American History Hit - The Confederacy: Could They Have Won?

Episode Date: March 17, 2025

Did the Confederates predict that secession would lead to war? How ready were they to fight? And what was their military strategy?Cecily Zander is back on the podcast for this third part of our series on the Confederacy. Listen to find out who was in charge, and whether there was ever a point when they might have won.Cecily is the author of the upcoming 'Abraham Lincoln and the American West', and 'The Army Under Fire: Antimilitarism in the Civil War Era'.Produced and edited by Sophie Gee. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. The Tredegar ironworks here in Richmond, Virginia, roar with fire and smoke. The largest ironworks in the Confederacy.

From here, on the James River, about half the artillery used by the Confederate forces originates and then rolls out on rails that were probably made here too. Over a thousand cannons forged here will thunder across the battlefields of this Civil War conflict. Fitting that were so close to the Capitol building. While the men are down here shouting and sweating and having, hammering away. Up there on Main Street, Jeff Davis and his generals are forging something else altogether. A strategy for a war. They are desperate to win. Greetings, folks. It's Don Wildman here, your host for another episode of American History Hit. Welcome. Today's interview is part of

our deep dive series on the nature and practice of the Confederacy, those 11 states that seceded from the Union through the winter and spring of 1860, 61, engaging in war until 65. South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee in that chronological order. I list them to say what a massive geography of 750,000 square miles we cover, which begs the question, how would they fight this war? What was the strategy? Against such a formidable foe as the United States, whose population outnumbered the South Morton three to one, never mind its obvious advantages in equipment and supplies. Cecilie Zander joins me today, as she has graciously done in the past.

Cessaly was my guest for Episode 162, Ulysses S. Grant and the Civil War. She is author of Abraham Lincoln and the American West, manuscript in progress. Also, the Army Under Fire, anti-militarism in the Civil War era from 2004. Welcome, Cicely Zander to back to American history. Thanks for coming. Thanks, thanks for having me. This is a conversation that concerns the vantage point of the Confederacy. We're looking at this from the Confederacy. And I think I have to ask you first, were they really expecting a war with the North to begin with? I think both sides hoped it wouldn't. I think they thought they'd be let go if they had the numbers. You talk about this vast geography. 11 states decide to leave. That's a huge percentage

of the country. So I think they thought they might be allowed to go in peace if they did it carefully. But they also did immediately start seizing United States military installations, federal arsenals, weapons, and they started enlisting an army pretty quickly. So I think they had in the back of their minds, war was not a distant possibility, though they probably held out hope. It wouldn't happen. But if it did, and both sides were guilty of this, they thought it would be a fairly quick war. So much of the organization of the Confederacy, its constitution, it was all a mirror image of the United States. And I suppose that went for the military as well.

The United States, to this point, was very suspicious of its own standing armies. You know, he didn't believe in that idea. Was the same true of the Confederacy? Yeah, and the Confederacy has the problem they don't have a preexisting professional army to draw on. They do have about 300 officers who had formerly been regular United States soldiers, so officers in the United States Army who resign their commissions and take up positions in the Confederate Army, but it's an entirely volunteer force. And it's going to be enlisted on a state-by-state basis.

So you're going to get regiments like the 15th Mississippi and the 4th, Virginia, and so on. And so just like the U.S. Army will be ultimately 95% volunteer. These are volunteer soldiers. They're not professionals by any means. They may have some experience with weaponry, perhaps some distant experience with militias or in the U.S.-Mexico war, though that would be quite rare, except for the oldest amongst them. And so they're untrained. They're fresh. And they're coming to this because of a cause.

And that's really their motivation. It's really, I mean, you grow up hearing about the Kentucky. and, you know, First Pennsylvania or something, they really were local militia, or state militia, at least, forged into a whole army and that went for both sides. Who was in charge militarily? So it's a very good question. Just like in the United States Constitution, the president is the commander in chief. So he gets to make some important decisions. There is a cabinet in the Confederacy, though. It's unclear how much influence they had as compared to the U.S. cabinet. We know someone like Edwin Stanton, the Secretary of War, in the United States, was extremely important. This seemed less true in the Confederacy.

There were some military advisors kind of floating around in at different times. Jefferson Davis pulls different folks in. But by and large, it's Jefferson Davis and a few trusted senior officers who are making a lot of the decisions for the Confederate military. The Confederate Constitution declares him as commander-in-chief, just like the U.S. Constitution. And also, interestingly, he was the Secretary of War on. under Franklin Pierce. So he knows how all this, you know, hierarchy is supposed to work. When does Robert Lee step into power, commander of the army of Northern Virginia? Yeah, so Robert Lee spends the first about 18 months of the war in what is now West Virginia.

