Armies of deliverance: a new history of the Civil War

529 Pages·2019·111.504 MB·English

by  Varon, Elizabeth R

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Armies of Deliverance
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Armies
of Deliverance
A New History of the Civil War
z

ELIZABETH R. VARON
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Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Varon, Elizabeth R., 1963– author.
Title: Armies of deliverance : a new history of the Civil War / Elizabeth R. Varon.
Other titles: New history of the Civil War
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, [2019] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018028897 (print) | LCCN 2018029572 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190860615 (Updf) | ISBN 9780190860622 (Epub) |
ISBN 9780190860608 (hbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: United States— History— Civil War, 1861–1 865. | Slavery— United States—
Public opinion. | Secession— United States— Public opinion.
Classification: LCC E468 (ebook) | LCC E468 .V37 2019 (print) | DDC 973.7— dc23
LC record available at https:// lccn.loc.gov/ 2018028897
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Map x
Introduction: “We Are Fighting for Them” 1
PART ONE: Loyalism
1. March of Redemption: First Bull Run to Fort Donelson 23
2. Ripe for the Harvest: To Shiloh 48
3. Sacred Soil: Virginia in the Summer of 1862 78
4. The Perils of Occupation 119
PART TWO: Emancipation
5. Countdown to Jubilee: Lincoln’s Hundred Days 153
6. The Emancipation Proclamation 184
7. Fire in the Rear: To Chancellorsville 210
8. Under a Scorching Sun: The Summer of 1863 241
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vi Contents
PART THREE: Amnesty
9. Rallying Point: Lincoln’s Ten Percent Plan 285
10. Is This Hell? Fort Pillow to Atlanta 322
11. Campaign Season: The Election of 1864 356
12. Malice Toward None: The Union Triumphant 384
Conclusion: “Deliver Us from Such a Moses”:
Andrew Johnson and the Legacy of the Civil War 422
Notes 435
Index 489
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Acknowledgments
Of the many debts of gratitude I incurred in writing this book, none is
greater than my debt to the John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History at the
University of Virginia, and to the staff, colleagues, students, and interns who
make up the center’s uniquely supportive community. I am grateful, as always,
to my colleague and Nau Center founder and director Gary W. Gallagher.
He is a model of intellectual integrity and generosity, and it has been a priv-
ilege and joy to work with him. William Kurtz, the Nau Center’s managing
director and digital historian, has been a source of insight about nineteenth-
century America and also about how our scholarship can engage with
the public. I have learned so much with and from our Civil War Seminar
participants— students and former students including Frank Cirillo, Mikes
Caires, Tamika Nunley, Adrian Brettle, Willa Brown, Jack Furniss, Melissa
Gismondi, Jesse George- Nichol, Lauren Haumesser, Shira Lurie, Asaf
Almog, Clayton Butler, Stephanie Lawton, Brian Neumann, Katie Lantz,
Daniel Sunshine, Joshua Morrison, Brianna Kirk, and Stefan Lund— and
I cherish them, as individuals and as a team. At the heart of our work is UVA’s
wonderful library system and its extensive collection of Civil War books,
manuscripts, and databases; I deeply appreciate the skill and helpfulness of
the library staff. And I deeply value the fellowship and scholarship of UVA
colleagues who work on early America and the nineteenth century, especially
Alan Taylor, Max Edelson, Justene Hill Edwards, Cynthia Nicoletti, Ervin
Jordan, Holly Shulman, Kirt Von Daacke, Carrie Janney, and Steve Cushman.
I am grateful to John L. Nau III for all he does to promote Civil War
scholarship. His remarkable archive of Civil War documents—including
thousands of unique, unpublished firsthand accounts by soldiers— is a treas-
ure trove from which I drew much material for this book. The Nau Civil War
Collection’s curator, Sally Anne Schmidt, in Houston, Texas, was generous
with her time and expertise in navigating the collection.
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viii Acknowledgments
My friend Matt Gallman read the entire manuscript and offered invalu-
able advice for improving it. I very much appreciated the chance to workshop
parts of this book at Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery,
Resistance, and Abolition, and I thank David Blight for the invitation to
speak at its annual conference in the fall of 2017; I am also grateful to have
received feedback at the Harvard University conference, that same fall, in
honor of my treasured graduate school mentor Nancy Cott.
Oxford University Press has been wonderful throughout this process, and
my thanks go to Susan Ferber and Charles Cavaliere for their editorial steward-
ship, and mapmaker George Chakvetadze for his expert work. The anonymous
readers who vetted the manuscript for Oxford made many helpful suggestions.
I am fortunate to live in a family of writers, and I rely on all of them for
inspiration: my husband, best friend, and all- time favorite historian, Will
Hitchcock; our kids, Ben and Emma, whose strong voices fill us with pride
and hope; my brother, Jeremy, with his fierce social conscience; my father,
Bension, whose productivity leaves us all in the dust; and my late mother,
Barbara, to whose standard we still aspire.
Nothing buoyed me more in the final stages of writing this book than the
experience of watching my nephew Arlo, a Brooklyn sixth- grader, become a
Civil War buff. Like I did at his age, he has become fascinated by the voices of
the war. But he has been exposed by his teachers to a far wider range of those
voices, and a more nuanced treatment of the war, than I was. His newfound
passion for the study of the Civil War makes me optimistic for the future of our
field, and serves as a reminder that we should never underestimate the capacity
of young people to handle the complexity of history. This book is for Arlo.
E.R.V.
Charlottesville, Virginia
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