The reason a lot of folks shy away from Porter's postwar memoir (The Naval History of the Civil War, 1886) is because it is highly embellished. That is a polite way of saying that it is full of lies. Porter's wartime letters and reports are bad enough, but his postwar memoir is far worse. He waited until nearly everybody else of importance was dead, then published his "highly colorful" version of events.

My rule of thumb is that unless a Porter statement or anecdote can be verified by a wartime source, it should be treated like toxic waste, and that includes everything he had to say about Arkansas Post.