The Montgomery advertiser., 1905-01-16

It is an easy matter for history to TO nstray, When one comes suddenly and sharply upon place where history stumbled and went wrong 1t shakes his faith in athe recorded things and he comes to think that historians arc very human people who have the weak nesses and foibles of all mankind. Ana he wonders If the limpid stream he has been taught to reverence as Truth. historical Truth. is as pure as IL seems. He wonders If the visions of the heroic figures reflected back from the clear waters were quite so large and quite so goilike when they were on earth and did the great things to their honor and their renown. And the question rises unbidden. are not faces and forms snissing from the galaxy of heroes that history's pearly waters reflect to the world. were there not men who served, who fought and who died for their peopie and stheir home. were there not men Ike these who went down In the waters of oblivion when their deeds endowed them with the right of preser- vation among the best that history shows the past could produce?
 One wonders at the ease with which history makers err and go wrong. HIS fancy pictures them as the old Egyp- tian embalmers going among the
 
 and slain that they may be preserved ana worshipped in the temples through out the intending cycles. And being among the dead they are confused by the tangled heaps of slain. they are confused and in seeking the body Of the hero whose fair hair was guer- don in the thickest of the fray and who paved the way to victory with his own xashed body, they find the corpse of the craven who basely fled and died with a wound in his back. And in the af- ter years when the people come to marvel and praise that which they wor- shin Is not the preserved body of the tall youth who showed the way to vlc- tory. but of him who cowardly turned to fleet in that crucial moment when the fate of the day hung in the bal ance.
 The Fallibility of History.
 I came upon the fallibility of the human recorders of event under the shadow of historic Fort Morgan. Hos ,sitable Mobile was entertaing party of we'll known Alabamians with an ex- cursions down Mobile Bay. The revenue cutter winona with the city's guests. swept under the Fort Morgans walls and out into the open water famed in song and history. the waters on which the sanguinary battle of Mobile Bay was fought. It was over these waters that the Federal fleet with Admiral David Farragut dashed to the mast sailed past the two Confederate forts. Morgan and Gaines, harrassed and poun ded by the famous ironclad Tennessee and two or three little gun boats. It was on these waters that the Federal offfcer touched his cap to Admiral Far ragut and said.
 T have to report that The Tecumseh has struck Cor A derate torpedo and gone down with a.S on board"
 And then came the reply which made Farragut famous for all times, Damn the tOrpedoes. Go ahead.' t
 This is the picture that has been made to show the hero of Mobile Bay, q determined figure lashed to the rig ging of his vessel, dammtng the tor pedoAs and urging his fleet on and on Into the jaws of death. But history, the commonly accepted history, has gone astray here. It was so demon etarfed to us on that day over forty years after the battle of Mobile Bay. IScs-r5
 The Tecumseh was not sunk by a Confederate torpedo. She was blown up by her own torpedo. with which she was trying to destroy the homemade iton-eiad Tennessee, the single little