New and Noteworthy: Biblical Deliverance, Slavery and Northern Motivations for the War

Why did the North fight the Civil War?, Gregory Downs, Washington Post, June 14 2019, a review of Armies of Deliverance

Armies of Deliverance: A New History of the Civil War, Elizabeth Varon, Oxford University Press, 528 pp., illustrations, maps, bibliographic notes, bibliography, 2019,  $34.95.

Everyone knows that Confederates fought the Civil War to preserve and extend the slave system that produced their wealth and shaped their society. But what, exactly, did white Northerners fight for? In her often-riveting “Armies of Deliverance,” Elizabeth R. Varon answers that question in a new way, with important ramifications for how we understand the nation’s most significant conflict, the meaning of anti-slavery politics and the disappointments of postwar Reconstruction.

Because Confederates launched the first assaults of the Civil War, and because Confederates so eagerly trumpeted their defenses of slavery, Northern motivations can seem irrelevant. Confederates attacked the United States, and the United States fought back. Yet historians have debated Northern motivations vigorously over the past few decades, because those motivations tell us a good deal about why the Civil War came, what kind of war it was and what its impact would be upon U.S. society. One loosely defined group of historians argues that most white Northerners aimed primarily to restore the Union: to preserve the nation and not to transform it. Other historians, meanwhile, claim that white Northerners generally sought to extend freedom by creating a new nation without slavery. The answer turns on which Northerners one examines — common soldiers, female teachers and nurses, free black activists, Ohio Valley politicians, officers in high command — and how one evaluates inherently slippery evidence about motivation.

This debate has real ramifications for how we understand the Civil War era. Did secessionists have genuine reason to fear white Northern intentions? Was the war restrained, or did it approach a total war? And did the Civil War fundamentally transform the lives of the 4 million enslaved Americans and undermine the nation’s foundations in white supremacy? Historians who emphasize the desire to restore the union generally argue that secessionists miscalculated white Northern intentions and that many white Northerners saw their job as returning, not remaking, white Southerners — even secessionists. Thus, they argue, white Northerners favored restraint during and after the Civil War to ease the reintegration of white Southerners. Those historians who emphasize the freedom story are more likely to see Southern secession as a reasoned response to transformative Northern goals, to trace increasingly bold war measures and to narrate ambitious plans for national re-creation in Reconstruction.

The argument between scholars on either side of the union and freedom debate is important but in danger of becoming repetitive. So it is a relief to watch Varon strive elegantly to escape that binary perspective and establish her own interpretive framework for white Northern motivations. Her answer is deliverance. Christians, North and South, looked to biblical stories of deliverance to explain how society could be transformed. For Confederates, deliverance was simple: They would be delivered from the tyranny of Northern political opinion. Enslaved people similarly saw deliverance in stark terms: escape from the tyranny of masters.

But how did white Northerners understand deliverance? Varon argues that many of them believed that white Southerners needed deliverance from their “scheming leaders,” the despotic planters who shut down public debate and dominated the political system. Once freed, the great mass of white Southerners would begin to think for themselves and, ineluctably, emulate the prosperous and free North. White Southerners’ political independence would then free the nation from the sway that planters exercised over politics and policy, a sway Northerners denounced as a despotic slave power. Deliverance, Varon writes, “resolved the tensions within the Union over war aims” between conservative Democrats and anti-slavery activists because a language of deliverance “could serve so many ends” — it supported everything from conciliatory war measures to abolition.

The imprecise nature of deliverance allows Varon to fold parts of both the union and freedom arguments into her own. Freedom scholars are right that the North intended to remake the South, but union scholars are right that the North didn’t act from a desire to free slaves so much as a will to free the South’s white farmers and small planters from the tyranny of the slaveholding owners of vast plantations.

Varon’s argument is at times more novel than persuasive. Although she is a distinguished historian of antebellum politics, she rushes past the coming of the Civil War; the conflict is underway already in Chapter 1. This might be fitting in a work about wartime tactics but less so in a book about deeper motivations. The Civil War was an ideological conflict, developed over decades of painstaking political and intellectual fights that she largely skims past. Those conflicts shaped the concepts of deliverance, freedom and union. To understand the power of deliverance, we would need to see more about how the concept developed over time.

