The New York Times Book Review - Thomas E. Ricks
This impressive work is explicitly a political study of the war rather than a military one…offered in clear, straightforward prose…Varon shows that we often can learn more about what led to victory from politics than from battles.
From the Publisher
"Elizabeth R. Varon's highly original and sweeping new study is one of the few histories of the war that deserve to be ranked as essential reading. Varon never veers too far from her overarching theme, but she has done her readers an enormous service by resisting the temptation to use 'deliverance' as a cudgel to reframe every last aspect of the war. When she returns periodically to her main argument, she does so with admirable deftness backed by persuasive research."—The Wall Street Journal
"Varon's main theme, offered in clear, straightforward prose, is that, contrary to what many have maintained, the Union tended to see the war as one of liberation—a mission of freeing a broad mass of poor deluded whites (and, for some, enslaved blacks) from the thrall of a tiny elite of oligarchical slaveholders. Varon shows that we can often learn more about what led to victory from politics than from battles."—The New York Times"This is some of the finest battle writing around, and a sweeping analysis of both United States and Confederate strategy and tactics."-The Washington Post"Armies of Deliverance argues that the Northern government's anti-slavery, Unionist political coalition created a message of liberation that was then taken up as its main reason for fighting the Civil War. Union armies embraced this liberation theme, claiming that a small coterie of wealthy planters deceived Southerners who did not own slaves into agreeing to secession. Summing Up: Recommended" — CHOICE"This book is an enjoyable read, engaging and well researched ... This is a substantial contribution to our understanding of the motivations, strategies, tensions, controversies, and triumphs that had characterized their lives and experiences. This reviewer highly recommends this for anyone interested in the Civil War." — David Marshall, The NYMAS Review"This is not a traditional story of North versus South but rather a story of North and South versus the Confederacy. Running alongside this revisionist narrative in Armies of Deliverance is a more-or-less straightforward political and military history of the Civil War, done very well. Varon creates thrilling set pieces of all the familiar battles and controversies."—The Christian Science Monitor“Elizabeth Varon’s Armies of Deliverance promises a ‘new history of the Civil War.’ She satisfies this bold claim by offering an interpretation of the conflict that subsumes the competing perspectives on northerners and slavery…. Most existing one-volume histories of the war adopt a rigorously chronological approach, centering the military narrative and following the contingencies of battles and campaigns through to Appomattox. Although Varon’s book likewise moves forward through time, her strong interpretive framework distinguishes the approach. For teachers reluctant to assign a single text because students protest the anodyne feel of textbooks, the strength of Varon’s argument makes this book a welcome choice….Her narrative carries the story with remarkable effectiveness and concision."—Aaron Sheehan-Dean, Journal of the Civil War Era
Kirkus Reviews
2018-11-26
A fresh interpretation of the Civil War that illuminates why Americans took up arms against each other—and why they thought they did.
Varon (American History/Univ. of Virginia; Appomattox: Victory, Defeat, and Freedom at the End of the Civil War, 2013) argues that the Union went to war with the Confederacy in the belief "that white Southerners could be redeemed"—redeemed, that is, from the tyranny of the planter class and the slaveholding economy and culture they imposed on the white working class. The premise of the South, conversely, was "that Northerners and Southerners could never again be countrymen." Both suppositions had motive power, rousing armies to take to the field and fueling a bloody war that lasted for four years. Still, the Union belief that federal armies would be greeted with open arms as liberators in the South turned out to be fatally flawed; as Varon observes, "Lincoln and other Northern political figures and writers were clearly wrong about a Southern populace deceived and coerced into supporting the secessionist movement." They had some reasons for thinking so, however, among them North Carolina's slowness to secede and the fact that there were so many North Carolinians who "actively and sometimes violently rejected the demands of Confederate nationalism," whether because they were Unionists or, as the war progressed, because they had deserted from Confederate armies—in fact, between 15 and 20 percent of the state's soldiers did. Just as the South was not monolithic, so the Union had its fragments and factions. The author reckons that although Lincoln was successful in piecing together a coalition of Unionists of varying stripes, the Union army was not enthusiastic in its support for him or, at the war's end, for Reconstruction, which helps explain why that decadelong effort is now widely considered a failure.
An accessible work of scholarship that will be of great interest to students of Civil War history.
