It's a Fact. No Discussion Needed. Or Is It?

[XYZ] actually said “Facts can be debated.”

Think about that for a moment!

With these words, a meme in current circulation takes to task      a public statement by a public figure.  So, let’s do “think about that for a moment.”  Are facts debatable?

Every document we use gives us “facts.” Someone makes an assertion—lots of them if we are lucky. Are those facts immutably engraved in stone? Do you feel there is no need to question them because, well, facts are facts?

If so, consider Nathaniel Maddux.

On 24 February 1821, Nathaniel married Rebecca Howard in Cocke County, Tennessee. Nathaniel even said he married Rebecca on that date.¹

Do we have a “fact” here?  Of course. A fact—an assertion about something—and it's a matter of public record.

Is that fact debatable? Absolutely!  Never mind that we have Nathaniel’s word for it. Never mind the assumption that a man ought to know who, when, and where he married. Never mind that an original document survives in which he makes this assertion. Never mind that he’s a primary informant for his statement about this event. He’s giving us firsthand information, by golly!

The “fact” of the marriage is still debatable, because “facts” often aren’t what they seem to be. Facts have context that have to be considered. Facts have to be checked for accuracy, for bias, for motive. We even need to search out other facts—alternative facts, to use another current buzzword—that may negate what we first assume to be a “fact.”

Let’s consider here the context for this fact of Nathaniel’s marriage. His statement appears in a September 1827 petition for  divorce—from one Anny Maddux.

Anny?  Umhhh.  Nathaniel said he married Rebecca in 1821. But in 1827 he’s seeking a divorce from Anny?

Was she “Rebecca Ann”? No. 

Did Rebecca die soon after marriage, leaving Nathaniel to remarry Anny, who did not live up to his expectations—hence the 1827 divorce petition?  No.

As Nathaniel’s petition explains:

On 6 December 1819, [he] was living in peace with his wife, Anny Maddux, when she left him. She left with Philip Rains. Nathaniel applied for a divorce at the circuit court on July 1820. He then married on 24 February 1821 to Rebecca Howard, thinking it wouldn’t be hard to get a divorce from his first wife, Anny …

Oops.

As researchers, when we encounter details in a legal document, we do tend to treat those details as “facts.” But even facts beg to be debated. We’re foolish if we don’t. Facts always have other facts lurking in their shadows.

Seven months before Nathaniel married Rebecca, Tennessee’s frontier legislature became quite outdone with another fact and passed a bit of legislation that threatened the tranquility of this new marriage Nathaniel was jumping into:

For as much as divers evil disposed and lascivious persons being married, run out of one county into another or into places where they are not known, and there become to be married …

Be it enacted by the General Assembly of the state of Tennessee, That if any person or persons within this state being married or which hereafter shall marry, do at any time, after the passage of this act, marry any person or persons, the former husband or wife being alive; that then every such offence shall be felony … and the person and persons so offending shall receive …. Trial and execution, in such county where the offence may have been committed.²

That law was passed, in fact, in the same month that Nathaniel filed for divorce from Anny. However, the local court to which he applied did not see fit to dissolve that marriage, perhaps because Anny had only been gone for seven months, not the seven years at which runaway spouses were deemed to be reliably gone.³

Meanwhile, lacivious or not, Nathaniel was in no mood to wait. And so, “thinking it wouldn’t be [so] hard to get a divorce,” he proceeded to commit an act of bigamy.

Cocke County’s local records of this era do not survive. But clearly, by 1827, Anny had not reappeared and the legality of Nathaniel’s marriage to Rebecca was a matter of local concern.  With the help of sixty friends who petitioned on his behalf, he asked the state legislature to tidy up his marital mess enough to keep him out of jail. Even so, the prospect of connubial bliss and community respectability with Rebecca faced another complication. Under the state’s prevailing law, if a divorce was granted the party guilty of adultery could not legally marry the person with whom the adultery had been committed.⁴

Surviving records tell us almost nothing more about Nathaniel’s imbroglio. The session acts between 1827 and 1835—the year the assembly bowed out of the divorce business—provide no evidence that the legislators had pity on his plight. By 1840, he had left Cocke for Polk County, with family in tow.⁵ By 1850, he had moved on to Missouri, where the census tells us that he still shared his home with a woman named Rebecca. That last census also suggests that, by that year 1827 when he petitioned to clean up his matrimonial problems, he and Rebecca had become devout Methodists—at least devout enough to name a son Lorenzo Dow.⁶

To no one’s surprise, family trees posted online for Nathaniel and Rebecca report the fact  that they married, but tell us nothing of the circumstances behind that fact.  Most even state the date of the marriage, but none seem to mention the record in which that fact  is documented.

Yes, facts should be debated. For everyone who seeks the truth—or at least as an approximation of it—facts must  be debated.

Facts are impish little devils. They’re shape shifters. They let us hide them or twist them to fit our needs of the moment. They allow us to select just the facts we want to report, the ones that support the case we want to make.

So, yes—and please—be a contrarian with your evidence. Question the facts. Search for the additional and alternative facts. Ferret out the truth that lurks behind the image someone else wants us to see and believe.

Posted 19 March 2017