For the past two weeks or so, I have been doing a deep dive into Buckhannon and Upshur County, West Virginia’s role in the early Civil War, delving into a variety of sources to figure out what happened during those crucial months of April-July 1861. Discovering new primary sources on Lt. Col. Jonathan McGee Heck’s foraging expedition to Buckhannon made me want to tell the complete story in an article I hope to publish in the not-so-distant future.
Whenever you’re writing something about the Civil War, determining the reliability of a source can be tricky. There are hundreds of post-war memoirs written years after the events took place, often decades. If someone asked you to write a narrative about your late teens or early twenties, how much could you recall? I know I would struggle with the details. Even things like diaries, letters, and reports written more or less as events unfolded, can be inaccurate or self-serving.
It’s standard to say you need at least three distinct sources to establish the validity of something, but it’s difficult when it comes to the Civil War to find three sources that all describe the same event. Sometimes a newspaper article can help fill in the blanks, but unless it was written by someone who was there, newspapers from the period often contained wild speculation and rumor.
Here is an example of when two sources seem sufficient to establish the validity of an event. On one hand, you have a memoir The Citizen-Soldier, or Memoirs of a Volunteer written by Lt. Col. John Beatty of the Third Ohio Infantry Regiment, published in 1879. On the other, the diary of Marcia Louise Sumner Phillips, who lived in Buckhannon and was the wife of Capt. Sylvester B. Phillips.
On pages 13-14, Beatty writes for July 4, 1861: “At ten o’clock the Third and Fourth Regiments were reviewed by General McClellan. The day was excessively warm, and the men, buttoned up in their dress-coats, were much wearied when the parade was over.”
In Marcia Phillips’ diary, July 4, 1861, she writes: “Presently a turn in the road brought us in sight of an Ohio Regiment encampment. Their snowy tents were pitched in regular order, and they were on dress parade. We stopped a few moments to see them then proceeded onward. We met two splendidly dressed officers who I learned afterwards were Generals McClellan and Rosencranz [sic], going up to review the Ohio Regiment.”
These sources are mutually supportive. Marcia writes that George McClellan reviewed an Ohio regiment on July 4th. Beatty confirms this was more or less correct, although it was two regiments, not one (Marcia was a civilian who probably couldn’t tell the difference). They both mentioned McClellan. Neither person knew each other or had any reason to collaborate after the fact to invent this story.
The only piece I question is that Marcia also referred to General “Rosencranz”, meaning Brig. Gen. William S. Rosecrans. The 3rd and 4th Ohio belonged to Newton Schleich’s Brigade. Did she actually see Schleich, not Rosecrans? Because Beatty fails to mention either general, we would need a third source to confirm that part of the story.
Now let’s look at two sources on the Confederate side.
Pvt. John Henry Cammack served in Company C, 31st Virginia Infantry. He was 17 when he enlisted, and his memoir was published in 1920 (59 years later) based on stories he told throughout his life. He fought at the Battle of Laurel Hill and gave this account on pages 26-27:
“At a point in the road where we turned up the hill to relieve our men we met Col. Taliaferro who had become separated from his command. Just as we got in line we were fired upon from the top of the hill… We soon found that the whole thing was a mistake, for we had been fired upon by four companies of the 23rd Regiment which we had come to relieve, they, in the twilight mistaking us for the enemy.”
Col. William B. Taliaferro, 23rd Virginia, gives a slightly different version of events in his recollection, published in Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, Vol. 5:
“The Thirty-seventh had just marched up and occupied the crest of the hill, at the base of which we had formed. They behaved well, but their firing, which was entirely sympathetic, was terribly wild. Luckily their shot passed over our heads. We were, of course, in imminent peril, for we were between the fire of friends and foes…”
Both of these accounts describe a friendly fire incident in which one regiment mistakenly fired over the heads of another. Cammack mentioned seeing Col. Taliaferro, which leads me to believe they were writing about the same event, but the details don’t match. Even if Col. Taliaferro mixed up the 31st and 37th regiments, he still recalled that his own regiment was the one fired on, not as Pvt. Cammack said, the 31st.
So are they speaking of entirely different events? It’s possible. But it’s also possible that, as Cammack recalled, Col. Taliaferro was confused and “separated from his command” and thought it was his own regiment being fired on. Or, maybe Cammack’s memory failed him in his old age. In this case, a third or even fourth source is necessary to determine what happened with any degree of certainty.
When it comes to reliability, the more events that can be corroborated by multiple sources, the more reliable I consider that source to be. In the case of Lt. Col. John Beatty’s memoir and Marcia Phillips’ diary, the two can be relied on to give a more or less accurate account of what happened, based on their mutually supporting accounts. The reliability of our two Confederate sources, however, is questionable because I can’t reconcile even the most basic facts between them. Additional sources are needed to figure out what actually happened.
Spirit of '61 