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1 Remembered War; Forgotten Struggle [We] were all anxious to leave the scenes of warfare and strife and go back to God’s country, to home and friends and loved ones; to lay aside the uniform and the sword and take up the implements and avocations of peace. —Thomas Crofts, from his history of the Third Ohio Cavalry At various times after 1880 individual authors (or committees) sat down to write the history of a Cumberland army regiment or the story of a soldier ’s life. When they did so there was no agreed-upon pattern to follow. Although a number of the authors read their compatriots’ works (often enough for the purpose of disagreeing about campaign details), no standard was ever set for what a regimental history or military autobiography should contain. The writers composed their studies at different times prompted by various circumstances. As a result, Cumberland narratives are a hodge-podge. Some are richly textured, voluminous discussions of a regiment’s or an individual’s service, while others are merely sketches. Fortunately, the more elaborate Cumberland histories create nearly a complete look at the army’s war.This completeness does not represent the particular writer’s interpretive ambitions so much as the desire to include all the experience that could be recalled or copied from journals and notes. Cumberland narratives are excursive more than systematic or analytical. But from the desire to tell it all, the authors fashioned something of a total picture. In addition to describing combat, the writers discussed camp life, the enlistment process, the virtues of a citizen-soldiery, the politics of secession, and, most important, the shift in the army’s strategy from the “rosewater” days of 1861 to the hard war that took hold beginning in early 1862. As part of this, the writers discussed slavery and emancipation, looking at how these elements were woven into the evolution of the war itself. In this respect, the real war got into the books. As a result, one can read the detailed memoirs and regimental histories as testimony to the Cumberland veterans’ willingness to remember emancipation and the larger Civil War. Far from removing or forgetting Remembered War; Forgotten Struggle 21 this memory, the narratives provide a look at the process by which the men came to link the abolition of slavery to the war against the Confederacy. In particular,the memoirs and regimentals provide an important angle on the army’s change of temper on this issue, because the stories are with few exceptions written chronologically. Not only did Cumberland authors make emancipation part of their remembered war, they retraced the process by which the soldiers came to support the idea. This chapter will detail this evolution as the narrators wrote it into the army’s memory. Importantly, Cumberland authors ended their tale with the Confederate surrender. If they were inclusive and expansive when describing events from Fort Sumter to Joe Johnston’s capitulation, the narrators ever so conveniently ended things in summer 1865. The “problem” with the regimental histories and memoirs is not that they erased the African American presence in the larger war. Rather, it is that the authors, with but a couple of exceptions, chose to disconnect Reconstruction from the story. Albion Winegar Tourgee, the famous Carpetbagger, illustrates why. An officer in the 105th Ohio, Tourgee had been part of the Army of the Cumberland until injury forced his resignation and return home in 1863. Years later he was enlisted to write The Story of a Thousand, the unit history of his regiment, which he completed in 1896. The book is of a piece with its fellow regimentals, which is to say that it is unlike Tourgee’s other writings. In particular, it is unlike A Fool’s Errand, a work in which the Ohioan produced a fascinating analysis of why the North could not reorder the South after the war. As will be discussed in this chapter, Tourgee argued forcefully and in detail that Reconstruction was a failure.Given such failure, what Cumberland narrators confronted at the turn of the century was not the need to rewrite the war but the necessity to be crafty about describing the peace. After all, the army’s authors insisted that they had won an enduring victory. Such a triumph would have to be found elsewhere than in the Reconstruction thatTourgee portrayed as a political and ideological disaster. The Unprovoked and Dastardly Attack When Cumberland regimental historians sat down to write the history...

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