The Good Men Who Won the War: Army of the Cumberland Veterans and Emancipation Memory
In his ambitious The Good Men Who Won the War, Robert Hunt seeks to show that the men of the Union Army of the Cumberland were more aware that theirs was a war of emancipation than we have traditionally thought. He has thoroughly studied the memoirs and regimental histories published during 1880-1928 by soldiers who fought under Don Carlos Buell, William Rosecrans and George Thomas. Hunt’s research is impressive, with a bibliography of over 70 Union soldiers’ books. A professor of history at Middle Tennessee State in Murfreesboro — itself the cockpit of some of the Cumberlanders’ campaigns — his grasp of the Western Theater is sure. Prof. Hunt’s argument that “the writers incorporated emancipation into the Cumberland army’s victory” seeks to overturn David Blight’s well-respected observation, made in Race and Reunion (2001), that Northern soldier-memoirists essentially wrote African-Americans out of their war memory. By my reading of The Good Men, however, the author fails to make his case. Maj. James Connolly of the 123d Illinois termed himself a “practical abolitionist” freeing Rebels’ slaves to get at the Rebels themselves. Robert Rogers of the 125th Illinois, writing in 1882, was proud that he had helped remove “from our national banner the odium” of slavery. But beyond these and a few other statements, the author has little evidence to support his contention. That is not to say that the Cumberland veterans were unaware of how the war “hardened” after mid-1862. The Northerners clearly saw that their fight against Rebel armies gradually targeted Southern civilians’ property, especially slaves. In Benjamin F. Magee’s history of the 72d Indiana (1882), freed slaves were “the steadfast friends of the Union soldiers,” who helped the invading Northern armies in numerous ways, notably by military service. On the other hand, Magee’s observations stand somewhat alone. Even Hunt concedes that such expressions blend with other writers’ racist remarks to form “a contradictory hodge-podge.” To be sure, making sense of Civil War memoirs and histories is always difficult, given their varying and sometimes conflicting observations. Hunt makes his task harder by trying to do more than look for evidence that the Cumberland veterans embraced “emancipation war.” He seeks to disprove Prof. Blight’s thesis that “veterans crafted a shallow and romantic recollection of the war,” and that they did not engage in the sentimental reminiscences described by Stuart McConnell in his study of the GAR (1992). He also wants to disprove Cecilia O’Leary’s argument that the veterans “fabricated memory” of the war to serve political purposes in the 1880s and 1890s. These concerns divert the author — and us — from the book’s primary focus on emancipation. As a self-described “memory study,” The Good Men fails to heed Phyllis Trible’s observation (quoted in David Goldfield’s Still Fighting the Civil War) that “what ‘actually happened’ and what a people thought happened belong to a single historical process.” The author thus belabors the distinction between “false recollection of the war” and “the real war.” He is determined to show that for his Cumberlanders, “their real war did get into the books.” This phrase, widely quoted, comes from Walt Whitman, who never served in an army and never saw a battle, but who believed that he could describe “the real war” from his experiences as a hospital steward tending sick and wounded Northern soldiers. Hunt seems not to have caught the irony of using a non-combatant’s phrase to judge the writings of men who actually fought. Such is the messy stuff of memory. In an admittedly complex and growing field of Civil War study, The Good Men Who Won the War seeks to contribute to the literature. It does so only faintly. Reviewer: Stephen Davis Stephen Davis studied under Bell Wiley at Emory University where his doctoral dissertation topic was “Johnny Reb in Perspective: The Confederate Soldier’s Image in the Southern Arts.” He was book review editor for Blue & Gray magazine for more than 20 years. His next book, What the Yankees Did to Us: Sherman’s Bombardment and Wrecking of Atlanta, will be published by Mercer University Press.
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Illustrated, index, bibliography, 178 pp., 2010, University of Alabama Press,