So, too, does Varon rush through her argument about the consequences of the Civil War. Deliverance may have fueled white Northern overconfidence in the efficacy of Reconstruction, and unconcern for freedpeople may have spawned apathy. But still, deliverance cannot explain the boldness and resilience of Republican support for civil and voting rights, nor can Republicans’ mixed motivations tell us much about the efficacy of their steps toward emancipation in 1861, abolition in 1865 and enfranchisement in 1867. A thorough reckoning with Reconstruction must engage with other issues: the fog of war, the idealistic vision of a self-perpetuating democracy, the resilience of local power, the weakness of the federal government. And above all that lies what seems the ultimate explanation for the disappointments of Reconstruction: an unbearably bloody white Southern counterrevolution. After all that is taken into account, it is not clear how much is left for notions of deliverance to explain.

While Varon doesn’t quite deliver on her argument about deliverance, she narrates battles and campaigns with an unusually deft, at times even gorgeous touch. This is some of the finest battle writing around, and a sweeping analysis of both United States and Confederate strategy and tactics. While the book can’t displace James M. McPherson’s “Battle Cry of Freedom,” still perhaps the single greatest volume ever written on the Civil War or even on United States history, it belongs beside it on the shelf. Given the volume of writing about the Civil War over the past 150 years, that is no small feat.

Full Text Source: Washington Post, June 14, 2019

New and Noteworthy: California and the American Civil War

California and the Civil War, Richard Hurley, History Press, 176 pages,  profusely illustrated, end notes, bibliography. July 2017. $19.95.

California and the Civil War is a clear and concise exposition on the Golden State’s history from The Bear Flag Republic through 1865. Hurley presents the geography of the state as a way of discussing the political leanings of Southern immigrants and Northern immigrants. California played a crucial part in political challenges during the 1850s. Statehood with or without slavery was a microcosm of national politics. Civil unrest in the state may be compared to civil war in the Kansas territory. Confederate military strategy included California and the author sees the state as suffering through the turmoil in the Southwest.

Hurley offers a discussion of civic life during the war that includes both Confederate partisans and Federal military adventures. He also notes the presence of the Sanitary Commission, its fairs and the Californians fighting east of the Mississippi River and even Mark Twain enters into the picture. The author gives a thorough accounting of his sources with end notes and a bibliography.

From The Publisher:  In the long and bitter prelude to war, southern transplants dominated California government, keeping the state aligned with Dixie. However, a murderous duel in 1859 killed "Free Soil" U.S. Senator David C. Broderick, and public opinion began to change. As war broke out back east, a golden-tongued preacher named Reverend Thomas Starr King crisscrossed the state endeavoring to save the Golden State for the Union. Seventeen thousand California volunteers thwarted secessionist schemes and waged brutal campaigns against native tribesmen resisting white encroachment as far away as Idaho and New Mexico. And a determined battalion of California cavalry journeyed to Virginia's Shenandoah Valley to battle John Singleton Mosby, the South's deadliest partisan ranger. Author Richard Hurley delves into homefront activities during the nation's bloodiest war and chronicles the adventures of the brave men who fought far from home.

Forthcoming--The Presidential Election of 1860: Fractured Parties and Fractured Voters

The Election of 1860: A Campaign Fraught with Consequences, Michael F. Holt, (American Presidential Elections Series) University of Kansas Press, 272  pages, 7 black and white photographs, bibliography, index, $29.25, hardcover, publication date October 6, 2017

From the publisher: Because of its extraordinary consequences and because of Abraham Lincoln’s place in the American pantheon, the presidential election of 1860 is probably the most studied in our history. But perhaps for the same reasons, historians have focused on the contest of Lincoln versus Stephen Douglas in the northern free states and John Bell versus John C. Breckinridge in the slaveholding South.

In The Election of 1860 a preeminent scholar of American history disrupts this familiar narrative with a clearer and more comprehensive account of how the election unfolded and what it was actually about. Most critically, the book counters the common interpretation of the election as a referendum on slavery and the Republican Party’s purported threat to it. However significantly slavery figured in the election, The Election of 1860 reveals the key importance of widespread opposition to the Republican Party because of its overtly anti-southern rhetoric and seemingly unstoppable rise to power in the North after its emergence in 1854.

