June 3, Cold Harbor. I Was Made Up

We note that other "noted historians" have attributed Foote as a source for this diary, have included this diary in their "historical" accounts of the battle, footnoted the attribution, and published their works on Cold Harbor.
By using this citation and including it their acknowledged "historical accounts" of the battle of Cold Harbor, the diary has become part and parcel of the narrative of Cold Harbor and is, therefore, for all intents and purposes, established as fact.
Unless, of course, one wishes to "fact check" every citation in every history on any topic, statement, quote, assertion, etc. of every history written about Cold Harbor or any other aspect of the Civil War or any war, or occurrence, or noteworthy happening made by any historian or, even, narrator to establish that such citations do not carry the weight of being true.

The diary doesn't exist. Because some historians took Foote at his word and were taken in does not mean it magically appeared.
 
From Rhea's book is this passage offered into evidence in this thread, which asserts that something recently surfaced in a 1974 book by an author who died in 2005. This appears to me to falsify the evidence. I'd rather bet on the diary instead of a historian that makes this sort of blunder.


https://books.google.com/books?id=zq6PDgAAQBAJ&pg=PA120&lpg=PA120&dq=Gordon+C.+Rhea+Shelby+Foote's+historical+novel&source=bl&ots=WCvWfwjibd&sig=-1gUaFhEL9UsL8-BzWJ3ow2x3Xk&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjVhKCxjZDYAhUJNSYKHQWtDFEQ6AEISTAG#v=onepage&q=Gordon C. Rhea Shelby Foote's historical novel&f=false

aJSvTAcLkmzfJwBla4mT6CQ4sYNzWwTNiH0XesJKnW6FacxL8dKnCyPSIhH0BglnEdrW2K2wo3fOz2OkBXJDUrlZg52-MGdw.png

The above looks like a misstatement.

The diary doesn't exist. Rhea made no blunder.
 
We note that other "noted historians" have attributed Foote as a source for this diary, have included this diary in their "historical" accounts of the battle, footnoted the attribution, and published their works on Cold Harbor.
By using this citation and including it their acknowledged "historical accounts" of the battle of Cold Harbor, the diary has become part and parcel of the narrative of Cold Harbor and is, therefore, for all intents and purposes, established as fact.
Unless, of course, one wishes to "fact check" every citation in every history on any topic, statement, quote, assertion, etc. of every history written about Cold Harbor or any other aspect of the Civil War or any war, or occurrence, or noteworthy happening made by any historian or, even, narrator to establish that such citations do not carry the weight of being true.
The same skepticism can be applied to many memoirs published by officers on both sides. How many of those are NOT self serving rationalizations and selective recall?
 
Yes. Cadwallader's journal was quoted for years as the gospel for the Yazoo Bender, until the minor detail surfaced that it was impossible for him to have been where he said he was to witness events.
Skepticism should be applied to every source.
Yes every source.
 
Yes. Cadwallader's journal was quoted for years as the gospel for the Yazoo Bender, until the minor detail surfaced that it was impossible for him to have been where he said he was to witness events.

I've come to figure that was made up for a definite agenda - always have to test something that appears years after everybody who could contradict it is dead. If Cadwallader witnessed anything like that, he was likely witnessing one of Grant's migraines. Shelby Foote accepted this as gospel - he had no reason not to - but it wasn't to disparage Grant. It was to show he was as human as anybody else. (Besides, Foote could relate...he'd had a few snootfuls himself in his time!)

There's a lot of widely accepted things that have just simply been accepted for years, decades and centuries not because no one double checked them but because of agenda. For example, Custer. Used to be a massacre, now it's a battle! You always have to think about the narrative around justifying the conquest of the Plains at that time. There's lots of examples of this.
 
I've come to figure that was made up for a definite agenda - always have to test something that appears years after everybody who could contradict it is dead. If Cadwallader witnessed anything like that, he was likely witnessing one of Grant's migraines. Shelby Foote accepted this as gospel - he had no reason not to - but it wasn't to disparage Grant. It was to show he was as human as anybody else. (Besides, Foote could relate...he'd had a few snootfuls himself in his time!)

There's a lot of widely accepted things that have just simply been accepted for years, decades and centuries not because no one double checked them but because of agenda. For example, Custer. Used to be a massacre, now it's a battle! You always have to think about the narrative around justifying the conquest of the Plains at that time. There's lots of examples of this.
I like this analysis. IMHO older histories, especially, interpretational as opposed to statistical histories as good mainly to what historians thought in a time and place.
 
Below is part of an article on Foote in Garden & Gun that contains quotes from Foote about his writing style. The only comment I'll make is, if the author believes that, "The Iliad is the great model for any war book, history, or novel.", is one not to expect just a bit of B.S. along the way? I leave interpretation of the Flaubert quote to others. :wink:

Though he dropped out of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Foote was a literary man by inclination and training. One of the great readers of his age, Foote consumed Proust, Hemingway, Homer, the Russians—nothing of note seems to have escaped him. It was this immersion in the most enduring works of imaginative literature that informed his rendering of the Civil War. “The Iliad is the great model for any war book, history or novel,” he said.

