Title: Book Review - The Union War - By Gary W. Gallagher - The New York Times
Headings: Why the North Fought the Civil War
What to Read
Why the North Fought the Civil War

Content: Continuity, not change, marked Northern attitudes. Gallagher acknowledges that as the war progressed, “a struggle for a different kind of Union emerged.” Yet his theme of continuity seems inadequate to encompass the vast changes Americans experienced during the Civil War. Surely, he is correct that racism survived the war. Yet he fails to account for the surge of egalitarian sentiment that inspired the rewriting of the laws and Constitution to create, for the first time, a national citizenship enjoying equal rights not limited by race. Before the war, slavery powerfully affected the concept of self-government. Large numbers of Americans identified democratic citizenship as a privilege of whites alone — a position embraced by the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott decision of 1857. Which is why the transformation wrought by the Civil War was so remarkable. As George William Curtis, the editor of Harper’s Weekly, observed in 1865, the war transformed a government “for white men” into one “for mankind.” That was something worth fighting for.