I found interesting the views of Doubleday in a contemporary book review of Doubleday's attempt at history in "Chancellorsvile and Gettysburg", 1882; from the Journal of the Military Service Institution of the United States/ President General W. S. Hancock...
"There is certainly exaggeration in the results attributed by the author to some of the minor affairs of the cavalry. For example (page 37) he says that a charge, at the cost of his life, by Major Keenan with four hundred of the Eighth Pennsylvania Cavalry, against Stonewall Jackson's front of ten thousand men at Chancellorsville, "saved the army from capture " and " the country from the unutterable degradation of the establishment of slavery in the Northern States." Without disparaging Major Keenan's gallantry and sacrifice, it is not too much to say that slavery would not have been established in the Northern States, if he had never charged or never been born. In this connection it may be intimated that the author seems to concern himself more than necessary in such a book as his, with the objects the rebels aimed to accomplish by the war. He appears to have confused ideas on the subject. Page 48, that object was "Vengeance," page 188 it was "Conquest of the North," and same page it was to determine "whether freedom or slavery was to rule the Northern States ;" page 195 it was " to extend the area of slavery over the free States ;" but after all by page 197, it was "the acknowledgment of the independence of the Southern Confederacy."
as for Doubleday's object in writing this history...
"In his preface General Doubleday says that he has had " better opportunities to judge " of men and measures than usually falls to the lot of others who have written on the "subject;" that he has "always felt it to be the duty of every one who held a prominent position in the great war to give to posterity the benefit of his personal recollections at the risk of "severe criticism and much personal feeling," announces that he cannot " consent to fulfil his (my) allotted task by a colorless history praising everybody and attributing all disasters to dispensations of Providence for which no one is "to blame," and adds, that " where great disasters have occurred it is due both to the "living and the dead that the causes and circumstances be justly and properly stated." A belligerent beginning! It is the opening of the controversialist rather than of the historian, and suggests a purpose—which perusal of the work confirms—to enhance the value of "personal recollections" as compared with "dry official statements," and thus settle some old scores with both the "living and the dead." This is dangerous ground for history, especially as affecting the dead."
These are some of the nicer things the reviewer said.
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David Upton