An Introduction

In the fall of 1990 more than 39 million Americans watched Ken Burns’s documentary series The Civil War and were introduced to a southern gentleman with a blue shirt and a voice that sounded like seersucker and bourbon. His name was Shelby Foote. Fifteen years earlier he had finished a massive trilogy on the Civil War, an odd work of narrative history that fell broadly into the category of military history, but boasted prose influenced by Homer, Thucydides, and Proust rather than the faux-literary journalistic English of his peers in the Civil War Centennial publishing boom. He had spent more than fifteen years writing it—putting his career as novelist on indefinite hold to do so. The trilogy was well reviewed at the time, but he was by no means a household name until the Ken Burns series. None other than Robert Penn Warren himself suggested Burns recruit Foote for his documentary, and the filmmaker made ample use of the novelist. Of the 690 minutes of the massive series, Shelby Foote appeared in 89 segments and for about an hour of speaking time—dwarfing the screen exposure of the other featured historians. The documentary made him a star. Within a few weeks of the end of the Ken Burns series, his trilogy was selling over a thousand copies a day. “Ken, you made me a millionaire,” Foote supposedly told the filmmaker. Foote spent the last fifteen years of his life as a literary celebrity and elder statesman, with all the media appearances and honorary degrees that entails.

Changes in Interpretation

The three volumes of Foote’s The Civil War: A Narrative were published in 1958, 1963, and 1975, a time of sweeping social change in the American south. Parallel to this was a dramatic course correction in the historiography of the Civil War and its place in American memory.

Speaking in very broad strokes, until World War Two the story of the War Between the States was the story of a fraternal conflict between white Southerners and white Northerners that was fought for vague reasons: agrarianism vs. industrialism, rural vs. urban, tradition vs. progress. The southern boys did not fight for slavery but for hearth and home. After the debacle of World War One, there was even one of those blessed and hard-won periods when all war was dismissed as useless and tragic, a perspective that left its mark on even some Civil War scholarship.

This interpretation of the Civil War grew directly from the writing of Southern leaders who sought to justify their part in the conflict, a historiography known as the Lost Cause. This myth—for a myth it was—was uncritically repeated even by Northern writers in the years following the war. Lee was a saint. Longstreet had failed him at Gettysburg. The South had fought valiantly but been done in by the technology, money, and numbers of the Federals. And it had not been about slaves.

Perhaps this was the metanarrative that white America needed as it sought reconciliation and unity. That is a controversial assertion, but what is certainly clear is that the Lost Cause was enormously successful in shaping the public memory of the war and is a direct reason that so many Confederate monuments pepper the cities south of the Ohio River and east of the Rockies.

The centennial of the Civil War began in 1961, a time of the Pax Americana, the American consensus, the “affluent society”, and military advisors in what was once French Indochina. Northerners were developing their own voice in Civil War histories. This was the apotheosis of Bruce Catton. In popular works like Catton’s, to speak about the war meant to focus almost entirely on military history. The analysis of the war’s origins was often a sketchy blur of Clay, Calhoun, Webster, Toombs, Bleeding Kansas, Dred Scott’s lawsuit, John Brown’s body, and the election of 1860. Like a high school history class it is long on names, dates, and proper-noun events, but short on context and the economics which drove the motivations of many. The war’s epilogue was likewise often short on detail and perspective. I understand why—which would be a better ending for a story: Lincoln’s funeral train bending over the horizon or the ignominious end of Reconstruction at the Compromise of 1877?

Gaining steam in the American imagination—especially imaginations Northern and urban—was the narrative that America was a great but imperfect nation which was gradually extending its blessings of liberty and prosperity to more and more groups: first white landowners, then all white men, then black men (to an uncertain extent), then women, and finally, the taking up of a dream deferred with Civil Rights legislation. It took a while for this view to make its mark on Civil War scholarship, but it was making itself definitively felt by the 1970s.

