Talk:Huck's Defeat

Cleanup/rewrite tag
Iv tagged this article because its just atrocious and needs to be completely rewritten.

The intro paragraph is ok, but the detailed description below reads like a poorly written recruiting pamphlet for people being asked to join up and fight the British! The language is strange and old fashioned "then they took a reaping hook to the neck of a farmwoman" etc.

Wikipedia articles should be written in correct encycplopedic english from a neutral point of view, using only citable historical facts, not weird campfire stories about the villainous British and their evil terrorising of the populace. While I am sure they did many bad things I find it hard to believe that even the British redcoats "killed a small boy while he was reading the bible". If someone with proper knowledge of the subject matter can't be found to edit this then I think it should probably be deleted.
 * Every sentence in the article is cited to creditable sources—including the killing of the boy and the threatening of the woman with a reaping hook. If you don't like the sources cited, then you need to find your own. (To sign your posts, type four tildes.)--John Foxe (talk) 18:00, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Tags for explanation and for opinion
Hello John Foxe. If you read the edit summary for last October 21, you will find the reason for the tags. I will repeat that information here for additional documentation. Firstly, not everyone knows what a courthouse town is; please change the wording or explain it. Secondly, describing someone as a "poor choice" is a point of view; please reword it or put it in quotes with a reference. On the question of it being a massacre, it sure sounds like it. The Tories were shot at long-range as they came out of the building so they had no way of defending themselves. But since there is only one secondary source it comes down to a matter of semantics. So I will not address that here. Thank you for your interest. Humphrey Tribble (talk) 01:17, 21 July 2022 (UTC)
 * I don't have a copy of Scoggins handy, so I've taken the easy way out and eliminated the "poor choice" reference. I will say that Scoggins himself read the article and had no complaints (at least expressed to me). John Foxe (talk) 02:51, 21 July 2022 (UTC)

Thank you John. I doubt Scoggins had any complaints because he is effectively the only source. Humphrey Tribble (talk) 03:04, 21 July 2022 (UTC)
 * What got me on the subject was Walter Edgar's Partisans and Redcoats: The Southern Conflict That Turned the Tide of the American Revolution (2001), a fine little book that emphasizes the importance of this relatively small action.

Hello. I'm learning about the revolution as my interests take me—a diversion from what I should be doing—so I came upon Huck's Defeat indirectly. To me, it sounds very much like the "Baylor Massacre": they were caught napping and suffered heavy losses.

I think the article, like the battle, seems one-sided. The problem is the absence of reports from Tories who were there, and the lack of official (i.e. regimental) records from the Whigs. I'd like the article to become more meaningful by giving it greater balance. Stick to the history and leave out the "lurid tales of the revolution". (I came across one source which said blatantly "Although the work is fiction, it is based on documentary evidence.")

Would you be interested in doing some more work on this? My time, like everyone's, is limited so I prefer to stick to what I do best: analysis and writing. Humphrey Tribble (talk) 00:05, 23 July 2022 (UTC)
 * I think the article's sound as it stands, not one-sided at all. I'm certainly open to including other points of view if there are such, but I think Huck was an arrogant jerk. And, as you've suggested, you can't create fictionalized articles in an attempt to create better balance.
 * Merriam-Webster defines "massacre" as "the act or an instance of killing a number of usually helpless or unresisting human beings under circumstances of atrocity or cruelty." That's not a description of Huck's Defeat, which is simply war being fought as wars are usually fought. We can lament the cruelty of war, but that doesn't make lopsided battle casualties massacres. John Foxe (talk) 02:55, 25 July 2022 (UTC)

There is more to this story,. For example, the article doesn't mention Bratton and his men hacking a wounded Tory to pieces, or the many bodies in the woods who had been murdered. Edgar's description of the pre-existing conflicts also provides more context. Many writers refer to it as a Civil War. I will work on it when I can. Humphrey Tribble (talk) 15:45, 26 July 2022 (UTC)

The reaping hook incident
This article says that Mrs Bratten was saved by Lieutenant William Adamson. Edgar says it was Captain John Adamson. The open library lacks a copy of Scoggins book so I am unable to compare. Nevertheless this discrepancy should be resolved if the statement is to be taken seriously. Furthermore, William Bratton’s recollection, more than half a century later, of a traumatic event when he was a child, isn’t a reliable source. Is there anything to corroborate the story? A statement by Mrs Bratten, the British officer, or the militiaman who threatened her would be reliable. Even a note from the memoirs of another soldier would help. Humphrey Tribble (talk) 00:41, 6 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia prioritizes secondary over primary sources, so it's what Scoggins says that counts. (Unfortunately, I don't have a copy of his book to check.) John Foxe (talk) 00:30, 7 July 2023 (UTC)