And he sort of is not making a very good name for himself. Some journals, one of my favorite Confederate women's journals is by a woman named Catherine Ann Devereaux Edmondson. She calls him old stick in the mud. So Lee is seen as this, not someone with a great potential, after Joe Johnston is wounded at Seven Pines in the Peninsula Campaign during the seven days battles against George McClellan, Lee is called to take command of the Army of Northern Virginia. And not only does he take command, he basically reorients the entire perspective of the war. The union was in within 15 miles of Richmond. And within three to four months, Lee will be launching an invasion of the United States into Maryland. And so it's a quick turnaround. Does being the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, a very glorious title there, put him de facto in. Is he in charge over Davis or does he really answer to Jeff Davis?

He answers to Jeff Davis technically, but unlike most of the other senior officers, Davis respectfully enough to really not dictate to him. He had some confidence in what Lee could do. There's only a handful of generals that Davis feels he can be this loose with the reins. Lee is one of them. Albert Sidney Johnston's another. But, you know, we've talked about U.S. Grant in the Civil War. At Shiloh, Sydney Johnson has killed facing Grant.

and the Confederacy loses it's probably second best commander by April of 1862. So Lee kind of stands alone in terms of having a relationship where he can tell Davis what he thinks and Davis can't really tell him what to do. Davis will try to tell most of his other generals what to do all of the time.

This is a good chance to drill down a bit on Jefferson Davis the way we really often don't. Jefferson Davis, West Point graduate with experience, lots of experience in the Mexican-American War, distinguished himself really. as I said, a former Secretary of War under Franklin Pierce, and now he's commander in chief. Is this going to play all this experience? Is it going to play it to his favor as the president, or is it going to be making more of a meddler?

The answer to the question is the latter. He's going to be an inveterate meddler and kind of military affairs. But initially, his experience is enough to scare Lincoln into basically saying, I, Lincoln's like, I feel way behind here. I got to catch up. Lincoln knows that as compared to Davis, they're going to look at those two and say, which of these two presidents is going to lead their nation to a military victory and an all-encompassing war? I mean, Davis would have taken those laurels out the gate. He clashes with Beauregard, who was the general who starts the Sumpter, and as you say, Joseph Johnston, how do they work that stuff out? Like, is it a greased machine as they get going? Not really. No, it's a lot of pouting, a lot of letters sort of being exchanged. back and forth. A nice reminder to whenever you write that really snippy email to wait before hitting

send to go back and reread. Jefferson Davis, Joseph Johnston, Pierre Beauregard, none of them were that careful. They would just sort of send off off the top of their head what they thought about each other and it made for some chilly relations. And Davis will kind of run through these generals. He'll remove Beauregard. When Beauregard upsets him, he'll take Johnston out of command when Johnston upsets him. He, for some reason, stays loyal to Braxton Bragg, who commands the second most important Confederate Army for the largest chunk of the war in the Western Theater. He won't remove Bragg for really interesting reasons, but eventually he's forced to do so because Bragg is fundamentally incompetent. So Davis has a couple of problems. He can't get along

with most of his senior commanders, but he also doesn't have that many competent senior commanders. And so he's running out of options. It's interesting how history, traditional history of the Civil War, paints it differently, were fed this idea that the southern states had this whole kind of military thing. They were just good at what they did. And Lee was just this respected, elegant commander. They had all the same political problems, never mind logistical problems as the North. Kind of one of the factors that makes it a more efficient war is they're on their home territory, right, most of the time. Yeah, I mean, the Confederate, if we want to talk about what is the Confederates?

you have to do to win militarily, they just essentially need to follow the blueprint of the American Revolution, of the Patriots. They need to defend home ground. They need to hold out long enough that the Union will give up or in the Patriot case, the British, because in order to win what the Union has to do or the British have to do in the case of the revolution is invade and occupy. And as you said at the top, this is three quarters of a million square miles. This is 11 states, including Texas, which is quite big. And so for the union, the task is almost insurmountable. The Confederacy just has to wait until the United States, the ordinary citizens, lose hope in the cause. And the Confederacy, you know, one reason we talk about Lee so much, and these two things

tie so nicely together is that one reason Lee comes through so strongly is not only was he the most capable officer that the Confederacy had, but he also becomes sort of deeply associated with the survival of the Confederate nation. Lee is really the avatar for the Confederacy by the end of the war. And there's this view that as long as Lee is in the field, as long as the Army of Northern Virginia is able to take the field, the Confederacy can go on. And that's a really important thing for listeners to keep in their minds when they think about kind of what the Confederacy is up to militarily. Did they know that this entire war would be fought on their ground pretty much? Yeah. I mean, they were expecting an invasion. And the few times that various Confederacy is,

