Private Barry Benson, Army of Northern Virginia (1880), quoted by Shelby Foote at the conclusion of Ken Burns’ The Civil War The Civil War: A Narrative, Pea Ridge to the Seven Days: War Means Fighting, Fighting Means Killing. New York: Random House. 2005. ISBN 0-307-29024-7. The trouble begins with the documentary’s star: Shelby Foote is a southern novelist with a down-home drawl, a gift for storytelling, and a very troubling version of the events of 1861 to 1865. Foote’s account of the Civil War has very little to do with slavery. He argues the war began “because we failed to do the thing we really have a genius for, which is compromise,” and that southerners were merely fighting to defend themselves against the northern aggressor. Foote’s unabashed admiration for the men who led the Confederacy is clear: Robert E. Lee is a “warm, outgoing man” who “always had time for any private soldier’s complaint,” Confederacy president Jefferson Davis “an outgoing, friendly man; a great family man, loved his wife and children; an infinite store of compassion.” [2]

Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 2: Fredericksburg to The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 2: Fredericksburg to

Similarly tragic is the painful recapitulation of the horrors of the reconstruction we Americans are suffering at present. Gettysburg...is described with such meticulous attention to action, terrain, time, and the characters of the various commanders that I understand, at last, what happened in that battle.... Mr. Foote has an acute sense of the relative importance of events and a novelist's skill in directing the reader's attention to the men and the episodes that will influence the course of the whole war, without omitting items which are of momentary interest. His organization of facts could hardly be bettered." — Atlantic Mitchell, Douglas. "'The Conflict Is behind Me Now': Shelby Foote Writes the Civil War." The Southern Literary Journal, vol. 36, no. 1, 2003, p.25 Timothy S. Huebner, Madeleine M. McGrady. "Shelby Foote, Memphis, and the Civil War in American Memory". pp. 15–16

Shelby Foote once said, with a microphone in his face: “Believe me, no soldier on either side gave a damn about the slaves.” As the cliché would have it. We are doomed to suffer (and suffer again) the nauseating ripples and echoes of the legacy of American history, if we fail to process all of its effects, heal its ghastly wounds and commit once and for all to a fundamentally better way moving forward. As a millennial Yankee, the mid-century Memphis where Shelby Foote wrote his trilogy seems about as distant and foreign to me as the Civil War likely seemed to him. The books themselves are animated by an ethos as concerns the study and presentation of history equally alien to our time, one that many contemporary historians would have us believe quaint. That history need not be an exercise in applied morality, that the past provides more than raw material for us, in our higher wisdom, to “problematize,” that history can be written absent a thesis or agenda, are all ideas fallen out of favor. Foote maintained that " the French Maquis did far worse things than the Ku Klux Klan ever did—who never blew up trains or burnt bridges or anything else," and that the First Klan "didn't even have lynchings." [31] [37] Foote saw slavery as a cause of the Civil War, commenting that "the people who say slavery had nothing to do with the war are just as wrong as the people who say it had everything to do with the war." Furthermore, Foote also argued that slavery was "certainly doomed to extinction" but was used "almost as a propaganda item," and that "those who wanted to exploit it could grab onto it." [33]

Shelby Foote’s Flawed Understanding of Slavery and the Civil War Shelby Foote’s Flawed Understanding of Slavery and the Civil War

Over many years I have read about many Civil War battles, and the problems that Lincoln faced, but this is the first time I have learned in any detail about what the South thought was going on. Without claiming sympathy with the motives of the Lost Cause, Shelby Foote presented a number of speeches and other denunciations of Yankee tyranny, barbarism, cruelty, and alleged racial inferiority from Jefferson Davis and various political and military figures of the Confederacy, and their claim to be the true heirs of the Revolution. They also maintained that the Confederate Constitution represented the Original Intent of the Founders, particularly slave owners like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, in spite of the fact that both freed their slaves in their wills. Many professional historians immediately took issue with “The Civil War,” and their concerns were published in a 1997 volume edited by Robert Brent Toplin. Featuring essays by some of the most well-known scholars of the day, including Eric Foner and C. Vann Woodward, with responses by Ken Burns and Geoffrey Ward, Ken Burns’s The Civil War: Historians Respond did little to lessen the continuing impact – indeed, the cultural and intellectual legacy – of the film itself. Out of all the books I've read, I can't think of another series that leaves me in such a state of awe, both at the history told and the historian who tells it. No amount of hyperbole conveys my love for Foote's masterpiece. These books are history at its best, not a collection of names and places and dates, but a huge tapestry of bravery and misery and love and loss, a record of the best and worst of the American character, an intimate look into the mercurial temperaments of thousands of countrymen who decided to kill one another rather than compromise. Foote captures the ultimate humanity of this conflict, the unforgettable horror of it all, the worthiness of the winning cause and the foolishness of the lost.I did learn a lot, and maybe I’ll be able to remember some of it. Of all the things I could write about, though, from military to political maneuvers, I think I’ll choose names and construction.

