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i
Armies of Deliverance
ii
iii
Armies
of Deliverance
A New History of the Civil War
zz
ELIZABETH R. VARON
1
iv
1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Map x
vi Contents
Notes 435
Index 489
vi
Acknowledgments
viii Acknowledgments
My friend Matt Gallman read the entire manuscript and offered invalu-
able advice for improving it. I very much appreciated the chance to workshop
parts of this book at Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery,
Resistance, and Abolition, and I thank David Blight for the invitation to
speak at its annual conference in the fall of 2017; I am also grateful to have
received feedback at the Harvard University conference, that same fall, in
honor of my treasured graduate school mentor Nancy Cott.
Oxford University Press has been wonderful throughout this process, and
my thanks go to Susan Ferber and Charles Cavaliere for their editorial steward-
ship, and mapmaker George Chakvetadze for his expert work. The anonymous
readers who vetted the manuscript for Oxford made many helpful suggestions.
I am fortunate to live in a family of writers, and I rely on all of them for
inspiration: my husband, best friend, and all-time favorite historian, Will
Hitchcock; our kids, Ben and Emma, whose strong voices fill us with pride
and hope; my brother, Jeremy, with his fierce social conscience; my father,
Bension, whose productivity leaves us all in the dust; and my late mother,
Barbara, to whose standard we still aspire.
Nothing buoyed me more in the final stages of writing this book than the
experience of watching my nephew Arlo, a Brooklyn sixth-grader, become a
Civil War buff. Like I did at his age, he has become fascinated by the voices of
the war. But he has been exposed by his teachers to a far wider range of those
voices, and a more nuanced treatment of the war, than I was. His newfound
passion for the study of the Civil War makes me optimistic for the future of our
field, and serves as a reminder that we should never underestimate the capacity
of young people to handle the complexity of history. This book is for Arlo.
E.R.V.
Charlottesville, Virginia
ix
x
xi
xi
xi
Armies of Deliverance
xvi
1
Introduction
“We Are Fighting for Them”
In July 1864, in the fourth summer of the Civil War, the popular Northern
journal Harper’s Weekly featured an article entitled “Fighting for Our Foes.”
The article invoked the “terrorism under which the people of the rebellious
States have long suffered”—the extortion, intimidation, and violence per-
petrated by elite slaveholders against the Southern masses in order to keep
“their white fellow-citizens ignorant and debased.” The Union army, Harper’s
pledged, would bring liberation to the South:
Many of these wretched victims are in arms against us. But we are
fighting for them. The war for the Union and the rights secured by
the Constitution is a war for their social and political salvation, and
our victory is their deliverance. . . . It is not against the people of those
States, it is against the leaders and the system which have deprived
them of their fair chances as American citizens, that this holy war is
waged. God send them and us a good deliverance!1
A modern reader might be tempted to ask: could Harper’s Weekly have been
sincere? Surely Northerners had learned, after so much blood had been shed
on so many battlefields, that the Southern masses were diehard Confederates,
not unwilling dupes of slaveholding aristocrats. Surely Northerners had given
up waiting for Southern Unionism to come to the fore. Surely Northerners
no longer cherished the naive hope of changing Southern hearts and minds.
Of all the ongoing debates over the Civil War, perhaps none has proven
so difficult to resolve as the issue of Northern war aims. What was the
North fighting for? Some modern scholars emphasize Northerners’ bedrock
2
2 Introduction
commitment to saving the Union, seeing that as the central point of con-
sensus among the majority of Republicans and Democrats. Other scholars
emphasize the growing power and momentum of antislavery Republicans,
and their role in establishing emancipation as the defining purpose and
achievement of the war. Each of these interpretations focuses on only part of
the broad Northern political spectrum. This book takes a different approach,
by asking how disparate Northerners, who disagreed about the fate of slavery
and the future shape of the Union, managed to form a powerful Unionist
coalition and to defeat disunionism. The answer lies in the political theme of
deliverance.2
Northerners imagined 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 and of modern civilization. Northerners did not
expect white Southerners to rise up en masse and overthrow secession. But
they did fervently believe that as the Union army advanced across the South,
Southerners, especially from the non-slaveholding majority, would increas-
ingly welcome liberation from Confederate falsehood and despotism.
This belief in deliverance was not a naive hope that faded, but instead a
deep commitment that grew stronger over the course of the war.3 That is be-
cause the idea resolved the tensions within the Union over war aims. A dis-
tinct politics of deliverance—a set of appeals that fused “soft war” incentives
and “hard war” punishments, and sought to reconcile the liberation of white
Southerners with the emancipation of enslaved blacks—unified a pro-war
coalition in the Union and sustained its morale. “As the guns of Grant and
Sherman shake down their idols and clear the air,” the Harper’s essay prophe-
sied, “these men, deluded fellow-citizens of ours, will see that in this country
whatever degrades labor injures every laboring man, and that equal rights be-
fore the law is the only foundation of permanent peace and union.” Grant and
Sherman, symbols of hard war, also stood at the head of powerful armies of
deliverance.4
Introduction 3
4 Introduction
citizenship. On the other end were conservative Democrats who rejected ab-
olition and black citizenship and were content for slavery to persist indefi-
nitely. Across the middle of the spectrum were moderates of various political
stripes who, like Lincoln himself, believed in the superiority of the free labor
system and resented the power of slaveholders but had a relatively patient atti-
tude toward slavery’s demise, wishing for its gradual extinction instead of im-
mediate abolition. From the start, antipathy to elite slaveholding secessionists
was a strong source of Northern unity. Republicans had long scorned Slave
Power oligarchs; Northern Democrats, bitter at the fracturing of their
party, felt betrayed by the leadership class of Southern Democrats. As his-
torian Martha Hodes notes, Northerners imagined a “simplistically divided
Confederacy” and did not carefully differentiate among the various strata of
non-elite whites. The ambiguous category of the “deceived masses” lumped
together the South’s landholding yeomen farmers and landless poor whites.7
Very quickly, in the first months of the Civil War, the Slave Power con-
spiracy idea took on a new cast and increased potency. Northerners began
to argue that the Confederacy was a “military despotism” that herded white
Southerners into its ranks, seized private property for the war machine, and
suppressed dissent. This was the theme of Lincoln’s first wartime message to
Congress, delivered on July 4, 1861, nearly three months after the Confederate
firing on Fort Sumter had initiated war. After “drugging the public mind of
their section for more than thirty years,” the leaders of the secession move-
ment had relied on “ingenious sophistry” (the false doctrine of state sover-
eignty) and on coercion (votes in which “the bayonets are all on one side
of the question”) to bring “many good men to a willingness to take up arms
against the government,” Lincoln insisted. A small band of conspirators had
seemingly cowed the South into submission. But how deep did support for
disunion really run? “It may well be questioned whether there is, to-day, a
majority of the legally qualified voters of any State, except perhaps South
Carolina, in favor of disunion,” Lincoln speculated. “There is much reason
to believe that the Union men are the majority in many, if not in every one,
of the so-called seceded States.” The Union fought to uphold the principle of
majority rule—that ballots, not bullets, should settle disputes—and did not
intend “any coercion, any conquest, or any subjugation, in any just sense of
those terms.”8
Claims that white Southerners were “ripe for their deliverance from the
most revolting despotism on the face of the earth,” as an influential newspaper,
the New York Herald, put it in May 1861, were standard fare in the Northern
press and among politicians in the early months of the war. Sometimes words
5
Introduction 5
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