Armies of Deliverance: A New History of the Civil War by Elizabeth R. Varon (review)

In this provocative and engaging history of the Civil War, Elizabeth Varon reassesses one of the conflict’s central questions. How did the North define its war aims in a fashion that unified and sustained a pro-war coalition of Republicans and Democrats capable of crushing secession? On entering office, Abraham Lincoln faced a contentious political landscape: Radical Republicans wanting to end slavery and promote black citizenship to War Democrats striving to maintain both the Union and the racial status quo. Between these political extremes was a majority of Northerners who, like the president, were determined to preserve the Union and end slavery primarily because of its negative impact on free labor. In addition, Lincoln needed to appeal to Southern unionists. What linked these groups during the war was their belief that secession had been caused by a slaveholding elite that enthralled slaves and common Southerners alike. Lincoln was able to forge an effective pro-war alliance, Varon argues, by using the political theme of deliverance.

Varon is a skillful writer with a deft touch and a commanding knowledge of the broad Civil War era. An award-winning author, she has published two previous books that bracket the actual Civil War: Disunion! The Coming of the American Civil War (2008) and Appomattox: Victory, Defeat, and Freedom at the End of the Civil War (2013). Her works reflect the influence of Raymond Williams’s ideas about keywords as socially prominent words capable of carrying interlocking and sometimes contradictory and contested contemporary meanings. In Armies of Deliverance, Varon gives short shrift to prewar events and deals, with postwar developments only in her conclusion. Given her previous works, this decision is understandable. However, it truncates any discussion of a perceived Northern belief in the necessity of Southern deliverance before 1861. Similarly, while deliverance was useful wartime rhetoric, it fed disagreement and disillusionment after Appomattox, especially over the issue of black civil rights and citizenship, which is passed over quickly.

Varon begins her book with a July 1864 article in Harper’s Weekly titled “Fighting for Our Foes,” which claimed Southern leaders, not the “ignorant and debased” Southern masses, were the real instigators of the war. This belief, she argues, allowed Northerners to depict “the Civil War as a war of deliverance, waged to deliver the South from the clutches of a conspiracy and to deliver to it the blessings of free society” (2). The strength of the term deliverance, replete with religious and moral overtones, was its ambiguousness that muted Northern differences across time and place and created the illusion of common cause. The concept allows Varon to depict the full range and alterations of Northern attitudes and motivations. It could link “soft war” incentives and “hard war” punishments. Advocates used deliverance to reconcile the liberation of the white Southern masses from thralldom with the emancipation of the slaves. Depicting the agents of secession as a narrow class of Southerners helped keep the war from descending into a war of atrocities and lay the basis for a reunited nation.

Any historian writing a concise single-volume history of the Civil War faces an onerous and daunting task. The fields to be incorporated are large and complex, while the historiography of the conflict is, like the universe, constantly expanding. Besides mastering current literature, the writer must make critical decisions about what to foreground and what to leave out. Whatever the choices made, not all readers will be satisfied. Given the book’s focus, there is little space here to include the naval war, the conflict’s international implications, or the way the two sides mobilized and replenished their fiscal and industrial resources. The latter is perhaps most surprising as Varon argues that it was the four years of attrition that ground down the Confederate Army and made Appomattox inevitable. That small qualm aside, she covers the war’s various military...