Now enjoy a book. Good afternoon everyone and welcome to the Gilder Lehrman book break on june 14. Welcome everyone. Todays guests will be professor Elizabeth Varon in her book armies of deliverance prefer you who are not familiar with the Gilder Lehrman institute of American History we are so glad you could join us and to tell you a little bit about Gilder Lehrman the Gilder Lehrman institute is a Nonprofit Organization dedicated to k12 History Education while also serving the general public. Our mission is to promote the knowledge and understanding of American History. Occasional programs and other resources. We also provide direct access to unique primary source materials through Gilder Lehrmans amazing collections but if amazing collections but if youre in to sit out anymore about Gilder Lehrmans program and a collection please go to Gilder Lehrman. Org. My name is william and im your host. When im not hosting im usually working on the Hamilton Education program. You want to find out more about the Hamilton Education program go to the web site. I also have with me Allison Kraft a curator from the Gilder Lehrman production. For those in our audience you will notice that your screens are often your microphones are often so please just know that is normal. There is no video and microphone for you guys. So you say how shall i ask a question . And know we will have a great conversation today and we will generate a lot of great questions. If you look at the bottom of your screen you will see the q a feature down there. During the conversation please submit the questions they are and when you said that your question if you believe thats a little note of where you are from because we like to know wherever but he is from here. Allison will be gathering up the questions and asking them in the second half of the program. We have a big audience of several hundred people so please note we are probably not going to be able to get to all the questions that but we are really going to try to ask as many questions as possible. For our speaker today our speaker today is professor Elizabeth VaronProfessor Emeritus of history at the university of virginia and serves on the executive council of the center for civil war history. She is a specialist in the civil war era and 19th century preachers also authored several books and the one we are talking about today. Some of her previous books include the need to be counted white women and politics in antebellum virginia, southern lady yankee spy, the true story of Elizabeth Van lou at union agent in the heart of the confederacy and disunion, the coming of the american civil war, 1789 to 1859 and appomattox, victory defeat and freedom at the end of the civil war. Today we will be speaking about her newest book armies of deliverance a new history of the civil war. This is an amazing book and ive had a chance to read it so now i want to stop sharing and welcome professor Elizabeth Varon. We do have and in the program. Thanks so much. A whole history of the civil war seems like an incredibly dont think task and you started through the theme of deliverance but this deliverance seems to touch on so many different topics related to the civil war from the emancipation to military but can you tell us why you decided to pack the whole emeritus of the civil war and what is meant by it deliverance . The story of american politics and my scholarship has focused on my home state of virginia. I was commissioned to write the supervise history of the entire civil war and i knew that was quite a learning curve for me and i was eager to answer for myself and for my readers some key questions about politics questions that historians have debated. The one synergistic name of most were as interested to learn more about the motivation of the soldier and how they sustain their morale over the course of a long war understanding why men enlisted in the early days when they hoped would be a short and sweet warring quick victory was what nerve them for combat. These were complex and i wanted in situ those. I was interested in the question of lincolns leadership and how we built a coalition to win the civil war. Northern society was sanctioned and divided to cross a broad political spectrum on where that abolitionists and the radical were conservative and democrats who are antiabolitionist and in the middle of that lyrical spectrum Abraham Lincoln who is a modernist who wrote about slavery and about abolition. I was interested to learn more about how coalitions sustain a coalition. There was a major question on the demise of slavery and the emancipation policy and how it took shape and the degree to which emancipation made political traction and how a sustained political traction. Over the course of my research i discovered northerners coalesced around this theme of deliverance and this was the belief that Union Victory would uplift southern whites and blacks alike isolate ring them from an elite holding oligarch secessionists who had held them under there for him as they saw it. You deliver to them but blessings of society but to put it another way Union Soldiers marched off to war in 1861 believing that their purpose was not to conquer the south and not to subjugate the south but to save it, save the southern masses from their own leaders. I argue over the course of the book that this theme of deliverance was so politically powerful that it had a message to the union cause and it permitted lincoln not only to forge a coalition but to grow that coalition of the course of the war that included republicans of all political stripes and some democrats from the opposition party, some loyal residents of the slaveholding states anticonfederate southerners and deliverance was key to all of this. I make the case that deliverance rhetoric proves very persistent over the course of the war. I tried to explain how it