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
