Shelby Foote

• 1. Introduction

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  Shelby Foote wrote every page by hand with a nib pen, then typed up a clean copy. He thought of himself first as a novelist. Yet he is remembered for a three-volume history of the American Civil War. He expected that history to take nine years, and it took twenty. The finished work ran to 3000 pages. How did a novelist end up writing the history of a war? Why do readers who love his prose still argue over what it leaves out? And what happened when television finally discovered him?

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• 2. Roots and Restlessness

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  Shelby Dade Foote Jr. was born on the 17th of November 1916 in Greenville, Mississippi. His parents were Shelby Dade Foote and Lillian, whose maiden name was Rosenstock. His paternal grandfather, Huger Lee Foote, was a planter who gambled away most of what he owned. A great-grandfather, Hezekiah William Foote, was a Confederate veteran who worked as an attorney, planter and politician. On his mother's side, his grandfather was a Jewish immigrant from Vienna. Foote was raised in his father's Episcopal faith and sometimes attended synagogue as a child, but he said he "never felt Jewish."

  Armour and Company kept promoting Foote's father, so the family kept moving. They lived in Greenville, Jackson and Vicksburg in Mississippi, in Pensacola, Florida, and in Mobile, Alabama. Foote was five when his father died in Mobile, and his mother took the family back to Greenville.

  At fifteen, Foote began friendships with Walker Percy and Percy's brothers LeRoy and Phinizy. The friendships lasted a lifetime, and Foote and Percy shaped each other greatly. His writing also drew on Tacitus, Thucydides, Gibbon and Proust. Another influence was William Alexander Percy, who was Walker's uncle and adoptive father.

  At Greenville High School, Foote edited the student newspaper, The Pica, and often used it to mock the principal. The principal got even in 1935 by recommending that the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill turn Foote away. Foote won a place only by passing a round of admission tests. In 1936 he was initiated into the Alpha Delta chapter of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity. He often skipped class to explore the library, and he once spent a night among the shelves. His fiction appeared in Carolina Magazine, the university's award-winning literary journal. Discrimination over his Jewish heritage at Chapel Hill later strengthened his support for the Civil Rights Movement.

  In 1937 Foote went home to Greenville, where he worked in construction and at a local newspaper, the Delta Democrat Times. In 1940 he joined the Mississippi National Guard and was commissioned a captain of artillery. His battalion was sent to Northern Ireland in 1943. The next year he was charged with falsifying a government document about a vehicle he had borrowed to visit his girlfriend in Belfast. A court-martial dismissed him from the service.

  Foote then found work with the Associated Press in New York City. In January 1945 he enlisted in the Marine Corps, but he was discharged as a private that November without seeing combat. Back in Greenville, he took a job at a local radio station and spent most of his time writing. He sent part of his first novel to The Saturday Evening Post. When the magazine published his story "Flood Burial" in 1946, it paid him $750, and he quit to write full-time. That gamble put his name on a book cover three years later.

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• 3. Novels and Faulkner

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  Tournament, published in 1949, was Foote's first novel. It was inspired by his planter grandfather, who had died two years before Foote was born. Follow Me Down came in 1950 and drew on a murder trial in Greenville that Foote attended in 1941. Love in a Dry Season, in 1951, turned to the upper classes of the Mississippi Delta around the time of the Great Depression. Foote often spoke of it with great affection.

  Shiloh, in 1952, was where Foote first used historical narrative to tell the story of what was then the bloodiest battle in American history. Seventeen characters share the telling. Confederate soldiers named Metcalf, Dade and Polly appear beside Union soldiers named Fountain and Flickner. Each of the twelve named soldiers in an Indiana squad gets one section of the chapter. The book quickly sold 6,000 copies and won praise from critics. It also showed Foote's Southern chauvinism. The novel favored the South, casting the Confederate cause as a fight for constitutional liberty and never mentioning slavery.

