Fact vs Interpretation, What We Have to Unlearn.

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Rhea Cole

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On the Emerging Civil War forum March 12, 2020, Chris Kolakowski wrote a post titled Fact vs Interpretation at the Bloody Lane. The Maryland Campaign has undergone a significant reinterpretation due to recent scholarship. Newly discovered evidence has revealed facts which have enlightened scholars & resulted in the removal of many old interpretive markers. One of the replacements caught Kolakowski's eye.

Porter Alexander.jpeg

Brigadier General Edward Porter Alexander


Confederate Brigadier General Edward Porter Alexander's statement that the Bloody Lane/Battle of Antietam was "end of the Confederacy" has been quoted & debated who knows how many times. The new marker at the Bloody Lane no longer contains that quote. The reason being that Alexander did not participate in the battle & was stating his interpretation based on the first person accounts he had heard. His was an informed interpretation, but it had been accepted as a first person judgement by a participant for a long time. It is no longer considered an appropriate quote to be used as if it were a first person statement.

I have no intention of going off into the weeds about Alexander's oft quoted statement. What does interest me is how many times in my long study of the Civil War I have had to unlearn absolute certainties. I grew up with an unadulterated Lost Cause narrative that I believed with a certainty normally reserved for revealed religion. I really believed that slaves were thankful for their bondage & loved their kind masters. The Civil War was all the Yankee's fault because they were jealous of Southerner's superior culture. Slavery had nothing to do with secession, etc, etc, etc, the twaddle I had been taught was endless. It was not until I was well into my adulthood before I finally shed the aftereffects of unlearning all that misinformation & began to fully understand what my family members had gone through during the Civil War. Thirty years has not been long enough to reach a full understanding of those fateful events. Civil War history is like unfolding an onion, there are endless layers & it makes your eyes water.

Shiloh marker.jpeg

Interpretive marker, Hornet's Nest, Shiloh Battlefield


Over two decades as a living history volunteer at Stones River National Battlefield I have had the privilege of touring Western battlefields with scholars, historians & local experts. Many times the volunteers were given "our side of the rope" tours of areas that visitors never get to see. Perhaps the most astonishing one of these tours involved Shiloh.

Our tour of the battlefield coincided with the publication of the complete reinterpretation of the Battle of Shiloh. The major fighting occurred on the Confederate left flank against Sherman. The Hornet's Nest, while intense, was not the pivotal focus of the battle. Beauregard's announced plan was to break Grant's connection with the river & drive him into the interior. For reasons that are still obscure to me, N.B. Forrest & his fellow commanders on the Confederate right, which were supposed to turn Grant's left did not receive any orders to attack. By the time they acted on their own initiative, it was too little, too late. It was not the death of Albert Sidney Johnston that prevented the Confederate victory, it was rank incompetence, pure & simple. As executed, the Confederate assault was foredoomed to failure. By the end of our tour, a list of my dearly held beliefs as long as my arm had to be wadded up & tossed into the trash. I must say, what replaced it was ever so much more nuanced & fascinating.

blast! copy.jpeg

Living history volunteers from Stones River N.B. serve their section of 1841 Model 6 pdrs, at Chickamauga N.M.P.
Battery has fired by piece from the right. Author is #1 on left gun of the right section.

Since then, any number of certainties have been added to my Civil War feet of clay collection. For example, for the better part of 20 years I had told visitors that six pound field cannon didn't actually fire grape shot, it was merely a literary convention. Imagine my chagrin when I saw a stand of grape for a 6 pdr at the Fort Defiance Museum in Clarksville TN! It must have been a naval round, but nevertheless less, there it was. If you Google six pounder gape shot, you will find me as a reference on several sites. I wasn't the only one surprised by that miniature stand of grape.

What dearly held Civil War certainty of yours has been shown to be untrue & how did learning the truth affect your understanding of what caused the war & how it was fought?
 
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Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain won the Battle of Gettysburg and therefore saved the Union on July 2, 1863, was a myth I was taught. While Chamberlain and the 20th fought well on July 2, its a bit more....complicated then that.

Of course I grew up about 12 miles from his birthplace, which may have had something to do with it.
 
Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain won the Battle of Gettysburg and therefore saved the Union on July 2, 1863, was a myth I was taught. While Chamberlain and the 20th fought well on July 2, its a bit more....complicated then that.

Of course I grew up about 12 miles from his birthplace, which may have had something to do with it.
All our icons were 12 feet tall, don't you know!
 
I really believed that slaves were thankful for their bondage & loved their kind masters.

