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Brian S. Wills, Bloody Promenade: Reflections on a Civil War Battle. By Stephen Cushman. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999. xvi, 295 pp. $29.95, isbn 0-8139-1874-X.), Journal of American History, Volume 88, Issue 3, December 2001, Pages 1081–1082, https://doi.org/10.2307/2700449
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On May 5–6, 1864, in the dark recesses of the Wilderness in north central Virginia, Ulysses S. Grant's Union soldiers grappled with Southerners under Robert E. Lee in a bitter struggle. The Federals sustained 18,000 casualties, the Confederates 8,000. Some of the wounded perished when the thick underbrush caught fire and they could not drag themselves to safety or be rescued before the flames reached them.
Stephen Cushman, a professor of English at the University of Virginia, wants to understand the battle of the Wilderness as fully as any individual can who is separated by time from the 1864 participants. To achieve this, he consults not only historical and literary sources but Civil War reenactors, works of art, and the battlefield itself. The result is a work not unlike Tony Horwitz's popular Confederates in the Attic (1998).
Yet Bloody Promenade is not Confederates in the Attic. The author applies a similar narrative style, but his work has an informed literary tone as well. Nor does his book purport to be typical of historical analyses of the battle. “If this book is a history of anything, it's the history of verbal and visual images of a single, particularly awful moment in the American Civil War.”
