Bryan, I wasn't being critical either I was just commenting that most of our "hindsights", as far as individual accounts go, are written postwar.

I just recently read Gen'l Smith account of the Battle of Seven Pine written in the 1890's trying to figure out what the 2nd Arkansas Battalion was doing in Pettygrew's Brigade in that battle. You talk about a hard book to read and try to understand. He was talking so much about the errors of previous accounts of the Battle that you had no idea what he was trying to correct. In most of that he was trying to correct things that had been said about him.

That is the reason that I say our hindsight into history will never be 20/20. Actually historians are like the blind man who will not admit he can not see. We just think we see thing as they truely are/were.