It is stunning to me that this is actually believed (other than in an ironic sense) by anyone. I try to accept the fact that there are people that think that way, but it is very difficult for me to comprehend.

ETA: Thinking further... I suppose one would have to first firmly believe that the differences between the enslaved and the slave-owners were greater than what fit with my general assumptions... something that prevents one from imagining one's self in that position.
 
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On the Emerging Civil War forum March 12, 2020, Chris Kolakowski wrote a post titled Fact vs Interpretation at the Bloody Lane. The Maryland Campaign has undergone a significant reinterpretation due to recent scholarship. Newly discovered evidence has revealed facts which have enlightened scholars & resulted in the removal of many old interpretive markers. One of the replacements caught Kolakowski's eye.

View attachment 350725
Brigadier General Edward Porter Alexander


Confederate Brigadier General Edward Porter Alexander's statement that the Bloody Lane/Battle of Antietam was "end of the Confederacy" has been quoted & debated who knows how many times. The new marker at the Bloody Lane no longer contains that quote. The reason being that Alexander did not participate in the battle & was stating his interpretation based on the first person accounts he had heard. His was an informed interpretation, but it had been accepted as a first person judgement by a participant for a long time. It is no longer considered an appropriate quote to be used as if it were a first person statement.

I have no intention of going off into the weeds about Alexander's oft quoted statement. What does interest me is how many times in my long study of the Civil War I have had to unlearn absolute certainties. I grew up with an unadulterated Lost Cause narrative that I believed with a certainty normally reserved for revealed religion. I really believed that slaves were thankful for their bondage & loved their kind masters. The Civil War was all the Yankee's fault because they were jealous of Southerner's superior culture. Slavery had nothing to do with secession, etc, etc, etc, the twaddle I had been taught was endless. It was not until I was well into my adulthood before I finally shed the aftereffects of unlearning all that misinformation & began to fully understand what my family members had gone through during the Civil War. Thirty years has not been long enough to reach a full understanding of those fateful events. Civil War history is like unfolding an onion, there are endless layers & it makes your eyes water.

View attachment 350720
Interpretive marker, Hornet's Nest, Shiloh Battlefield


Over two decades as a living history volunteer at Stones River National Battlefield I have had the privilege of touring Western battlefields with scholars, historians & local experts. Many times the volunteers were given "our side of the rope" tours of areas that visitors never get to see. Perhaps the most astonishing one of these tours involved Shiloh.

Our tour of the battlefield coincided with the publication of the complete reinterpretation of the Battle of Shiloh. The major fighting occurred on the Confederate left flank against Sherman. The Hornet's Nest, while intense, was not the pivotal focus of the battle. Beauregard's announced plan was to break Grant's connection with the river & drive him into the interior. For reasons that are still obscure to me, N.B. Forrest & his fellow commanders on the Confederate right, which were supposed to turn Grant's left did not receive any orders to attack. By the time they acted on their own initiative, it was too little, too late. It was not the death of Albert Sidney Johnston that prevented the Confederate victory, it was rank incompetence, pure & simple. As executed, the Confederate assault was foredoomed to failure. By the end of our tour, a list of my dearly held beliefs as long as my arm had to be wadded up & tossed into the trash. I must say, what replaced it was ever so much more nuanced & fascinating.

View attachment 350726
Living history volunteers from Stones River N.B. serve their section of 1841 Model 6 pdrs, at Chickamauga N.M.P.
Battery has fired by piece from the right. Author is #1 on left gun of the right section.

Since then, any number of certainties have been added to my Civil War feet of clay collection. For example, for the better part of 20 years I had told visitors that six pound field cannon didn't actually fire grape shot, it was merely a literary convention. Imagine my chagrin when I saw a stand of grape for a 6 pdr at the Fort Defiance Museum in Clarksville TN! It must have been a naval round, but nevertheless less, there it was. If you Google six pounder gape shot, you will find me as a reference on several sites. I wasn't the only one surprised by that miniature stand of grape.

What dearly held Civil War certainty of yours has been shown to be untrue & how did learning the truth affect your understanding of what caused the war & how it was fought?
That the South was united behind the Confederacy and it was a war between the states. I learned later that it was hardly the case as the South was bitterly divided.
Leftyhunter
 
For me, I used to buy into the line that the Monitor was the ancestor of the battleship, instead of a side-spur of ship evolution... the true lineage of the battleship runs through the wooden Kearsarge and others like her, rather than the monitors. (The turret is the major distraction there.)

