Gary Gallagher, more carefully and precisely than anyone else, enables the reader to understand why so many citizen soldiers were willing to peril their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to preserve the United States as one nation, indivisible and, in Lincoln's words at Gettysburg, to give the "new nation" brought forth in 1776 a "new birth of freedom" in 1863. -- James M. McPherson, author of Battle Cry of Freedom The Union Warreaffirms Gary Gallagher's reputation as one of the most astute and provocative writers on the American Civil War. This work places the Union at the heart of the war but also argues for the central role of armies and soldiers in understanding how the goals of reunion and emancipation were finally realized. With clarity and verve, Gallagher deals with large questions in an unfailingly profound way. -- George C. Rable, author of God's Almost Chosen Peoples Gary Gallagher has written another gem in The Union War. A companion to his brilliant and controversial The Confederate War, this slender volume is sure to generate wide readership and debate. -- Joseph T. Glatthaar, author of General Lee's Army: From Victory to Defeat A rare volume that forces us to reconsider how we think about the Civil War. Examining historic actors in the context of their own time and place, Gallagher reminds of the centrality of "Union" as the motivating force driving the Northern cause, and the significance of those citizen-soldiers who joined the Union Army in determining the results. -- Matthew Gallman, author of Northerners at War: Reflections on the Civil War Home Front
Gary W. Gallagher is John L. Nau III Professor of History at the University of Virginia.
Gary Gallagher, more carefully and precisely than anyone else,
enables the reader to understand why so many citizen soldiers were
willing to peril their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred
honor to preserve the United States as one nation, indivisible and,
in Lincoln's words at Gettysburg, to give the "new nation" brought
forth in 1776 a "new birth of freedom" in 1863. -- James M.
McPherson, author of Battle Cry of Freedom
The Union Warreaffirms Gary Gallagher's reputation as one of
the most astute and provocative writers on the American Civil War.
This work places the Union at the heart of the war but also argues
for the central role of armies and soldiers in understanding how
the goals of reunion and emancipation were finally realized. With
clarity and verve, Gallagher deals with large questions in an
unfailingly profound way. -- George C. Rable, author of God's
Almost Chosen Peoples
Gary Gallagher has written another gem in The Union War. A
companion to his brilliant and controversial The Confederate War,
this slender volume is sure to generate wide readership and debate.
-- Joseph T. Glatthaar, author of General Lee's Army: From
Victory to Defeat
A rare volume that forces us to reconsider how we think about the
Civil War. Examining historic actors in the context of their own
time and place, Gallagher reminds of the centrality of "Union" as
the motivating force driving the Northern cause, and the
significance of those citizen-soldiers who joined the Union Army in
determining the results. -- Matthew Gallman, author of
Northerners at War: Reflections on the Civil War Home
Front
Brimming with insights, eloquent in argument, and filled with new
evidence from the men who fought for the Union, this revisionist
history will cause readers to rethink many of the now-standard
Civil War interpretations. An essential work. -- Randall M. Miller
* Library Journal (starred review) *
This exceptionally fine book is in effect a companion piece to its
author's The Confederate War, published in 1997... Now, in
The Union War, Gallagher is back to take issue with what has
become the new conventional wisdom, that the North fought the war
in order to achieve the emancipation of the slaves. While welcoming
the post-civil-rights-era emphasis on "slavery, emancipation, and
the actions of black people, unfairly marginalized for decades in
writings about the conflict," Gallagher makes a very strong
case--in my view a virtually irrefutable one--that the overriding
motive in the North was preservation of the Union...Gallagher, who
holds a distinguished professorship in history at the University of
Virginia, is far more interested in pursuing historical truth than
in massaging whatever praiseworthy sentiments he may harbor on
race, gender, class or anything else. He knows that for the
historian the central obligation is to understand and interpret the
past, not to judge it. This is what he has done, to exemplary
effect, in The Union War. I suspect that one of his motives
in writing it may have been to remind us of what a precious thing
our Union is, a Union that we have come to take for granted.
Fighting for its preservation was a noble thing, in and of itself.
-- Jonathan Yardley * Washington Post *
Gary Gallagher, a Civil War historian at the University of
Virginia, aims to recover an antebellum understanding of the Civil
War. In his new book, The Union War, Gallagher argues that
Northerners actually went to war to support the abstract idea of
"Union"--a political idea, he writes, whose "meaning has been
almost completely effaced" from our modern political consciousness.
-- Josh Rothman * Boston Globe blog *
In The Union War, Gallagher offers not so much a history of
wartime patriotism as a series of meditations on the meaning of the
Union to Northerners, the role of slavery in the conflict and how
historians have interpreted (and in his view misinterpreted) these
matters...At a time when only half the population bothers to vote
and many Americans hold their elected representatives in contempt,
Gallagher offers a salutary reminder of the power of democratic
ideals not simply to Northerners in the era of the Civil War, but
also to people in other nations, who celebrated the Union victory
as a harbinger of greater rights for themselves. Imaginatively
invoking sources neglected by other scholars--wartime songs,
patriotic images on mailing envelopes and in illustrated
publications, and regimental histories written during and
immediately after the conflict--Gallagher gives a dramatic portrait
of the power of wartime nationalism. -- Eric Foner * New York Times
Book Review *
While mindful of slavery's complex and deleterious role in
fomenting disunion, Gallagher emphasizes the centrality of
Northerners' devotion to the idea of the Union of their
grandparents and their parents...Historians who stress emancipation
over Union, Gallagher insists, miss the realities of antebellum
inequalities based on class, gender and race...Gallagher's great
contribution lies in contextualizing and underscoring the broad
meaning of the Union, and later emancipation, to Northerners. --
John David Smith * News & Observer *
Gallagher, one of the nation's preeminent Civil War scholars and a
professor at the University of Virginia, deals in his latest book
of the question of why did the North fight? His answer is in the
volume's first sentence: The loyal American citizenry fought a war
for Union that also killed slavery. This fast-paced review of the
controversies that civil war historians have been arguing about is
opinionated, well-informed, provocative and just the thing any
American history buff needs to read this spring as our country
gears up for the sesquicentennial of the conflict that made the
United States begin to live up to the Declaration's words that "all
men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with
certain unalienable rights." -- Karl Rove * Rove.com *
Gallagher recaptures the meaning of Union to the generation that
fought for it. He rescues the "Cause" for which they fought from
modern historians who maintain that the abolition of slavery was
the only achievement of the Civil War that justified all that death
and destruction...He makes his point with force and clarity. --
James M. McPherson * New York Review of Books *
Bold, fast-paced, and provocative...The Union War offers a
searing critique of what Gallagher terms anachronistic scholarship
that privileges emancipation and the agency of African-Americans
during the war over loyal citizens' commitment to the concept of a
perpetual Union. Accusing historians of allowing "modern
sensibilities" to skew their "view of how participants of a distant
era understood the war," Gallagher finds, not surprisingly, that
their scholarship exposes "the many ways in which wartime
Northerners fell short of later standards of acceptable thought and
behavior."...Gallagher reminds us of the centrality and importance
of the Union to the war that forever ended serious threats of
secession and racial slavery. -- John David Smith * Chronicle of
Higher Education *
[An] important work. -- Lawton Posey * Charleston Gazette *
This slender volume offers a convincing demonstration of what
motivated most white U.S. citizens during the Civil War. Theirs was
not a quest to end slavery, although emancipation became a vital
tactic in the epic conflict...Gallagher shows that participants
fought to save a political arrangement they considered sacred, and
begrudgingly supported emancipation as the best way to bring the
secessionist serpent to heel. -- E. R. Crowther * Choice *
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