Shelby Foote (1916–2005)

The book is everything the title purports it to be...an impassioned cry to connect with our past. I found the photos of deserted, crumbling, forlorn Southern antebellum homes both artistically stunning and emotionally enticing for the romantic in me. The accompanying story of the Civil War tactic of soldiers burning Southern plantation homes further aids the reader in personalizing and connecting with the images that fill the pages.

This haunting collection of images drew me into a different show more time and space. The narration confirms the continued presence of unsettled national psyche around the Civil War and the way things, people, and entire experiences are lost by impersonal, 'rational' decisions by others. It challenges us to remember what we do to ourselves, and that moments of other-connectedness are the only things that can save us. show less

What hauntingly gorgeous photographs depicting an era lost to us. How appropriate for the 150th anniversary of the Civil War in the United States. I love the area of the state of Mississippi along the great river of the same name. A few years ago as I rode up Highway 61 just north of Vicksburg through mist shrouded fields at dawn I imagined I was communing with the souls of the civil war soldiers as they woke to the dawn thinking of the battles ahead. And yes I felt a great loss as these show more beautiful photographs portray.

And while the photographs are startling yet beautiful, the novella by Shelby Foote that accompanies the photographs while fiction still resonates with truth. Your house has been selected to burn, you have twenty minutes, Edward is told by a Union officer on Page 91. While many homes and buildings were burnt by the Union soldiers as they triumphantly marched through the South that they had beaten down, many of the homes and buildings such as churches that did remain standing are now falling into ruin and are beyond restoration. This book vividly captures those images. This book will haunt my thoughts for some time.

Highly recommend this book. show less

WOOT W00T Rooty-toot-toot! I finished!!

THE CIVIL WAR: A NARRATIVE: FORT SUMTER TO PERRYVILLE by Shelby Foote

I did. I did. I read every word. Even when I despaired of ever finishing, I read and read and read. I gave it 5 stars too because it is a monument. Shelby marches every army over almost every mile of every day of the war from Jefferson Davis's farewell to the U.S. Senate to the aftermath of Perryville in 1862. His goal was to make the reader a participant, and he largely succeeded. I show more learned things that I never knew and more than I wanted to know about strategy and tactics and the sheer bloodiness of the war itself. I bogged down in swamps. I imagined marching the miles without shoes or food.
I was vastly relieved when the narrative turned itself to politics, whether Union or Confederate. I loved the Lincoln stories (could he borrow McLellan's army since he wasn't using it?) and the pictures of Stonewall Jackson sucking his lemon, and the appearance of Polk at Perryville at a Federal gun emplacement (he was wearing a new, dark uniform, and realized too late that the soldiers he was yelling at to stop firing at their own men were actually Yankees. He brazened out their questions and rode slowly away from them expecting a bullet at every heartbeat) and Bragg requisitioning supplies as commander and denying them to himself as quartermaster.
I came away astounded at how many men moved over huge distances. I was astounded also at the number of generals on both sides. I was astounded at how many mistakes were made because of miscommunications or some general deciding on his own to do something different from the battle plan. I was humbled and full of pity for the gallant, ignorant men on both sides who marched or ran into gunfire or turned tail and ran.
I wish that he had mentioned the year a little more often. I wish that he had included a listing of the generals by army (but I made my own). Otherwise, I find that I am glad to have spent the time I spent in this book, and I suspect that I'll move on to volume 2 next year when I've recovered.

ETA: DH reminds me that S. Foote wrote the whole thing with a nib pen - dip and write, dip and write, dip and write.
I see that volume 2 is even longer. show less

Well, I made it through. It took 14 months, but I read the whole thing. The reading is fairly demanding: so much information is packed into Foote's concise text that I often found I could only read around 4-5 pages before stopping to absorb what I had just read. Since the trilogy is over 2,500 pages long, the overall effect is rather monumental.

Before reading this, I knew little more about the Civil War than the average man (or woman) on the street. I knew the names of a few of the really show more big players; I had visited the Gettysburg battlefield as a kid (and memorized Lincoln's famous address delivered there); I had heard of Sherman's march to the sea; I knew about the Emancipation Proclamation and Lincoln's assassination. That was pretty much it. The rest was mostly just a blur.

Reading this trilogy changed that, of course, but more than just improving my knowledge and understanding of this period of American history, I believe this has somewhat changed my understanding of America itself. In the first half of the 1960s, my parents, who were both from New Jersey, lived in Richmond, VA, the capital of the Confederacy. This coincided with the centennial remembrances of the War, as well as much of the Civil RIghts Movement. (Foote would have been in the process of writing this work for the whole of that period as well.) My parents later reported to me that Richmond had definitely not forgotten what had happened 100 years earlier. They were still bitter, and took it out on Northerners by mostly shunning them. There were only a very few people who accepted my parents socially, and that only towards the end of their 6 years there. Although the more than half a century that has passed since then has seen a significant reduction in the resentment levels of most people in the South, I can now understand this phenomenon better. And in spite of the fact that the Civil War as a lived event about which people still have strong feelings is now fading into the distant past, I think understanding that time can shed some light on our current situation as well.

Some have complained that Foote was a Confederate sympathizer. This is not untrue, and stems from his roots. Among other things, Foote's family was friends with the descendants of Nathan Bedford Forrest. As a child Foote had been allowed to hold that general's sword. Confederate lore was in his blood, and it shows through slightly in these books. Overall, however, the balance he achieved is remarkable. In later years, Foote told a story of how, after he had written the trilogy, he had told somebody in the Forrest family that he considered the War to have had only two real geniuses: Forrest and Abraham Lincoln. The response he got was, "We have never been very fond of Mr. Lincoln."

Since almost everybody now can agree that the "correct" side won the Civil War, it is, I believe, useful to at least understand something of what the other side thought and felt, as well as the perspectives of the "good guys". After reading this trilogy, I almost feel as though I have lived through that tragic war myself, on both sides. So many people, so many places, so many stories. It is immersive, in the way the best narrative history can be. And this is surely among the best histories that have ever been written in English, a classic which likely will endure for centuries. show less