(If Ericsson had lived a generation later, he would have been working right alongside John Holland in developing the submarine, because that's really the logical end toward which he was thinking when he designed the Monitor. For further proof, I offer the fact that after the war, Ericsson worked on a self-propelled torpedo.)
 
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There are a large number of Western heroes and characters whose real stories begin at the Civil War. When those beginnings are seen, the larger-than-life individual becomes either just plain Joe Six Pack or really interesting. Found that out when I first began to be interested in N B Forrest. He was certainly not as grand or brilliant as Shelby Foote thought he was but he was a whole lot more fascinating than his legend!
 
I used to believe "we", as in the United States, fought the Civil War to end slavery. I realize now that ending slavery was never the primary goal, and far from being done for primarily moral reasons, an attack on slavery was seen as an attempt to undermine the Southern war effort by taking away valuable material support from the Confederates.
 
Solid South during the war. Lee & ANV repeatedly overcoming 3:1 and 4:1 odds. Butcher Grant.

In general, a smoothing of most peaks and valleys in terms of best and worst. Some generals were definitely better than others, and a few really were incompetent, but it's more like a regular bell curve than an inverted bell curve. I think the more you learn about anything the better you can rate on 1-5 stars scale rather than merely thumbs up/down.
 
There are a large number of Western heroes and characters whose real stories begin at the Civil War. When those beginnings are seen, the larger-than-life individual becomes either just plain Joe Six Pack or really interesting. Found that out when I first began to be interested in N B Forrest. He was certainly not as grand or brilliant as Shelby Foote thought he was but he was a whole lot more fascinating than his legend!
You are so right.
 
I used to believe "we", as in the United States, fought the Civil War to end slavery. I realize now that ending slavery was never the primary goal, and far from being done for primarily moral reasons, an attack on slavery was seen as an attempt to undermine the Southern war effort by taking away valuable material support from the Confederates.
On the other hand there would be no Secession with out slavery has the secessionists articulated very well.
Leftyhunter
 
To my great embarrassment, I once believed that The War for Confederate Independence was fought between two distinct geographical sections of the same country, and that it was fought over slavery. I have since learned the truth, that The War was fought between two sovereign countries over the right of political independence and self-government.
 
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On the Emerging Civil War forum March 12, 2020, Chris Kolakowski wrote a post titled Fact vs Interpretation at the Bloody Lane. The Maryland Campaign has undergone a significant reinterpretation due to recent scholarship. Newly discovered evidence has revealed facts which have enlightened scholars & resulted in the removal of many old interpretive markers. One of the replacements caught Kolakowski's eye.

View attachment 350725
Brigadier General Edward Porter Alexander


Confederate Brigadier General Edward Porter Alexander's statement that the Bloody Lane/Battle of Antietam was "end of the Confederacy" has been quoted & debated who knows how many times. The new marker at the Bloody Lane no longer contains that quote. The reason being that Alexander did not participate in the battle & was stating his interpretation based on the first person accounts he had heard. His was an informed interpretation, but it had been accepted as a first person judgement by a participant for a long time. It is no longer considered an appropriate quote to be used as if it were a first person statement.

I have no intention of going off into the weeds about Alexander's oft quoted statement. What does interest me is how many times in my long study of the Civil War I have had to unlearn absolute certainties. I grew up with an unadulterated Lost Cause narrative that I believed with a certainty normally reserved for revealed religion. I really believed that slaves were thankful for their bondage & loved their kind masters. The Civil War was all the Yankee's fault because they were jealous of Southerner's superior culture. Slavery had nothing to do with secession, etc, etc, etc, the twaddle I had been taught was endless. It was not until I was well into my adulthood before I finally shed the aftereffects of unlearning all that misinformation & began to fully understand what my family members had gone through during the Civil War. Thirty years has not been long enough to reach a full understanding of those fateful events. Civil War history is like unfolding an onion, there are endless layers & it makes your eyes water.

View attachment 350720
Interpretive marker, Hornet's Nest, Shiloh Battlefield


Over two decades as a living history volunteer at Stones River National Battlefield I have had the privilege of touring Western battlefields with scholars, historians & local experts. Many times the volunteers were given "our side of the rope" tours of areas that visitors never get to see. Perhaps the most astonishing one of these tours involved Shiloh.

