Elizabeth R. Varon asks the right question in the introduction to her Lincoln Prize-winning synthesis of the American Civil War: “what was the North fighting for?” (1). Before Armies of Deliverance, historians had engaged in an unresolved debate over that question, positing answers along a spectrum from “saving the Union” at one end to “emancipation” on the other. Varon combines her mastery of the political, social, and military literature about the war with impressive original research in nineteenth-century newspapers, periodicals, government records, songs, novels, letters, and diaries, to give a different and compelling answer. Unionists, North and South, who disagreed with each other about the nature of the union and about the necessity for emancipation united around the “political theme of deliverance” (2). Politicians from different parties and factions, ministers speaking from the pulpit, editors publishing newspapers, soldiers fighting in the field, and women working in arsenals and hospitals sincerely believed they were delivering southerners from the military despotism of conspiratorial elite slaveholding secessionists and bringing to the South the blessings of a free society. Deliverance rhetoric pervaded public and private discourse, and, by building a broad and effective coalition, contributed to the Union's military victory. The politics of deliverance played out in the South as well, where Confederates developed the unifying theme of deliverance from northern barbarity and atrocity, and sought to liberate the border states from Yankee oppression.

Varon builds her case for the centrality of deliverance politics in a narrative format that follows the political, social, and military events of the war from First Bull Run to Lee's surrender at Appomattox. In choosing this periodization for her narrative, Varon implicitly rejects the claims of scholars such as Gregory P. Downs that southern violence and military occupation after 1865 constituted another phase of a war that did not really end until the early 1870s. Varon also sides with scholars such as Gary W. Gallagher who emphasize the importance of conventional military operations rather than with such as Daniel E. Sutherland who argue that local guerrilla wars were militarily significant and played an important role in local social collapse in a variety of places in the Confederacy. Her discussion of guerrillas is generally limited to what took place in Missouri and ignores the role that women played in sustaining their efforts. Varon's consideration of the war and Native peoples west of the Mississippi river is minimal, with no discussion of the campaigns in New Mexico, for example, where scholars such as Megan Kate Nelson locate a “three-cornered war” between Unionists, Confederates, and Native peoples for power and the future of the West. As Varon acknowledges, sovereignty and empire seem more appropriate themes for war fought in that part of the continent than deliverance.

Varon's narrative explores a range of people and institutions who worked for deliverance, from Harriet Tubman and Anna Dickinson, to Union Leagues, to “Parson” Brownlow, to Ulysses S. Grant. Deliverance politics shaped the production of hymns (such as “John Brown's Body” on the Union side and “Maryland, My Maryland” on the Confederate side), policies and debates in Congress, the movement of armies, the behavior of black and white soldiers, the welfare and reform efforts of women, and the politics of federal occupation of the South. Varon addresses most of the standard topics and controversies that are well known in the field (the book works well as an introduction to the American Civil War): for example, what did the Emancipation Proclamation accomplish? Why did Lincoln try to revive colonization? How important and extensive was dissent in the South? Should Lee have invaded Pennsylvania? How did federal armies reconcile hard war with their notions of civilized war? And so on. Yet seeing these issues through the framework of deliverance provides a helpful way to better understand them.

In a field with a vast scholarly literature focussed on the Emancipation Proclamation, one of the most important contributions of Armies of Deliverance is to restore President Abraham Lincoln's December 1863 Amnesty Proclamation to a place of equal importance for scholars seeking to understand the American Civil War. Northerners believed they were delivering white southerners, not only enslaved people, from slaveholder despotism. Lincoln's offer of forgiveness to southerners who renounced secession and slavery was broadly popular in the North and encapsulated northern war aims: to liberate the southern masses and restore their love for the Union. Varon reads Lincoln's 19 November 1863 Gettysburg Address as preparing the ground for amnesty, particularly when paired with Edward Everett's speech, which blamed secession on slave power aristocrats who used a reign of terror to overwhelm the southern majority. Lincoln's proclamation, Varon notes, “drew a sharp line between the guilty elite and the errant populace” (306), offering amnesty for the mass of rebels but requiring high-ranking military officers and government officials to seek pardons from Union authorities. The Union Army “promulgated and implemented” (307) the amnesty offer, as it did the Emancipation Proclamation, including leaving handbill copies in southern homes.

Armies of Deliverance is a thought-provoking and enjoyable read. The essential brilliance of the book is that it reconstructs an important aspect of the political mind-set of nineteenth-century Americans. It shows readers how they understood their own civil war and offers gentle correction to the scholarly interpretations that have clouded rather than illuminated that essential point.