Shelby Foote More Than Footnote

When Abraham Lincoln died in 1865, his secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, said," Now he belongs to the ages."

The sentence was prophetic and it has endured as well.

Much the same tribute could be paid to historian and novelist Shelby Foote, who died last week at the age of 88.

Certainly, if the cantankerous writer does not belong to the ages, than his signature work, "The Civil War: A Narrative," belongs there.

His trilogy, 20 years in the making, brings alive the seminal event of American history, the event that continues to shape us as a people in ways most of us never will fully appreciate nor understand.

Petty and inconsequential critics cracked that it took Mr. Foote longer to write his epic narrative of the war than it did to fight it.

He, as always, had just the right rejoinder: "There were a good many more of them than there was of me."

His trilogy should have won the Pulitzer Prize or the National Book Award, but politics and maybe no little envy entered into those selections. The snub little mattered to the proud Mississippian whose grandfather had lost the family plantation in a poker game. It little mattered to the courtly Southerner with wonderful manners and matchless eloquence with pen and tongue. The Pulitzer and National Book Award crowds needed Mr. Foote more than he needed them. He had the readers with him and such powerful advocates in the history community as the influential C. Vann Woodward who praised Mr. Foote for his "impressive narrative gifts and dramatic purposes."

The three-book set -- "Fort Sumter to Perryville," "Fredericksburg to Meridian," and "Red River to Appomattox" -- brought him three Guggenheim Fellowships, a Ford Foundation grant, and a ton of royalties. So the shrewd Southerner did not make out too badly in all of this. And the arrival in his life of documentary maker Ken Burns in 1985 was icing on the cake.

Mr. Burns was planning a PBS special titled simply "The Civil War." He and his producers planned to have 75 or 80 historians talking or reading material in the background. Then one day noverlist and poet Robert Penn Warren ("All The King's Men") called Mr. Burns and said, "Talk to Shelby Foote right away."

Anyone old enough to remember Mr. Burns' PBS show over several nights in 1990 understands that Shelby Foote was the star of that show. His Southern voice and the depth of his knowledge of the war captivated the nation.

Mr. Foote and Mr. Burns did an immense service to the country in that documentary. It brought alive the war to a generation that may not have much studied it before Shelby Foote stepped into their livingrooms through the magic of television.

Mr. Foote later was to tell Brian Lamb, of C-SPAN, "It was kind of strange. I had two sessions at my house with Ken and his crew, and I took them to Shiloh and I took them to Vicksburg and we did a little filming at Shiloh and a little at Vicksburg, but most of it was done right there in the sitting room at my house. I think he had maybe four hours of tape out of which he took what he wanted."

Mr. Foote would have been unable to play that significant national and regional role had he not had the discipline anf skill and love he brought to the Civil War. He had visited every battlefield in the war and more. Since his boyhood when he heard family stories about his great-grandfather, Capt. Hezekiah William Foote, of the Confederate Army, had commanded cavalry at Shiloh he had been mesmerized by the war.

"Any Deep South boy, anyhow, and probably all Southern boys have been familiar with the Civil War as a sort of thing in their conscience going back," Mr. Foote said a few years ago. "I honestly believe that it's in all our subconscious. This country was into its adolescence at the time of the Civil War. It really was; it hadn't formulated itself really as an adult nation, and the Civil War did that. Like all traumatic experiences that you might have had in your adolescence, it stays with you the rest of your life, certainly in your subconscious, most likely in your conscience, too. I think that the Civil War had the nature of that kind of experience for the country. Anybody who's looked into it at all realizes that it truly is the outstanding event in American history insofar as making us what we are. The kind of country we are emerged from the Civil War, not from the Revolution. The Revolution provided us with a constitution; it broke us loose from England; it made us free. But the Civil War really defined us. It said what we were going to be, and it said what we're not going to be. It drifted away from the Southern, mostly Virginia, influence up into the New England and Middle Western influence, and we became that kind of nation instead of the other kind of nation."

As a young novelist, he began assembling an enormous personal library on the war and read and reread it, especially after Random House contracted with him to write a one-volume history on the conflict. Mr. Foote quickly found that was not his cup of tea, that the history had to be three volumes. Bennett Cerf, then head of Random House, agreed. It took Mr. Foote five years to complete the first volume, another five years to finish the second, and an entire decade to complete the third book. He began working on the project in 1954 and completed it in 1974.

He later would say that he wrote 500-600 words a day. He refused to use a typewriter and word-processors and computers had not arrived on the scene during most of his writing process. Instead, he used an ink-dipped pen, the kind one once found in U.S. postoffices. He wanted to feel the words, the flow of the words, he later said.

This most admirable soul was a man of paradoxes, to be sure. He immersed himself, for example, in the works of the great writers, Shakespeare, Tacitus, Thucydides, Gibbon and Proust, even his lifelong friend Walker Percy, but Shelby Foote was an indifferent student at the University of North Carolina and dropped out after two years. He could write some of the most stirring prose about military engagements but he received a dishonorable discharge from the Army because he took an Army Jeep to date a girl near his base. He openly opposed racial segregation in his native state when it was dangerous to do so, but he honored the Confederate flag until his death last Monday, June 27, 2005.

But when he took pen in hand, he brought everything, every experience, every loss, every triumph, every hour spent walking the Civil War battlefields to the table. He made the reader or listener believe he had been there with Lee and Grant and their kindred spirits.

And so his readers, in a sense, really were there. Listen to his words describing Gen. Robert E. Lee after his surrender to U.S. Grant.: "Grief brought a sort of mass relaxation that let Traveller (Lee's beloved horse) proceed, and as he moved through the press of soldiers, bearing the gray commander on his back, they reached out to touch both horse and rider, withers and knees, flanks and thighs, in expression of their affection."

He would laugh when asked why Southerners are considered by Northerners obsessed by the events of 1861-1865. Again, he gave the perfect answer: "You remember the fights you lose."

In wake of his death, several commentators have said that he was the last of a breed, but let's hope not. There is something special in a human being pursuing the truth of an event and using every faculty in the soul to capture it for all time in the light of truth.

That is part of what he did for all those years, and glory to his name and his work. May his example continue to inspire those to follow him to seek the standards he doggedly set.

(Originally Published July 7, 2005)

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