@jprr: I never understood why he was/is so lauded but for that he took a true story and fictionalized it, and that fictionalization became seen as a history lesson for people who couldn't be bothered to actually study history. He turned a kinda awful guy into a 21st-century hero, and it was because, as he himself has said, didn't really do much research about him other than his outcastness and rise to fame and fortune.