It’s now the 150th anniversary of Fort Sumter, and I’ve just finished Shelby Foote’s three-volume history The Civil War. I think I went through it in real time.
I decided to read the whole trilogy about four years ago, and I was slow getting started. About the same time, I started reading James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom. McPherson’s book is straight history: political and military but also economic and cultural; McPherson is rightly praised for giving us the best and most rigorous single-volume history of the war and its era. It’s excellent. I plowed through it in just a couple of weeks, reading in bed.
Foote takes much longer.
For some people I know, Shelby Foote is something close to scripture. This is not just because of the word count. Growing up down South—and this was the suburban 70’s and 80’s South—I knew these books were important. A set of all three, usually boxed, held honored shelf space in most of my friends’ parents’ houses, and mine too. Not an ambitious reader as a kid, I classed them as “big, important, and too long to read.” I don’t think most people who owned them read them either.
But I’ve always weirdly loved the Civil War. I know this is an odd thing to say—I’m not Gary Brecher here. I know the Civil War was a miserable time for everyone concerned. In its essence it was suffering and starvation, destruction of property, fear and burning, blisters and blindness and gangrene. These are things that can’t really be hidden by the thick oil of heroic paintings or the bug-spattered idiocy of bumper stickers.
But what’s compelling about the Civil War is the sheer narrative power of it all. That’s where Foote comes in.
When Edward Gibbon wrote his meticulously researched and objectively analyzed Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, he never allowed facts to get in the way of his essential pessimism. Foote does history much the same way. There’s a barely disguised Southern bias in his reporting of military and political affairs. Southern retreats are cast as the unfortunate price of war while Northern routs are delineated in loving detail. What is bold manliness in a Southern commander like Jackson or Hill (standing up under fire, leading from the front) is cast as foolhardiness when Hancock or Reynolds does it. Grant is a blunt calculator, Lee a bold strategist. The latter never appears without a tragic, stainless aura.
Of course this is history by a novelist. No pains are taken to avoid (or indicate) speculation or to separate known facts from imaginative descriptions. Moods are boldly inferred. Character and characters are depicted with authoritative, fictive certainty. Compared to most modern academic history, this is kind of refreshing, but it also makes for double-shotted partiality. History makes a good story, but stories don’t always make good history. You have to know what you’re in for.
Despite the awesome scope and impressive length of this history, there’s a lot that doesn’t make it in. This is strictly a battlefield understanding of the war. As such, it is superb—but there is no war that demands more attention to contexts and causes than this one. When events outside the fighting appear, they come in mainly for satire, but only on the Northern side. The Southern way of life is somehow cast as aristocracy and democracy simultaneously, its graciousness covering a multitude of sins. While slaves are occasionally mentioned, Slavery is not an issue.
A focus on personalities to the exclusion of other causes makes a good story but an unstable history. Jeff Davis opens and closes the whole trilogy, as if his tragedy somehow outweighs all others. (Who today thinks of Jefferson Davis at all?) At times it all comes perilously close to suggesting that secession was right because Lincoln was homely.
Most of all, one wants a sense that both sides actually believed in something. Foote’s haloed descriptions of Southern arms make it easy to picture an army of idealistic heroes fighting a horde of invading stumblebums. It should be remembered that both of these armies endured tremendous hardship. Both thought much of their purposes. Both sustained themselves by heroic verses.
So why read it?
The answer is Shelby Foote’s writing. I’m someone who works at it (though never hard enough or long enough), and for me it’s an astonishing pleasure to read such a tremendous voice sustained at such great length. While Foote’s treatment of history off the battlefield is shallow, his prose itself is never anything but deep. There’s an achievement here that is not only one of historical writing, but of Writing.
Such a comprehensive embrace of the entire scope of the war, battle by battle, makes sameness seem almost inevitable, but somehow it never arises here. Foote finds the language for each turn of moment, the right tone for each stage of the war. Never pretentious and never overreaching, he nevertheless sometimes gets whole passages that must be read again, immediately, because they are so musical. He stands well behind his subject, never forcing his own person onto the scene. (I counted three references to contemporary events, all of them relevant.) His weariness in the latter half of volume 3 is apparent, but it is a weariness of war, never a weariness of telling.
It’s impossible to think that anything less would keep a reader—this reader, anyway—going through all those three thousand pages, all those 1.2 million words. It’s compelling, it is somehow urgent, it fills four years, and it’s difficult to imagine that it will ever be achieved again.
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