(By Elizabeth Varon, professor of history) Northerners imagined the Civil War as a war of deliverance, waged to deliver the South from the clutches of a conspiracy and to deliver to it the blessings of free society and of modern civilization. Northerners did not expect white Southerners to rise up en masse and overthrow secession. But they did fervently believe that as the Union army advanced across the South, Southerners, especially from the non-slaveholding majority, would increasingly welcome liberation from Confederate falsehood and despotism.