Gary Gallagher: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, there would be continued heated political debates, intense political debates about the expansion of slavery, but it would not cause rebellion to then escalate into a full-on hot war. I think that’s conceivable. I don’t think the war was inevitable. But I think the conditions were present for it to happen, obviously. I mean, that’s stating… ‘Cause it did happen. But I think it’s very tricky to just say that it was inevitable. That’s kind of starting at the end of the story and just saying, “Let’s look at the factors that got us here. We know it was gonna happen, and these are the things that pointed this direction.” Can we just actually linger on this, on the nature of war? Over 700,000 people dead. How do we make sense of our capacity as, in that context, Americans? To kill sometimes literally our brothers……

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