Also of critical importance was the corruption of the incumbent administration of Democrat James Buchanan—and a nationwide revulsion against party. Grounding his history in a nuanced retelling of the pre-1860 story, Michael F. Holt explores the sectional politics that permeated the election and foreshadowed the coming Civil War.

He brings to light how the campaigns of the Republican Party and the National (Northern) Democrats and the Constitutional (Southern) Democrats and the newly formed Constitutional Union Party were not exclusively regional. His attention to the little-studied role of the Buchanan Administration, and of perceived threats to the preservation of the Union, clarifies the true dynamic of the 1860 presidential election, particularly in its early stages.

New and Noteworthy---- Did Blundering Politicans Make The Civil War Inevitable?

The Republic in Crisis, 1848-1861, John Ashworth, Cambridge University Press, 2012. 217 pp. $75.00 (cloth), $22.99 (paper) and  A Political Nation: New Directions in Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Political History, Gary W. Gallagher, Rachel A. Shelden, eds., University of Virginia Press, 2012. 272 pp. $40.00 (cloth),

 

Reviewed by Matthew E. Mason (Brigham Young University)
Published on H-CivWar (August, 2013)

"Reading these two books together with an eye to Civil War scholarship is in a way an exercise in déjà vu. For these volumes offer versions, if attenuated and nuanced ones, of the old historiographical debate between those who held that the Civil War was an "irrepressible conflict" and those who argued that it was a "blundering generation"--not underlying sectional differences or grand forces--that caused the war. But besides the persistence of this debate, there is no way in which reading these two volumes feels like being caught in a time warp. For all their appreciation for traditional political history, both books, especially Gary W. Gallagher and Rachel A. Shelden's edited collection, draw productively on and model the latest developments in American political history." 

 

"Though very different in origins, purpose, and nature, these two books will in their own way provide current and future scholars of the politics of the Civil War era with plenty to consider and discuss."

 

This combined review of these two books is continued at H-Net Civ War.

 

New And Noteworthy: Slavery, Secession, Surrender and the Second American Political Party System

A Political Nation: New Directions in Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Political History, Gary Gallagher and Rachel Sheldon, editors, University of Virginia Press, 272 pages, $40.00.

Publisher's Description:  This impressive collection joins the recent outpouring of exciting new work on American politics and political actors in the mid-nineteenth century. For several generations, much of the scholarship on the political history of the period from 1840 to 1877 has carried a theme of failure; after all, politicians in the antebellum years failed to prevent war, and those of the Civil War and Reconstruction failed to take advantage of opportunities to remake the nation. Moving beyond these older debates, the essays in this volume ask new questions about mid-nineteenth-century American politics and politicians.

In A Political Nation, the contributors address the dynamics of political parties and factions, illuminate the presence of consensus and conflict in American political life, and analyze elections, voters, and issues. In addition to examining the structures of the United States Congress, state and local governments, and other political organizations, this collection emphasizes political leaders—those who made policy, ran for office, influenced elections, and helped to shape American life from the early years of the Second Party System to the turbulent period of Reconstruction.

The book moves chronologically, beginning with an antebellum focus on how political actors behaved within their cultural surroundings. The authors then use the critical role of language, rhetoric, and ideology in mid-nineteenth-century political culture as a lens through which to reevaluate the secession crisis. The collection closes with an examination of cultural and institutional influences on politicians in the Civil War and Reconstruction years. Stressing the role of federalism in understanding American political behavior, A Political Nation underscores the vitality of scholarship on mid-nineteenth-century American politics.

Contributors:
Erik B. Alexander, University of Tennessee, Knoxville · Jean Harvey Baker, Goucher College · William J. Cooper, Louisiana State University · Daniel W. Crofts, The College of New Jersey · William W. Freehling, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities · Gary W. Gallagher, University of Virginia · Sean Nalty, University of Virginia · Mark E. Neely Jr., Pennsylvania State University · Rachel A. Shelden, Georgia College and State University · Brooks D. Simpson, Arizona State University · J. Mills Thornton, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Blurbs:
"Separately and together, these essays make a persuasive argument for a return to traditional political history. Each contributor in the collection draws on the best of the extant literature in his or her field/bailiwick, synthesizes it, and suggests either new avenues for exploration or ways to think about and bring coherence to a field (political history) that has become fragmented if not diffuse. Incredibly well written and accessible," Michael A. Morrison, Purdue University.

