Yale historian David Blight turns to the military history of the Civil War, arguing that the North's eventual victory was never inevitable and hinged on a series of turning points on the battlefield. Part of his DeVane Lecture Series course on slavery and its legacies in American life, this session traces how shifting fortunes in campaigns and leadership shaped the war's outcome and, with it, the fate of emancipation. Blight weaves military strategy together with the larger political stakes, showing how close-run engagements and command decisions determined whether the Union could hold together long enough to win. The lecture treats the war not as a foregone conclusion but as a contest whose result reshaped the nation's constitutional and racial order for generations afterward.