THE PENSION APPLICATIONS TRANSCRIBED BY HARRIS AND WILL GRAVES HAVE HARDLY BEGUN TO BE STUDIED BY PROFESSIONAL HISTORIANS. THE TRANSCRIPTIONS ARE A GREAT NATIONAL TREASURE, AND SHOULD SOON BE RECOGNIZED AS SUCH.
What follows is Harris.
What follows is Harris.
CAN PENSION APPLICATIONS BE TRUSTED? |
www.southerncampaign.org/2016/11/25/can-pension-applications-be-trusted/
Nov 25, 2016 - An example that comes to mind is Hershel Parker's paper on “John Butler's ... in the January 2015 issue of Journal of the American Revolution.
Pension applications do have the disadvantage that they were written a half century or so after events. In spite of that limitation some historians have made unique contributions by mining the 20 thousand transcribed and fully searchable pension applications for information that is not available otherwise. The most successful approach appears to be to use individual applications for color, and many applications for consensus.
An example that comes to mind is Hershel Parker’s paper on “John Butler’s ‘Want of Good Generalship’” in the January 2015 issue of Journal of the American Revolution http://allthingsliberty.com/2015/01/john-butlers-want-of-good-generalship). Parker uses the quotations of individual soldiers to express their views of NC militia Gen. John Butler’s generalship in words that add both color and authenticity, judiciously avoiding relying on any one account as documentation. From a large number of accounts, however, Parker extracts a consensus view that is probably more honest than those previous histories and biographies. In this and probably many other cases, the pension applications, though vulnerable to fraud and the frailty of memory, are more reliable than anything found in conventional historical sources.
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