In 1988, two books were released that have set the terms of discussion on the Civil War that I expect to last beyond my lifetime. Eric Foner published his Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877 and James McPherson published The Battle Cry of Freedom. Neither of these men were military historians. Both were more interested in the Emancipation Proclamation than Jackson’s flank attack on the Union right at Chancellorsville. They placed the Civil War in the context of social and economic change in the nineteenth century, the most important of which in that time being not Gettysburg, Vicksburg, or anything done with muskets, but the emancipation of four million black people held in violent bondage. David Blight, another brilliant contemporary historian, provides a good rule of thumb for what an accurate Civil War history ought to be in his Yale course on the period: one third on the causes of the conflict, one third on the war, and one third on Reconstruction. These are not the only major contemporary historians, but rather the three with which I am most familiar.

Each of them is quite aware of the power of the Civil War in the national memory, and how the conflict morphs from generation to generation as the American people break apart and recombine shards of memory to face new conditions and challenges. This is revisionist history—not in the pejorative sense but in the best sense of the word. Their work has truly changed the public discourse around the war, and while it was only barely reflected in Ken Burns’s documentary, its interpretation has been widely disseminated in periodicals like Smithsonian Magazine, The New York Times, and even the History Channel. This movement has finally proven to the American public, beyond any doubt whatsoever, that the war was about slavery, slavery, slavery. For that thinking people ought to be eternally grateful.

Their ability to “zoom out” and focus on the grand sweep of the war, rather than getting bogged down in bright and tempting specifics, has also changed the story which military historians tell. Where Grant was once an unimaginative butcher, he is now the master strategist. Where Sherman was once this conflict’s devil, he is now the visionary inventor of total war. Lee’s reputation has tumbled down to earth in contrast, as historians now recognize the general’s myopia when it comes to events outside of his beloved Virginia and his misbegotten wasting of his army in repeated assaults. Moving away from individuals, the new military history of the Civil War puts more emphasis on campaigns than battles and gives greater emphasis to the campaigns outside Virginia, the blockade, and the North’s brilliant use of its logistical advantage.

The pendulum, however, has by now swung, I believe, to another extreme, and in the public imagination there is a reading of the Civil War almost reciprocal to the old Lost Cause myth. Taking on aspects of the new historical consensus that the war was (eventually) fought to free slaves, they view the Union armies as noble, avenging armies which fought against white supremacy. Of course, any Manichean reading of history is false, or at the very least unbalanced. This reading, though, serves an important purpose to segments of the country who desire a sudden correction to the sins of our nation against our black brothers and sisters, and more so, a systemic change to address the structures which put blacks at an instant disadvantage in our supposedly meritocratic society.

Reaction Against Foote

And this brings us back to Shelby Foote. While known as a historian, not a novelist, after the release of the trilogy, Foote was viewed by many in the trade as an interloper—for his refusal to use footnotes, for his reliance on published material for sources, for his outdated historiography.

Fame in the 1990s brought with it renewed criticism. Almost as soon as Ken Burns released The Civil War historians pointed out that it did not send a clear message that the war was fought over slavery. Shelby Foote exemplified to many what was wrong with the documentary: sympathetic to the south, focused on the white experience in the war almost exclusively, and a view that soldiers were not fighting about slavery.

The normally staid David Blight has called Foote’s explanation on why the North won the war “bullshit”. In 2010 and 2011 Ta-Nehisi Coates read the trilogy, and wrote about it in several of his columns for the Atlantic in this period, finding Foote’s work engaging, but his naiveté regarding the history of the Ku Klux Klan in an 1999 Paris Review interview appalling, and the work lacking in what would truly teach people about the war. While Coates read Foote’s work, much of the criticism of Foote is centered upon his contribution to Burns’s documentary. That makes perfect sense—America is more of a “watching” culture than a reading culture, and has been for quite a while, and it is far easier to grapple with an hour of sound bites in a documentary than 3,000 pages of text.

The Point of this Blog

Having told you that history has moved on without Shelby Foote, I am going to read Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: A Narrative and blog as I do so. I am going to take frequent breaks to write about Foote’s life and other work (especially his novel Shiloh), the slim scholarship on Foote’s historical writing (especially James Panabaker’s Shelby Foote and the Art of History), as well as different editions of Foote’s work and other arcane amusements.

