The things you find on the internet. The unedited interviews by Ken Burns of Shelby Foote for The Civil War. Hard to believe it is 31 years since the series was broadcast. I recall it as if it were yesterday.
I have read the three volume history of the Civil War written by Shelby Foote, and I highly recommend it to anyone who has not. Combining the skills of a novelist with those of a keen historian, Foote brings to life the American Iliad.
“The point I would make is that the novelist and the historian are seeking the same thing: the truth – not a different truth: the same truth – only they reach it, or try to reach it, by different routes. Whether the event took place in a world now gone to dust, preserved by documents and evaluated by scholarship, or in the imagination, preserved by memory and distilled by the creative process, they both want to tell us how it was: to re-create it, by their separate methods, and make it live again in the world around them.”
In the Battle of Shiloh, Union losses were 1754 killed, 8408 wounded, 2885 captured: total, 13047. Confederate losses were 1723 killed, 8012 wounded, 959 missing: total, 10694. Of the 100,000 soldiers engaged in this first great bloody conflict of the war, approximately one out of every four who had gone in battle had been killed, wounded or captured. Casualties were 24%, the same as Waterloo’s. Yet Waterlook had settled something while this one apparently had settled nothing. When it was over the two armies were back where they started, with other Waterloos ahead. In another sense, however, it settled a great deal. The American volunteer, whichever side he was on in the war, and however green, would fight as fiercely and stand as firmly as the vaunted veterans of Europe… Total American casualties in all three of the nation’s previous wars – the Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Mexican War: 10623+6765+5885 – were 23,273. Shiloh’s totaled 23,741.
Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative, Volume I (1958)
Longstreet considered Chancellorsville the kind of flashy spectacle the South could ill afford. Facing what Lincoln called ‘the arithmetic’, he perceived that four more such battles, in which the Confederates were outnumbered two to one and inflicted casualties at a rate of three for four, would reduce Lee’s army to a handful, while Hooker would be left with the number Lee had had at the outset… The style he preferred had the Confederates taking up a strong defensive position against which the superior blue forces were shattered, like waves against a rock… Longstreet listened with disapproval as Lee announced his intention to launch an offensive in the East. He protested… but Lee’s mind was made up. So Longstreet contented himself with his theory that the proposed invasion be conducted in accordance with his preference for receiving rather than delivering attack when the two armies came to grips, wherever that might be. As he put it later, quite as if he and Lee had been joint commanders of the army, “I then acceptted his proposition to make a campaign into Pennsylvania, provided it should be offensive in strategy but defensive in tactics, forcing the Federals to give us battle when we were in strong postion and ready to receive them.”
Lee heard him out with the courtesy which he was accustomed to extend to all subordinates, but which in this case was mistaken for a commitment. He intended no such thing, of course… trouble was stored up for all involved.
Lee laid his hand on the dead Jackson’s map, touching the regiion just east of the mountains that caught on their western flanks the rays of the setting sun. “Hereabouts we shall probably meet the enemy and fight a great battle,” he saud, “and if God gives us the victory, the war will be over and we shall achieve the recognition of our independence.” One of the place names under his hand as he spoke was the college town of Gettysburg, just over 20 miles away, from which no less than 10 roads ran to as many disparate points of the compass, as if it were probing for trouble in all directions.
In the past 10 months, the Army of the Potomac had fought four major battles under as many different commanders — Bull Run under Pope, Antietam under McClellan, Fredericksburg under Burnside, and Chancellorsville under Hooker — all against a single adversary, Robert Lee, who could claim unquestionable victory in three out of the four; especially the first and the last, of which about the best that could be said was that the Federal army had sruvived them. Now it was about to fight its fifth great battle… and it would fight it under still a fifth commander. Not that Hooker had not done well in the seven weeks since Chancellorsville. He had indeed: especially in the past few days, when by dint of hard and skillful marching he managed to interpose his 100,000 soldiers between Lee and Washington without that general’s knowledge that the blue army had even crossed the river from which it took its name. The trouble was that, despite his efforts to shift the blame for the recent Wilderness fiasco — principally onto Stoneman and Sedgwick and Howard’s rattled Dutchmen — he could not blur a line of the picture fixed in the public mind of himself as the exclusive author of that woeful chapter… There was much in the criticism of Hooker that was unfair but it was generally known that his ranking corps commander, Darius Couch, had applied for and been granted transfer to another department in order to avoid further service under a man he judged incompetent.
