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As another civil war nerd; how do you know how haven't already been gaslit? There was a strong, well funded revisionist and revanchist effort to deny the historical reality of the south, the civil war, and the way the war was fought for several decades up until at least the 1960's.
How do you know the sources you read weren't based Rutherford's feelings about it rather than the historical reality?
It's turtles all the way down if we want to go tit for tat on "how do you know". What I can say about my older textbooks is they use far less emotional language and have more graphs than contemporary cruft.
Again: Do they? When you read accounts of EG Shiloh from pre about 2006 you'd think Johnny Reb had carried the day and not gotten driven from the field. When you look at nice books full of nice graphs from those days, you might notice the casualty numbers are somewhere between "enthusiastic" and Plutarch, with the union loosing something like 2 times as much as they actually did; by folding in a certain amount of loses to disease and desertion into battlefield casualties while at the same time only counting Confederates that were shot dead on the field. This leads to ridiculous figures (again, to pick shiloh) where the union looses twice as many men on the line in a battle where the confederates attacked, lost, and retreated.
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