Confederate armies, you know, go north. The expectation is never to stay in the United States. It's never to stay in Pennsylvania, Maryland. Braxton, goes into Kentucky, a Confederate commander named Henry Hopkins Sibley goes out to New Mexico, which is technically a union from Texas and does a little invasion over there. They never expect to stay. But again, it's a way of attrition. It's a way of grinding down northern morale, saying, you're so incompetent at invading us that we have these six-week windows occasionally where we can North and actually invade you. And that's really supposed to be a real grind on northern morale. But for the most part, the Confederacy expected to sit back and fight a fairly defensive war, which, again, makes Lee such an ironic figure. Lee is not a defensive general. He's a very aggressive general. Interesting.

They mean to force Lincoln to the negotiating table. That's really the general goal and objective of this strategy. A defensive strategy is actually a very strong war to fight because you always know what you're going to do. And it forces the hand of your rival because they have to bring in all sorts of supplies and all sorts of stuff. And it's just an exhausting process to go after somebody on their home territory. There is a point where this is very close to working out for them. When does the offensive defensive strategy start? So this was kind of what Davis hoped would be possible from the beginning. Sit back as much as possible. But when you had these opportunities to attack a

concentration of Union troops, say they had invaded, the Tennessee campaign, the Shiloh campaign is a great example of this. The Confederates sit back in Corinth, Mississippi. Grant advances further south after Henry and Donaldson, and they see that Grant is concentrating near Shiloh Church and the Confederates strike out. And they aim to punch Grant in the nose

and then kind of again fall back to Corinth, protect that railroad junction. In that regard, Shilohel's not as much of a loss for the Confederacy as it sometimes portrayed. They really achieve that defensive, offensive strategy, sitting back, getting a solid punch, stopping Grant for a moment, and then being able to retreat safely back into Mississippi. Well, and defending all their territory is obviously

going to stretch their forces too thin, so they have to keep doing that. Talk about how slavery played a role in their general strategy. How were they going to use this? I guess they thought of it as an asset, right? Yeah, well, absolutely. I mean, if you think about what percentage of your military age male population you can mobilize, the Confederacy. comes close to 100% because they almost need nobody to stay home and attend to the crops and keep the farms running, which are essential for supplying the army and keeping it fed. So women go to work in wartime industries. They do this in the civil war just as they've done in almost every American war, helping to make ammunition and uniforms and so on. But back at home, Confederate agriculture is sustained

in large part by the work of enslaved people. And so it's a huge asset. They can mobilize something like 90, 95% of their military age male population, the United States doesn't have this luxury. And the Confederacy still has to turn to conscription to keep men in the ranks. They're forcing people into the army very early on in the war trying to get those manpower numbers up, because as you say, it is a three to one disadvantage that they find themselves at. You can kind of map the civil war by it sort of happens around these prioritized areas where slavery was a big part of life. Is that just a coincidence? I mean, that's how they planned. it out? It's interesting. A lot of the most heavily populated enslaved county, so where something like

90% of the population was enslaved are sort of on the coast of the Carolinas and Georgia, where rice plantations and sugar plantations are very popular. And then on the Mississippi Delta, where the United States is concentrated on executing Winfield Scott's Anaconda Plan, which requires control of the coasts and coastal counties and cities and installations, as well as control of the Mississippi River. And so the United States is naturally going to be hitting these areas with heavily enslaved population as quickly as they possibly can because that's part of their overall military strategy to encircle and cut off the Confederacy. And who was the architect of this Confederate strategy? I think it sort of organically comes from this relationship that the Confederacy has to the Patriots in the American Revolution. I think it's really interesting.

