In Armies of Deliverance , Elizabeth Varon offers both a sweeping narrative of the Civil War and a bold new interpretation of Union and Confederate war aims.
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In Armies of Deliverance , Elizabeth Varon offers both a sweeping narrative of the Civil War and a bold new interpretation of Union and Confederate war aims.
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Learning about the United States and its history is a never-ending rewarding experience. In particular, the study of the many facets of the Civil War can bring insights over a lifetime to amateurs, Civil War "buffs", and scholars alike. In times of turmoil it is good to think closely about America.
The joy and the rewards of learning about the Civil War are amply fulfilled in Elizabeth Varon's new (2019) one-volume history of the conflict, "Armies of Deliverance: A New History of the Civil War". The Langbourne M. Williams Professor of History at the University of Virginia, Varon has written extensively on the Civil War, including a book I have read and reviewed, "Appomattox: Victory, Defeat and Freedom at the End of the Civil War" (2013). Varon's new study of the entire conflict is elegantly and seriously written, displays great knowledge of the source material and the work of other scholars, and displays thoughtful judgment. The book also develops a fresh perspective on the war and on the reasons why it was fought.
The book brings together the military, social and political history of the war, with the discussion of battles and campaigns receiving somewhat less attention than in other studies. Varon's focus is on the reasons which led the Union to conduct and persevere in the long, bloody difficult four-year conflict with the Confederacy. Typically scholars have offered and given different emphases to two different answers to this question: 1. the desire to preserve and restore the Union and 2. the desire to end slavery. Varon tries to find a third answer to the question that combines the strengths of the two most common answers: she finds the Civil War constituted a War of Deliverance. She argues that both North and South saw the war in this fashion but in mirror-image ways. Most of her book is given over to explaining what a "War of Deliverance" meant to the participants and how it was waged. Her understanding of the conflict is set out in the book's lengthy Introduction, titled "We are Fighting for Them" which sets the stage for the treatment in the body of the study.
Varon argues that the Union fought the war for the benefit of the white southern population as much as for the slaves. The North saw the white population as in part a "deluded mass" under the control of the small aristocracy of the Slave Power which fought the war for its own benefit and used and cared little for the southern people. White southerners were victimized by lack of economic opportunity, lack of education, poor living conditions, and restrictions on their thought and expression by the small aristocracy of large slaveholders. The Union sought to deliver southerners into the benefits of free society. Hence, it fought the Civil War as a War of Deliverance. Varon argues in detail how this understanding of the aims of the war helped united the disparate Union coalition which included Abolitionists, moderate Republicans, War Democrats, and more. Her view of the war focuses even more attention on the importance of the Border States than they receive in most studies. And it shows, in Varon's account, how the Union could combine elements of "hard" war as waged by Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan with many conciliatory gestures towards southerners, former Confederates, and border state residents who came over to the Union cause. Varon also discusses who the Confederates cast their own efforts as a "war of deliverance" to free themselves from the Yankees and their alleged barbarism, brutality, and materialism.
The North over-estimated the strength of Southern Unionism and the degree to which southern whites felt themselves in the thrall of the aristocracy. Varon recognizes this fact which is critical to understanding her study. She writes "In hindsight, Lincoln and other Northern political figures and writers were clearly wrong about a Southern populace deceived and coerced into supporting the secession movement." She finds that "far greater evidence exists of the robust support of white Southerners for secession on the eve of war." In the short concluding chapter of the book, Varon stresses the faulty assumptions on which the deliverance theory of the war was based by examining the fate of Reconstruction. Still, understanding the Civil War as motivated by an aim of delivering and redeeming the "deluded masses" of the South has a great deal to commend it in explaining the conduct of the war.
Varon's study itself consists of three large parts, well-titled, "Loyalism" which covers the period up to the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, "Emancipation" , which takes the war through Gettysburg, Vicksburg, the New York City Draft Riots, and Fort Wagner, and "Amnesty" which covers the last year and one-half of the war. Throughout the book, Varon weaves together the military aspects of the war with the political history, a rare and important accomplishment. While she discusses the Emancipation Proclamation at length, she focuses even more on Lincoln's Ten Percent Plan late in the war as evidence of Lincoln's attempts to offer a conciliatory approach to southern whites. She also treats extensively and well the 1864 presidential election and Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, often considered his greatest speech and maturest statement of his war aims. The study throughout shows Lincoln's evolving attitude towards the slaves and his necessary efforts throughout the war to maintain the allegiance of the border states, included repeated attempts at compensated emancipation.
The word "deliverance", Varon concludes, remains of critical importance in understanding how the Union viewed the "deluded" southern whites and, ultimately, how it viewed the slaves. She writes: "the story of Civil War-era deliverance politics is both bounded by a specific time and place and boundless, with modern echoes. In the Civil War era, more than today, the term and the Union War aims were resonant with Biblical overtones derived from the Book of Exodus. "Over the course of the long civil rights crusade" Varon writes, "generations of African American activists together with their white allies have again and again drawn on the symbolic power of the Exodus story and of deliverance narratives."
Varon's book offers a moving account of the Civil War and of deliverance. The book is a joy to read and ponder for those who want to learn about the United States and the seminal event of its history.
