The Good Men Who Won the War: Army of the Cumberland Veterans and Emancipation Memory, and: A Chickamauga Memorial: The Establishment of America's First Civil War National Military Park (review)

The real Civil War, according to Walt Whitman, was never likely to get into the books, and for many historians that has held true, even if the volumes in question are memoirs; perhaps especially if the volumes in question are memoirs. We are at a point in the historiography of the Civil War where, so glutted are we by firsthand contemporary letters, diaries, dispatches, and newspapers, we are in danger of dismissing firsthand accounts written after the fact. And yet, at the same time, we are fascinated by the idea of Civil War memory, even though we too often position it as a false memory, one constructed within the context of a postwar national (or indeed sectional) narrative driven by a combined political and racial imperative, to which was often added a hefty dose of sentimentality, to make the war seem better or worse than it actually was. Better, worse, and, above all, real are, of course, relative terms, and in the case of a civil war this is especially so. In war, one person's victory is always another's defeat; in a civil conflict, that leaves the nation, if it survives, in a bit of a quandary. In the case of the American Civil War, that quandary was exacerbated by the fact that the nation did survive, but slavery did not. And in "the question of what counts as real," Robert Hunt proposes in The Good Men Who Won the War, "lies the key to the Cumberland writers' memory of emancipation" (2).

Hunt's is a relatively trim and tidy study, but it certainly packs a punch. It utilizes the personal memoirs of Army of the Cumberland veterans alongside their regimental histories "to evaluate how the authors included emancipation in their interpretation of the North's victory in the Civil War" (1). The choice of the Army of the Cumberland as the lens through which to refract the multitude of memories and the meanings applied by and to them is an excellent one. Certainly for Hunt, who has long worked in Tennessee, it was, he admits, also a practical one. Nevertheless, the Army of the Cumberland comprised such a broad mix of backgrounds in its soldiery, and operated in an area that received, at best, mixed messages about what the war was about, as to render the perspectives of its veterans especially valuable for historians. "Cumberland narrators," Hunt notes, "provided ample testimony that the Civil War had been tricky and confusing as well as deadly" (35).

Did Hunt's soldiers conclude that the war had been worth it as far as emancipation was concerned; did they believe that they had won a lasting victory that would bequeath an equally lasting legacy for the nation? On these questions, Hunt finds a degree of prevarication. Within the larger context of the war as one fought by citizen armies, and what that implied for the nation, he finds more. "In the end," he proposes, "Cumberland authors incorporated emancipation into their army's legacy by absorbing liberation into the nation's enduring mission" (97). Their war, consequently, "had been in so many ways a war of the American future" (101). Hunt's is such a marvelous and supremely well-crafted study; persuasive and provocative in equal measure. He succeeds in drawing out these men of the Army of the Cumberland not just from the battlefields they fought on, but from the historiographical battlefield that they now find themselves in. It is an excellent example of the many ways that America's Civil War past is inflected in its present, and the epitome of historical analysis...