Beginnings

People who know very little about Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: A Narrative know that it begins and ends with the person of Confederate president Jefferson Davis. We will get deeper into Foote’s treatment of Davis later, and of course the work done by the trilogy’s ambiguous conclusion, but let’s read the gorgeous in media res first paragraph of Foote’s first volume:

It was a Monday in Washington, January 21; Jefferson Davis rose from his seat in the Senate. South Carolina had left the Union a month before, followed by Mississippi, Florida, and Alabama, which seceded at the rate of one a day during the second week of the new year. Georgia went out eight days later; Louisiana and Texas were poised to go; few doubted that they would go, along with others. For more than a decade there had been intensive discussion as to the legality of secession, but now the argument was no longer academic. A convention had been called for the first week in February, at Montgomery, Alabama, for the purpose of forming a confederacy of the departed states, however many there should be in addition to the five already gone. As a protest against the election of Abraham Lincoln, who had received not a single southern electoral vote, secession was a fact—to be reinforced, if necessary, by the sword. The senator from Mississippi rose. It was high noon. The occasion was momentous and expected; the galleries were crowded, hoop-skirted ladies and men in broadcloth come to hear him say farewell. He was going home.

Some hallmarks of Foote’s narrative history make themselves known in the here: people and their gestures come first, followed by the history. We see Jefferson Davis sitting and then we see him standing. Foote runs through a brief telling of the Secession Crisis, as if in an observer’s memory as we watch the Mississippi senator stand up to take the floor and wonder what this could be about. To commandeer a term from music, this legato technique of combining historical and personal data is the most distinctive thing about Shelby Foote’s historical writing. When we get to the famous chapter on Gettysburg, “The Stars in their Courses”, we will have a close read of the subtle changes in perspective the writer takes us on as we drift from Beauregard and Longstreet’s respective plans for a Confederate summer offensive in 1863, the current state of Vicksburg, the debate on military policy in Davis’s cabinet, and then the figure of Lee, who we see through Davis’s star struck eyes and then through the sober analysis of John Reagan, the confederate Postmaster General. The effect of it is like a long tracking shot that takes us across multiples states over several months. This opening paragraph is not so complex, nor should it, be, but is made with the same sort of tools.

After the fluidity of several sentences requiring commas and dashes to organize the thoughts in print, Foote applies the brakes with two short, declarative sentences: “The senator from Mississippi rose. It was high noon.” Varied sentence length and complementary sentence structures are among the oldest techniques in the Anglophone storyteller’s toolbox, and were once the signs of good rhetoric and writing—since the 1960s, I am sad to say that I feel our language in both its written and spoken forms has gotten rather rhetorically flat and undifferentiated. 

One does not need to see Jefferson Davis as a Christ figure (Shelby Foote is too much of a modernist to see anyone as a Christ figure) to see that, “it was high noon” is the borrowing of a technique used in John’s Gospel. Foote seemed to be familiar with at least parts of the King James Bible, judging from his choice of an obscure epigram from Ecclesiasticus chapter 44 (a book also known as Sirach or The Wisdom of Ben Sira, which is canonical in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles but printed in the apocrypha of Protestant Bibles like the King James). He would have known how in John, abstract non-sequiturs (such as the observation “and it was night” as Judas left to betray Jesus to the temple authorities) accompany momentous events and actions. In the Gospel, they have a certain symbolic and suggestive power teased out over centuries in the tradition of meditative reading.  Here, it has more modern suggestions. I doubt Foote meant to call to mind Western films, but as I read I think of an observer suddenly pulled into the present by a dramatic gesture and looking up at the clock. I hear distant church bells.

The first fourteen pages of the trilogy are devoted to Jefferson Davis’s life up until this point, and what history of the South and rising sectionalism Foote can squeeze in as he tells the story. It is important to note that the thing that instantly sets Foote’s history apart from the work of modern histories is that Foote is self-consciously writing a history made up of the lives and decisions of Great Men. This was the norm from Thucydides all the way to the nineteenth century. It seems strange to us now, a century into the mainstreaming of Marxist ways of viewing and interpreting history and a half century into the corrective movement in which we privilege the narratives of women, minorities, the poor, and other people “written out” of the old history. These ways of writing history are both commendable and important, but we should also recognize that the work of a Tacitus or a Petrarch was not meant to educate the young in a democratic society where we feel we are owed role models and representation. Historical figures were presented as heroes to emulate, victims of tragedy to learn from. In a later post we will get into Foote’s admiration for this type of history and his attempt reproduce its effect in a 20th century work about 19th century events. 

The most strongly worded criticism of Shelby Foote’s trilogy I’ve seen was in one of Ta-Nehesis Coates’s columns in The Atlantic, in which he wrote, “And yet here is the bit of sadness: [Foote] gave twenty years of his life, and three volumes of important and significant words to the Civil War, but he could never see himself in the slave.”

Coates has some important things to say about Foote in this column and others, things important and true enough that I want to reflect on them later exclusively, and not shoehorned into a post that was supposed to be just about this book’s first paragraph! I think there is more smoke than fire in this critique, however. To echo part of Cornell West’s critique of Coates, he often sees race in a vacuum, separated from class and other determining factors. I can’t imagine reading deep into the third volume of Foote’s trilogy, as Coates did, and not noticing that Foote takes us almost exclusively in the world of Generals and their staffs, Presidents and their cabinets. It seems that Foote is loath to fill the page with too many proper nouns. I think this is one of the things that makes his story flow so well. There is a cast of hundreds, yet we never feel as if we have forgotten whether Elisha Rhodes, the famous diarist from the 2nd Rhode Island Infantry, fought for the North or South. There are many unattributed quotes in this work that prefers to cite a quote by “one southern diarist” than “Mary Chestnut, Charleston diarist”. Sometimes what makes great history and great literature are mutually exclusive.

I will not be spending this blog popping the balloons of everyone who criticizes Foote. I relish the opportunity to later speculate why Foote’s later interviews seem to be from a totally different perspective than his trilogy, and share Coates alarm at some of these statements. (I also acknowledge that in Coates statement, quotes above, he is speaking of Foote in general, and not specifically about Foote the writer.)   

I should point out here that Foote misses a tremendous opportunity making Frederick Douglass one of the “Great Men” of his story. Not only was he one of the truly great speakers and writers of the period—whose prose is perhaps only exceeded by Lincoln, and perhaps only equaled by Grant’s memoirs—but Foote would have done wonderfully describing Lincoln through Douglass’s perspective, so often one of righteous urgency. The historian David Blight has a biography out on Douglass which is apparently wonderful. Penguin also now has a “Portable Douglass” with many of his speeches as well as his famed autobiography. Douglass is one of the few recognizably “modern” figures among the Great Men of that era, although Grant comes close. Foote would add Forrest as well, I think, but that isn’t a can of worms we will open today.