Parsing Sources, Part 2

Yesterday, I discussed the process by which I find the material that goes into my work. Today, I will discuss what happens to it once I’ve got it.

As a lawyer, I’ve been trained in evaluating evidence. Evaluating and presenting evidence is my job. With experience, you learn what’s credible and what’s not. You learn when something can be relied upon and when it can’t. A key, of course, is whether something can be corroborated. If it can be corroborated by an independent source, then it’s reliable. So, the key for me is to evaluate the sources and then to determine what’s reliable and what isn’t.

I always look for things to corroborate my sources, or, as an old friend likes to say, calibrate my sources. If there is a second account that says basically the same thing, then it’s a reliable source and I will use it. Conversely, if it can’t be corroborated, odds are that it won’t be used at all. If I do use it, it will be with a caveat, usually stated in a footnote, that the source cannot be corroborated and hence is not entirely reliable. That happens only rarely.

I also talked about the timing of the account yesterday. A good of rule of thumb is: the closer in time to the event that the account is written, the more reliable it’s likely to be. Consequently, things written right away get a lot of leeway with me, because they’re so fresh, while accounts written forty years after the fact typically don’t, simply because we have no idea what factored into the writing of that account. So, if someone writes within a couple of days of the event, it’s likely to be defendable because it’s fresh. So, I always look at the timing of the recording of the account.

Another factor to consider is where it came from. If it’s a letter, it’s probably more reliable than a memoir written years later, since memoirs typically have some agenda in mind when they’re being written (if you need an example of this, see James Longstreet’s memoirs, From Manassas to Appomattox, which were written as an opportunity for Pete Longstreet to defend himself from the Lost Causers who blamed him for the Confederate defeat at Gettysburg). Diaries tend to be very reliable, since they weren’t written for anyone to read but the diarist, meaning that there was no incentive to spin things. I tend to find that items from the Southern Historical Society Papers are not terribly reliable since they were written with a clear agenda, the Lost Cause. Consequently, I tend not to use them unless I’m addressing a controversy or I want spin.

Finally, there’s what one of my old law school professors used to describe as the judicious use of gastronomical jurisprudence. In other words, does this pass the smell test? Sometimes, you read something, and you just know it’s made up or badly puffed, and not reliable. You can just tell. You get a gut reaction that says “nope, this dog don’t hunt.” With a gut as ample as mine, it’s usually pretty reliable. I’ve discarded a lot of accounts because they don’t make sense or they are questionable on their face. As a result, I tend to ruminate a bit on each one before I decide to use it in a work.

Finally, it’s been my experience that no matter how hard I might try, I will never be able to tell these stories as well as the soldiers themselves. Consequently, whenever possible, I try to let the participants tell their own stories in their own words. That means being extremely careful in selecting the accounts and quotations to use. If it makes it into one of my works, you can pretty well conclude that it’s there because it passed the various tests set forth herein.

To conclude, it’s about experience, it’s about knowing when and how to sniff out BS, it’s about being able to evaluate and corroborate evidence, and it’s about being careful.