Bloody Promenade: Reflections on a Civil War Battle

The American South Series

by Stephen Cushman

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 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.

Genres: History, Civil War

295 pages, Paperback

First published October 22, 1999

About the author

Stephen Cushman is Robert C. Taylor Professor of English at the University of Virginia.

Reviews

[Arnie · Rating 5 out of 5]

While doing research on an ancestor who participated in the battle of the Wilderness I came across this book. It juxtaposed modern day against 1864 very well. It made me want to visit the site of the battle even more because I have passed by the same roadsigns many times in my own daily travels around Virginia.... Knowing what I know now, the call from those long ago battles is ever present.

[Mark Harden · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very uneven series of essays. The best deal with how contemporaries experienced the war, and how we experience it today. At other times, the author (a published poet) delves too deeply into literary criticism for my taste.

[Fred Svoboda · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am really a fan of this book. Cushman is meditating on the many meanings of the Battle of the Wilderness, and a patient reader should much enjoy. Anyone with a serious interest in the Civil War could consider reading this.

[Michael Nash · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a fascinating book, part post-modernist history about the representations of a particular battle across time and mediums, part meditation on the nature of war and the specific meanings of the US Civil War, part criticism of of works of fiction about the war and histories, along with a collection of about five excellent poems by the author. There's some tremendous insight here, and some fascinating questions. The only problem with it is its lack of focus, its lack of a throughline thesis, but that is a small price to pay for general readability. Recommended for anybody trying to understand what the Civil War does and should mean to a modern audience.

[Margaret · Rating 2 out of 5]

Okay, maybe my expectations for this book were a little too high. I heard about it at a panel at this year's Organization of American Historians (OAH) meeting as a possible substitute for a less biased & more scholarly work on the Civil War & popular memory than Horwitz's *Confederates in the Attic*. However, I just found the book to be a difficult read in the sense that I didn't feel very engaged. Its also written more as a literary memoir of sorts, and I guess that I was hoping for something a bit broader? Anyway, I'm glad that I ordered Horwitz for this fall.