Our tour of the battlefield coincided with the publication of the complete reinterpretation of the Battle of Shiloh. The major fighting occurred on the Confederate left flank against Sherman. The Hornet's Nest, while intense, was not the pivotal focus of the battle. Beauregard's announced plan was to break Grant's connection with the river & drive him into the interior. For reasons that are still obscure to me, N.B. Forrest & his fellow commanders on the Confederate right, which were supposed to turn Grant's left did not receive any orders to attack. By the time they acted on their own initiative, it was too little, too late. It was not the death of Albert Sidney Johnston that prevented the Confederate victory, it was rank incompetence, pure & simple. As executed, the Confederate assault was foredoomed to failure. By the end of our tour, a list of my dearly held beliefs as long as my arm had to be wadded up & tossed into the trash. I must say, what replaced it was ever so much more nuanced & fascinating.

View attachment 350726
Living history volunteers from Stones River N.B. serve their section of 1841 Model 6 pdrs, at Chickamauga N.M.P.
Battery has fired by piece from the right. Author is #1 on left gun of the right section.

Since then, any number of certainties have been added to my Civil War feet of clay collection. For example, for the better part of 20 years I had told visitors that six pound field cannon didn't actually fire grape shot, it was merely a literary convention. Imagine my chagrin when I saw a stand of grape for a 6 pdr at the Fort Defiance Museum in Clarksville TN! It must have been a naval round, but nevertheless less, there it was. If you Google six pounder gape shot, you will find me as a reference on several sites. I wasn't the only one surprised by that miniature stand of grape.

What dearly held Civil War certainty of yours has been shown to be untrue & how did learning the truth affect your understanding of what caused the war & how it was fought?
Well said i was of the same school of thought.
 
Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain won the Battle of Gettysburg and therefore saved the Union on July 2, 1863, was a myth I was taught. While Chamberlain and the 20th fought well on July 2, its a bit more....complicated then that.

Of course I grew up about 12 miles from his birthplace, which may have had something to do with it.
I suspect that being from the Brewer area had a great deal to do with that! Mainers tend to be very proud of each other and willingly believe that anything that a Mainer did was of paramount importance. I, of course, know better: it was Selden Connor who saved the Union! 😀
 
I used to believe "we", as in the United States, fought the Civil War to end slavery. I realize now that ending slavery was never the primary goal, and far from being done for primarily moral reasons, an attack on slavery was seen as an attempt to undermine the Southern war effort by taking away valuable material support from the Confederates.
Put me in the same camp. That was my belief as well. I would imagine (that belief) is still pretty common. It's what I was taught in school. Not only did I believe that myself, I never questioned it because, that's what everybody believed. Or so I thought. I wasn't taught about the subject at home.

It wasn't until I got older, & became more serious about my own interest in the subject, that my views changed. I realized that was a pretty simplistic view, & left much of the story, or nuances out. I do realize, most high school history classes didn't have the time to cover the subject as in depth, as we do here. I would imagine the same is true today.

I would also think, other subjects are the same. Meaning, you have to have a serious interest in a subject, & be willing to devote many hours, to educate yourself beyond a very basic understanding. Your not going to learn how to use the Pythagorean Theorem if all you ever take are basic math classes.
 
On the Emerging Civil War forum March 12, 2020, Chris Kolakowski wrote a post titled Fact vs Interpretation at the Bloody Lane. The Maryland Campaign has undergone a significant reinterpretation due to recent scholarship. Newly discovered evidence has revealed facts which have enlightened scholars & resulted in the removal of many old interpretive markers. One of the replacements caught Kolakowski's eye.

View attachment 350725
Brigadier General Edward Porter Alexander


Confederate Brigadier General Edward Porter Alexander's statement that the Bloody Lane/Battle of Antietam was "end of the Confederacy" has been quoted & debated who knows how many times. The new marker at the Bloody Lane no longer contains that quote. The reason being that Alexander did not participate in the battle & was stating his interpretation based on the first person accounts he had heard. His was an informed interpretation, but it had been accepted as a first person judgement by a participant for a long time. It is no longer considered an appropriate quote to be used as if it were a first person statement.

I have no intention of going off into the weeds about Alexander's oft quoted statement. What does interest me is how many times in my long study of the Civil War I have had to unlearn absolute certainties. I grew up with an unadulterated Lost Cause narrative that I believed with a certainty normally reserved for revealed religion. I really believed that slaves were thankful for their bondage & loved their kind masters. The Civil War was all the Yankee's fault because they were jealous of Southerner's superior culture. Slavery had nothing to do with secession, etc, etc, etc, the twaddle I had been taught was endless. It was not until I was well into my adulthood before I finally shed the aftereffects of unlearning all that misinformation & began to fully understand what my family members had gone through during the Civil War. Thirty years has not been long enough to reach a full understanding of those fateful events. Civil War history is like unfolding an onion, there are endless layers & it makes your eyes water.

