Bloody Promenade: Reflections on a Civil War Battle (The American South Series) - Softcover

Cushman, Stephen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0813920418 ISBN 13: 9780813920412

Publisher: University of Virginia Press, 1999

Synopsis

On 5 and 6 May 1864, the Union and Confederate armies met near an unfinished railroad in central Virginia, with Lee outmanned and outgunned, hoping to force Grant to fight in the woods. The name of the battle―Wilderness―suggests the horror of combat at close quarters and an inability to see the whole field of engagement, even from a distance. Indeed, the battle is remembered for its brutality and ultimate futility for Lee: even with 26,000 casualties on both sides, the Wilderness only briefly stemmed Grant's advance.

Stephen Cushman lives fifty miles south of this battlefield. A poet and professor of American literature, he wrote Bloody Promenade to confront the fractured legacy of a battle that haunts him through its very proximity to his everyday life. Cushman's personal narrative is not another history of the battle. "If this book is a history of anything," he writes, "it's the history of verbal and visual images of a single, particularly awful moment in the American Civil War." Reflecting on that moment can begin in the present, with the latest film or reenactment, but it leads Cushman back to materials from the past. Writing in an informal, first-person style, he traces his own fascination with the conflict to a single book, a pictorial history he read as a boy. His abiding interest and poetic sensibility yield a fresh perspective on the war's continuing grip on Americans―how it pervades our lives through films and songs; novels such as The Red Badge of Courage, The Killer Angels, and Cold Mountain; Whitman's poetry and Winslow Homer's painting; or the pull of the abstract idea of the triumph of freedom.

With maps and a brief discussion of the Battle of the Wilderness for those not familiar with the landscape and actors, Bloody Promenade provides a personal tour of one of the most savage engagements of the Civil War, then offers a lively discussion of its aftermath.

About this title

About the Author:

Stephen Cushman, Professor of English at the University of Virginia, is the author of a poetry collection, Blue Pajamas, and two books of criticism on American poetry.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Some words or phrases imply assumptions I happen to disagree with. In the context of the Civil War, "home front" is an example. To speak of the "home front" in connection with the Civil War is to use an anachronism, since the phrase came into our language during World War I, when a distinction between people who lived at home in peace and people who faced the "red animal" across an ocean actually meant something. But to Katherine Couse, cringing at Laurel Hill in May 1864 while the Battles of the Wilderness and Spotsylvania swirled around her house, or to Jennie Wade, killed in her kitchen at Gettysburg, this distinction meant nothing. Well, of course, some might argue, but doesn't the distinction between war front and home front hold wherever civilians do not confront actual combat, as in most of the north?

I don't believe so. In fact, one of the ways to think about "civil war," a way that perhaps still acknowledges the long history of Southern discomfort with the term, is to think of it as war in which the boundaries between war front and home front are anything but stable and clear. True, more fighting happened in the south than in the north, much of it in Virginia alone, and so the name "War of Northern Aggression" has some appeal, especially if one ignores the firing on Fort Sumter. But the fact is that effects of warfare, whether actual fighting between armies, the threat of actual fighting (as in the minds of the citizens of Harrisburg or Philadelphia after Lee invaded Pennsylvania in 1863), or the violent and destructive consequences of actual fighting (the New York draft riots of July 1863 or the Confederate raid on St. Albans, Vermont, in October 1864, a raid that many would now consider terrorism), extended far beyond the battlefield. Furthermore, and more important, beyond the worrying and nursing and grieving and mourning and financing and supplying and laboring and cheering that have made up the work of noncombatants during the later wars abroad, civilians during the Civil War, both north and south, felt deeply uncertain about the future shape of what they called home, about exactly where its front would be. When the phrase "home front" was coined fifty years after Appomattox, it was coined to describe a realm in which people don't feel deeply uncertain about the future shape of home.

Some people might disagree about this particular phrase, and I can accept their disagreement with something like respectful detachment. But in the case of certain other words or phrases my respectful detachment collapses, since those words or phrases imply assumptions I cannot stand. In the context of the Persian Gulf War, "collateral damage," an Orwellian euphemism for civilians killed in the bombing of Baghdad, would be an example. In the context of the Civil War, one of the worst offenders is buff, when used as a noun to mean someone interested in the events, conditions, and legacies of the years 1861 to 1865. Of course, there is at least one big difference between "collateral damage" and "buff." Whereas "collateral damage" disguises the killing of innocent civilians in neutral, bureaucratic language, most people who use the term buff have no conscious intent to obscure or conceal. The term does, however, obscure and conceal, just as it illuminates and reveals, much that is important.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0813920418
• ISBN 13: 9780813920412
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 295