Gary Gallagher: uncertainty

Transcript context

…The following is a conversation with Gary Gallagher, a historian of the American Civil War. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so on. And now, dear friends, here’s Gary Gallagher. The American Civil War broke out in 1861. What were the causes of the Civil War? Could it have been avoided, or was it inevitable? 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 1860, ’61, 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 1850s. 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 white people in the United States now who would be making the political decisions. It’s a question of whether slavery was going to be able to expand into federal territories. That is what really created the starkest difference between the two sections in the 1850s, even in the late 1840s. The issues that came to most perilous a point in the view of many people then had to do with whether slavery would be allowed only where it already existed, or would it be allowed to expand. If it could expand, then it seemed that it might be conceivable at some point even that the slaveholding states could end up with a majority. They were in a minority by 1860, ’61 and feeling beleaguered, feeling threatened. They’d long since lost the population race to the free states. Early in the nation, the most powerful states were slaveholding states. Virginia was by far the most important state. Four of the first five presidents were from Virginia, all slaveholders, all prominent members of the slaveholding class. Those days were long gone by the late 1850s. So that’s an important thing to say. It wasn’t before the Civil War a discussion about abolishing slavery. It’s about whether slavery, the institution of slavery, should be expanded.…

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