released 30 nov 02 / last mod 01 jun 07 / greg goebel / public domain
* In the early 1990s, I saw Ken Burn's CIVIL WAR series on the US Public Broadcasting network, and was interested to see as part of that series commentaries by an easy-going "propah" Mississippi gentleman named Shelby Foote. Foote turned out to be something of the godfather of the series, since Burns had been influenced by Foote's monumental three-volume history of the war, titled simply THE CIVIL WAR. I picked up the three volumes, beginning a ten-year exercise in writing up notes and going through other materials to figure out the war. Having completed this exercise, I figure it's time to reflect on the books that started it all.
The first thing is that Foote's THE CIVIL WAR is basically one of the essential books to read if you want to get into the subject in reasonable detail. It is a work of proverbial grand breadth and scope, engrossing and inspiring, that gives the reader a real feel for the conflict.
However, it is important to point out that Foote's THE CIVIL WAR has some limitations as well. The biggest is that it is mostly a battlefield history, minimizing the social and political framing of the conflict. For example, black activist Frederick Douglass is not mentioned once. It also tends to lean somewhat more towards the rebel point of view, though Foote apologizes for this, portraying it as "sympathy for the underdog".
The other issue is that this is a relatively unstructured work with a novelistic flavor. This is fine in a sense, since it makes it very entertaining to read, and it's not like it's haphazard by any means -- it's just a little like following a big, slow-moving, meandering river. The problem is that it can make keeping track of details and chronology difficult, which is what led me to the note-taking exercise, which I never figured would drag out for ten years.
The biggest complaint about Foote that I can make is that he occasionally fails to be redundant when it would make life much easier for the reader. He sometimes makes references to minor incidents from hundreds of pages previous as if the reader has a perfect memory of them, leaving the reader scrambling through the index -- which is a particular nuisance if the item is in a previous volume.
This is a quibble. This is essential reading for anyone with a major interest in the war, though given its limitations I wouldn't say it's the only book on the subject that should be read.