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Reuben M. Potter to McArdle, September 10, 1875
Page 1 of 2
Handbook
of Texas article on Reuben M. Potter
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Brooklyn N.Y. 282 Franklin
Ave. Sept 10th 1875.
To
H.A. McArdle Esq Independence, Texas
My Dear Sir:
I received a few days ago yr letter
of the 26th of August and the
Galveston News of the 22nd, for both of which please
accept my thanks.
The paragraph in the aforesaid newspaper, which
introduces the Hymn
of the Alamo, is so brief & vague and of tone which implied
so little pretention
of exactness, that I think its historical errors hardly demand a
formal
contradiction, especially as they are free from the worst extravagance
of popular legend. It does not exaggerate but rather underrates
the number
of the enemy, it does not pile them up in fabulous heaps of slaughter,
assuming per-
haps that the hymn had done that sufficiently. Its greatest blunder
perhaps
is that of awarding, as it apparently does, the brightest course
of martyrdom and
heroism to the only six men who skulked while the rest died fighting.
What the writer says about me is correct, except
that he puts me into the Pay De-
partment instead of the qutr master’s and makes my residence
in Galveston longer
than it was, as I lived there steadily but eight or nine months.
I sent on the letter to Judge Duval at Austin
for the Historical So-
ciety of Texas, a revision and enlargement of the tract entitled
"the fall of the
Alamo," which I published in 1860. Should the Society some
day choose to
publish it, it will be the best corrective I can offer for the current
popular illusions
touching the event it relates to. My letter to you of the 13th
of August 1874 would
not do this so fully, and would exhibit some of my crude ideas on
the artist’s han-
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Reuben M. Potter to McArdle, September 10, 1875, The McArdle Notebooks,
Archives and Information Services Division, Texas State Library and Archives
Commission.
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