The good men who won the war

"Robert Hunt examines how Union veterans of the Army of Cumberland employed the extinction of slavery in the trans-Appalachian South in their memory of the Civil War ... This work demonstrates that both the collapse of slavery and the economic and social post-war experience convinced veterans that they had participated in the construction of the United States as a world power, built on the victory won against corrupt Southern plutocrats who has impeded the rightful development of the country"--Dust jacket.