The Record of Murders and Outrages: Racial Violence and the Fight over Truth at the Dawn of Reconstruction

Abstract

emancipation through the chronological progress of the war, all structured around detailed descriptions of individual battles, makes for an impressive, comprehensive and, above all, enjoyable read. It deservedly already has had an impact on its field, but in its approach and style, it will undoubtedly have a lasting impact beyond that. This is a very different kind of history of the Civil War, even if, in the end, the theme of deliverance raises the question of why the Union, having delivered the nation from the scourge of enslavement, failed to deliver it from the persistent inequalities of race. Varon recognizes as much in the conclusion, observing that the “story of Civil War-era deliverance politics is both bounded by a specific time and place and boundless, with modern echoes” (p. 434). The same might be said of histories of the Civil War. And Varon’s work is very much one that probes the past from new angles, incorporating the most recent research on the conflict, its nationalist implications, the experiences of the soldiers, the compromises made in the name of reconstruction. The Civil War, as a topic of study, is boundless. And Armies of Deliverance is undoubtedly the work for our times.