Like Homer, Foote focused on two things: the clash of arms and the lives of the warriors. The grand issues of politics and diplomacy, of economics and culture, mattered less to Foote than re-creating the reality of battle. “The idea is to strike fire,” he wrote, “prodding the reader much as combat quickened the pulses of the people at the time.” Critics took Foote to task for this single-minded focus, but he believed in his approach, and stuck to it. “I think the superiority of Southern writers lies in our driving interest in just…two things, the story and the people.” In a way, Foote is one of the little-noted pioneers of the New Journalism, the movement to bring fictional technique to nonfiction subjects, elevating journalism, history, and biography to the level of literature.

He also saw himself working in a broader tradition than that of many mainstream historians. “My hope was that if I wrote well enough about what you would have seen with your own eyes, you yourself would see how those things, the politics and economics, entered in,” he said. “I quite deliberately left those things out. My job was to put it all in perspective, to give it shape. Look at Flaubert: He didn’t criticize Emma Bovary as a terrible woman; he didn’t judge her; he just put down what happened.”

http://gardenandgun.com/articles/shelby-footes-war-story/
 
Wiley Sword stated that Hood was a dope addict and all you historians take the book "Confedarcy's Last Hurrah", as the gospel truth,well researched ,documented and what you insist must be there are footnotes. *edited by bdtex*
 
Last edited by a moderator:
An Interview with Shelby Foote
(excerpt)
How long have you been working on it?
Off and on for a long time. I first conceived it before I started The Civil War, over twenty years ago.

The Civil War was quite a detour for you.
If I had known it was going to take twenty years, I never would have begun it. But I’m glad I did it. I enjoyed the history thoroughly, the whole time. I was never the least bit doubtful about whether this is what I should be doing. But it was not an interruption. I found no difference in writing history and writing a novel. The narrative history is very much like a novel. Nothing pleases me more than when somebody asks me whether I made something up in that history. It pleases me greatly. I didn’t make anything up in it.

But do you think that the discipline of writing narrative history is any different from the discipline of writing fiction?
I really don’t. There are differences, obvious ones. You can’t say Lincoln’s got gray eyes, unless you know that he did. And you do. But if he’s a fictional character, I’ll give him any color eyes I want to. But once I give him those eyes, those are his eyes. A good novelist would be no more be false to a fact dug out of his head — and they are facts — than a good historian would be false to a fact dug out of documents. If you’re not true to your facts, you’ve got a trashy book. You can’t go being false to what you’ve laid down as being a man’s nature. You can’t have someone arbitrarily doing something that he just would not do.

In my fiction, I had always decided what color a man’s eyes were, what shape his fingernails were, what kind of tie he wore. Those things were always important to me. In the history, it didn’t bother me the least bit to have to look them up, instead of imagining them. So that I wound up with exactly the same approach doing the history that I had when I was doing the novels. With this added dimension: Who’s going to write a novel that’s got characters like Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and U.S. Grant in it?

Real life is richer than fiction at certain times?
Infinitely richer.

Still, there must be plenty of academic historians who criticize your whole approach to writing history.
Oh, sure. Professional historians resent the hell out of the absence of footnotes, for instance. And footnotes would have totally shattered what I was doing. I didn’t want people glancing down at the bottom of the page every other sentence. The professional historians have criticized it, but what they haven’t done is point out any errors. I’m not saying there are no errors, but there are **** few, fewer than most history books that are just loaded with footnotes.

Professional historians resent it and creative writers don’t read it. So I’m falling between two stools, you see. But that doesn’t bother me. The book makes its own claims.

Source
 
Below is part of an article on Foote in Garden & Gun that contains quotes from Foote about his writing style. The only comment I'll make is, if the author believes that, "The Iliad is the great model for any war book, history, or novel.", is one not to expect just a bit of B.S. along the way? I leave interpretation of the Flaubert quote to others. :wink:

Though he dropped out of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Foote was a literary man by inclination and training. One of the great readers of his age, Foote consumed Proust, Hemingway, Homer, the Russians—nothing of note seems to have escaped him. It was this immersion in the most enduring works of imaginative literature that informed his rendering of the Civil War. “The Iliad is the great model for any war book, history or novel,” he said.

Like Homer, Foote focused on two things: the clash of arms and the lives of the warriors. The grand issues of politics and diplomacy, of economics and culture, mattered less to Foote than re-creating the reality of battle. “The idea is to strike fire,” he wrote, “prodding the reader much as combat quickened the pulses of the people at the time.” Critics took Foote to task for this single-minded focus, but he believed in his approach, and stuck to it. “I think the superiority of Southern writers lies in our driving interest in just…two things, the story and the people.” In a way, Foote is one of the little-noted pioneers of the New Journalism, the movement to bring fictional technique to nonfiction subjects, elevating journalism, history, and biography to the level of literature.

