A Load of Buell? Another Look at The Cannoneer (Lecture)

Here’s Ranger Bert Barnett giving a presentation as part of the 2017 Gettysburg National Military Park Winter Lecture Series. This lecture covers Augustus C. Buell, who wrote a book he claimed was his memoir of his service in the Civil War. Buell fabricated an enormous amount of material in his writings and plagiarized a number of items as well.

The video’s description reads, “Many stories have been spun about the American Civil War; some of them better than others. In the modern marketplace, everything from AK-47 wielding Confederates to a vampire-slaying Lincolns Permeates the battlefields in search of profit. With this as a backdrop, let us re-evaluate the scorned story of one soldier of the Union in ‘A Load of Buell?- Another look at the Cannoneer’ ”

One comment

  1. This is great stuff! I remember reading (back in the 70s) the excerpts from “The Cannoneer” that were published in “The Blue and the Gray,” and I also remember when your old professor, Bud Robertson, published a short column in CWTI, detailing Buell’s fictionalizing. I even wrote him some years later, having read another account of all this (and having forgotten his first column), suggesting he do it again. He wrote back a nice note, saying he was all ready to write the column, when he checked his records and realized he already had done so!

    I’ve listened to about half of it—I’ll finish tomorrow night.

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