Presidencpresident s into the bos featured historians, visit cspan. Org the president s available in paperback, hardback and ebook, wherever books are sold. Welcome to the program supposed to be cosponsored by the university of history. My name is jim andsign presidenand im president of theg important books in American History which 18th century volumes behind me or current important books by some of the major prizewinning historians in the country. William roka at the institute most recently on the Hamilton Education program, william will present the historians and then died the question and answer session towards the end. Other programs sponsored by lehrman. Good afternoon everyone is welcome to the Gilder Lehrman book break here on june 14. Welcome, everyone. Todays guest will be professor Elizabeth Varon in her book, armies of deliverance. For those that are not familiar with the Gilder Lehrman institute, first welcome. We are so glad you could join us. To tell you just a little bit about Gilder Lehrman the gildere 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 through educational programs, such as book break and other resources. We also provide direct access to unique primary source materials through Gilder Lehrmans amazing collection. And if youre interested in finding out anymore about Gilder Lehrmans Amazing Program into the collection, please go to lehrman. Org. My name is william roka, and im your host here on book breaks and im not posting, im usually working on the Hamilton Education program. So if you want to find affordable the Hamilton Education program, again go to the website. I also have with the allison kraft, curator assistant from the Gilder Lehrman collection. So for you guys out there in the audience, you can notice that your screens are off and your microphone faroff concept leaves just know that that is normal. Theres no video and microphone for you guys. But then you say how shall i ask a question. I know we are going to have a great conversation today and generated a lot of great questions. So, if you look at the bottom of the screen, you are going to see the little qanda are down there and during the conversation, please come is a meta questions in plain use of your question, if you could also lead a little note of where you are from because they like to know where everybody is from here on book breaks. Alisoallison will be gathering o these questions in the second half of the program. Now, we have a big audience of several hundred people. But please note we are probably not going to be able to get all questions but we are going to try our best to ask as many as possible. For our speaker today, our speaker today is professor Elizabeth Varon, williams professor of American History at the university of virginia and serves on the executive council for civil war history. Shes a specialist in the civil war era in the 19th century. Shes also authored several books before the one we are going to be talking about today. Some of the previous books include we mean to be counted, white women in politics and antebellum virginia southern lady yankees guy is a true story elizabeth family who an agent in the heart of the confederacy, and this union becoming the civil war 1789 to 1859, victory defeat and the end of the civil war. Today we will be speaking about the latest book, armies of deliverance a new history of the civil war. This is an amazing book. Ive had a chance to read it so now i want to have, when they stop sharing my screen and welcome professor. Its great to have you on the program. Tackling the whole history of the civil war seems like an incredibly daunting task and youve done it through this theme of kilograms, as in the title, armies of deliverance, but it seems to touch on so many different topics related to the civil war from the diplomatic to the emancipation to military. Can you tell us a little bit about why you decided to tackle the whole history of the civil war and then a little bit more about what is meant by deliverance . Guest my scholarship has focused mostly on the American South and my home state of virginia so i was commissioned by the University Press to write a single volume of the entire civil war and i knew that was a learning curve for me and i was eager to answer for myself and some of the readers of the questions about the politics and questions historians have debated. The questions that interested me the most were as follows. I was interested to learn more about the motivation of the Union Soldiers, how they stand up their morale over the course of understanding why in the early days when folks are short and sweet is not all that tricky but understanding the combat, these are complex questions i wanted insight into these motivations. I was interested in the question of the leadership and how he built a coalition to win the civil war. I use the term coalition because the society was fractious and northerners were ready to cross the broad political spectrum if they were radical republicans willing to take int dig into sly altogether far end of the spectrum or conservative democrats that were antiabolition, and in the middle of the political spectrum were figures like Abraham Lincoln who were a uneasy both about slavery and abolition. So they have to manag he had ton homefront and i was interested to learn more about how he built a coalition and sustained a coalition. I was also interested on the unions emancipation policy and how they took shape in the degree to which they gained political traction. So over the course of my research, i discovered that northerners coalesced around the scene of deliverance, and