  Jordan County: A Landscape in Narrative arrived in 1954. It gathers novellas, short stories and sketches set in an imaginary Mississippi county of Foote's own invention.

  September, September appeared in 1978. In it, three white Southerners kidnap the 8-year-old son of a wealthy African American, against the backdrop of Memphis in September 1957. Foote found the Black characters hard to write. He said the task "scared the hell out of" him, and he struggled most with the wealthy Theo Wiggins. He admitted to Walker Percy that he had never really known anyone like the character.

  William Faulkner, Foote's literary hero, once told a University of Virginia class that Foote "shows promise, if he'll just stop trying to write Faulkner, and will write some Shelby Foote." Eudora Welty admired his work too, and both The New Yorker and critics at The New York Times Book Review recommended his fiction. Even so, he was never among America's best-known fiction writers. Shiloh, meanwhile, had caught the attention of a publisher at Random House.

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• 4. Building the Narrative

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  Foote moved to Memphis, Tennessee, in 1952. He had begun outlining an epic called Two Gates to the City in 1951, and he was struggling with that "dark, horrible novel" when Bennett Cerf of Random House made him an offer. Cerf admired the factual accuracy and rich detail of Shiloh, and he wanted to capitalize on the centenary of the war. He proposed a contract for a short history of about 200,000 words.

  Foote spent several weeks on an outline and decided the proposed size was too small. He asked for three volumes of five to six hundred thousand words each. The result was titled The Civil War: A Narrative. Fort Sumter to Perryville appeared in 1958, Fredericksburg to Meridian in 1963, and Red River to Appomattox in 1974.

  Money for the project came in pieces. Foote lived off two Guggenheim Fellowships, held from 1955 to 1960, along with Ford Foundation grants and loans from Walker Percy.

  Foote had no training as a historian, so he taught himself on the ground and in the library. He visited battlefields and read standard biographies and campaign studies. He read recent books by Hudson Strode, Bruce Catton, James G. Randall, Clifford Dowdey, T. Harry Williams, Kenneth M. Stampp and Allan Nevins. He also mined the primary sources in the 128-volume Official Records of the War of the Rebellion. Along the way he gained new respect for Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman, Patrick Cleburne, Edwin Stanton and Jefferson Davis. He grew to dislike Philip Sheridan and Joseph E. Johnston.

  Foote called himself a "novelist-historian." He claimed the historian's standards without the paraphernalia, and he used "the novelist’s methods without his license." He left out footnotes to protect the storytelling. Citations, he said, would have "totally shattered what I was doing." He also thought most historians were "so concerned with finding out what happened that they make the enormous mistake of equating facts with truth...you can't get the truth from facts. The truth is the way you feel about it." Reviewers and academic historians would soon test that claim.

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• 5. Critics and the Lost Cause

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  C. Vann Woodward, a Southern historian, defended Foote's book as acceptable "narrative history." He argued that professional historians had drifted toward analysis, resulting in "a virtual abdication of the oldest and most honored role of the historian, that of storyteller." John F. Marszalek went further. He called the work "a literary masterpiece" and predicted it would stand beside the volumes of Bruce Catton as the final word on the military side of the war.

  Other critics found gaps. Some faulted Foote for little interest in newer research and for a weaker grip on politics than on military affairs. In 1993 Richard N. Current argued that Foote leaned too often on a single source for lifelike details. Even so, Current thought the book "probably is as accurate as most historians" and would "continue to be read and remembered as a classic of its kind." Academic historians routinely lament the missing citations.

  Eric Foner and Leon Litwack felt Foote played down the extent of Southern white racism, treating "white southerners" as the same as all "southerners." Litwack concluded that "Foote is an engaging battlefield guide, a master of the anecdote, and a gifted and charming story teller, but he is not a good historian." Foote's biographer judged that at its best his writing dramatised tensions of racial and regional identity. At its worst, the biographer wrote, it fell back on the social prescriptions of Southern paternalism.

