LEARN MOREFrank Varney will be at the Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park on Saturday and Sunday -- the 151st anniversary of the Battle of Chickamauga -- to present a 45-minute program in the Chickamauga Battlefield Visitor Center at 1 p.m. on both days. He also will be available to sign copies of his book from 10 a.m. until 5 p.m. both days."If you pick up any standard history of the Battle of Chickamauga, you'll read that William S. Rosecrans panicked on the field and abandoned his still-fighting army; that his men were starving until they were rescued by Ulysses S. Grant; and that Grant was forced to relieve Rosecrans because the latter was about to abandon Chattanooga.None of it is true."- Dr. Frank Varney
There is an old saying: "Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it." Lately someone added "Those who do study history are doomed to stand by while some other idiot repeats it."
History is more important than many people assume. They reason that if something is over, it is also done with -- a false assumption. The lessons of history need to be considered, and taken to heart. But when history is wrong, then the lessons are wrong. And that is where I, and numerous other historians, come in. We dig into what we think we know, and sometimes we find out that what we thought we knew was wrong.
Since the Civil War ended -- indeed, even while it was still going on -- the stories began to take shape about what happened on various battlefields. Like every other student of the conflict I thought I knew what had happened, within certain broad limits. Certainly, I admitted, there were nuances I did not fully grasp, or details I did not know. It would take someone with either a much better memory than mine or a much larger ego to be absolutely certain that he knew everything there was to know about such a broad subject. But I was reasonably sure that I had a pretty good handle on the larger sweep of the war.
But while researching my book, "General Grant and the Rewriting of History: How the Destruction of General William S. Rosecrans Influenced Our Understanding of the Civil War," I began to realize that a great deal of what I thought I knew about the greatest and bloodiest of America's conflicts was, in fact, not true.
In 1885, Grant, then a former president of the United States, published one of the most influential books ever written about the Civil War. The "Memoirs" of Ulysses Simpson Grant may be a superbly written book, but is so riddled with flaws as to be unreliable. Historians -- then and now -- have made extensive use of Grant's recollections, and generations of scholars, with no malice whatsoever, had propagated a myth.
One of the first statements about the study of history which I heard in graduate school was "we stand on the shoulders of giants." Indeed we do. And if we did not, it would be impossible to make any headway. It is not fair to expect every historian to go back to the primary sources and recheck absolutely every detail. There simply is not enough time, and often the subject they were researching did not require that they dig down to the bedrock of the truth. But since I was looking at certain specific events and people -- and looking at them through a different lens -- I dug deeper than I might otherwise have done. Legions have come before us, and they have left an outstanding body of work. Unfortunately, this natural human assumption that we can rely on what others have written can trip us up.
So how did so many fine historians come to have a flawed understanding of some of the Civil War's most important personalities and events? It is actually not that complicated. If one person writes a book and makes a statement, and another person cites person A, and another person cites A and B, and another cites A, B, and C ... well, you get the picture. Before long we figure that we know what happened, because every book we pick up says the same thing; and some of those books are by award-winning historians of international renown. But when you begin tracing the thread back to the beginning, you might find that the scholarship was limited to one or two sources. And when you realize that those sources have flaws, you begin to wonder if what you have always known is true. And if you then begin looking at other sources, some of them overlooked for more than a century, that is when things get really interesting.
As Oscar Wilde has said: "The truth is rarely pure, and never simple."
Frank Varney is an author, historian and professor of U.S. and classical history at Dickinson State University of North Dakota.