View attachment 350720
Interpretive marker, Hornet's Nest, Shiloh Battlefield


Over two decades as a living history volunteer at Stones River National Battlefield I have had the privilege of touring Western battlefields with scholars, historians & local experts. Many times the volunteers were given "our side of the rope" tours of areas that visitors never get to see. Perhaps the most astonishing one of these tours involved Shiloh.

Our tour of the battlefield coincided with the publication of the complete reinterpretation of the Battle of Shiloh. The major fighting occurred on the Confederate left flank against Sherman. The Hornet's Nest, while intense, was not the pivotal focus of the battle. Beauregard's announced plan was to break Grant's connection with the river & drive him into the interior. For reasons that are still obscure to me, N.B. Forrest & his fellow commanders on the Confederate right, which were supposed to turn Grant's left did not receive any orders to attack. By the time they acted on their own initiative, it was too little, too late. It was not the death of Albert Sidney Johnston that prevented the Confederate victory, it was rank incompetence, pure & simple. As executed, the Confederate assault was foredoomed to failure. By the end of our tour, a list of my dearly held beliefs as long as my arm had to be wadded up & tossed into the trash. I must say, what replaced it was ever so much more nuanced & fascinating.

View attachment 350726
Living history volunteers from Stones River N.B. serve their section of 1841 Model 6 pdrs, at Chickamauga N.M.P.
Battery has fired by piece from the right. Author is #1 on left gun of the right section.

Since then, any number of certainties have been added to my Civil War feet of clay collection. For example, for the better part of 20 years I had told visitors that six pound field cannon didn't actually fire grape shot, it was merely a literary convention. Imagine my chagrin when I saw a stand of grape for a 6 pdr at the Fort Defiance Museum in Clarksville TN! It must have been a naval round, but nevertheless less, there it was. If you Google six pounder gape shot, you will find me as a reference on several sites. I wasn't the only one surprised by that miniature stand of grape.

What dearly held Civil War certainty of yours has been shown to be untrue & how did learning the truth affect your understanding of what caused the war & how it was fought?
Growing up in a Northern state where my interest in the CW began at a very young age, I was taught in grade school, high school and at the undergrad level in College that the North was all in for abolition. And God loved our side for it and that’s why the North won. The Abolitionists were the pure lovers of freedom. These heroes of humanity , led by the New England Transcendentalists and William Lloyd Garrison were speaking on behalf of all good and true Unionists. Uncle Toms Cabin, Battle Hymn of The Republic , Gettysburg Address—all of it was to stop slavery we Northerners were taught. From the opening fire on Ft Sumter , the good folk of the North took to arms to free the slaves.


I had no idea whatsoever that the Abolitionist position was in fact not the majority view in 1861. Hell, I never heard that a different view of slavery even existed until a decade out of Undergrad. Years later as my own reading grew , that myth was dismantled. There are many reasons the teachers and professors did this, but rest assure it was either because they didn’t read anything or if they did know the balanced truth but they had a cultural, sociological, and political agenda.
 
What dearly held Civil War certainty of yours
I prefer to read autobiographies, journals and the like rather than interpretative histories. Of course we all believe that we are the stars of our own stories but memoirs often reveal the biases and character of the writer. So my "certainty" is one of these--and it is Porter Alexander himself. Based on what I had read by others, I was quite prepared to like him BUT the man he revealed in Fighting for the Confederacy was an altogether different person.
 
Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain won the Battle of Gettysburg and therefore saved the Union on July 2, 1863, was a myth I was taught. While Chamberlain and the 20th fought well on July 2, its a bit more....complicated then that.

Of course I grew up about 12 miles from his birthplace, which may have had something to do with it.

This was my first thought too. I was taught that in Pennsylvania so it isn't because of where you're from. It's a bit more complicated than that is right.

I was always taught the "ragged rebel" myth about the Confederate soldiers. They all went to war with pristine uniforms, well made and rugged, with good sturdy shoes. Then that dang Yankee blockade came along, and by the time they surrendered, they were all barefoot and wearing rags that barely counted as a uniform, or clothes for that matter. Long haired and unshaven, looking like ZZ Top members or the Duck Dynasty guys, they marched on empty stomachs, subsisting off their own hopes and dreams....

Turns out it was almost opposite of that. After the mustering in clothes went away they got a bit ragged for a while, but by the end they were well equipped, more uniform in appearance, and wearing uniforms that could hardly be called rags. Most had short hair, and short or no facial hair. They weren't well fed though, so at least I was taught something right.
 
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