And they all, you know, early on, people like Lee and Davis and Johnston and Beauregard, there's no sort of grand council of war. They don't all come together and say, this is what we need to do. They all just sort of understand that their best template is to do what their Patriot forebears had done. And that's why Virginia is so important to the Confederacy, right? Virginia comes late to the game. They come in the second wave of seceding states. Getting Virginia gets you that revolutionary legacy. It gets you the association with Washington. It gets you where our Liberty Lee, who is married into the Washington family through his wife. It is incredibly important. And so I think the Confederacy knows from the beginning, this is kind of the basic template. They see themselves as patriots. And that's the plan they're going to execute. But it's telling that the first capital was in Montgomery in Alabama. So deep in the south, they didn't know. I mean, it's very likely that Virginia would have been a border state, right? Yeah, Virginia voted not to secede more than once. And then they finally did after Fort Sumter. So Virginia felt compelled. But, But, like, Jubile Early, who will become one of the most ardent, lost-cause advocates, an important general serving under Robert Dillian in the Army in Northern Virginia is a delegate to the Virginia Secession Convention, and he votes against it twice. And then he becomes the biggest Confederate advocate you could hope to find. Sure. So the idea is to make it as costly as possible, both in blood and treasure for the North to fight this war. Eventually, the public's going to turn away for this. I'm curious if propaganda played any role in the Confederate strategy.

A little bit, but it's amazing how quickly the kind of information streams of these two nations, and we can think about this as a war between two modern 19th century nation states, diverge. Of course, you get newspapers kind of going back and forth, but I think the Confederacy believed they weren't going to be able to convince the majority of the White North that their cause was just, because the majority of the White North sees them as breaking the fundamental compact of Union, which was what made the United States such a great nation that made its Democratic Republic flourish. And so I don't know that there was a lot of time invested in propaganda.

Though, again, when Lee goes north and Bragg and even Sibley, they go north into the border states and into Pennsylvania, and they do say they come as liberators, that they want to allow these border states to actually express their true indication of their feelings and join the Confederacy. But I'd say that's about where the propaganda, and a piece. Interesting. I'll be right back after this short break. Meantime, if you'd like us to cover

anything specifically, if you have any ideas of subject matter, we should be looking at, send us an email at a-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-huryhit.com. We'd love to hear from you. It's all about getting the supply lines of the North stretched out as thinly as possible, which, of course, doesn't happen as well as they planned, especially when the Mississippi River kicks over to the Union. And all of those supply lines are maintained, especially when you have a quartermaster, a professional quartermaster in charge in the Ulysses S. Grant. That was the big factor. When that doesn't work out and they're really on their heels, it becomes a guerrilla warfare, doesn't it? Yeah, in lots of places in the Confederacy, you see this devolution of kind of organized warfare. And the Confederates will say

they're responding to union strategy. They're responding to Sherman and Sheridan going off-peased from what anyone expected, cutting loose from their supply lines, invading deep into Confederate territory. So the Confederates say they're sort of justified in this. And it's very few Confederate officers who don't at least entertain this in some degree. The one who really doesn't at the surrender at Appomattox, Lee sits down and he says, you know, he contemplates, should I give orders to what is left of the Army of Northern Virginia to take to the forest, to take to the hills and to wage a guerrilla war to see if they can go down to the Carolinas, maybe unite with Joe Johnston's army. And he says, no, it's just not going to be worth. the cost or worth the trouble. Let's just surrender it and call it done. This is so exciting to me to finally understand and say once and for all, I understand how

the North understood how to fight the South. Which was, you know, chicken and egg conversation. Did the North recognize the offensive defensive strategy or the other way around? Did the South understand how to beat them by drawing them in? I think the North came late. They unlocked the key late. And it was only through the ascension of Grant and his two key subordinates. There's Sherman and Sheridan in particular. They led George McClellan and his conservative approach dominate their view of the war for too long. And McClellan had a point, right? McClellan thought an easier conservative war would compel the Confederacy to come back. And it's after 1863 and after the Emancipation Proclamation that the union

really starts to reevaluate and then grants rise, which is, you know, should have been solidified by 1862, but Lincoln instead chooses the pull Henry Halleck out of the Western theater to be the kind of chief military advisor instead of Grant is delayed another couple of years. But once Grant is in place, the tide really turns. Although Grant's major initiatives are stalling. And we talked about how close did the Confederacy come. I would say the summer of 1864 is the closest the Confederacy ever comes to winning the war. This is when Lincoln writes his letter to his cabinet saying, we're stalled in every military theater. We're not achieving any battlefield victories.

