The fog of uncertainties and inaccuracies that shrouded wartime accounts of battles began to lift with the postwar publication of memoirs. These personal reminiscences, along with the appearance of massive compilations of official records, provided a seemingly objective basis from which the military events of the war could be sorted out and ordered. Indeed, the popularity of the generals' memoirs rested on the assumption that here were the authorities who had seen the big picture and could present it as it actually was. For this reason, the memoir occupies a middle ground between the eyewitness letter or diary, on the one hand, and a conventional historical narrative, on the other. Memoirs are often more revealing of the workings of historical memory than of the events being described.
Memoirs can also convey an emotional sense of the past that can be grasped in no other way.
With the publication in 1928 of Union General John Gibbon's Personal Recollections of the Civil War , the cycle of Civil War memories had about run its course. In large part because so much historical writing rests upon retelling stories already told by others, fiction and poetry can often bring us closer to the unique particularity of an event in the past. His perceptive comments on a broad range of novels and poems that touch or focus upon combat experience in the Wilderness reveal just how the most creative of this literature can surpass nonfiction in jolting us into a fresh understanding of a story we thought we already knew. Cushman ends on a wistful note. He wonders if Americans can safely assume that they will never again face an internal ordeal as terrible as the Civil War.