  Many critics read Foote as sympathetic to the Lost Cause, the myth that casts the Confederacy in a noble light. He relied heavily on Hudson Strode, whose sympathy for that myth produced a portrait of Jefferson Davis as a tragic hero lacking many flaws other historians saw in him. Annette Gordon-Reed suggested that romantic nostalgia powers Foote's narrative. She saw in it "the very strong mark of memory as opposed to history." Chandra Manning placed Foote in a school of Civil War writing that finds almost no place for slavery in the Union cause. Joshua M. Zeitz called him living proof that many Americans still mystify the Confederacy's martial glory.

  In a 1997 interview, Foote said he would have fought for the Confederacy and would do so today if the circumstances were similar. He told of a ragged Confederate soldier who owned no slaves. Captured by Union troops and asked what he was fighting for, the soldier replied, "I'm fighting because you're down here." Foote did count slavery as a cause of the war. He said "the people who say slavery had nothing to do with the war are just as wrong as the people who say it had everything to do with the war." He called slavery "doomed to extinction" and said it was used as "propaganda." He also insisted that "no soldier on either side gave a damn about the slaves," since they fought for other reasons. No Confederate figure divided opinion about Foote more sharply than one general whose portrait hung on his wall.

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• 6. Forrest and Race

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  Nathan Bedford Forrest's portrait hung on Foote's wall, and Foote praised him as "one of the most attractive men who ever walked through the pages of history." He dismissed Forrest's role in the Fort Pillow Massacre and suggested the general had tried to prevent it, despite evidence to the contrary. He compared Forrest to both John Keats and Abraham Lincoln. He argued that the French Maquis did far worse things than the Ku Klux Klan, and that the First Klan "didn't even have lynchings."

  In 1986 Foote strongly denounced the NAACP's campaign to remove the Nathan Bedford Forrest Monument in Memphis. He said, "the day that black people admire Forrest as much as I do is the day when they will be free and equal." Civil War historian Harold Holzer rejected the comparison with Lincoln. He said Foote "somehow compared the great emancipator with a man who owned slaves, murdered blacks and joined the Ku Klux Klan." Holzer added that Foote was "certainly a character."

  Foote's views on slavery itself were harsh. He called it "a stain on this nation's soul that will never be cleansed." Yet he also named emancipation as "a second sin that's almost as great." His complaint was that freed people received no schools, no jobs and no real preparation for citizenship. He called the Freedmen's Bureau "mostly a joke, corrupt in all kinds of ways."

  During the 1950s and 1960s, while writing his history, Foote counted himself a liberal on race. He supported school integration and opposed Eisenhower's hands-off approach to Southern racism. He championed Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. In 1968 he argued that the white, upper-class South had to decide whether Black Americans were fully men, and that if so, they deserved the respect owed to an equal.

  The Confederate battle flag drew a similar mix of judgments. Foote protested the Klan's use of it, believing the Klan stood for almost the opposite of what the Confederacy had stood for. He still felt the flag should fly because it "represents many noble things." In the 2001 referendum on the Flag of Mississippi, he campaigned against a proposal to replace the battle flag with a blue canton bearing 20 stars. "I’m for the Confederate flag always and forever," he declared.

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• 7. Unexpected Celebrity

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  By 1981, Foote had given up on Two Gates to the City, the novel he had set aside in 1954 to write his Civil War trilogy. After finishing September, September he returned to it, then put it down again in the summer of 1978 to write "Echoes of Shiloh" for National Geographic Magazine. For years afterward he told interviewers he was still working on it. In the 1980s he also served on the Naval Academy Advisory Board.