I'm not going to be reelected. So we need to do something in the next few months to bring this war to an end. Or George McClellan will win the election and the Confederacy will be a free and independent nation. And Sherman captures Atlanta and it changes everything. It's a chilling fact how late in the game this could have gone otherwise. Why did they lose? I mean, what's sort of the list of factors that causes that to happen? You know, it's funny.

some of these are integral elements of the lost cause mytholysization of the war. So we have to be careful, you know, not to oversell them, but they were outnumbered and they were out supplied. That's very true. But they still, for four years, managed to wage a very effective war against this fact. And again, it is the ascension of Grant, who is someone who is willing to use those supplies to actually put the Confederacy through the meat grinder that makes it really possible. The Confederacy, seems to lose its most key positions when it finds itself subjected to a siege. And Robert Ely says this at the outset of the Overland campaign in the spring of 1864. He says, I will fight Grant up and down Virginia. I can do that. But the second it gets into a siege, which it does at Petersburg in the summer of 1864, and then goes on for nine months until the surrender at Appomattox, once it gets to a siege, it's only a matter of time. You can essentially start the countdown clock. Lee doesn't know how long that is. But you trap him down in a siege. He can't maneuver. It's attrition at that point. And we see this in the fact that Lee's army goes from

some 60,000 men to about 15,000 in a matter of weeks as the war grinds to its really slow conclusion. And so the Confederacy got trapped. They fell victim to sieges and that kind of meat grinder of union superiority. The first draft in the United States is the southern conscription. Does Does that continue throughout the war? Does it cycle? Yes. So the Confederacy goes to a draft a few months before the United States does. Both do. But the Confederacy expands its parameters over the course of the war. So it starts at a fairly normal, something like ages 18 to 25. By the end of the war, it's something like age 17 to age 50. You could be drafted into the Confederate Army. And those are old men, yes. And the difference between the United States and the Confederacy in this regard, the United States, when you signed up to go

fight in the Civil War, you were guaranteed that after three years, if you wanted to get out, you could. Lots of folks re-up and they go back for the remaining two years of the war. In the Confederacy, once you are in a gray uniform, you are not getting out. There's no three-year term it is for the duration. And that's what makes, I think, the Confederate draft a little harsher, but they were desperate for men so desperate by the late sort of final weeks of the war that Robert Lee is actually talking seriously to Jefferson Davis about enlist. enslaved people into his army. Yeah, one wonders why they waited so long.

I mean, these are people that could be told what to do. I guess it was to hold down the home front, right? And Lee also says the thing about it is, and Lee is a soldier through and through, and he knows what it means to fight. He says, if you ask them to do this, you have to give them their freedom. Yeah, exactly. You can't sort of keep it from them. You can't order them to die.

Like, that's where Lee kind of draws the one. How much of a factor did exemptions for slave-holding Southerners play in this? I mean, here's the fact. For each 20 enslaved people, one white man must stay on the plantation. That was the kind of rule of thumb, right? So it allows, it tends to be overseers who stay back. Occasionally plantation owners would stay. The Civil War has often been portrayed as a rich man's war and a poor man's fight, especially in the South.

And again, that's, I mean, to be clear, about 60% of Southerners never owned a slave. That didn't mean slavery didn't impact their lives and they didn't rely on slavery to maintain social order and political order and so on. But we do know that slaveholders, especially in the early months of the war, are some of the first to enlist and the most eager. And so there's this interesting correlation. The more enslaved people, a person owned, especially the sons of maybe these wealthy plantation owners, they're some of the first men to kind of go into the ranks. But you have about three and a half million enslaved people in the Confederacy. Most plantations don't have more than 20 slaves. I mean, the average is like six to 10. So those exemptions are fairly rare in terms of how they would be deployed.

It's all about supplies, of course, in fighting any war. And the original northern strategy of the Anaconda Plan, the Scott's Anaconda, it gets caught up to by Grant's meat grinder of a pursuit. It becomes a successful blockade that plays such a factor because they can't get weapons. They can't get ammunition from other sides. Yeah, they can't get anything in. They still get enough, you know, muskets and so on. But they are running short of food. They are running short of uniforms.

It's very ad hoc in terms of what they get. We like to think of sort of wars, and we see them in movies, and both sides are sort of polished and well-dressed, and everybody's in matching uniforms. The Confederacy just struggled throughout the war to ever achieve that kind of cohesive look because of the supplies. They were able to get in, or more often than not, weren't able to get in.

