The Union War By Gary W. Gallagher Harvard University Press.
$27.95 New York Times Book Review, May 1, 2011 Among the
enduring mysteries of the American Civil War is why millions of
Northerners were willing to fight to preserve the nation's
unity. It is not difficult to understand why the Southern states
seceded in 1860 and 1861. As the Confederacy's founders
explained ad infinitum, they feared that Abraham Lincoln's
election as president placed the future of slavery in jeopardy.
But why did so few Northerners echo the refrain of Horace
Greeley, the editor of The New York Tribune: "Erring sisters, go
in peace"? The latest effort to explain this deep commitment to
the nation's survival comes from Gary W. Gallagher, the author
of several highly regarded works on Civil War military history.
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 (