this was the belief the Union Victory would uplift southern whites and blacks alike by delivering them to the elite slaveholding oligarch secessionist who have held them under their thumb. To deliver to them. To save the masses from their own leaders. This theme of deliverance is so politically powerful that it drew like a magnet implemented to grow the coalition over the course of the war where the republicans of all political stripes and party from democrats and the Opposition Party and the loyal slaveHolding Border states, anticonfederate southerners in the seated state. And i make the case that i tried to explain how it is unions persisted in believing they could save the southern masses from the southern leaders even in the face of massive evidence that the confederates didnt want to be saved. I also try to address the issue of the sort of longterm impact of the deliverance rhetoric and to note that while it is instrumental in the Union Victory in the coalition building, the deliverance rhetoric also failed to persuade the confederates to accept Union Victory or block freedom on the longterm, and also failed in any longterm way to resolve the debate on the northerners about what victory would mean. One additional point because i know there were a lot of teachers are the wind. Thinking as a teacher when i wrote this book i was commissioned to write a book that would appear with scholars and general readers but also used as a textbook in College Classrooms and high school ones, too. I had the pedagogical aims in mind. I wanted students to take away two important things from this book, and to understand things sometimes americans struggle to put in the same frame. Those two things are first, racism was an american problem, not only a southern problem, American Society was confused with racism and 19th century in the north and in the south. This meant africanamericans were waging a freedom struggle on two fronts, the war against the slavery in the south and White Supremacy also battling the north of discrimination where they were free but relegated to the kind of secondclass so i emphasize that to understand the consequences into the causes, you have to grapple with the depth but i want them to come away understanding Something Else and that is that the union and confederacy were starkly different political systems, representing different ideologies, representing different destinies for america. And it was these differences that Frederick Douglass in mind when he famously said in the 78th speech is a right side and wrong side. Booklist described it a war of ideas between the old and the new, between slavery and freedom, barbarism and civilization, the illusion that the society was perfect, he was in the Vanguard Movement to reform the modern society, but douglass knew the Union Ideology with an emphasis on free labor as opposed to enslave labor and an emphasis on the moral reform, Union Ideology created a framework in which change and progress were possible, not inevitable or likely, but possible. And activists like douglas pushed open the door to to change and progress. The change in progress. Douglas also knew that confederates were they enemies of change and progress that they were intent on pulling the door shut and chaining it shut and throwing away the key. So its important to understand all this because i wanted students to be mindful to guard against falling into the trap of the false equivalency of the union and confederacy. We are reminded all the time by those events of charlottesville and the aftermath. Host looking at the challenge that lincoln had ahead of them while trying to keep this gigantic coalition in the north from democrats, radical republicans, abolitionists dealing with this slaveholding states that remained in the union, can you talk a little bit about that and how his views on emancipation evi evolved to the emancipation proclamation and how that played into the political dynamic going on in the north . The standard way that we account for the northern site is that pragmatism as a politician, he knew he had to keep this together and not to alienate the moderate and conservatives. They wouldnt have identified themselves as abolitionists. They were committed to the state of the union, but not to the work and the slavery. So we know that lincoln experiments with various policies and offers to try to lure the slaveholders back into the union with a. Com is that if they voluntarilthey voluntarilyr slaves people compensate them. The freed people he makes a series of appeals that we consider part of the long tradition of antislavery gradualism. This is one in which lincoln comes around when he observes events on the ground, especially the resistance against slavery they are exodus. When he sees this activism and resistance by these slaves is eroding the institution and that the offers are taken of the gradual solutions are being rebuffed and he comes around for driven by the pragmatic belief that it is abolition as a means to saving the union and its based on military necessity. We emancipate the means to the end because it is a necessity to take resources away from the enemy. I recognize the value of that it will benefit southerners opening the way for the blessings of the free society, education, free speech, economic prosperity, slow Southern Society to remove the source of contention between the north and south. It will displace that slaveholding belief that have dominated the Southern Society. And they intend to list various allies into people from the slaveHolding Border states and southerners from the Confederate States that were