  In the late 1980s, Ken Burns assembled consultants to interview for his Civil War documentary. Foote was not in the first group, though Burns had Foote's trilogy on his reading list. A phone call from Robert Penn Warren prompted Burns to contact him. Burns and his crew traveled to Memphis in 1986 to film an interview in the anteroom of Foote's study. In November 1986, Foote figured prominently at a meeting of dozens of consultants gathered to critique Burns's script. Burns interviewed him on camera in Memphis and Vicksburg in 1987. That same year, Foote became a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

  Foote was little known to the general public until the documentary reached PBS in 1990. There he introduced a generation of Americans to a war he believed was "central to all our lives." His outspoken praise of Nathan Bedford Forrest drew mixed reactions. Historian Judkin Browning wrote that "Lost Causers raised their beer mugs in salute while historians hurled their lagers at their televisions."

  Foote professed to be a reluctant celebrity. When the series first aired, his telephone number was publicly listed, and viewers called him. He never unlisted it, and the volume of calls grew each time the series was rebroadcast. Many Memphis natives paid him a visit at his East Parkway residence in Midtown Memphis.

  Horton Foote, the playwright and screenwriter, supplied the voice of Jefferson Davis in the series. His credits include To Kill A Mockingbird, Baby the Rain Must Fall and Tender Mercies. The two Footes are third cousins, since their great-grandfathers were brothers. Horton said, "While we didn't grow up together, we have become friends; I was the voice of Jefferson Davis in that TV series."

  In the early 1990s, journalist Tony Horwitz interviewed Foote for a project on American memory of the Civil War. It became Confederates in the Attic, published in 1998. During a visit that year, Foote told Horwitz he was dismayed by the behavior of Black Americans, in terms that echoed claims the Klan had made. He added that his loyalties in the 1860s would have lain with Southerners. "I’d be with my people, right or wrong," he said. He also claimed that freed people had caused Reconstruction to fail, and that the Confederate flag stood for "law, honour, love of country."

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• 8. Honors and Afterlife

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  In 1992 Foote received an honorary doctorate from the University of North Carolina, the school that had nearly turned him away. That year he also won the St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates. In the mid-1990s he joined the editorial board for the relaunch of The Modern Library, which published two books excerpted from his Civil War narrative. He also wrote a long introduction to its 1993 edition of Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, telling Crane's life in the same narrative style.

  In 1994 Foote was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. That year he also joined Protect Historic America and helped oppose a Disney theme park near battlefield sites in Virginia. Burns invited him back for the documentary Baseball. In the 2nd Inning he recalled the dynamics of crowds in his youth, and in the 5th Inning he told of meeting Babe Ruth.

  In 1999 Foote received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement, along with an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from The College of William & Mary. On the 2nd of September 2001, C-SPAN devoted its In-Depth program to him. Founder Brian Lamb conducted a three-hour interview in which Foote showed his home library, his working room and his writing desk. He detailed the writing of his books and took calls and emails on air. In 2003 he received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award from the Tulsa Library Trust.

  Foote died at Baptist Hospital in Memphis on the 27th of June 2005, aged 88. He suffered a heart attack following a pulmonary embolism. He was interred in Elmwood Cemetery in Memphis, beside the family plot of General Forrest.

  The argument over his reputation outlived him. A 2004 mockumentary, C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America, satirized the apologies for white Southern racism that Foote's critics saw in his commentary. Its character Sherman Hoyle was defined by lamenting the "good ole days." In 2013 the Sons of Confederate Veterans protested the removal of Forrest's statue in Memphis, citing Foote's description of the general as a "humane slave holder." In 2017 the conservative writer Bill Kauffman argued in The American Conservative for reviving Foote's sympathetic portrayal of the South. In October 2017, White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly said that "the lack of ability to compromise led to the Civil War" and praised Robert E. Lee as an "honorable man." Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended him by citing Foote's work.

  On the 18th of October 2019, a Mississippi Writers Trail historical marker was installed in Greenville, Mississippi, honoring Foote's literary and historical contributions. That same year, his distinctive Southern accent served as the model for Daniel Craig's character in the film Knives Out.

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