A defense of Southern memoirs

Robert K. Krick, author and Civil War historian, assails critics of Confederate officers’ accounts

Civil War historian Robert K. Krick is a careful scholar. He loves primary sources—documents written by participants at the time—since memory sometimes plays tricks with the facts.

But he’s had it with fellow historians who’ve dismissed swaths of memoirs written by Confederate military officers as unreliable.

Krick, who lives in Fredericksburg, let fly those feelings during a daylong, statewide symposium hosted Thursday by the Virginia Military Institute’s Center for Leadership & Ethics.

He and Penn State professor Carol Reardon led a panel on “Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia,” held at the Virginia Civil War Sesquicentennial Commission’s 2012 Signature Conference.

Krick, retired chief historian of Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park, mounted a vigorous defense of Confederate memoirs as valuable historical sources. He decried modern writers who appear to distrust such accounts as tainted by “Lost Cause” mythology.

One “inane strain” of that criticism, he said, holds that Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee wasn’t really so popular among his troops and Southern citizens at the time.

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A defense of Southern memoirs