Hilary Abner Herbert
In 1890 Mr. L. E. Chittenden, who had been United States Treasurer under President Lincoln, published an interesting account of $10,000,000 United States bonds secretly sent to England, as he said, in 1862, and he told all about what thereupon took place across the water. It was a reminiscence.General Charles Francis Adams in his recent instructive volume, 'Studies Military and Diplomatic,' takes up this narrative and, in a chapter entitled 'An Historical Residuum,' conclusively shows from contemporaneous evidence that the bonds were sent, not in 1862, but in 1863, but that, as for the rest of the story, the residuum of truth in it was about like the speck of moisture that is left when a soap bubble is pricked by a needle. General Adams did not mean that Mr. Chittenden knew he was drawing on his imagination. He was only demonstrating that one who intends to write history cannot rely on his memory.The author, in the following pages, is undertaking to write a connected story of events that happened, most of them, in his lifetime, and as to many of the most important of which he has vivid recollections; but, save in one respect, he has not relied upon his own memory for any important fact. The picture he has drawn of the relations between the slave-holder and non-slave-holder in the South is, much of it, given as he recollects it. His opportunities for observation were somewhat extensive, and here he is willing to be considered in part as a witness. Elsewhere he has relied almost entirely upon contemporaneous written evidence, memory, however, often indicating to him sources of information.