Nothing in Fighting Joe Hooker’s five-month tenure, in the course of which the army had experienced much of profit as well as pain, became him more than the manner in which he brought it to a close.
What Meade lacked in fact was glamour, not only in his actions and dispatches, but also in his appearance, which one journalist said was more that of a ‘learned pundit than a soldier’. Two birthdays short of 50, he looked considerably older, with a ‘small and compact’ balding head, a grizzled beard, and outsized puches under eyes that were ‘serious, almost sad’ and ‘rather sunken’ on each side of what the reporter had charitably described as ‘the late Duke of Wellington class of nose’.
Lee groped his way across the Pennsylvania landscape, deprived of his eyes and ears (Stuart’s cavalry) and with little information as to the enemy’s whereabouts or intentions… Whatever Lee encountered, good or bad, was bound to come as a surprise, and surprise was seldom a welcome thing in war. And so it was. Coincidents refused to mesh for the general who, six weeks ago in Richmond, had cast his vote for the long chance. Fortuity itself, as the deadly game unfolded move by move, appeared to conform to a pattern of hard luck; so much so, indeed, that in time men would say of Lee, as Jael had said of Sisera after she drove the tent peg into his temple, that the stars in their courses had fought against him.
One more item concerned Lee, though few of his lieutenants agreed that it should be so. They were saying that Meade was about as able a general as Hooker, but considerably less bold, and they were exchanging congratulations on Lincoln’s appointment of another mediocre opponent for them. Lee, who had known the Pennsylvanian as a fellow engineer in the old army, did not agree. “General Meade will commit no blunder on my front,” he said, “and if I make one he will make haste to take advantage of it.”
Shelby Foote
The night of the third day falls. The battle is done. Lee entrenches that night upon Seminary Ridge. All next day the battered armies still face each other Like enchanted beasts.
Lee thinks he may be attacked, Hopes for it, perhaps, is not, and prepares his retreat.
Vicksburg has fallen, hollow Vicksburg has fallen, The cavedwellers creep from their caves and blink at the sun. The pan of the Southern balance goes down and down. The cotton is withering.
Army of Northern Virginia, haggard and tattered,
Tramping back on the pikes, through the dust-white summer,
With your wounds still fresh, your burden of prisoners,
Your burden of sick and wounded,
“One long groan of human anguish six miles long.”
You reach the swollen Potomac at long last,
A foe behind, a risen river in front,
And fording that swollen river, in the dim starlight, In the yellow and early dawn,
Still have heart enough for the tall, long-striding soldiers To mock the short, half swept away by the stream. “Better change our name to Lee’s Waders, boys!” “Come on you shorty — get a ride on my back.” “Aw, it’s just we ain’t had a bath in seven years And General Lee, he knows we need a good bath.”
So you splash and slip through the water and come at last Safe, to the Southern side, while Meade does not strike; Safe to take other roads, safe to march upon roads you know For two long years. And yet — each road that you take, Each dusty road leads to Appomattox now.
Stephen Vincent Benet
There is no other legend quite like the legend of the Confederate fighting man. He reached the end of his haunted road long ago. He fought for a star-crossed cause and in the end he was beaten, but as he carried his slashed red battle flag into the dusky twilight of the Lost Cause he marched straight into a legend that will live as long as the American people care to remember anything about the American past.
Bruce Catton
For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it’s going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose than all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago.
The point I would make is that the novelist and the historian are seeking the same thing: the truth — not a different truth: the same truth — only they reach it, or try to reach it, by different routes. Whether the event took place in a world now gone to dust, preserved by documents and evaluated by scholarship, or in the imagination, preserved by memory and distilled by the creative process, they both want to tell us how it was: to re-create it, by their separate methods, and make it live again in the world around them.
