In Armies of Deliverance, Elizabeth R. Varon argues that Northerners imagined the war as a crusade to deliver the Southern masses from slaveholder domination and to bring democracy, prosperity, and education to the region. And that Confederates, fighting to establish an independent slaveholding republic, were determined to preempt, discredit, and silence Yankee appeals to the Southern masses. Interweaving military and social history, Varon shows how the Union's politics of deliverance helped it to win the war but also ultimately sowed the seeds of postwar discord.