“The premise of the Union war was that white Southerners could be redeemed; the premise of the Confederate war was that Northerners and Southerners could never again be countrymen.”
IN 1861, Americans embarked upon the single bloodiest conflict in the nation’s history. Nearly 160 years later, many still seek to explain the reasons for the unprecedented bloodshed of the Civil War.
The struggle has been characterized as a fight for emancipation or for the restoration of the Union. Others assert that it was a clash over “states rights” or a response to naked Northern aggression.
Elizabeth Varon, a professor of history at the University of Virginia, maintains that the factors that drove those who fought were actually much different than the standard explanations for the conflict so often articulated today, and far more complex.
In her new book, Armies of Deliverance: A New History of the Civil War by Oxford University Press, Varon explores the varying motivations of combatants on both sides, and contrasts them with those of the politicians and elites who sent the armies off to do battle. Urban or rural, rich or poor, white or black – Americans of all backgrounds fought, killed, and in many cases died, for sometimes vastly different reasons.
MilitaryHistoryNow.com recently connected with Varon to discuss her book and the fresh insights it offers on a chapter of American history that continues to divide us.
MilitaryHistoryNow.com: Many Americans have been brought up to think of the Civil War as a fight to preserve the Union that evolved into a struggle to end slavery. Is this the wrong way to think of it?
Elizabeth Varon: That narrative is basically sound, but it doesn’t fully account for the broad range of positions along the political spectrum of Unionists, or for the various efforts to harmonize Union and emancipation as war aims. Radical Republicans, abolitionists and black Southerners believed from the start that for the Union to be saved it must be redeemed from slavery. Politically moderate Unionists of various stripes were determined from the start to cordon off slavery and prevent its growth. And even conservative Unionists, who were hostile to abolition, wanted to protect the Union and the free labor system against the disunionist “slave power conspiracy.” So, the defence of the Union was inextricably linked to a critique of slaveholders and their corrosive impact on American politics and society. That critique, from the start, posited that non-slaveholding white Southerners were duped and oppressed by the slaveholding elite and would thus benefit from the demise of slavery and the spread of the free labor system.
MHN: You characterize the North’s framing of the conflict as a “war of liberation.” Explain what you mean by that.
EV: Northerners imagined the Civil War as a war of deliverance, waged to deliver the South from the clutches of secessionist “oligarchs” and to bring to it the blessings of free society. Many in the North imagined that as the Union army racked up victories, Southerners, especially non-slaveholders, would welcome liberation from Confederate despotism and falsehood. This belief in deliverance was a deep commitment by Northerners that grew stronger over the course of the war. Indeed, deliverance was such a powerful political theme that it drew followers like a magnet to the Union cause, and enabled Abraham Lincoln to forge a broad coalition for defeating disunionism. Loyal Americans turned to metaphors to conjure how the Union war would save the South: Confederates were pupils who needed teaching, patients who needed curing, children who need parenting, heathens who needed converting, drunkards who should sober up, madmen who needed to come to their senses, errant brethren who should return to the path of righteousness, prodigal sons who should return home.
MHN: You describe how political leaders in the North incorrectly expected the that the Union armies would be greeted as liberators in the South. Why did they think that would be the case?
EV: Of course, African Americans in the South did greet the Union army as liberators, fleeing to Union lines by the hundreds of thousands and then joining the Union army en masse beginning in 1863, where they made decisive contributions as liberators. In fact, their stories remind us that we should not equate the South with the Confederacy, as anti-Confederate Southerners were crucial to Union victory. Where white Southerners are concerned, Northern expectations are harder to riddle. The image of the white Southern masses as the victims of their own leaders had deep roots in Northern politics. Abolitionists had long warned the Northern public that a “slave power conspiracy” of elite Southern masters exercised unseemly control over national politics, subverting the will of the non-slaveholding majority. The fledgling Republican party appealed to the Northern mainstream by emphasizing slavery’s harmful effects on whites—the economic backwardness, lack of opportunity and absence of free speech in the South. As soon as the war started, Northerners began to argue that the Confederacy embraced a “military despotism” that herded white Southerners into its ranks. Knowing what we do about what a long, hard war Confederates would prosecute, it can seem naïve for Northerners to have dreamed of Southern deliverance. But they drew hope from many sources: from their success in raising Union recruits in the slaveholding Border States; from the vocal Unionism of a small number of dissenting whites in Confederate states, like Andrew Johnson of Tennessee; and from the behaviour and testimony of disaffected Southern refugees and deserters. In short, Unionists’ belief in Southern deliverance was ideological. They believed in man’s capacity for reform and repentance, and subscribed what scholars have called the “affective theory” of the Union—the view that the nation must be based on bonds of affection not coercion. In light of this belief system, they concluded that for the North to win the war, Confederates must not only be defeated on the battlefield: they must be made to love the Union again. By distinguishing between the guilty secessionist elite and the redeemable masses, deliverance rhetoric allowed Northerners to maintain their belief in a consensual Union.
