Alex Lukic's Reviews > The Civil War, Vol. 3: Red River to Appomattox

NOTE: this is a review for all three volumes of Shelby Foote's "The Civil War"

For decades I had been looking forward to reading – what I thought would be – this magnum opus of American history. I finally gave myself enough time (much of it at my family’s expense) only to discover, much to my disappointment, a remarkably narrated set of stories sadly tampered with an obsession to vindicate the south philosophically and historically. I would like to be as brief as the length of this massive work allows me in three core areas: historical fairness, structure, and content. Without trying to elevate the fever of presentism already established in most instances of revisionist history, please bear with me.

First, on objectivity and historical fairness, Mr. Foote has a conspicuous appetite for elevating Confederates as mythical heroes and snubbing Federals as pedantic soldiers. In his book Rebel victories are swift and glorious; Union victories bear a huge asterisk of doubtful merit. And he does not particularly like Gen. U.S. Grant whom he denigrates whether on judgment (his military decisions at Vicksburg, for example) or character (his drinking problem that he digresses onto many pages of obsessive berating and speculative self-asserted facts). His descriptions of Lincoln show him as a cynical, grumpy, visceral, impatient, and arrogant leader, far from the Lincoln-leaning contributor that he was in Ken Burns’ award-winning documentary “The Civil War.”

The book clings to the mantra, “you may have a better army, but we have better soldiers, so we’ll call it a draw.” Gen. Robert E. Lee does not contain one single molecular blemish; his perfection as a tip-top sharp general and as a gentleman is both poetic and operatic. Gen. Stonewall Jackson is the southern Achilles that Shelby Foote adores to mythologize. Only Gen. Braxton Bragg is spared of immortality.

Foote dodges the plight of the “Negroes” (as if the War itself had little to do with slavery) and when he seldom welcomes black slaves into his book it is to remind the reader that these “Negroes” are either cowardly in battle or prone to plunder and arson during Sherman’s scorched earth strategy in Georgia. Frederick Douglass and the Ku-Klux-Klan are not mentioned a single time! Nothing on how black regiments were formed (in detail). That is a HUGE oversight consistent with a prism of bias for a man who was born in the deep south half a century after the cessation of hostilities between Federals and Rebels.

And then there is Jefferson Davis. The book begins and ends with the obscure and controversial leader of the Confederacy, an underwhelming character on the overwhelming topic of the American Civil War. He indicts the shackling of Davis (whom he names “President” throughout the three volumes more times than Lincoln himself) in unnecessary detail, after being taken prisoner. I never cared to read a Jefferson Davis biography, personally, so I resent that Mr. Foote forced me to do so, one peppered by unnecessary hyperbole and sheer vainglory. An extremely improper way to make book ends of this narrative.

I respect how Mr. Foote humanizes many personalities by transferring diary entries into sublime descriptions during peaks of battle fury. However, this heroic prose is mostly limited to members of the Confederacy. But even that gets avoided with the Andersonville Confederate prisoner camp, an egregious chapter in the War that Foote does not waste a sentence to describe anything on the miserable treatment of Union prisoners. He does mention the lack of blankets at the Johnson’s Island Union prison, though (hurray for a sliver of biased humanity!) “30,000 inmates whose liberation would be nothing less than the top cavalry exploit of the war,” he wrote in speculating that freeing that prisoner camp would have been a godsend to Gen. Grant to arm those prisoners who were emaciated skeletons not fit for combat for months. Did Foote research that? And why protest the hanging of Andersonville commandant Henry Wirz, a monster worthy of an SS badge? Similarly, there is the ill-treatment of the Lincoln assassination conspirators: “shackled at their trial, as no prisoner had been in an English-speaking court for more than a hundred and fifty years.” Was this as an objection or as an emphasis?

Second, on structure, the author does not help the reader get comfortably situated. The book teems with quotes from multiple sources, yet it omits footnotes (a huge historian blunder). The chapters are gargantuanly long (some 150 pages in some cases) that send the reader into a foggy spin; and the title on most of those chapters adds a certain pro-Confederacy sentimentality. The fact that all three tomes add up to almost 3,000 pages deters effective editing. The maps are somewhat useful, but they lack legends and careful explaining. Microscopic geography is required knowledge in this book. One is compelled to resort to a huge map of the United States; not just for spotting mountains, valleys or rivers, but creeks, bluffs, fords, lagoons, estuaries, turnpikes, and railroad crosses.

There is no preface or introduction warming up the mind of the reader at explaining more in detail, for example, the pivotal significance of the Mexican-American War and its political influence on the Civil War that would follow twelve years later. And there is an improvised apologetic afterword mostly covering for the Confederacy’s misdeeds, conspicuously displaying Mr. Foote’s emotional baggage toward the War.

And third, on content, the author strikes me as an obsessive-compulsive writer challenging the reader to become an obsessive-compulsive reader. A detailed chronicle of a battle is not history. History is the soul of the event and how its outcome transforms over time the places, people, and institutions involved. Most of this narrative keeps grinding the reader into a maze of minute battle depictions that eventually and inevitably cause reader’s fatigue from which I was suffering well into the second volume. The combination of length and monotony with scores of pages about detailed battles, engagements, and skirmishes describing detail upon detail of gruesome and, in some cases, inconsequential bellicosity totally lost me. This is more journalism than history.

Detailed description of the circumnavigation of the Confederate battleship Shenandoah and endless pages about the diplomatic efforts to sell the War to Britain and France are nothing shy of an attempt to glorify the ephemeral internationalization of the Confederacy. Again, not a blip about the lives and conditions of black slaves, many of whom contributed to the economic war effort of the Confederacy with their humanity in shatters. Did any Confederate general own slaves? Did some of them treat them severely? Why not go out of your way to explain the absence of humanity on but a few of them? Foote did go out of his way on so many topics such as Gen. Dan Sickles having a passionate affair – many years after the War – with the deposed Isabella II of Spain. In fairness he did expose the Ebenezer Creek incident, a horrifying moment of the War, offering no moral shelter to the Rebels, but hardly covering a reluctant paragraph.

I do not recommend this history of the American Civil War first because more is less, second because you probably have more significant literature to fill your evening hours for three months, and third because Mr. Foote has failed to shake off his emotional southern ghosts in composing objective history.