And so they really do try to protect what they've got. But they're always at a disadvantage, and they're at a disadvantage in terms of where they can move supplies, even when one army may need them more than another, because they have something like 20% of the railroad mileage that the North has. They just don't have the logistical, not just the supply capacity, but the logistical capacity to move things quickly enough to respond to what's going on on the ground. If Lincoln was so worried in the summer of 1864 that his lack of re-election would cause the North to lose,

the South must have been dying for this. That must have been fundamental for them. But was it that political problem, that political outcome? Was that the fateful moment towards the end? It's tough to say. I think they throw a lot into trying to stall Sherman and Grant. You know, these things are sort of coincidental. And so they do need to, if they possibly can, they know that Lincoln's reelection kind of hinges on these two guys and whether or not they can succeed in their objective. So for Sherman, that's taking Atlanta, for Grant, that is moving toward Richmond. Lee Stalls Grant at Petersburg in June, this is partly what prompts Lincoln to write that letter. Sherman is still moving.

He's moving against Joseph Johnston. And Joseph Johnston goes into what's called a fighting retreat. He basically tries to retreat as slowly as possible in the face of Sherman's advance to save Atlanta. And the great irony is we criticized Joe Johnston as not being a very competent or capable officer. It was his fighting retreat that really kept Sherman at bay for as long as he did. Because he knew if he threw men at Sherman, Sherman would just plow them over and then march to Atlanta unimpeded. Johnston really slows him down. I have a feeling we're coming back to you for Sherman's March, which we've yet to do on this podcast.

It is the fateful military move that does end the war. But I really want to point out something I'm even sort of learning. I've never really framed it mentally as it's the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 and then the re-election in 1864 that really frames this entire thing. Yeah. Lincoln needs that re-election to know that the Northern people have given in the mandate to push this thing through to its conclusion. And Lincoln is always, you know, there's so much to admire about him, but his sense of doing what the people willed him to do, was really great. And that letter he writes about not being reelected essentially says, you know, the people may will that I not be reelected. And in that case, the people have willed that they don't want to win the war. And we have to accept that, either negotiate or surrender. Outcome of the war, at least 620,000 dead from both sides, 360,000 approximately from the U.S. and 258,000 from the Confederates, more union dead than Confederates. But as a percentage of the population, the Confederacy suffers a higher death rate amongst its military age men than any nation will in World War.

We think of all these European nations sort of losing the flower of their youth in the First World War. The percentage of young men who died from the Confederacies is actually higher, which really gives you some perspective on the impact this war has psychologically on these 11 Confederate states. Yeah, it's going to take the daughters of the Confederacy to rebuild this whole idea. April 9th, Ophthalmatics Courthouse, Virginia. Ulysses S. Grant accepts the unconditional surrender of General Robert Lee very famously, and the Civil War ends on May 13, 1865. At that very moment, the Confederate States of America ceased to exist. It was never a nation outside of war.

And so arguable, it was never a nation, you know, although it's the way we talk about it. I guess it's important just to put a pin in this idea. the Confederacy went to war against the United States to protect slavery and instead brought about its own and immediate abolition, which is just a bumper sticker on this entire idea, isn't it? Yep, they gambled big and they lost. And they had to know that that was, you know, when you hear people say that this wasn't really about slavery, the Confederates knew what they were betting. And their politicians say it and their generals say it. And that's what they're trying to preserve. But it takes a while for that to be on the table.

But when Lincoln finally does put it on the table, he figures it out, right? I mean, it takes Lincoln until early 1863, but he finally figures out. If the thing the Confederacy is fighting for is slavery, then the thing we need to go after. to undermine them is that thing. Sure. And so that's the irony. There's so many takeaways. For me, it's, thank God for the Gettysburg Address.

That's usually the one I go to and that it's scrawled on the walls of the Lincoln Memorial. I mean, it's got to be the takeaway from all of this. Cecily Xander is an accomplished academic author and speaker. She is the author of the upcoming Abraham Lincoln and the American West. Also the Army Under Fire, Anti-Militarism in the Civil War era from Bathelea. Rouge, Louisiana State Press, as well as a number of articles in various peer articles, which you can see, as I did, at cicely nzander.com, where you can also view photographs of Moe, the border collie, who has seen this nation in every battlefield along the way and chased many a ball across them.

That's right. Thank you very much, Cecily. Nice to see you again. We'll talk to you again down the road. Thanks, Don. I appreciate it. Had a great time. Hello, folks. Thanks for listening to American History Hit. Each week, we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays. All kinds of great content, like mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements, to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode. By hitting like and follow, you help us out, which is great, but you'll also be reminded when our shows are on. And while you're at it,

share with a friend. American History Hit with me, Don Wildman. So grateful for your support. Bye for now.