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Introduction This study examines Army of the Cumberland regimental histories and personal memoirs in order to evaluate how the authors included emancipation in their interpretation of the North’s victory in the Civil War. During the conflict the army had been instrumental in turning invasion into an act of liberation in Kentucky,Tennessee, and Georgia, and I wanted to see how Cumberland authors incorporated this fact into the war histories they wrote in later years—if they incorporated it at all. While studying this question I found that the available historical literature on the subject took two very different directions. On the one hand, James McPherson has led the effort to turn the Civil War into an emancipation event—an interpretation made necessary by the civil rights generation , as Edward Ayers has rightly pointed out.1 McPherson’s work, in turn, has blended with the labor of those historians who have carved out the field of “soldier studies.” By marrying military history to social history , these scholars have allowed us to see soldiers as thinking individuals and as important actors in policy making. Increasingly, these studies have also demonstrated that Union men willingly aided the process of emancipation during the war.The best of these works, Chandra Manning’s What This Cruel War Was Over, even suggests that many of the Federal soldiers became converts to liberation as a genuine social revolution. In any case, if Manning is right, the Union soldiery was pragmatic and flexible in their ability and willingness to redirect the North’s war toward the controversial objective of freedom.2 On the other hand, in contrast to this uplifting historiography, the narratives of Reconstruction and turn-of-the-century imperialism, respectively , paint a gloomy picture of racial failure, the rise of militarism, and 2 Introduction political reaction. Parallel to this, students of Union Civil War memory have argued that the former Federal soldiery constructed a false recollection of the war. In Stuart McConnell’s study of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), for example, the author insists that this veterans’ organization created memories of “sentimental bivouac rather than a messy war.” The GAR deliberately removed any “sense of tragedy” or references to the “shock of modern combat.” The veterans simply did not allow the “real war” to be expressed in the collective memory. McConnell cites John W. DeForest and Ambrose Bierce as the exceptions.3 Such assessments of sentimentalist cover-up have opened the door for many scholars to dismiss Union war veterans and their memory, particularly on the matter of the emancipation legacy. According to David W. Blight’s Race and Reunion, for example, veterans crafted a shallow and romantic recollection of the war, and this helped facilitate a national reconciliation movement that wrote African Americans out of the fight entirely . Union veterans, he insists, cooperated in creating a cult of common manhood blue and gray, leaving blacks to fend for themselves in segregated America.For her part,Cecelia O’Leary argues that the Grand Army of the Republic became openly reactionary, deploying their war memory to promote a culture of militarism in response to the labor, gender, and racial troubles of the turn of the century.4 This literature has been critiqued, of course. New studies have found that Union veterans were reluctant to abandon their former comrades in the United States Colored Troops (USCT), and were hardly eager to make common cause with their former Confederate enemies. In his excellent discussion of honoring the Union war dead, for example, John Neff asserts that most of the former soldiers did not support reconciliation but remained insistent in defending their triumph—their belief in the “Cause Victorious,” as he styles it.5 I certainly applaud this critical literature and hope that my effort gives it aid and comfort.For my part,I will critique the argument that Union veterans buried or distorted the “real war,” because in the question of what counts as real lies the key to the Cumberland writers ’ memory of emancipation. The authors of Cumberland regimental histories and memoirs were certainly part of late-Victorian culture and so it would be odd if sentimentalism did not run through their work in some form. This said, these authors did not use their narratives to indulge in literary escapism or romance . To the contrary, they constructed an argument. They used their histories to insist that the Union army had preserved the country’s fun- Introduction 3 damental military traditions intact—particularly the ideal...

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