Research

Because of my professional responsibilities, I rarely get the chance to go to archives and libraries and actually do the digging myself. I seldom have time, and it also doesn’t make a lot of economic sense for me to spend a lot of time digging myself when it’s much less expensive to pay someone to do this for me. That way, I continue being able to bill my time at my hourly rate while someone else researches for me at a MUCH lower hourly rate.

However, I had promised Noah Andre Trudeau that I would go to the Ohio Historical Society and get some stuff for him. Andy’s working on what will undoubtedly be the definitive work on Sherman’s March to the Sea, and since he lives in Washington, DC, it’s difficult for him to get to OHS. My office, on the other hand, is just over ten minutes’ driving time from OHS, and I’ve been needing to get there myself to check out their holdings on Morgan’s Indiana and Ohio Raid of 1863, which is one of the primary reasons why I agreed to do this for Andy. Since I was going anyway, it added absolutely no burden for me to go do this for him.

Susan’s been in Pittsburgh visiting her sister for a couple of days, and I didn’t have much to do in her absence. I cleared my schedule out for today and made a trip to OHS to fulfill my commitment to Andy. What a shame. OHS has been treated miserably by the Ohio General Assembly for years. It’s very much the red-headed step child. Although it relies upon state appropriations for most of its funding, it gets next to nothing, making an easy target for budget cutters in Ohio’s miserable economy. Most of its satellite sites have been closed due to lack of funding, and the Ohio Village, a replica of a Civil War-era town that housed period craftsmen, is never open now. Because nobody in this state seems to give a damn about history, it’s one of the first and primary targets for budget cuts each year, and each year something more gets slashed. Consequently, the library and archives, which have an impressive collection, are only open for part of the day on Wednesday and Thursday and from 9-5 on Saturday. That’s it. It means that it’s terribly inconvenient to go there; the last time I meant to go, I cleared a morning and then discovered that they were only open in the afternoon. The lack of being user-friendly at all is a big part of the reason why it took me much longer than I might otherwise have liked to get Andy’s stuff for him.

I showed up there today, and got Andy’s material right away, fulfilling my obligation. I then turned my attention to Morgan’s 1863 Indiana and Ohio Raid. Given that the most important events of the raid occurred here in Ohio, and that Morgan spent the most time here, it makes sense that there would be lots of good material available. In the course of about three hours–until I ran out of copying money–I found seven or eight excellent primary source materials that nobody else has ever used in writing about Morgan’s Raid. One was a phenomenal letter by a soldier describing the nine days and nights spent in the saddle chasing Morgan that I’ve never seen before. I also found a small published pamphlet by the commander of the 8th Michigan Cavalry about the pursuit of Morgan that I doubt has ever been used by anyone else previously. I’m excited about it. I’m also far from finished. I have at least three more trips to make there before I feel like I’ve gotten everything that there is to be had.

I also wasn’t the smartest today. I was kept up too late by restless dogs who had been alone too much yesterday (I had to go to work and then went to the Blue Jackets game last night), and clearly wasn’t hitting on all eight cylinders this morning when I left. Consequently, it never even occurred to me to take a laptop with me, so I ended up transcribing a bunch of letters by hand, which is a miserable business at best. Because I was using manuscript materials and rare books, I was forced to use a pencil–and a tiny golf-style pencil at that. I hate writing with pencils and have since childhood. Unless they’re razor sharp–which they don’t stay for more than a few seconds–I REALLY don’t like writing with them. Having to transcribe this stuff by hand was NO fun. The next time that I go, I will definitely take a laptop with me so that I can transcribe stuff.

My point in raising all of this is that even with its terribly inconvenient hours and painfully thin staff, the folks at OHS are friendly and very, very helpful. All of this material is there, just begging for somebody to use it. Why the author of the recent book on Morgan’s Raid didn’t avail himself of these materials is really a mystery to me, because he lives in Cincinnati. Aside from this book’s distinct lack of editing or proofreading, it’s painfully short on primary source research materials. The author talked to every family along the raid route he could find, collecting tons of oral history anecdotes that cannot be corroborated (and repeated them as the gospel truth), but overlooked lots of good stuff like the stuff I found today. This fellow invested years into doing what he did. In less than a year of working on this raid, I’ve already turned up substantially more in the way of primary source material than he did in all his years of working on the project. That says to me that he was either plain lazy or he didn’t understand the importance of using only credible sources. Probably it’s some of both. In short, this book embodies most of the things that I really hate in a book, including the total lack of any sort of a bibliography. Why it’s gotten the rave reviews it’s garnered really is a mystery to me, as I think it’s terrible.

That this book is woefully deficient in lots of ways is the exact reason why I decided to tackle Morgan’s Raid–it still lacks the sort of scholarly treatment it deserves, and that 1998 book certainly is NOT that.