is that unions persisted in believing they could save the southern masses from southern leaders even under massive evidence that the confederates did not want to be saved. I also tried to address the issue of the longterm impact of this deliverance rhetoric and to note while this was instrumental in Union Victory in Coalition Building deliverance failed to persuade or except black freedom on the norths terms and deliverance rhetoric also failed in a longterm way to resolve northerners about what victory would mean and shape freedom would take. I will make one additional point about my a mint is because i know there are a lot of teachers on the line. I was thinking of teachers as i wrote this book in the sense that i was commissioned to write a book that general readers and also as a use for a textbook in College Classrooms and potentially high school too. I had it pedagogical aim in mind. I wanted students to take away two important things from this book and to learn and understand two things that americans sometimes struggle with. Those two things are first that racism was an american problem not only a southern problem. American society was fused with racism and 19th century in the north and the south. Africanamericans were waging a freedom struggle on two fronts a literal war against the horrors of slavery in the south but also a battle in the north for Political Rights and persistent discrimination in the north where they were free but relegated to secondclass status. I emphasized in this book that to understand the consequences of the causes of the civil war you had to grapple with american racism. Her mind student readers of the book and that is that the union and the confederacy were starkly different politically. Representing a starkly different ideologies and starkly different destiny for america and what these differences he famously said in 1878 there is a right side and a ron sighed. Douglas described a war of ideas between the old and the new, between slavery and freedom between barbarism and civilization. That was under no of delusion that Northern Society was perfect. Douglas knew that Union Ideology had an emphasis on free labor as opposed to leave enslaved work with a emphasis on moral reform. Union ideology created a former for which change was possible. Not inevitable by any means for easy or even likely but possible and activists like douglas pushed open the door and gave great odds in the face of greater diversity pushed open the door for change and progress. He also knew that confederates which were against change and progress. They were intent on pulling that door shut and chaining a shed and throwing away the key. Its important to understand all this. I want students to be mindful falling in the trap of a false equivalency between the union and confederacy and we know and are reminded all the time by events in charlottesville and their aftermath that thats the false equivalency is a very dangerous trap. In looking at the incredible challenge that lincoln had ahead of him when he got liked it trying to keep this gigantic complicated coalition in the north from democrats and republican abolitionist dealing with holdings in states that remained in the union. Can you talk a little bit then how emancipation and thought emancipation of golf to the emancipation of washington to the emancipation proclamation and how that played into the political dynamic when not in the north . Absolutely. The standard way as we view emancipation as a core war aid on the northern side is to emphasize the pragmatism as a politician. He knew he had to keep this political entity in border states but not to alienate moderates and conservatives. He knew soldiers wouldnt identify themselves as abolitionists. They were committed to the state of the union but not to end slavery. We know that lincoln had various policies. He offered gradual emancipation to lure slaveholders back to the union with the promise that they would be compensated for their losses and colonize. He made a series of appeals that we consider part of a long tradition of antislavery and gradualism. Lincoln comes around when he observes that events on the ground most especially the massive resistance he gave slavery by his their exodus from plantations to union lives. This activism and resistance by these is an institution that his offers to take him up on solutions and he comes around driven by a pragmatic belief that the right move for saving the union is abolition and abolition is a means to saving the union and he makes arguments on behalf of emancipation that are again pragmatic for a stunt hesitancy and convinced northerners by saying emancipation is a maintenance driven by pragmatism because emancipation takes free slaves away from our enemies. I recognize the value of that are together narrative but i emphasized in my book lincolns idealism when he comes around as it were in lincolns thinking and change. When it comes to emancipation he and his allies make when the context at the time was an idealistic argument that emancipation will benefit all americans and it will benefit southerners and it will benefit white southerners but it will benefit them by opening the way to the blessings of a free Society Education free speech Economic Prosperity and will remove the source of contention between the north and south. It will displace that slaveholding belief that has dominated Southern Society. He had attempts to enlist various allies people from the slaveholding border states in southerners from confederacy from going to support him. He tries to make his case that emancipation has brought benefits in giving freedom to the slaves. To recognize that lincoln is making this benefit northerners in southerners white and black on emancipation is its a little bit sobering in disappointing. One of think this signals is emancipation arguments remain more