He also saw himself working in a broader tradition than that of many mainstream historians. “My hope was that if I wrote well enough about what you would have seen with your own eyes, you yourself would see how those things, the politics and economics, entered in,” he said. “I quite deliberately left those things out. My job was to put it all in perspective, to give it shape. Look at Flaubert: He didn’t criticize Emma Bovary as a terrible woman; he didn’t judge her; he just put down what happened.”

http://gardenandgun.com/articles/shelby-footes-war-story/

This I can relate to very much. I'm much more interested in who fought the war as a means of understanding why they did what they did - hence, I get into details of their lives. This is what I always thought Foote was doing with his CW narrative, too. The story and the people, as he says.

An Interview with Shelby Foote
(excerpt)
How long have you been working on it?
Off and on for a long time. I first conceived it before I started The Civil War, over twenty years ago.

The Civil War was quite a detour for you.
If I had known it was going to take twenty years, I never would have begun it. But I’m glad I did it. I enjoyed the history thoroughly, the whole time. I was never the least bit doubtful about whether this is what I should be doing. But it was not an interruption. I found no difference in writing history and writing a novel. The narrative history is very much like a novel. Nothing pleases me more than when somebody asks me whether I made something up in that history. It pleases me greatly. I didn’t make anything up in it.

But do you think that the discipline of writing narrative history is any different from the discipline of writing fiction?
I really don’t. There are differences, obvious ones. You can’t say Lincoln’s got gray eyes, unless you know that he did. And you do. But if he’s a fictional character, I’ll give him any color eyes I want to. But once I give him those eyes, those are his eyes. A good novelist would be no more be false to a fact dug out of his head — and they are facts — than a good historian would be false to a fact dug out of documents. If you’re not true to your facts, you’ve got a trashy book. You can’t go being false to what you’ve laid down as being a man’s nature. You can’t have someone arbitrarily doing something that he just would not do.

In my fiction, I had always decided what color a man’s eyes were, what shape his fingernails were, what kind of tie he wore. Those things were always important to me. In the history, it didn’t bother me the least bit to have to look them up, instead of imagining them. So that I wound up with exactly the same approach doing the history that I had when I was doing the novels. With this added dimension: Who’s going to write a novel that’s got characters like Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and U.S. Grant in it?

Real life is richer than fiction at certain times?
Infinitely richer.

Still, there must be plenty of academic historians who criticize your whole approach to writing history.
Oh, sure. Professional historians resent the hell out of the absence of footnotes, for instance. And footnotes would have totally shattered what I was doing. I didn’t want people glancing down at the bottom of the page every other sentence. The professional historians have criticized it, but what they haven’t done is point out any errors. I’m not saying there are no errors, but there are **** few, fewer than most history books that are just loaded with footnotes.

Professional historians resent it and creative writers don’t read it. So I’m falling between two stools, you see. But that doesn’t bother me. The book makes its own claims.

Source

There it is, all clear! Never said it was anything else than what he described right there. Another who is very similar in many ways is Bruce Catton. He wasn't an historian either, he wasn't a novelist - journalist. But he could sure write! Stillness at Appomattox is almost prose poetry.
 
This I can relate to very much. I'm much more interested in who fought the war as a means of understanding why they did what they did - hence, I get into details of their lives. This is what I always thought Foote was doing with his CW narrative, too. The story and the people, as he says.



There it is, all clear! Never said it was anything else than what he described right there. Another who is very similar in many ways is Bruce Catton. He wasn't an historian either, he wasn't a novelist - journalist. But he could sure write! Stillness at Appomattox is almost prose poetry.
Agree

If we apply historical principals to The Civil War: A Narrative.
It is a Secondary Source.
What is a Secondary Source?
For a historical research project, secondary sources are generally scholarly books and articles. A secondary source interprets and analyzes primary sources. These sources are one or more steps removed from the event. Secondary sources may contain pictures, quotes or graphics of primary sources.
Primary source - Wikipedia. It is not a Primary Source
Historians consider the accuracy and objectiveness of the primary sources that they are using and historians subject both primary and secondary sources to a high level of scrutiny. ... For any source, primary or secondary, it is important for the researcher to evaluate the amount and direction of bias.​

It is up to us to evaluate the amount and direction of bias.

Evaluating Primary and Secondary Sources

Suitability
•Read the introduction, go through the table of contents and
the index, to determine if the source has sufficient and
relevant information. Also, the information in the work
should meet the required academic standard, for example do
not use a primary school textbook for your CSEC History SBA.

Objectivity
•Prejudices and biased opinions will never be excluded from
secondary sources. It is important to detect these biases, and
an introduction or preface will usually give an idea of the
point of view of the writer. Therefore use other secondary
sources to get a balanced view



 
Back
Top