Armies of Deliverance

A New History of the Civil War
Erscheinungsjahr 2019
ISBN: 978-0-19-086060-8
Verlag: Oxford University Press

Buch, Englisch, 528 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 239 mm, Gewicht: 907 g

Loyal Americans marched off to war in 1861 not to conquer the South but to liberate it. In Armies of Deliverance, Elizabeth Varon offers both a sweeping narrative of the Civil War and a bold new interpretation of Union and Confederate war aims. Lincoln's Union coalition sought to deliver the South from slaveholder tyranny and deliver to it the blessings of modern civilization. Over the course of the war, supporters of black freedom built the case that slavery was the obstacle to national reunion and that emancipation would secure military victory and benefit Northern and Southern whites alike. To sustain their morale, Northerners played up evidence of white Southern Unionism, of antislavery progress in the slaveholding border states, and of disaffection among Confederates. But the Union's emphasis on Southern deliverance served, ironically, not only to galvanize loyal Amer icans but also to galvanize disloyal ones. Confederates, fighting to establish an independent slaveholding republic, scorned the Northern promise of liberation and argued that the emancipation of blacks was synonymous with the subjugation of the white South.

Interweaving military strategy, political decision-making, popular culture, and private reflections, Varon shows that contests over war aims took place at every level of society within the Union and Confederacy. Everyday acts on the ground--scenes of slave flight, of relief efforts to alleviate suffering, of protests against the draft, of armies plundering civilian homes, of civilian defiance of military occupation, of violence between neighbors, of communities mourning the fallen--reverberated at the highest levels of governance. In this book, major battles receive extensive treatment, providing windows into how soldiers and civilians alike coped with physical and emotional toll of the war, as it escalated into a massive humanitarian crisis. Although the Union's politics of deliverance helped to bring military victory, such appeals ultimately failed to convince Confederates to accept peace on the victor's terms.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Varon, Elizabeth R

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Militärgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Amerikanische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtswissenschaft Allgemein

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- Acknowledgments

- Introduction: "We Are Fighting for Them"

- Part I: Loyalism

- Ch 1. March of Redemption: From Bull Run to Fort Donelson

- Ch 2. Ripe for the Harvest: To Shiloh

- Ch 3. Sacred Soil: Virginia in the Summer of 1862

- Ch 4. The Perils of Occupation

- Part II: Emancipation

- Ch 5. Countdown to Jubilee: Lincoln's Hundred Days

- Ch 6. The Emancipation Proclamation

- Ch 7. Fire in the Rear: To Chancellorsville

- Ch 8. Under a Scorching Sun: The Summer of 1863

- Part III: Amnesty

- Ch 9. Rallying Point: Lincoln's Ten Percent Plan, December 1863

- Ch 10. Is This Hell? Fort Pillow to Atlanta

- Ch 11. Campaign Season: The Election of 1864

- Ch 12. Malice Toward None: The Union Triumphant

- Epilogue: "Behold Him Now the Pharaoh": Andrew Johnson and the Legacy of the Civil War

- Notes

- Index

Über Autor(innen)

Elizabeth R. Varon is Langbourne M. Williams Professor of American History and associate director of the John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History at the University of Virginia. A specialist in the Civil War era and 19th-century South, Varon is the author of We Mean to be Counted: White Women and Politics in Antebellum Virginia; Southern Lady, Yankee Spy: The True Story of Elizabeth Van Lew, A Union Agent in the Heart of the Confederacy, Disunion!: The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789-1859, and Appomattox: Victory, Defeat and Freedom at the End of the Civil War.