My belief is that Foote’s work has been mis-labeled as to genre. While I’m sure it gave Foote pleasure to be considered a historian in his later years, his work’s strength lies in the aesthetics of its prose and not in his research or interpretation of facts. Shelby Foote was of the generation of writers who had internalized the innovations of Faulkner and Hemingway and practiced their craft with a subtlety in American letters that will not be seen again, I think. Foote’s use of close third-person omniscient narration is the finest I’ve seen in a work of nonfiction, as delicate as its use in the novels of Richard Yates.

That being said, I will not shy away from discussing its merits as a work of history. The trilogy is a fluent retelling of the conflict’s military aspects, and one that was well ahead of its time in the equal time it gave the Western Theater, among other aspects. I also hope to learn more about Shelby Foote than I do now, to understand this chronicler of Southern memory, who for a while was presented as a member of the historical academy.

In this introduction I have written quite a bit about the Ken Burns documentary, but I plan to mainly ignore it from here on out. I still haven’t forgiven Burns for the philistinism of his Jazz documentary, or his haircut for that matter. Foote’s trilogy, and its literary qualities, are going to be my main concern.

My own Perspective

I am a Yankee. More than that I am a school teacher from Rhode Island in my mid-30s. I studied economics at Brown University. I am embarrassed to say that I was a Civil War buff as a child, of a particularly severe sort. I think it may have been watching “Civil War Journal” that did it to me. I remember with particular clarity an episode on color guards that made a big impression on me. I did not see the Ken Burns documentary, but I had the big, thick book that was companion to the PBS series. My parents gave me the amazing (or so I thought at the time) Time-Life series which had metallic gray covers and fantastic battle maps. I also had an American Heritage book of battle maps that had been excised from one of Bruce Catton’s many single volume histories of the war. I was enough of an obsessive my parents bought me several volumes of the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion. I regret that I did not get much out of them. (As an aside, these were a major source for Shelby Foote).

I am a Catholic, having come to the faith in my mid-20s, and it is primarily through this lens that I see the world. More than that, I suppose I am an idiosyncratic sort of Catholic—attracted to the Benedictine tradition, pacifism, contemplative prayer, and whatnot. I enjoy reading most of all. Lately some favorites of mine have been Flannery O’Connor, Hans urs von Balthasar, John Milbank, the Knox translation of the Vulgate, Walker Percy—especially Lost in the Cosmos—and books about John Coltrane. While Flannery O’Connor is my favorite writer, the novels I most admire are The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald, Stoner by John Williams, Fat City by Leonard Gardner,The Easter Parade, and Revolutionary Road, both by Richard Yates. My interest in the Civil War is a bit anti-type when it comes to my other interests, I suppose.

I remember seeing ads for Shelby Foote’s trilogy in Civil War Times as a child, both the spartan original hardcover edition and those gorgeous trade paperback covers which Vintage printed. I don’t think I remembered Shelby Foote again until I read the Modern Library list of the top 100 nonfiction books from the 20^th Century. After that, it was mostly through my enjoyment of Walker Percy that I became interested in his childhood friend Shelby.

This will be the second time I read the trilogy through. While reflecting upon why I love Shelby Foote’s The Civil War so much, I was reminded that the two translations of the Bible I most admire are the aforementioned Knox Bible and the New English Bible. Neither of these are hyper-literal translations of the Hebrew and Greek originals but are instead rendered in a fluent and elegant style that leaves me wanting to continue reading. I get the same feeling as I read Foote’s work. Like those two translations, Foote has emphasized beauty and the grand sweep of a story which affects all of us. Like the titular prince in Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, I have this fanciful notion that beauty will save the world. It is for that reason that I share Walker Percy’s enthusiasm for Foote’s The Civil War and belief that it might just be “read in the ruins”

I have no wish to cover my eyes and avoid the hard truth of slavery, and all of America’s complicity in it. If you truly want a deep and broad knowledge of this period, I highly suggest watching David Blight’s Civil War lectures on Yale Open Courses, and, if you can, read the books he assigns. Let it not be said that my attraction to Foote’s work is a reaction against the reading of history that Blight imparts in this amazing course. Shelby Foote will give you a different sort of knowledge.

I invite you to read along with me.