white centered centered on benefits for the white. The focus should have been on the suffering of slaves and their rights to freedom and citizenship. Northern antislavery remains centered in lincolns version of that. Another way to think about this in the context of what had come before this argument that emancipation will have wrought and if its for all americans is quite radical because it is a reputation of what had been centuries of zerosum game relations an argument that centrist had made in a colonial period that came at the expense of widespread lincoln and his allies reject did and its a big rate from the past in this kind of thinking. It has to be emphasized that lincoln is in a sense following the lead of the true antislavery vanguard and that is not only those enslaved people who have taken matters into their own hands and risen up against slavery eventually to enjoin the army but also very much to get to the intellectually those figures like Frederick Douglass and other abolitionists like lloyd garrison who had been building this case for abolition. Once he did embrace it here embraced it and await that was quite a big break from what had come before. Emancipation seem to play not just a role domestic way but internationally as well. Its all love can set concept of deliverance that you talk about which across the atlantic cotton was part of a Global Economy and the British Empire was dependent on cotton from the south and trying to prevent themselves from being recognized as a nation seeking selfdetermination. Can you talk a little bit more about the International Aspects of deliverance and emancipation . Again really the emphasis in deliverance for someone like lincoln and the central part of it was what we called the theory of Southern Society politics. This was a very widespread popular belief by northerners that the white southern masses most to did not own slaves had then cajoled or looted pressured terrorized into supporting the secession of leaders and somehow the union could break the spell that secession is head over the southern masses. Those southern masses would welcome deliverance at the hands of the union army. Lincoln was referred to rebellion insurrection he believed very staunchly that secession was essentially the work of a small group of secessionist conspirators and that it was not a legitimate movement that reflected the truth of the southern masses. We talk about again how didnt northerners say so much evidence of confederate support or ideology but this have implications in terms of geopolitics and diplomacy did the confederates are making a bid to persuade the british that they were a legitimate state that should be recognized as such. Like it was trying to make a case in this way to say this is not a bit jenna exercise in nationbuilding by the victims of tyranny. This is a conspiracy by a small number of slaveholders who are arriving riding roughshod over the southern masses and have to be toppled in order to restore slavery. Confederates hope of foreign recognition are dashed and a preliminary proclamation in antietam undermined the confederate bid for recognition by clearly identifying the union war with emancipation policy. And then for the confederacy how did they react to these notions of deliverance and the newspapers and the words that were. On the newspapers in the north. What was there ideology against the north so to speak . Heres an important thing to note that is at the heart of the ideological propaganda wars between the two sides. We tend to imagine that one side demonizes the other and we do see it in the civil war but the premise of the union war was that southerners would once again become chairman of northerners. This union would be restored and so unionists tended as i say to describe southerners metaphorically as people who needed teaching in drunkards who needed to sober up and madmen and centers who should repent with an accent on bringing them into the national old. Confederate leaders were dashed to this deliverance rhetoric and they wanted it all cost to discredit it. From the start of the war and before the fur shots were fired the folks with the confederate ideology is making the case to white southerners that the union is intent on the war of determination so its deliverance is the key word for unionists on the confederate side to keywords were things like degradation pollution and this was meant to preempt and discredit the southern masses by suggesting that northerners are intent on subjugation of the south. This raises the corollary issue and that is how much dissent white southern unionism was in the south and thats a tricky question to answer. Unfortunately confederate top again to us power a powerful and unionism never materialized among whites and Confederate States of the degree lincoln and others hoped it would. With the war showed was the true blue unionists were africanamerican whose participation in war effort at every level offered her assistance into enlistment into the union army was decisive in Union Victory. Another point i want to emphasize to people is while its a bit of a shorthand to equate the south and the confederacy we shouldnt do so because of course there were africanamerican stewart anticonfederate southerners and the 200,000 africanamericans who served in the union army, 80 were southerners. It comes back to your question confederate ideology argues theres a solid confederate nationalism devoted and loyal slaves and in reality it was a divided south end lincoln was able to capitalize on some of those divisions. And then taking a look at these two different ideologies to summarize the confederate viewpoint as they called it the northern barbarity and southern itemization and the north is on one hand trying to use deliverance to eventually bring the south back into the fold that their wayward brother so to speak. W