The Union War (review)

As respected historian Gary W. Gallagher spells out plainly in the opening sentence of the introduction to this volume, "the loyal American citizenry fought a war for union that also killed slavery" (7). In the two hundred pages that follow, he provides a valuable reminder that although the Civil War was caused by slavery and decided the fate of that peculiar institution, the preservation of the Union remained the foremost motivating factor in the minds of the majority of its northern participants. To the people of the northern states, the Civil War was, above all else, the struggle of a free people, waging war by means of its own citizen-soldiers, to defend its self-governing republic against the attack of a slaveholding oligarchy. In so doing, northerners believed they had preserved not only their own republic for their posterity but also the principle of republican government for the entire world to emulate. The destruction of slavery was, for most northerners, an unregretted side effect.

Gallagher opens his account with a discussion of the Grand Review, in which approximately 150,000 Union troops of the armies of the Potomac, Tennessee, and Cumberland paraded triumphantly through the streets of Washington on May 23 and 24, 1865 to celebrate the Union victory. He takes to task some modern historians who have shown a propensity to criticize the review. These scholars, he believes, have failed to appreciate its true significance. Although black troops did not participate, this was not because of any deliberate desire to exclude them, but rather because no black units were stationed at that time in the immediate vicinity of the capital. Like most of the Union's troops at the end of the war, the black units were deployed elsewhere and thus were not available to parade through Washington. Abundant admiring recognition of black troops in contemporary newspaper accounts made clear that they would have been welcome in the review had their participation been possible. Other scholars have criticized the review as a celebration of militarism, brutality, or, worse still, patriotism, but Gallagher explains that to the soldiers who marched up Pennsylvania Avenue, and the even larger crowds of civilians who watched and cheered them, it was above all a celebration of the ability of citizen-soldiers to preserve the Union, and with it the world's foremost (and thoroughly exceptional) example of self-government.

Gallagher next moves naturally to the strictures of many recent scholars on the North and its cause in the Civil War. Such scholars find northerners of the Civil War generation insufficiently committed to several of the values held dear by many modern academics and accuse the victors of the Civil War of accepting inequalities of race, class, and gender. However, as Gallagher points out, concepts of race, either of equality or of racism, were not much on the minds of the majority of white Americans, who lived in a society in which they rarely encountered African Americans at all. To northerners of the Civil War generation, the Union, as the embodiment of what Lincoln famously called "the last best hope of earth," was the chief motivating factor in the war, as demonstrated in such diverse elements of wartime culture as popular songs or the patriotic decorations on stationery envelopes used by soldiers in sending letters to their families back home. The theme continued in the postwar accounts of Union soldiers, who celebrated the victory of citizen-soldiers in preserving the national unity of the states that was essential to the preservation of liberty. Most of these northerners accepted emancipation chiefly as a useful tool in saving the Union and punishing the traitors who threatened it. Thus, during the course of the war, many who had initially fought only for the Union came to support emancipation. Nevertheless, saving the Union often remained the chief goal of these northerners.

Also important in strengthening the devotion of the northern people to the cause of Union was the Union army, both by its existence...