When the Civil War broke out, there was debate in the North as to why the conflict was being waged. Moderates thought that the war was simply to save the Union, and abolitionists hoped that the war would finally put an end to slavery. In "Armies of Deliverance," a unique look back at the Civil War, author Elizabeth Varon examines another reason why the North fought—to emancipate Southern whites who were not a part of the planter class, and to bring the benefits of freedom and nineteenth-century civilization to them.
An anecdote that Varon raises illustrates why much of the North held this view. In 1863, as the war dragged on and scarcity became more common in the South, a bread riot was staged in Virginia by non-elite Confederates. In response, the elites acted as though middle- and lower-class Southerners simply had no legitimate grievances. Then, of course, there was the law that the planter class passed exempting themselves from military service while simultaneously drafting yeomen and poor whites to fight.
It is obvious what the planters thought of their slaves, but they sociopathically viewed yeomen and poor whites as existing only to serve them as well. The planters ran, essentially, a totalitarian state embedded in a larger country founded on the principles of liberty and equality before the law, and the antebellum South stood foursquare against the principles of 1517, 1776, and 1865—against the classical liberalism of the Founding. Innumerable settlers seeking freedom desperately fled Europe to escape the type of society that the South was before 1861.
A prescient few in the South took the opportunity of westward expansion to do whatever they could to leave in the 1850s and establish new lives for themselves in places like California and Oregon, but, tragically, the majority of Southerners countenanced the prevailing system, some more willingly than others. Varon references testimonies from Southerners who felt coerced into military service for the Confederacy—multitudes of yeoman and poor whites allowed themselves to be exploited, when they should instead have told the planters to go (pound sand).
The South is often described as fighting for its way of life during the war, but the North was no less fighting for its—for freedom, liberty, and constitutional government. Had it lost, it would have been surrounded, as Harry Turtledove describes in his alternate history series. What would have been left of the United States would have had a huge new hostile neighbor to its south, a hostile British Canada to its north, and the oceans that America traditionally viewed as a buffer would have been full of threats. The abridged U.S. of necessity would have transformed much more toward a permanent garrison state, with the attendant loss of liberty, and the Constitution would have been much eroded.
The North did win the war, and Varon examines the South’s interpretation of Lee’s surrender at the time, and this interpretation has evolved over time. In the twenty-first century, the canard that the South seceded for economic issues is still advanced often, but Edward Bonekemper in his excellent "The Myth of the Lost Cause" proves as conclusively as a thing can be proven that slavery was the cause of the war—there is voluminous primary source material from 1860 and 1861 citing slavery as the cause of secession, and virtually none citing economics. The South had an opportunity to secede over economic issues during the Nullification Crisis of 1832. It did not do so.
The author covers all the major battles and events of the war, as well as the politicians and generals who led both sides. The Emancipation Proclamation and its effects are also discussed, and the experience of Southern Unionists is recalled. "Armies of Deliverance" is a solid history of the Civil War, with an eye throughout to the deliverance theory and a focus on those who are many times overlooked when talking about the conflict—the non-elite Southern whites who were forced to make enormous sacrifices for a wretched cause.
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