The Interesting Thesis that the Turning Point of the US Civil War Was a Battle the Union Lost.

[NNadir]

I have this guilty pleasure of spending a few hours most weekends watching CSPAN history shows. Most weekends there's a section about the US Civil War, and one sees famous Civil War Historians give lectures on the subject.

Gary Gallagher is of course, a very prominent historian, and this weekend I watched one of his lectures, at the Lincoln Forum, on the battle of Gettysburg. He makes the point that no one during the war saw it as decisive, and thus it wasn't decisive.

In the Q&A after the talk he offers a thesis about which I never really thought, but actually makes a lot of sense. He says that the war's turning point was actually the Seven Days, a battle the Union lost because it's commander, George McClellan, was terrified of the enemy. He makes the case in the Q&A which begins at about 45 minutes into the video. (The full lecture is well worth watching.)

The video can be found at the CSPAN history link below:

https://www.c-span.org/video/?516143-2/important-gettysburg

He makes the point that without ending slavery the war would not have been won by the Union, and because the defeat at the Seven Days hardened the Union to do that, to make a war for the Union into a war to end slavery, the defeat was the turning point.