MHN: What fresh insights does your book offer into what Southerners made of the war, either the ‘planter class’ or ordinary citizens.
EV: I argue that Confederates were keenly attuned to Northern deliverance rhetoric, and were determined to pre-empt, discredit and silence Yankee appeals to the Southern masses. Thus, from the start of the war to its finish, Confederate propaganda insisted that the North waged ruthless, remorseless war, and sought the brutal conquest, not the liberation, of the South. That propaganda proved effective. Most Confederates were scornful of the idea that Southerners’ affection for the Union might be rekindled. Over the course of the war, the experience of Union occupation intensified the patriotic fervor of diehard Confederates. Predisposed to believe that the hated Yankees would not fight fair, Confederates circulated endless tales of the invaders’ “atrocities” against civilians and of their “violation,” “pollution” and “degradation” (typical keywords of Confederate rhetoric) of the South. As the Union took aim at slavery, Confederates reviled the Emancipation Proclamation as the culminating proof that any reunion between the North and South was utterly impossible. In other words, while we sometimes take it for granted that nations at war will demonize each other, in the case of the Civil War the Confederates engaged in a much more sweeping and urgent project of demonization. The premise of the Union war was that white Southerners could be redeemed; the premise of the Confederate war was that Northerners and Southerners could never again be countrymen. Confederates feared invasion but also feared infiltration—that the Northern Republican party would succeed in establishing a beach-head in the South. And so Confederates relentlessly demonized Northerners, portraying them as infidels and heretics, foreign mercenaries, condescending Puritans, money-grubbing materialists and socialistic radicals.
MHN: Had Lincoln survived the war, how might the Reconstruction era have unfolded differently? Do you think he would have been as effective as president in peacetime as he was during the war?
EV: We get a clear sense of Lincoln’s agenda for Reconstruction from his December 1863 amnesty proclamation. It offered forgiveness and a restoration of political rights to any white Southerner who took a loyalty oath, accepting abolition and pledging future allegiance to the Union. The plan also offered readmission to states that could form an electoral core of such loyalists, equal to ten percent of the 1860 electorate. Lincoln imagined that states such as Louisiana, Tennessee and Arkansas, where there was a strong occupation force and vanguard of homegrown Unionists, would lead the way, modelling for other Confederate states how to re-enter the national fold. In keeping with the deluded masses theory of Confederate culpability, Lincoln’s proclamation drew a sharp line between the guilty elite and the errant populace. Certain classes of high–ranking Confederate military officers and government officials were exempted from the offer of amnesty and would have to throw themselves on the mercy of Union authorities to receive pardons. But the mass of rebels, should they renew their allegiance, would carry no stigma of responsibility for the war. It is impossible to overstate how enthusiastic Lincoln was about his Ten Percent Plan and how hopeful he was that it would appeal to wavering Confederates, and even encourage desertion. Union scouts carried the amnesty proclamation to enemy lines, cavalry expeditions were sent out supplied with it, and copies were left behind in Southern dwellings. For Lincoln, the emancipation of blacks and amnesty for whites were two sides of the same coin, and his linkage of them was integral to the campaign of his newly christened “National Union Party” in the presidential contest of 1864. If he had lived, he would have been deeply disappointed, as U.S. Grant was, to confront the depths of Confederate recalcitrance. But he surely would have handled the situation better than Andrew Johnson did.
MHN: We’re living in an era of divided politics in which Americans increasingly view those of opposing ideologies as ‘traitors’ and ‘the enemy.’ Many parallel our current climate to that of the years leading up to the Civil War. Is there anything to such comparisons?
EV: Make no mistake about it: the country was much more deeply divided in the 1850s than it is now. And slavery was at the heart of those divisions. But there are nonetheless parallels and recurring patterns visible in our political life, then and now. Slaveholders wrote the playbook for cynical, divide-and-conquer politics. At the core of their proslavery ideology was the view of American race relations as a zero-sum-game, in which any gains for blacks would bring losses for whites. Lincoln, along with Frederick Douglass and other key allies, as they made the case that emancipation would benefit all Americans, including Southern whites, profoundly challenged that old way of thinking. But a fear-mongering politics, that pits Americans against each other, survived the Civil War and was retooled into the “Lost Cause” defence of slavery and of the Confederacy. As events in my hometown of Charlottesville illustrated, we still live with the tragic legacy of Lost Cause politics today.
ELIZABETH R. VARON is a professor of American history at the University of Virginia. An expert in the Civil War-era and 19th-century South, she is the author of several award-winning books of the period, including her latest: Armies of Deliverance: A New History of the Civil War by Oxford University Press. Varon’s public presentations include book talks at the Lincoln Bicentennial in Springfield; at Gettysburg’s Civil War Institute; and on C-Span’s Book TV. She is also a featured speaker in the Organization of American Historians’ Distinguished Lectureship program.
