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Epilogue The North’s Civil War created a paradox for the victors. In previous conflicts Americans had been able to translate military victory into the absolute control of the conquered (or secured) landscape. By contrast, the Union’s triumph in 1865 simply ended Confederate independence, turning the Southern states into an insurgent territory that congressional Republicans could never master. Surrender of the Rebel armies produced dangerous tension and perpetual political muddle. This was a fascinating irony, for the North had organized the society’s military power to a degree never before seen in the country’s history. In response to Fort Sumter and the subsequent shame of Bull Run, Union states and regions had recruited men in unprecedented thousands. To this mass of soldiers was added the U.S. Treasury’s financial creativity, women and blacks who insisted on mobilizing themselves, a president who vastly expanded the executive war power, and, above all, a grand promise of freedom. The result was an American levée en masse. When fully organized by various military and civilian leaders, this levée was turned into a tremendous destructive force. The Confederacy was crushed by an overwhelming power that Jefferson Davis—or Edmund Ruffin—could not possibly have imagined when the first cannon was fired to “reduce” Fort Sumter in April 1861. And yet the results of it all were so problematic: a victory more in myth than truth, perhaps. In this respect, the North’s war set the pattern for America’s major conflicts in the twentieth century. In each of the great global wars of this new age, the United States produced massive mobilizations, some type of military-industrial complex, and millennial expectations. The result was immense destructive power. Yet frustration, irony, contradiction, and 136 Epilogue muddle followed in the wake of military triumph. If the North’s victory in the Civil War eventually produced a Fourteenth Amendment (a revolution in words) that proved impossible to turn into any concrete political reality, Woodrow Wilson sought to make the “world safe for democracy” and to create a League of Nations to replace dangerous imperial rivalries. This Virginia-born segregationist even toyed with the idea of a declaration of human rights in order to protect Jews and other ethnic minorities in the newly remade Eastern Europe.1 However, the United States never joined the League, while economic instability and disappointed hopes stimulated ugly dreams in Germany and Japan. Later, it was argued that World War II would allow the country to use full mobilization to destroy the evil of totalitarianism, but half the victory (at least) belonged to the Soviet Union and the alliance with Stalin turned sour even as the Germans and Japanese still fought. At several points in America’s modern military history, we have organized overwhelming power and used it to destroy (or threaten) the immediate enemy, but “real” victory has always remained elusive, fuzzy, or quickly redefined by circumstance. Cumberland veterans and the men of the other Union armies faced this dilemma for the first time in the country’s history and it is intriguing that their response to it amounted to something of a template for America’s later wars. Beyond pointing out the obvious fact that they had destroyed their enemy’s military power and nationhood, Cumberlanders did not dwell on how surrender changed the former foe. Outside of Albion Tourgee, little or nothing was said about control over the politics of the Southern states. Rather, the veterans shifted the focus to themselves and to the society to which they returned. Cumberlanders found victory in the fact that war had not corrupted them and that they had returned to a land that was both undestroyed and untainted. In Wilbur Hinman’s case, his fictional Si Klegg found victory in being worthy to go home to his idyllic “Injianny” and his beloved Annabel. For Joseph Warren Keifer, the America redeemed and purified by emancipation war would now use force only to promote humanitarianism and international good government. Composed in this way, the Cumberland authors’ collective effort did not amount to the memory of a war so much as a way to imagine modern war making. In this respect, they fashioned something entirely different from the Lost Cause. Whether found in such efforts as Laura Martin Rose’s UDC history for white Southern schoolchildren or David W. Griffith ’s spectacle Birth of a Nation, the South’s Civil War was recast into celebrating the Ku Klux Klan. In this redrafting...

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