Shelby Foote

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQfKkCH_YoM

In time, even those who had opposed him most fiercely during the four-year conflict would come to agree in large part with Lincoln’s war-scorched vision. That would be part of what became known as the Great Compromise, whereby Southerners agreed that it was best, all round, that the Union had been preserved, and Northerners agreed—although some with equal reluctance—that the South had fought bravely for a cause it believed it was just.

In the light (or shadow) of that Compromise, I suggest that we remember here today that roughly half of the 50,000 casualties on this field were Confederates, many of whom also gave “the last full measure of devotion.” We would do well to remember that they too were Americans—deserving, as well, of our remembrance, our admiration and, if need be, our forgiveness. One man I know would give all three of these, and had even begun to do so before he was martyred, five days after Appomattox. That man was Abraham Lincoln, who spoke here all those hundred and thirty years ago.

Shelby Foote, November 19, 1993, Address to the Lincoln Fellowship of Pennsylvania

The above video interview occurred on September 2, 2001.  Hard to believe it has been fifteen years since his death.

In 1954 Bennett Cerf, the President of Random House, decided that with the coming Civil War Centennial his company needed to publish a short history of the War, not longer than 200,000 words. Wanting the history to be entertaining he hit upon the idea of having Shelby Foote, author of a novel on the battle of Shiloh in 1952, undertake the task.  Foote, 37, a non-combat veteran of both the Army (Captain) and the Marine Corps (Private) during World War II, accepted a $400.00 advance and assumed that he could pound out the history quickly and get back to writing fiction.  Nineteen years, and a million and half words later, Foote completed the final volume of his immortal three volume history of the War.

Foote wrote his books during the years of the fight over segregation in the South.  Although far from being a political liberal, in his bibliographical note to the second volume published in 1963 Foote made clear where he stood:  In a quite different sense , I am obligated also to the governors of my native state and the adjoining states of Arkansas and Alabama for helping to lessen my sectional bias by reproducing, in their actions during several of the years that went into the writing of this volume,  much that was least admirable in the position my forebears occupied when they stood up to Lincoln. I suppose, or in any case hope, it is true that history never repeats itself, but I know from watching these three gentlemen that it can be terrifying in its approximations, even when the reproduction–deriving, as it does, its scale from the performers–is in miniature.

Foote in his 19 years of studying, thinking and writing about the Civil War, became convinced that it was impossible to understand America without understanding the Civil War:

Any understanding of this nation has to be based, and I mean really based, on an understanding of the Civil War. I believe that firmly. It defined us. The Revolution did what it did. Our involvement in European wars, beginning with the First World War, did what it did. But the Civil War defined us as what we are and it opened us to being what we became, good and bad things. And it is very necessary, if you are going to understand the American character in the twentieth century, to learn about this enormous catastrophe of the mid-nineteenth century. It was the crossroads of our being, and it was a hell of a crossroads.

Back in 1991 Crisis Magazine had a fascinating interview with Shelby Foote.  Go here to read it.  Historians can be a fairly colorless lot, but Shelby Foote, who passed away in 2005, was never among their number, and his examination of the American Iliad was as colorful and passionate as his own personality.