Knew him well, did ya?
As I’ve said prior, to the victor goes the writing of history. Using that same source material, to frame the ‘truth’, is folly. This whole thread is based upon conjecture and personal opinion/theories.
Sorry, history was not written only by the victors in this case. The insurrection generals had many who survived, and wrote. Even Jeff Davis wrote a two volume fiction about the war.
So the assertion that history of the civil war was written by the victors is a lie, except in so far as the confederati were embarrassed by the reasons for which they started the war and the churlish way in which they prosecuted it, so what they wrote was in many cases fiction, not history.
He graduated from the United States Military Academy (West Point) in 1825 and received a commission as a second lieutenant in the 2nd Regiment of Artillery. He served in the Black Hawk War of 1832 as a colonel of Illinois volunteers, where he had the distinction of twice mustering Abraham Lincoln in and out of army service. Returning to the Army as a first lieutenant in 1833, he served in the Second Seminole War as an assistant adjutant general on the staff of Winfield Scott, and was promoted to captain in October 1841. In the Mexican-American War, he was severely wounded at Molino del Rey, for which he received a brevet promotion to major. He eventually received a permanent promotion to major of the 1st Regiment of Artillery in the Regular Army on October 5, 1857. He was the author of Instruction for Field Artillery, Horse and Foot in 1839.
Doesn’t sound like a blowhard to me, because I imagine he would be vastly different from you.