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4 Legacies Probably the greatest single change in American civilization in the war period, directly connected with the conflict, was the replacement of an unorganized nation by a highly organized society—organized, that is, on a national scale. —Allan Nevins, Organized War to Victory By the turn of the century the legacy of the North’s Civil War seemed dead. As America embarked on its imperialistic crusade in 1898, it seemed to betray the great moment of liberation that had happened three decades earlier. After January 1, 1863, the North had used its overwhelming force not only to destroy the Confederacy but also to give freedom a wider meaning. In the process, the American way of war had seemed to become a new thing. In contrast to the Jacksonian generation’s use of war as a device to acquire yet more agricultural living space for whites, the North had turned American war making into a selfless and idealistic act. However, by the 1890s all this seemed to unravel. America reinvigorated imperialism at the turn of the century, not only in the conquest of the Plains Natives but also in the adventure of the Cuban and Philippine war. Furthermore, as a generation of scholarship has demonstrated, this new aggressiveness was about far more than territory (or foreign markets). Late-Victorian America produced a crisis of gender, at least within the privileged classes. Anxious to escape an “overcivilized,” feminized society, and fearful of what they termed “race suicide,” white males in polite America sought adventure, danger, grime, and sweat. Splendid little war (along with college football and the Boy Scouts) turned out to be just the answer, giving Americans like Theodore Roosevelt their “crowded hour,” while seeming to prove that the United States had become an example of the potency of the “Anglo-Saxon race” in the world order.The main prize, as phrased so well by Richard Slotkin, was not territory so much as a desperately craved “regeneration through violence.”1 Without question, this exuberant masculinity left a legacy. As Max Boot has explored, the squashing of the Philippine “insurrection” gave Legacies 103 birth to a twentieth-century succession of “small wars.” In particular, the Marine Corps came to specialize in quasi-imperialist interventionism in Latin America, producing a doctrine for prosecuting such limited conflicts along with a tiny group of daring, hell-for-leather heroes led by twotime Congressional Medal of Honor winner Smedley Darlington Butler. America engaged in a number of splendid little wars, and these became an important element of the country’s twentieth-century military experience. Yet, as Boot is careful to note, this new legacy never quite caught fire with the army,nor could it rework America’s larger citizen-soldier tradition.Indeed , Boot sees this fact as an important ingredient in the country’s military failure in Vietnam. The American way of war in the twentieth century never took Smedley Butler truly to heart.2 Or maybe it is better to say that Americans stayed true to the foundation that Union soldiers prepared in the 1860s.The themes that Cumberland writers developed as vital to their war anticipated what later generations of Americans would use to imagine and describe their own massive conflicts. After all, as Cumberlanders discussed it in their regimental histories and memoirs, the North’s Civil War had been a total war not a small one. The nation’s integrity and destiny had been at stake. In response to this crisis Unionists produced a mass mobilization that, said the Cumberlanders , was eventually organized into an overwhelming force that destroyed an evil enemy in his own backyard. Moreover, this destructiveness was understood as idealism, not masculine adventure or conquest. However cruel or brutal the devastation, and however incomplete the victory might have been in real terms, Cumberlanders found triumph in the selflessness of the motive and in the enhanced power of the nation. As well, they found ultimate victory in “God’s Country” and in the future one could build in a homeland now secure from external danger. Understood in such terms, the Cumberlanders’ war memory could travel a long way into the twentieth century. In this chapter I will focus on two veterans from the Army of the Cumberland , Wilbur Hinman and Joseph Warren Keifer. Hinman became the author of the novel Corporal Si Klegg and His “Pard,” a work that very quickly became recognized as an “every-soldier’s” story of the Cumberlanders ’ war. Effectively, it was a master narrative in...

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