If we demote the significance of the deliverance theme, there is another way to organize the impressive evidence that Varon has accumulated. The Civil War was an explosive example of the one thing that American mythology says this country never has: class conflict—or, at least, class politics—in this case pitting slaveholders against nonslaveholders. Start with Varon’s observation that most of the Unionist sentiment in the South was antislaveholder rather than antislavery. She makes a similar point about the War Democrats in the North, who had no interest in emancipating the enslaved but had been infuriated by the treason of the Southern slaveholders. If antislaveholder and antislavery sentiment could be united in defense of the Union, the Slave Power could be defeated.
Lincoln and the Republicans understood this. To be sure, they never separated their determination to suppress the Slave Power from their hatred of slavery itself. They went to war to uphold what they believed was an antislavery Constitution and to restore the antislavery union that the founders intended to create. They made it clear that they would put down the slaveholders’ rebellion at all costs, and they could do so because in 1861 they had taken control of the presidency and (thanks to the secession of 11 slave states) both houses of Congress.
But to win the war, they needed more than congressional majorities; they needed allies, and their natural allies in the struggle against the Slave Power were the nonslaveholders in the South as well as the North. “A privileged class has existed in this country from an early period of its settlement,” New York Senator William Seward declared in 1855. “The slaveholders constitute that class.” The irrepressible conflict over slavery was best understood as a “conflict between the privileged and the unprivileged classes of this republic.”
The rallying cry for the coalition of the unprivileged classes was “Union.” Lincoln went to great lengths to hold the Northern War Democrats in the coalition, even as they recoiled from the Emancipation Proclamation, by appealing to their Unionism. In the summer of 1863, in the aftermath of the Draft Riots, Lincoln made it clear that opponents of emancipation still had good reason to support the war. “You say you will not fight to free negroes,” he wrote in an open letter to War Democrats. “Some of them seem willing to fight for you; but, no matter. Fight you, then, exclusively to save the Union.” By the end of the war, hundreds of thousands of War Democrats, unwilling to “fight to free negroes,” nevertheless fought and died to suppress the slaveholders’ rebellion.