Evan's Reviews > The Civil War: A Narrative, Vol. 3: Red River to Appomattox

Because I just finished this...

And it makes me feel like this...

But then my elation is tempered and I'm humbled when I remember this ...

First off, an apology in advance. I'm not going to give this series of books the analysis it deserves.
I realize this is a generalized, low-effort review but I'm afraid that that's the way most of them are going to be from now on, as I have to put my mental exertions elsewhere. The upshot is: if you want a gripping, highly readable, comprehensive overarching view of the war, this is the place to go. Is it the only place to go? No. But these books finally put the whole war into perspective for me, and now I can proceed to more specialized or focused treatments of particular aspects of the conflict and know where those events place into the larger picture.

I don't know the actual number hours I spent on Shelby Foote's magnum opus of the American Civil War. It was somewhere between 180 hours on the low end and 240 hours on the high. Scaling and descending this Mount Everest of publishing -- which took Foote two decades to complete -- entailed a traversal of three brick-thick volumes of 3,000 pages and 1.2 million words. I kept at it relentlessly, every day, for weeks, reading the physical books, the PDFs when I was at the computer, and the Grover Gardner superbly narrated unabridged audiobooks on Playaway MP3 devices from the public library when doing other things -- just to keep the narrative threads going and the momentum chugging. It's a credit to author Foote that, as exhausting as this exercise was, I was never bored and never reluctant to plunge right back in again and resume the tale. The canvas was just too rich and vast, dramatic, horrifying, deeply moving and heart-wrenching.

There is a place for the Dunes and the Lord of the Rings and the Game of Thrones franchises of the world of lit, with their epic labyrinthine stories of violence and quests and wars and politics. But here, in these bristling and vivid pages, we have all those kinds of things in real life: a vast saga of inconceivable suffering and terror, bravery and fear, irony and incongruity. In so many cases, the stories of the Civil War are often stranger than fiction. It's the story of the kings, the rooks, the knights and the pawns, but also of the pieces that have no place on the battlefield, who have been dragged into the fray anyway in this template of future total wars.

This third volume covers the titanic events of 1864-1865, with the undermanned and under-provisioned Confederacy still pulling unexpected tricks from its sleeve and the Federal North finally gaining painfully won victories from its grinding attrition warfare -- the kind of wins where you lose more men than the foe you supposedly beat. Grant finally takes charge of the Union effort to bring to it the strategic uniformity it has so far lacked and to goad his martinet underlings to work in concert to pull it off. The most fruitful of Grant's command allies was, of course, the fascinating William Tecumseh Sherman, the complicated, effusive and ruthless exponent of total warfare.

I'd previously seen documentaries and read several books on the war, but have only now come to feel the Shakespearean tragic dimension that Foote brings to his comprehensive treatment. For the first time, too, I have a solid chronological grasp and moving map of the whole war in my inner mental library that I can access when placing events in context.

As good as it is, there are some minor quibbles in this volume. One is Foote's Southern-apologist-bent dismissal of the seriousness of the Fort Pillow massacre -- a war crime still hotly debated among Civil War buffs. I chose to take his interpretation with a grain of salt and move on. Another is his insertion of a soldier's diary entry stating: "I am killed," that apparently has never had a verified source provenance. It's quite likely that Foote conjured some of his novel-writing skills for the sake of drama and brevity: to distill the essence into such cobbled bits of poetic license. Civil War buffs of the anal retentive variety (and there are quite a few of those out there) will be more outraged at such things than I am. These are the kind of guys who serve hardtack at Civil War reenactments and complain that the crackers aren't hard enough to break their teeth or don't have the right number of surface indentations on them. They can't see the Nathan Bedford Forrest for the trees, if you will. (Sorry, just had to.)

What really struck me, too, while reading these volumes was the stubborn vehemence and faith-based intransigence of the Southern cause and its adherents. So many of the things they said and did in the face of contradictory facts have the same delusional qualities as the stuff peddled by today's elites and their Republican political minions, fomenting strife and tearing the common civil fabric with their political "Southern Strategy" of the last several decades -- basically stirring up the same kind of partisan nonsense and divisional hatreds that the country had once successfully buried. And now we have half the country at each other's necks again. Divide and conquer and follow the money, folks. History repeats, as we know, and it helps to understand the particulars, the context and the continuum.

What one feels, ultimately, after reading these behemoth books is an overwhelming sense of the sheer suffering this war caused. A sense, I say, because to put it any other way would be presumptuous and even insulting. Reading about these things in the comfort of your own home is a world away from what these men and women went through.

It's a testament to these books, I think, to say that I'd love to dive right into them again in a heartbeat and spend another 200 hours with them.

If you're lucky enough to obtain them and have the time to do so, these volumes will provide one of the most rewarding reading experiences of your lifetime.

--
kr/eg 2019

Credits:
**Civil War graveyard photo was taken at Cave Hill Cemetery, Louisville, KY (my hometown) and is attributed to TripAdvisor and credited as required.
**Old soldiers photo is attributed to Associated Press and used on a fair-use comment/educational basis.