Shelby Foote
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, 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 postition 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: (more…)
Something for the weekend. The opening of the Civil War documentary, to the tune Ashokan Farewell, that premiered twenty-five years ago this September. As the 150th anniversary of the Civil War draws to a close, what strikes me most is the immensity of the conflict and the immense changes it wrought in American life. One can spend a lifetime studying this conflict as I have, and still find, almost daily, new pieces of information. Shelby Foote, and it took a gifted novelist I think to write an epic history worthy of this huge, sprawling event in American history, put it best:
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.
Before the war, it was said ‘the United States are’ – grammatically it was spoken that way and thought of as a collection of independent states. And after the war it was always ‘the United States is’, as we say today without being self-conscious at all. And that sums up what the war accomplished. It made us an ‘is’.
My co-blogger Paul Zummo and I also blog at The American Catholic. Yesterday we were asked by a commenter why we were interested in the Civil War.
Here is my answer:
There are many eras of history that interest me, Pinky, but I am especially interested in the Civil War for the reason noted by Shelby Foote:
“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. “
Here is Paul’s answer:
I’m an American history buff, and the Civil War is the seminal moment in our history. There’s also something to the fact that many of the battlefields are either wholly or at least partially preserved. You can go to Gettysburg, spend a couple of days there, and still not see everything. So being able to stand on the fields and see how the battles played out is something that is unique to the Civil War, as I don’t believe the Revolutionary War battlefields are as ubiquitous. (more…)
The point I would make is that the novelist and the historian are seeking the same thing: the truth — not a different truth: the same truth — only they reach it, or try to reach it, by different routes. Whether the event took place in a world now gone to dust, preserved by documents and evaluated by scholarship, or in the imagination, preserved by memory and distilled by the creative process, they both want to tell us how it was: to re-create it, by their separate methods, and make it live again in the world around them.
Shelby Foote
I know quite a few of our readers have a keen interest in the Civil War . I am curious as to what the favorite Civil War books of our readers are. There are so many magnificent studies of the Civil War that I have read over the years, that I find the question difficult to answer. However, I think pride of place for me is Shelby Foote’s magisterial three volume The Civil War: A Narrative. Written by a master novelist, Foote’s volumes are an epic recreation of the terrible conflict that made us, certainly more than any event since, what we are today. That is my choice, what is yours?
“I am a Mississippian. Though the veterans I knew are all dead now, down to the final home guard drummer boy of my childhood, the remembrance of them is still with me. However, being nearly as far removed from them in time as most of them were removed from combat when they died. I hope I have recovered the respect they had for their opponents until Reconstruction lessened and finally killed it. Biased is the last thing I would be; I yield to no one in my admiration for heroism and ability, no matter which side of the line a man was born or fought on when the war broke out, fourscore and seventeen years ago. If pride in the resistance of my forebears made against the odds has leaned me to any degree in their direction, I hope it will be seen to amount to no more, in the end, than the average American’s normal sympathy for the underdog in a fight.”
It is very rare for a great historian to also be a great novelist. Shelby Foote was a national treasure and the country was poorer when he passed from the scene in 2005. To truly understand America I think it is very important to have a firm grasp of our Civil War. Foote, with his magisterial three volume epic, did all Americans a service by giving us a readable and comprehensive study of that vast conflict. He spent 20 years of his life doing it, and the care with which he crafted each page shines through.
The Civil War, there’s a great compromise, as it’s called. It consists of Southerners admitting freely that it’s probably best that the Union wasn’t divided, and the North admits rather freely that the South fought bravely for a cause in which it believed. That is a great compromise and we live with that and that works for us. We are now able to look at the war with some coolness, which we couldn’t do before now, and, incidentally, I very much doubt whether a history such as mine could have been written much before 100 years had elapsed. It took all that time for things to cool down.
Donald R. McClarey
Paul Zummo
Almost Chosen People 