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Emancipation and the Army of the Cumberland
Introduction
This is a web archive of selected
memoirs from soldiers of the Army of the Cumberland,
showing the veterans' attitudes towards emancipating the
slaves.
1)
The veterans of the Army of the Cumberland who wrote
personal memoirs or composed regimental histories
recorded a wide range of experiences about the Civil War
in Tennessee, Kentucky and Georgia. With rare
exceptions, these are combat narratives, detailing the
Union soldier's perspective on the theater's great
battles of Shiloh, Chickamauga, Stone's River and the
rest.
2)
Despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of the
men in the Army of the Cumberland had enlisted only to
save the Union, the events of war suddenly made them
abolitionists in a practical sense. Although
the men put on the uniform to fight Confederate
soldiers, the moment the Army of the Cumberland
invaded middle Tennessee it became a vehicle for
thousands of slaves to escape the institution, and for
many among those slaves to become Union soldiers
themselves. The memoirs and the regimentals give
the veterans' perspective on this. In them you can
read of the soldiers' often perplexed reactions as they
watched slave refugees show up in camp, or thought about
the consequences of Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation
Proclamation, or learned that the army would be
recruiting United States Colored Troops. The
sources record the soldiers' responses to this dramatic
change in the army's mission.
3)
Furthermore, given the time when they were written, the
memoirs act as a blend of eras. In part, the
sources describe a time when the men were young
soldiers. Freedom, at that point, was connected to
the great prewar debate over slavery, and to the
contrasting politics of the Republican and Democratic
parties. But the memoirs themselves were composed
between 1880 and 1910, and by that time the men who
wrote them were gray-bearded veterans. They had
seen Reconstruction come and go, and were watching
racial segregation being built into the structure of the
nation. Of course, the vantage point of this
hindsight affected how they discussed emancipation in
their writings.
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