I recall my English teachers telling me to write about
something I know about. I now appreciate what they
meant. Mr. Muncrief did a great service in transcribing
the documents. His error is in then writing about
something he knew little about and essentially adding
his own politically-correct rant, i.e. the short chapter on
the Civil War, in which he offers no supporting documents
to support what he "wants" to be true.
To paraphrase a quote I saw recently, patriotism is the
enemy of history.
We know that contemporaneous reports and
correspondence are naturally colored by the ideas and
biases of the writer. The same is true of memiors. It is
unfortunate that so many of the subsequent "histories"
are written with motives other than striving to understand
the events and participants and 'their' biases.