call for 300,000, three-year volunteers from the loyal states. The song features no references to the eradication of slavery. Its only mention of “slave” is itself a comment on the political economy of the north, in which no white man, however poor, risked subjugation to another before the law. The cause rings unmistakably clear: “Union forever!”

Gallagher’s central argument, his claim that the northern cause of Union, first, foremost, and above all (even emancipation) holds deeper significance because it cuts against the grain of much recent Neo-abolitionist scholarship on the war. This scholarship suggests that Union war aims shifted in 1862 towards emancipation—a profoundly moral cause and one that worked to sanctify the northern war effort. Gallagher shows that though Americans never doubted the transcendent goal of fighting a massive war to restore the Union, they remained much less certain in 1864 on the merits of emancipation. As George B. McClellan’s impressive showing in the 1864 presidential election revealed (he garnered forty-five percent of the popular vote), many Americans favored a restoration of the Union even with slavery intact in the southern states (78-9). Gallagher takes issue with the broader trajectory of Civil War historiography vis-à-vis the question of emancipation. The Civil War, he claims, preserved the Union. It happened also to kill slavery. The abolition of slavery was thus incidental, accidental, in the Aristotelian and proper sense of the term. The Neo-abolitionist turn accomplished the two-fold task of restoring African Americans to the narrative of the war after the era of Civil Rights while combating the religion of the Lost Cause.

Gallagher’s historiographical intervention is at once this book’s great strength and flaw; a strength, because it helps to curb the “Appomattox Syndrome” prevalent in the Neo-abolitionist turn. This condition holds that because a war fought for Union killed—in the process—the institution of slavery, ergo, the abolition of slavery existed from the first in northern war aims as an overriding goal. Historians mistakenly interpret the emergence of emancipation as a war aim equal to, and predicated upon, the cause of Union. Gallagher considers this an historical fallacy and largely anachronistic. His historiographical intervention remains at once a weakness, however, for other reasons. Much of the book reads as an exercise in historiography that targets mercilessly the arguments of other eminent scholars. Gallagher takes issue with a perceived suppression of ‘Union’ in the works of Harry Stout and Walter McDougall, but particularly with their laments for the tragic nature of the war. He encapsulates complex and thorough arguments with remarkable brevity. While the American political experiment, the Union, certainly stands as an unique endeavor in legal thought and politics, it seems lost on Gallagher that some historians of the United States harbor moral reservations with the religion of American exceptionalism. Gallagher takes for granted (as did Lincoln in a matter unique to his time) the existence of an American nation that predated the United States Constitution, a fact many historians, and the very preconditions of the war itself, call into question. With regard to the question of emancipation and the fallacy of the Appomattox Syndrome, Gallagher exerts great energy to refute the scholarship of Chandra Manning, who locates anti-slavery sentiment in soldiers in the early stages of the war. While Manning discovers such sentiment in the words of some northern soldiers from 1862 onward, it seems a telling feature to Gallagher that many more remained silent on the issue of slavery. In addition to this, soldiers explicitly disavowed the notion that they fought for the cause of emancipation. Over and above, this is a useful, eloquent, and forcefully argued study that will help to nuance how historians understand those factors that compelled northerners to fight the slave power of the South. It will surely provoke much conversation and debate within the Civil War scholarly community.

MITCHELL G. KLINGENBERG

Texas Christian University