Checking those historical facts
The Legal Genealogist is very fond of the various websites that are willing to tell us what happened on this day in history.
Despite their occasional inaccuracies,1 the websites that serve up history in sound bites often provide fodder for blog posts or, at least, food for thought.
They can be inordinately frustrating, as when I was trying to find the source of the on-this-day factoid many of the sites are reporting today that on this day in 1664, Adriaen Pieck and Gerrit de Ferry patented a wooden fire spout in Amsterdam.2 I mean, really? A wooden fire spout? I can’t even…
And they can lead to other frustrations — that still serve as fodder for blog posts or, at least, food for thought.
Case in point: today is the 157th anniversary of the second Battle of Bull Run (along with yesterday and tomorrow).
According to Wikipedia, “The Second Battle of Bull Run or Battle of Second Manassas was fought August 28–30, 1862 in Prince William County, Virginia, as part of the American Civil War. It was the culmination of the Northern Virginia Campaign waged by Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia against Union Maj. Gen. John Pope’s Army of Virginia, and a battle of much larger scale and numbers than the First Battle of Bull Run (or First Manassas) fought on July 21, 1861 on the same ground.”3
So… here’s the issue. Take a careful look at this image — a Currier and Ives hand-colored lithograph of the battle held by the Library of Congress.4 You can click on the photo to see a larger version.
Gorgeous, isn’t it?
Now, here’s my question: looking at the image, who won this battle?
It sure looks like the Second Battle of Bull Run ended with a victory for the Union forces, doesn’t it?
But that’s not what happened at all. The Confederate troops drove the Union troops from the field in that battle: “The Union left flank was crushed and the army was driven back … Only an effective Union rear guard action prevented a replay of the First Manassas defeat. Pope’s retreat to Centreville was nonetheless precipitous. … The Second Battle of Bull Run, like the First (July 21, 1861), was a significant tactical victory for the Confederates and was another blow to Union morale…”5
So the moral of the story is always, always, always check the facts — all those historical facts we use in genealogy, whether they’re facts of personal history or of national or world history.
No matter if it’s a birthdate of an ancestor or the parent-child relationship of two people in our line or the outcome of a battle we see depicted in a contemporary drawing, we always need to check the facts.
Now if I could just find the facts about that fire spout…
Cite/link to this post: Judy G. Russell, “On this day,” The Legal Genealogist (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : posted 29 Aug 2019).
SOURCES
- See Judy G. Russell, “O death! Thy name is woman,” The Legal Genealogist, posted 14 Jan 2013 (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : accessed 29 Aug 2019). ↩
- See e.g. “Historical Events on August 29,” On This Day (https://www.onthisday.com/ : accessed 29 Aug 2019). ↩
- Wikipedia (https://www.wikipedia.com), “Second Battle of Bull Run,” rev. 2 June 2019. ↩
- Currier and Ives, “The second battle of Bull Run, fought Augt. 29th 1862” (New York : Published by Currier & Ives, 1862?); digital images, Library of Congress Prints & Photographs (https://www.loc.gov/pictures/ : accessed 29 Aug 2019). ↩
- Wikipedia (https://www.wikipedia.com), “Second Battle of Bull Run,” rev. 2 June 2019. See also “Second Manassas-Second Bull Run, Brawner’s Farm,” American Battlefield Trust (https://www.battlefields.org/ : accessed 29 Aug 2019). ↩
Thank you for this! My 2nd gr grandfather, Mathew H. Kinsey, was severely injured in this battle, fighting for the 6th Wisconsin. Obtaining his pension records and learning about the battle taught me a lot about Civil War history. I would have been confused by the lithograph since I well knew the outcome; it is nice to know from an expert not to take as fact all things presented as such.
This is a pretty weak example – I’d be inclined to say a straw man argument even though your point is important. Although I hope you don’t rely on Wikipedia as an indisputable source for anything, in this case it is technically correct — the part you quoted does not attribute victory to either side.
So Currier and Ives misstated the result of the battle. I looked for a date of publication on the print – there isn’t one so one can’t tell how quickly they tried to issue the print. They could have printed it without full knowledge of the result, they might have suffered from wishful thinking, or they might have been in the pay of the spin-meisters in the Federal government. All of those things happened before the Internet made instant truth of someone’s Tweet. That said, I can’t image anyone using a C&I image as a credible source in their research. I have a number of originals from that era and they all show idealized life in one way or another just as did every other publication. Goday’s Ladies Book showed lovely, well dressed, and happy women in marital bliss, not the poor Irish scrubwoman in NYC struggling to survive with her large family and a drunken spouse. Harper’s showed armies with no dead or wounded much like watching Roy Rogers shoot the bad guy in 1955. It wasn’t until Brady and others sent their photographers to the battlefield that some of the horror became widely known. And this wasn’t just in the north – the Confederacy was just as illusional.
But I digress . . . while the coincidence of the Manassas anniversary provided an opening, surely you can find a better example to illustrate your argument. How about all those gravestones on FindaGrave that have one date for a death while official records show the same month and day but a full year difference? And an obit might show still a different date.
There are always more-better-other-different examples that can be used for almost any point. As long as the point is made…
To me, with a young son currently in the Navy, in Florida, looking toward a possible evacuation because of a hurricane’s landfall, today marks the 40th anniversary of the potential ravaging of Hurricane David, in August 1979, upon the barrier Islands of Florida, and brings to mind memories of my baby sister, Mary, and me, sitting in the back seat of our family car, stuck on the “Bee Line” in Central Florida, experiencing the squalls, the fear of not knowing if there would be a shelter open, and the wait to be directed to a Red Cross Shelter: the hurricane’s squalls bearing down on the East Coast of Central Florida. Someday that event may be termed as “history.”