Despite the certainly novel fling of Fast Day
at one who went into service as a mere boy, it remains a fact that rank,
without the devoted study of years and a single eye to truth, will not
enable any one to write history. It was proven beyond a peradventure on
Fast Day, that the command of a corps, let alone a division, will not of
itself breed a historian. Partisanship never will.
Truth will get written some day. I myself prefer to write as an
American, forgetting North and South, and to pass down to those who will
write better than any of us, as one who tried to speak the truth,
whomsoever it struck. It is not I who criticise, who condemn Joseph
Hooker: it is the maxims of every master, of every authority on the art
of war. Not one of Hooker's apologists can turn to the history of a
master's achievements, or to a volume of any accepted authority, without
finding his pet commander condemned, in every action, and on every page,
for the faults of the fighting days at Chancellorsville.
It was assumed on Fast Day that one should criticise only what he saw.
I have never understood that Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire" is any the less good because he did not live in the first few
centuries of the Christian era, or that Jomini could write any less well
of Frederick than of Napoleon.
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