"Leading interpreters of America's mid-nineteenth-century political crisis join with several younger historians in this collection of insightful and provocative essays. Introducing new issues and topics as well as reexamining some of the more enduring ones, A Political Nation will be of great interest to all those who, quite understandably, find the Civil War era intriguing," Michael Perman, author of Pursuit of Unity: A Political History of the American South  

The Authors: Gary W. Gallagher is John L. Nau III Professor of Hisgtory at the University of Virginia and most recently the author of The Union War.   Rachel A. Shelden is Assistant Professor of American History at Georgia State College and State University.

 

 

 

Opinion---Civil War Politics, The Tea Party, And The Decisions That Await Us

The Civil War at 150: The Past In The Present?, David W. Blight, Kansas City Star, October 3, 2011.

Why can’t we just get over the Civil War in America? Why does it still have such a hold on our imagination, on our political habits and rhetoric, on the stories through which we define ourselves as a people and a nation? Why is the Confederacy, a mere four-year experiment in revolution to preserve a slave holding society, still so interesting to so many people? Haven’t we had at least two “Reconstructions” — the first of the 1860s and ’70s, the second the civil rights movement a century later — to solve those issues at the war’s roots?

As we commemorate this most pivotal and transforming event — at the same time the country descends into some of the worst political polarization in modern times — it is important to visit these questions. The stakes are very high. And, ideologically, many of the issues of 2011 are much the same as in 1861. Given the hold the tea party seems to have on the base of the Republican Party, we should take notice when some in the group invoke the Confederate constitution as a model for anti-tax, anti-centralization libertarianism.

First, it was modeled closely after the U.S. Constitution. Second, its advocates may need a reminder of just how desperately the Jefferson Davis administration struggled to forge a centralized government out of the chaos of war, jealous localism, states’ rights and homegrown greed and individualism. Indeed, yesterday’s secessionists and today’s nullifiers have much in common. Both are distinct minorities who have suddenly seized an inordinate degree of power.

One acted in revolution to save a slaveholders’ republic; the other seems determined to render modern federal government all but obsolete for any purpose but national defense. Both claim their mantle of righteousness in the name of “liberty,” privatization and racial exclusion (one openly, the other using code that keeps it largely a white people’s party). Both vehemently claim the authority of the “Founders.” Compromise? Both professed disinterest, indeed seemed to welcome rupture. All this we might have thought all but buried in the mass slaughter of the Civil War. But, alas, history keeps happening.

This month, Texas Gov. Rick Perry chose to announce his presidential candidacy in Charleston, S.C., where secession and the Civil War began. Merely coincidental? This is the man who in 2009 suggested his state might consider “secession” as resistance to federal authority. Perry crafted this line for his now larger national audience: “I’ll work every day to try to make Washington, D.C., as inconsequential in your life as I can.” What would the United States be if Abraham Lincoln’s administration and the federal government had decided to be “inconsequential” in 1861?

Texas secessionists would have realized their dream back then. But how would have West Texas farmers in Depression-era Haskell County — where Perry grew up — have gotten electrification but from a consequential federal government? Just how would racial segregation have been dismantled there or the rest of the country?

And would we prefer to have federal standards less consequential for food and drugs? Or how many national parks would there be if the feds had simply never bothered to be consequential in land use and natural resources. What kind of air might we be breathing if there were no Clean Air Act? Interstate highways? Social Security? Workplace safety? College loans and the GI Bill, which helped forge an American middle class? An endless list.

We all make the past useful to our personal present, some more than others who might negate a social contract with their fellow humans in the service of private “freedom.” Is it possible that at the heart of this dispute is that the federal government — however cumbersome amid the arcs of history bending forward and backward — has actually been a vehicle for the increase of democracy and equality, and that some Americans resent this?