willing to support him if he tries to find them on in making the case that it will have benefits and giving freedom to the slaves. To recognize that lincoln is making this argument about the broad benefits to the American Society, northerners and southerners, white and black of emancipation, is in a sense a little bit sobering and disappointing because one of the things that it signals is that the arguments for emancipation remains more centered on the benefits to whites than we would have liked and it should have been more on the suffering of slaves into their rights to freedom and citizenship. But the politics remain quite centered. In the context of what had come before, there would be broad benefits for all americans quite radical because it is a reputation of what has been centuries of zerosum game thinking about Race Relations and the argument that was made in the colonial period that you couldnt have block freedom because any gain could come at the expense. And lincoln and his allies rejected this and it is a big break with the past to reject this kind of thinking. It has to be emphasized lincoln here is following the lead of the antislavery vanguard and that is not only those that have taken matters into their own hands and to withdraw from it and eventually joined the union army, but also a very much in debt to those figures like Frederick Douglass and other abolitionists who had been building a. When he did embrace it it was in a way that was quite a break from what had come before. Emancipation seemed not just to play a role t but drastically but internationally as well because also the concept of deliverance but you talk about that lincoln also had to keep an eye on the atlantic because colvin was perfect the Global Economy and the British Empire was dependent on coffin from the south and then they were truly to prevent them from being recognized as a nation seeking selfdetermination. Can you talk more about the International Acts of deliverance . Guest the emphasis in central premise is what we might call the devoted mass hysteria of the Southern Society politics and it was a widespread popular belief dot the white southern masses most of whom didnt own slaves had been duped, pressure from the debate could trigger raised into supporting the secessionist leaders and somehow they could break the spell. So lincoln referred to it as a rebellion insurrection and believed that it was the work of a small group of secessionist conspirators and it wasn it waa legitimate movement that reflected the true bill of the southern masses, and we can talk about again how it is northerners can believe that and have so much evidence of the confederate support. This has implications in terms of the geopolitics and they were making the bid to persuade the powers, but they were a legitimate state that should be recognized as such. Lincoln was trying to make the case to say this is not a legitimate exercise o this is a conspiracy if you have to be toppled to restore the union. And of course they embraced emancipation proclamation in the Union Victory in antietam undermined the confederate bid quite clearly identifying the union war with the emancipation policy. For the confederacy, how did they react to the notion of deliverance into the newspapers and the words that were printed, what was their ideology so to speak . Sinecure is an important thing to note at the heart of these ideological battles between the two sides we tend to imagine what happens is people demonize each other if we do see the demonization of the civil war but the premise of the union if they would be restored. So they tended to describe them as drunkards that need to sober up and they should come to their senses. They are in tune to this deliverance rhetoric and they wanted at all costs to discredit episode from the start of the war indeed before the first shots have been fired, the focus of the ideology is on making the case that the union is intent on the war of extermination and so is the key word for the unionist. On the confederate side of things like degradation, pollution, extermination in the sense of the confederate ideology it is meant to discredit by suggesting northerners are intent on the subjugation. So this raises a corollary issue and that is how much was there in the south and that is a tricky question to answer. Unfortunately it was powerful and the unionism never materialized to the degree that lincoln and others hoped that it would. It shows that the unionists were africanamerican whose participation in the effort at every level and from white to small up to the union army is absolutely decisive in Union Victory and another point i want to emphasize to people is a we shouldnt do so because there were anticonfederate southerners who serve in the union army nearly 80 or southerners and so it sort of comes back to your question, that it ideology would argue that there was a solid we had a reality that it was a divided south and lincoln was able to capitalize on some of those divisions. Host you summarized this as they called it northern barbarity of the southern victimization. And then the north is on the one hand trying to use deliverance as a way to eventually bring the south back into the way their wayward brothers, what with some of the impact of the enough theh the war with the start of the reconstruction, and what are some of the legacies in some ways that almost negates or takes advantage of the northern view of trying to bring them back into the fold and become brothers once again . Host i came to realize what i was finding was the back story to a tale i told in my Previous Po