Shelby Foote

• 1. A Boy From The Delta

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  Shelby Dade Foote Jr. was born on the 17th of November 1916 in Greenville, Mississippi. His father worked for Armour and Company, moving the family from Greenville to Jackson and then Vicksburg before settling in Mobile, Alabama. When Shelby turned five years old, his father died in Mobile. His mother Lillian moved them back to Greenville, where he would spend much of his life. He attended Greenville High School, editing a student newspaper called The Pica. The principal there disliked his lampooning columns and blocked his admission to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1935. Foote had to pass special tests just to get in. He spent nights sleeping among library shelves while skipping classes. A Jewish immigrant maternal grandfather shaped part of his heritage, though he never felt Jewish himself.

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• 2. The Novelist's First Blood

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  Foote published his first novel Tournament in 1949, inspired by his planter grandfather who died two years before Foote was born. Follow Me Down arrived in 1950, drawing on a murder trial he attended in 1941. Love in a Dry Season followed in 1951, attempting to capture upper-class Delta life during the Great Depression. Shiloh appeared in 1952, selling 6,000 copies quickly. This book presented the bloodiest battle in American history through seventeen different characters including Confederate soldiers Metcalf, Dade, and Polly. Union soldiers Fountain and Flickner also narrated parts of the story. Each of the twelve named soldiers in an Indiana squad received their own section. Critics praised the work, yet it showcased Southern chauvinism. The author favored the South throughout, portraying the Confederate cause as a fight for constitutional liberty while omitting any reference to slavery. William Faulkner once told a class that Foote showed promise if he would just stop trying to write like him.

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• 3. Writing Three Thousand Pages

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  Bennett Cerf of Random House approached Foote in 1952 with a contract for a short history of the Civil War. Cerf wanted approximately 200,000 words based on his admiration for Shiloh's factual accuracy. Foote requested three volumes instead, each containing 500,000 to 600,000 words. He estimated nine years but took twenty to finish. The resulting work ran to 3,000 pages titled The Civil War: A Narrative. Volume one covered Fort Sumter to Perryville in 1958. Fredericksburg to Meridian arrived in 1963. Red River to Appomattox completed the trilogy in 1974. Foote had no formal training as a historian. He visited battlefields and read standard biographies plus campaign studies by Hudson Strode, Bruce Catton, James G. Randall, Clifford Dowdey, T. Harry Williams, Kenneth M. Stampp, and Allan Nevins. He mined primary sources from the 128-volume Official Records of the War of the Rebellion. He developed new respect for figures like Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman while growing to dislike Philip Sheridan and Joseph E. Johnston.

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• 4. The Voice On Television

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  Ken Burns assembled consultants for his PBS documentary The Civil War in the late 1980s. Foote was not initially on that list despite having his trilogy on Burns's reading list. Robert Penn Warren made a phone call prompting Burns to contact him. Burns and crew traveled to Memphis in 1986 to film an interview in the anteroom of Foote's study. They filmed again in Memphis and Vicksburg during 1987. That same year he became a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. When the series first broadcast, his telephone number appeared publicly listed. People called constantly after seeing him on television. Many Memphis natives paid visits to his East Parkway residence in Midtown Memphis. Horton Foote provided the voice of Jefferson Davis in the series. The two Footes were third cousins whose great-grandfathers had been brothers. Foote professed reluctance about becoming a celebrity yet never unlisted his number.

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• 5. A Portrait Of Forrest

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  Foote kept Nathan Bedford Forrest's portrait hanging on his wall throughout his life. He lauded Forrest as one of the most attractive men who ever walked through history. He dismissed Forrest's role in the Fort Pillow Massacre, suggesting the general tried to prevent it despite evidence contradicting this claim. Foote compared Forrest to John Keats and Abraham Lincoln simultaneously. In 1986 he strongly denounced the NAACP campaign to remove the Nathan Bedford Forrest Monument in Memphis. He stated that black people would be free when they admired Forrest as much as whites did. Civil War historian Harold Holzer dismissed this characterization as comparing a great emancipator with a man who owned slaves and murdered blacks. Foote argued the French Maquis did far worse things than the Ku Klux Klan ever did. He claimed the First Klan didn't even have lynchings. Critics read his work as sympathetic to the Lost Cause myth, relying heavily on Hudson Strode's scholarship which portrayed Jefferson Davis as a tragic hero without many flaws attributed by other historians.

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• 6. The Paradox Of Race

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  Foote abhorred slavery calling it a stain on the nation's soul that would never be cleansed. He believed emancipation was insufficient to address the issue. There should have been huge programs for schools and employment provided for freedmen. He condemned the Freedmen's Bureau as mostly corrupt despite some good work. Yet he supported the civil rights movement arguing in 1968 that white upper-class Southerners must decide if negroes were men entitled to respect. He called native Southern culture perhaps the most racist society in the United States. Speaking in 1989 he declared the black separatist movement a bunch of junk. He believed African Americans should model themselves on Jews who had talent for making money. While writing his history during the 1950s and 1960s he remained liberal on racial issues supporting school integration. He opposed Eisenhower's hands-off approach to Southern racism championing Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson instead.

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• 7. Legacy And Death

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  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 beside the family plot of General Forrest. In 2013 Sons of Confederate Veterans protested removing Nathan Bedford Forrest's statue by invoking Foote's characterization of him as humane slave holder. Conservative writer Bill Kauffman argued for revival of Foote's sympathetic portrayal in The American Conservative in 2017. White House Chief of Staff John Kelly claimed lack of ability to compromise led to the Civil War praising Robert E. Lee as honorable. Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended these remarks citing Foote's work. On the 18th of October 2019 a Mississippi Writers Trail historical marker installed itself in Greenville honoring his contributions. His distinctive Southern accent became the model for Daniel Craig's character in Knives Out released in 2019. Foote received honorary doctorates from UNC Chapel Hill in 1992 and William & Mary in 1999. He won the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award in 2003.

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