We live in a society in 2011 not only divided over race and the advent of a black president, over the rights of immigrants, over religious tolerance, over a seemingly permanent state of war, over who and what are legitimate Americans and whether they shall be accorded birthright citizenship. And we have ceaseless debate about the proper relation of federal to state power. That “Union” preserved by the Civil War generation, turning 150 years old, is not a healthy organism.

Yes, the Civil War is rooted in states’ rights. But the significance of any exercise of states’ rights, like any other constitutional doctrine, is always in the issue to which it is employed. Today, states’ rights claims are advanced by many governors and Republican-majority legislatures in the very language of “secession” and “nullification” made so infamous in antebellum America. They are aided and abetted by a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, although the justices have not justified “nullification” by name. What indeed has brought those words back into our political parlance?

A short list of examples among many tells us just how alive some Civil War legacies are in our time. Kentucky has a bill pending to make that state a “sanctuary” from the Environmental Protection Agency. Arizona Republicans want to exempt products made in their state from federal interstate commerce laws. Montana has one bill that would “nullify” the federal Endangered Species Act and another to require the FBI to get a local sheriff’s permission to make any arrests.

Contexts change, of course, but we have a history with these ideas, and it had a terrible result in 1861. Put most directly, either the United States reborn in slave emancipation is based on a social contract, forged and reforged by the new historical imperatives of industrialization and urbanization in the Progressive era and by a horrible economic Depression in the 1930s and a civil rights revolution of the 1960s, all of which for real reasons necessitated the increased exercise of federal power to protect human liberty, welfare and survival, or it is not.

The conservative movement in America, or at least its most radical wing, seems determined to repeal much of the 20th century and even its constitutional and social roots from the transformative 1860s.

The Civil War is not only not over, it can still be lost. As the sesquicentennial ensues in publishing and conferences and on television and countless websites, one can hope that we will pursue matters of legacy and memory with one eye on the past and the other acutely on the present.

The stakes are high.

David W. Blight teaches American history at Yale University and is the author of the just released “American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era,” as well as the multiple-award-winning Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory.

Text Source: Kansas City Star, October 3, 2011

Top Image Source: Bedford St. Martins Press

CWL: CWL respects and has thoroughly enjoyed Blight's work. Having read his very new American Oracle, CWL's respect has grown even more. American Oracle reviews the Civil War Centennial as perceived by William Penn Warren, Bruce Catton, James Baldwin and others. It is part American literary history, part historiography and part biography. Read in the course of a week, it became a 'couldn't put it down' book. But the U.S. government of 1861, 1931 and 1981 is not the government of 2011. Those governments were all much smaller than the government today which seems not to be able to do levee maintenance well, clean up oil spills well, monitor investment firms well, management a budget well, nor guide the American economy well. Instead of being too big to fail, the national government may be too big to succeed. E.F. Schumacher wrote a book during the 1970s entitled Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered. That small truth may be applicable today. By the way, CWL is a 'Wide Awake for Lincoln' man and scoffs at the Lost Cause but has come to understand that the current national government may itself need a 'Reconstruction'.

Forthcoming---American Social History: Slavery Moves From Being A Political Problem To A Moral Issue

America Aflame: How The Civil War Created A Nation, David Goldfield, Bloomsbury Press, 640 pages, color and b/w illustrations, notes, index, $35.00, March 15, 2011.

Publishers Weekly: "This sweeping, provocative history of America from the 1830s through Reconstruction has two grand themes. One is the importance of evangelical Protestantism, particularly in the North and within the Republican Party, in changing slavery from a political problem to an intractable moral issue that could only be settled by bloodshed. The second is the Civil War's transformation of America into a modern industrial nation with a powerful government and a commercial, scientific outlook, even as the postwar South stagnated in racism and backward-looking religiosity. UNC-Charlotte historian Goldfield (Still Fighting the Civil War) courts controversy by shifting more responsibility for the conflict to an activist North and away from intransigent slaveholders, whom he likens to Indians, Mexicans, and other targets viewed by white evangelical Northerners as "polluting" the spreading western frontier. Still, he presents a superb, stylishly written historical synthesis that insightfully foregrounds ideology, faith, and public mood The book is, the author writes, "neither pro-southern nor pro-northern," but rather "antiwar." Goldfield's narrative of the war proper is especially good, evoking the horror of the fighting and its impact on soldiers and civilians. The result is an ambitious, engrossing interpretation with new things to say about a much-studied conflagration."

