Whose War was it Anyway?
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When three of America's foremost historians of the American Civil War publish sweeping overviews at almost the same time, it seems like a good opportunity to take stock of the state of the field. We are six years past the end of the sesquicentennial, which many scholars hoped would spark a resurgence of public interest in the period. That did not happen—at least not to the extent of the centennial—but the past six years have seen a very public reassessment of the place of Confederate iconography in the American landscape, and with it a realization that the Civil War, and the long shadow of American slavery, still resonates. As we saw over the summer of 2020, when protests over the deaths of George Floyd and other African Americans led to the removal of scores of Confederate monuments, the Civil War still has the power to inflame, and many of its lessons remain unlearned.
Even without the hook of the sesquicentennial or public protests, Civil War historians are blessed with a broader audience than our colleagues in many other subfields. This is both a blessing—our books have greater commercial potential—and a responsibility to make our work accessible to general readers rather than simply writing for the historiography. All three of these books succeed on that count; in fact, their utility for scholars and students is more varied.
In the introduction to The Women's Fight, Thavolia Glymph describes four Civil Wars that historians explore: armies fighting on the battlefields, conflicts [End Page 259]on the home front, the slaves' war for freedom, and the war in the far West. These three books address these multiple wars to a varying degree, with the West receiving the least attention. I would add two more wars to this formula: the war over meaning and memory, and the war of Reconstruction. Politics, in statehouses and Washington and Richmond, cut across these various conflicts. Fortunately, all of these volumes recognize the intimate interplay between the home front, the battlefield, and the political arena, sparing us the tired debate over whether one should be privileged over the other.
Elizabeth R. Varon, having written about the long antecedents of the Civil War in Disunion!: The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789–1859and its putative end in Appomattox: Victory, Defeat, and Freedom at the End of the Civil War, turns to the entirety of the conflict in Armies of Deliverance: A New History of the Civil War. Compressing the sweep of the entire war into a single volume is no simple feat, and Varon does it both concisely (at 434 pages of text, the book is half the length of James McPherson's 1988 classic Battle Cry of Freedom), and elegantly. The narrative flows smoothly, linking political, military, and social vignettes and showing the interplay among the various facets of the war. While I imagine Varon wrote with a trade or popular audience in mind, Oxford University Press has issued it in a so-called College Edition as well, and that is the edition under review. The text is unchanged save for the addition of a timeline in the front and a glossary and list of suggested readings in the back, along with a host of electronic resources including primary sources and flashcards.
Varon organizes her work around the idea of "deliverance" as a political metaphor that unified disparate groups of Northerners into a Unionist coalition. According to Varon, Northerners subscribed to what she calls the "deluded masses...
