If you feel that strongly exposing errors and omissions by an author and fully footnoting the evidence is “hurling insults” then we will just have to agree to disagree.

Hitting below the belt simply means that you do not agree with the historian in question. That is very different from assuming nefarious motives and hurling insults in a public forum. There is no comparison between the two. You may be right that some people may question Sword’s conclusions based on the article and, than again, it may be worth asking how many people will brush it off because of the overly zealous language.

You may be right, but frankly I think Sword hit Hood below the belt in his Courage Under Fire essay much more than the Hood group did with the tone of their article. Tough as they might be on Sword the Hoodites didn’t call him a drug user, a murderer or claim that he sired his children merely to prove to the world that his penis or testicles hadn’t been shot off.

Nor did they do anything as harmful as Sword inflating Hood’s Tennessee Campaign casualty figures by thousands.

Maybe Sword will get some sympathy over then article and maybe not. Probably readers will reconsider their opinions-positive and negative- of both Sword and Hood, and that’s not a bad thing.

Back in the 1980s I read William McFeely’s biography of Ulysses S. Grant, and I had serious problems with it. I thought he was flat wrong on several critical issues, especially Grant’s views on race and toward the carnage of the battlefield, in what I saw as a rendering of a Grant indifferent to the suffering around him. It helped that I had a great deal of material to counter that interpretation, including documents drawn from collections with which McFeely should have been familiar, given his own notes.

The result was an article that ran in the March 1987 number of Civil War History. What I did was to demonstrate that McFeely had handled/mishandled or failed to consider evidence that offered a different take on the issues he was exploring.

What I refused to do was to speculate on McFeely’s motives in writing as he did. My mission was to argue that his interpretation was wrong, not that he was some sort of monster.

I should note here that McFeely seemed to me to take this all very professionally in my face-to-face encounters with him, unlike several other people interested in Grant who held far more positive views on Grant. In turn, the article was cited in a number of books, and I have to think that was due in part to my tone and approach.

Having looked at the website under discussion, I think that the critics have a point, and had they crafted their message differently, I think it would have made far more of an impact. They way in which they have gone about this, however, serves only to boomerang on them, in the fashion typical of overheated arguments. I doubt this was their intention. We’ve seen this in cases involving discussions of George McClellan and George Thomas, so this isn’t a “Confederate thing,” either.

Let me say again that I don’t think anyone has suggested that an individual or organization doesn’t have the right to respond in an appropriate manner. I think it’s great that we now have additional tools that allow for increased communication on these and other matters. You can find fierce intellectual debates between historians in plenty of places. No doubt, this is not the first time that Sword has dealt with a disagreement over interpretation, but if I were Sword I wouldn’t give these people the time of day.

That is not the point. My problem is with the way the society went about this and their choice of words. For example, if you can’t demonstrate that Sword intentionally ignored certain evidence than you have no basis to make the claim one way or the other. That is a very serious charge.

I will close by stating again that if the author of this essay stuck with laying out the areas of disagreement and announcing it in an appropriate way I would not have written this post or made any fuss whatsoever.

You are obviously not a fan of Wiley Sword and that is fine. There are plenty of historians that I’ve disagreed with on a host of issues. That is the nature of the discipline.

Like this blog, a web site isn’t truncated or edited at the whim of a magazine editor. I think what the Hood group did was simply using modern media.

Whether or not Sword intentionally or unintentially concealed historical evidence will never be known, but based upon the Swordexposed essay and other evidence I can’t give him the benefit of the doubt. The essay is full of detailed examples of Sword’s errors and/or omissions. He is too skilled and thorough a researcher to have missed 100% of everything supportive that was ever written by both Confederate and Federal veterans about Hood. Further, if Sword allowed his publisher to corrupt the scholastic credibility of his book by editing out credible and corroborated historical evidence then I have even less respect for Sword.

I’m not sure the article was intended to be a typical book review. If it was submitted to any of the major magazines I suspect they would have required it be reduced to a fraction of its length.

I am not impressed with Wiley Sword. Notwithstanding what the “Hood worshippers” contend, he made errors in his first book on Shiloh that had to be corrected in the second edition, and Eric Jacobson’s book on Spring Hill and Franklin found many major factual and statistical errors by Sword.

Hood’s memoirs has errors, but if you excuse Sword’s errors and omissions as being unintentional, why doesn’t Hood deserve equal consideration? Surely John Bell Hood showed as much personal character and integrity in his life’s endeavors as Wiley Sword has. Also, if Hood’s memoirs are a personal defense, he certainly wasn’t alone. Johnston, Sherman and others were as bad or worse. I don’t have a problem with a 19th century character not wanting to defer his place in history to his enemies and detractors, especially given the environment in the American south in the post war years. If I knew an author like Wiley Sword was going to write my biography, I would darn sure write my own autobiography as quickly as possible.