Gilbert Taylor, Booklist: A specialist in southern history, Goldfield assesses Civil War causes and consequences chronologically from 1834 to the termination of Reconstruction. Why begin in 1834? That year a Boston mob destroyed a Catholic convent; for Goldfield, that event is symbolic of a toxic factor in the period’s politics, evangelical Protestantism. Arguing that it promoted eschatological mentalities on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line, Goldfield, as his narrative navigates the 1850s, personifies evangelicals’ influence in Uncle Tom’s Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe and in southern preachers who sermonized on God’s sanction for southern rights, slavery included. The overtly religious aren’t the sole culprits in Goldfield’s interpretation. He critiques the increasing inflexibility of such politicians as former Whigs Abraham Lincoln and Alexander Stephens. Frederick Douglass and Walt Whitman stroll through Goldfield’s pages as eyewitnesses while he considers that the South’s fear for slavery’s future and for its exclusion from industrialization and westward expansion underlay variously argued causes of the war. But it is his emphasis on the religious angle that readers may find distinctive among Civil War overviews."

CWL is looking forward grabbing a copy ASAP; too bad the book is released a week after spring break but will have to be added to the May [post-finals week] reading list.

Off-Topic---The Conservative Implementation of Liberal Ideals

Cycles of American Political Thought, Joseph F. Kobylka, The Teaching Company, Course 4820, 36 lectures on 18 compact disks.

Historian and social commentator Louis Hartz described the United States as being a democratic republic that conservatively implements liberal ideals. Seeing America as a philosophical experiment with historical and theoretical baggage, Kobylka sets the Puritan's communities of saints and Virginia's communities of capitalists in the context of geographic expansionism and personal individualism. Noting the colonies varied inheritances, especially England's Glorious Revolution of 1688, Kobylka recreates an era of political revolution whose main voices are Thomas Hutchinson, John Dickinson, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson.

Keeping an eye on the social life of Americans as described Crèvecoeur and John Adams, Professor Kobylka dwells on the construction and implementation of the Constitution and the many balances within as well as the many countervailing weights that are in the balances. The fears of the Anti-Federalists towards a self-interpreting federal government, the contradiction of Thomas Jefferson ideas of equality and slavery, the democratic impulses of Andrew Jacksonian and the iconoclastic individualism of Henry David Thoreau reveal a republic that is an alloy of freedoms and fears.

Before the Civil War freedmen and females clamored to be included in the American democratic experiment. The thoughts and actions Frederick Douglass and Elizabeth Cady Stanton are presented along with the organic socialism of Brownson. The proslavery thoughts that represent American feudalism in the political discourse of George Fitzhugh and the opposition to American feudalism in Helper's view of an impending crisis reveals how American struggled with constitutionalizing the slave masters and their states' rights approach to federalism.

Lincoln's reconstitution of America and the post-war struggle with the concept of equality before the law and in practice struggles with the Social Darwinism and economic laissez-faire in a constitutional area of many 5-4 split decisions of the Supreme court. Teddy Roosevelt's support and clash with Progressivism, the Supreme Court and laissez-faire capitalism reveals the fundamental tensions in the 19th and 20th centuries with which America still struggles with in the 21st century. The Women's Movement, the 19th Amendment, Eugene V. Debs, and working-class socialism provide both the means and ends of a culture on a collision course with the Great Depression, FDR, the New Deal, and a Supreme Court that resists change.

The racial revolution wrought by WWII and Harry Truman is set beside the new impulses of blacks who have debated the ideas Carver, DuBois, and Garvey and continue to face poverty and limited opportunities to establish a black middle class. The civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s are at times renewed during the Reagan revolution in the Bakke decision.

This course is taught by Dr. Joseph F. Kobylka, professor at Southern Methodist University. Kobylka's half hour lectures is a good fit for commuters who are looking to put into context the possibilites of political change that are upon the American democtratic republic. American political thought today is an alloy of laissez-faire capitalism, free markets, and economic welfare for individuals, families and corporate feudalism.

Link to Cycles of American Political Thought, The Teaching Company