Dimitri and Primary Sources

Dimitri wrote the following in his blog post for today, quoting me in the process:

If that quote doesn’t grab you, if it strikes a “yeah, yeah, okay” note, you haven’t lately read any of the vast sea of Pulitzer Prize-winning history rooted in secondary sources. To paraphrase Tom Rowland (again), the deeper one goes into the material, the greater becomes the shock and personal fear at discovering how dependent one has been on other people’s previous surmises.

The risk of not going down Eric’s path, of trusting the previous treatments, is that you are made the fool by aggregating bad stuff. And that, in a nutshell, is the central problem in Civil War history today.

In an interview published on the Savas-Beatie website, I said, “Primary documents are always the foundation of my research. I am known for turning up obscure published and unpublished source materials, and that’s what I focused on for this book.” I thought I would follow up on this a bit and explain what I meant here.

By way of introduction, I absolutely agree with Dimitri on this subject. Allow me to share a special favorite myth that has been passed along ad nauseum because it has been repeated in so many secondary sources. According to legend, the reason why John Buford’s dismounted cavalrymen were able to hold off an entire division of Confederate infantry on the first day of the battle of Gettysburg was because his men had rapid-firing Spencer carbines that laid down such a severe fire that the Southerners flinched. Or so goes the urban legend. This myth has been repeated more times than I can count, and even by the likes of Ed Longacre in his award-winning book The Cavalry at Gettysburg (to Ed’s credit, he has since corrected this error in later works).

The truth: First, and foremost, on July 1, 1863, there were perhaps a dozen Spencer carbines in existence, all of which would have been prototypes. The weapon did not go into mass production until September 1863, so it’s a factual impossibility. That leads us to the question of whether Buford’s men might have carried Spencer repeating rifles, as elements of the the Michigan Cavalry Brigade did at Gettysburg. A review of the June 30, 1863 ordnance returns for the Cavalry Corps, Army of the Potomac–THE primary source–indicates that of the 92% of Buford’s companies that reported on that date, not a single company was armed with a repeating weapon of any sort. Rather, the majority of them were armed with Sharps .56 caliber single-shot, breech-loading carbines. The rest were armed with other similar weapons: the Ballard, Starr, Merrill, Burnside, or Gallagher carbine.

This myth is easy to disprove by using the primary sources. However, it has become engrained in Gettysburg lore. Why? Because so many secondary sources repeat it. This is just one of many examples, but it’s an easy one to discuss.

Consequently, when I’m writing, I try to stick to primary sources wherever and whenever possible. I try to limit my use of secondary sources to things like background discussions (such as pertinent local history) or capsule biographies of leading players. When it comes to writing about the actual action, I try to limit myself to using primary sources at least 90% of the time. In some instances, it’s 100%. Most of the time, it’s about 95%. Every once in a while, it can’t be helped.

However, my purpose in trying to limit myself to the primary sources is that when I do so, I have the pure material in front of me: the ACTUAL words of the participants, not someone else’s interpretation of those words. That way, when I do my own interpretation, it’s a first-generation interpretation, as opposed to going several generations deep on someone else’s interpretation of that primary source. Another technique that I try to follow is to allow the soldiers to tell their own stories in their own words wherever possible, and it’s absolutely mandatory that I use the primary sources when I do so, or else I run the risk of not accomplishing my goal.

Here’s an analogy from my professional life. Hearsay–defined as an out-of-court statement by a third party that is not subject to cross examination–is generally not admissable in evidence because it’s unreliable. Why? Because it’s someone else’s words being construed/interpreted by a third party. That’s the specific reason why hearsay is usually not admissable in evidence. The idea is sound, and it’s precisely the rule that I try to follow whenever possible in my historical work. A review of the endnotes of any of my books will bear this out.

Finally, I really enjoy uncovering these obscure and/or seldom-used primary sources. I think that they add a great deal to the work by adding insight/evidence that is different and fresh, and not the same old, tired sources used by everybody. For me, finding this stuff–the process of doing the detective work–is what I find most rewarding of all about what I do. I like to think that this is one of the things that sets my work apart from some of the other people writing Civil War history.

So, I very much share Dimitri’s concerns. There’s nothing like primary sources when trying to tell these stories. That’s the only way to get the raw material in an untainted fashion.