The South’s Jewish Proust - Tablet Magazine

Like all Civil War histories, the interesting and exciting parts are at the beginning. By the end of the war all the illusions had been stripped away. The armies of both sides had gone from eager volunteers out for adventure to bitter veterans and unwilling draftees engaged in an industrial war of attrition; from the fifes and drums of the Revolution to the trench warfare of Verdun and Flanders, in four years. The Civil War taught anyone who had eyes to see that if war ever had been bright flags and heroic adventure, (which it hadn't, of course,) it wasn't that now, and it never would be again. In fact, it had become so horrible that we couldn't even lie to ourselves about it any more. This is the last volume which covered Grant arriving in Washington to take up duties as commander—and looking like a scruffy nonentity who was offered a room in the attic of Willard’s Hotel until the clerk saw his name—to the death of Jefferson Davis (Foote is a southerner after all). Really great work—it’s taken me a couple of years to read it. Random House publisher Bennett Cerf commissioned southern novelist Shelby Foote to write a short, one-volume history of the American Civil War. Thirty years and a million and a half words later—every word having been written out longhand with nib pens dipped into ink—Foote published the third and final volume of what has become the classic narrative of that epic war.The reality is, the Civil War has been hotly debated for 160 years and will be for another 160 years. It is far more complex than the author seems aware of. There were “good guys” on both sides. There were “bad guys” on both sides. And while the right side won the war, there were plenty of scoundrels who made it happen and do not deserve the lofty place history has given them. Mississippi Writers Trail markers for Shelby Foote and Walker Percy unveiled in Greenville | Mississippi Development Authority". Mississippi.org . Retrieved June 16, 2020. But man, prose-wise, when he gives himself literary license, the man can truly open up and GALLOP. To wit: Foote professed to be a reluctant celebrity. When The Civil War was first broadcast, his telephone number was publicly listed and he received many phone calls from people who had seen him on television. Foote never unlisted his number, and the volume of calls increased each time the series re-aired. [13] Many Memphis natives were known to pay Foote a visit at his East Parkway residence in Midtown Memphis. Mr. Foote served in the Army in Europe during World War II. While stationed in Belfast, he was court-martialed for an unauthorized visit to his Irish girlfriend -- later his first wife -- who lived two miles beyond the official military limits.

Civil War’: Ken Burns series turns 30 amid Breonna ‘The Civil War’: Ken Burns series turns 30 amid Breonna

Veterans who survived the worst this war afforded, up to now, went through the motions of combat after the manner of blank-faced automatons, as if what they were involved in had driven them beyond madness into imbecility; they fought by the numbers, unrecognizant of comrades in the ultimate loneliness of a horror as profoundly isolating in its effect as bone pain, nausea or prolonged orgasm, their vacant eyes unlighted by anger, or even dulled by fear.” (The Civil War, vol.3, pg. 222)The Civil War: A Narrative, Fort Stedman to Reconstruction (40th Anniversaryed.). Alexandria, VA: Time-Life. 2000. ISBN 0-7835-0113-7. He was called William Faulkner's heir apparent for his early fictional work, often grim and gothic tales from his native Mississippi that focused on farmers, gamblers and assorted ne'er-do-wells. By this light can we make sense of the pending exhumation of Nathan Bedford Forrest and his wife from the Memphis park which once bore his name and the calls for sandblasting the Stone Mountain memorial to Jefferson Davis, Stonewall, and Lee. These men fought for slavery and if they must be remembered at all it should be with contempt. Foote would have been deeply troubled by such developments, and a reader holding this limited view of greatness will find no sympathy in his work. I hope in the future there are more documentary’s on the civil war. Would I watch a “academic scholar” drone on and on and on about his thoughts and perspectives; No.