Historian Gary Gallagher: Slavery Was Thriving in 1860, Not Fading Out

On a recent episode of the Lex Fridman Podcast — episode 499, titled 'Gary Gallagher: American Civil War, Slavery, Lincoln, Grant & Lee,' released July 28, 2026 — historian Gary Gallagher took direct aim at a long-standing argument in Civil War scholarship: that slavery was already on its way out by the time the war started, and the war itself was therefore unnecessary.

Gallagher told host Lex Fridman that claim doesn't hold up. He said slavery in the United States in 1860 was not fading but expanding, moving beyond cash crops like cotton, rice and sugar into industrial applications. 'It was not on its way out. It was thriving,' Gallagher said.

Gallagher pointed to Lincoln's own estimate as evidence of how entrenched the institution was, noting the president once thought slavery might last another fifty years absent the war. 'Lincoln said at one point he thought it might have lasted another 50 years,' Gallagher said.

Without the Civil War, Gallagher argued, the United States would likely have held the distinction of being the last place in the Americas to abolish slavery — trailing both Brazil and Spanish Cuba, which ended the practice later in the 19th century through legislation rather than mass bloodshed.

To back up the scale of slavery's economic weight, Gallagher cited the 1860 census. 'The wealthiest part, the 1860 census is our friend,' he said, explaining that the value of enslaved people held as property — about $3 billion — outstripped the combined value of every industry and railroad in the country, which came in under $2.5 billion.

Fridman, in the same conversation, noted that Britain freed 800,000 enslaved people in 1833 through compensated emancipation, Russia freed 23 million serfs by decree in 1861, and Brazil abolished slavery through ordinary legislation in 1888 — all without the roughly 750,000 deaths estimated in the American Civil War. Gallagher's point, as laid out on the show, was that those comparisons don't work in the U.S. case because American slavery was economically ascendant, not declining, when the war began.

Heard on Lex Fridman Podcast — #499 – Gary Gallagher: American Civil War, Slavery, Lincoln, Grant & Lee (2026-07-28).