Amateurs at War

 

In 1859, after being sentenced to hang for the ill-fated Harper’s Ferry insurrection (a quixotic adventure aimed at getting the slaves of the South to rise up against their masters), John Brown scribbled a short note and left it in his jail cell. It proved prophetic: “I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.”

Yet, on the way to the gallows, as he rode in a wagon sitting on his own coffin, Brown looked out at the Blue Ridge Mountains and said, “This is a beautiful country. I never had the pleasure of really seeing it before.”

The anecdote appears in the opening pages of Shelby Foote’s *The Civil War: A Narrative and is one of the pithy asides that took me off guard and donged a bell deep within. For me this is history at its most appealing. It doesn’t lecture; it takes you there.

This last spring I took myself there, or, anyway, the Gettysburg battlefield park in Pennsylvania. In the museum’s bookshop I saw a title, The Stars in Their Courses. It was an excerpt from Foote’s narrative dealing with the Battle of Gettysburg and put into book form. I read the first paragraphs and thought, wow, this could be good. So I bought it and quickly devoured  it. When I got home, I bought the whole thing -- hardbound, three volumes, 1.2 million words — and dove in.

Shelby Foote entered pop culture when Ken Burns’s seminal documentary, The Civil War, aired on PBS in 1990. Foote was one of the main commentators in the 9-episode series. His deep knowledge, southern drawl, tobacco-stained beard and cornball humor captivated audiences. And, previously, so had his writing among history buffs and literary types.

I was quickly immersed in the world of the Civil War, Foote’s old-school style really capturing the atmosphere of the conflict. (He composed it with a fountain pen.) The work, published between 1958 and 1974, is military history and focuses on the campaigns and the leaders who managed them, figures like Lincoln and Davis, Grant and Lee, Jackson and Sherman, and many others. The really useful thing for me is how well Foote ties events together, showing how even distant battles west of the Mississippi had an impact on the more prominent action in the east. Simply riveting is the narration of the sequence of battles in 1862 when Robert E. Lee takes over the Confederate army and wins victory after victory until he’s finally stopped at Antietam. It’s edge-of-your-seat stuff with the outcome of the war teetering in the balance.

One thing that stands out is all the hesitancy, fumbling, hair-brained schemes and general ineptitude shown on both sides during the war’s first years. These weren’t the highly institutionalized militaries of Europe, but amateurs figuring it out as they went. Early in the war, one general complained to Abraham Lincoln that the army was too green to go on the offensive. Lincoln replied: “You are green, it is true; but they are green also. You are all green alike.”

Admiring Foote’s gifts as a storyteller and a historian, I assumed he was a professional academic. I didn’t realize until the end of volume one that he was actually a novelist. This is what he writes in the bibliographical notes:

The point I would make is that the novelist and the historian are seeking the same thing: the truth — not a different truth: the same truth — only they reach it, or try to reach it, by different routes [...]

This has been my aim, as well, only I have combined the two. Accepting the historian’s standards without his paraphernalia, I have employed the novelist’s methods without his license. Instead of inventing characters and incidents, I have searched them out — and having found them, I took them as they were.

That approach applied even to Lincoln whose dark side is made visible. Lincoln possessed a ruthlessness that can be unnerving to read about. Lincoln knew it was a war of attrition and the Union had to keep hammering. The cost of lives would be high but the Union could afford the “terrible arithmetic,” whereas the South could not. Yet so many of his top commanders struggled to be adequately aggressive. Among other things, being normal human beings, they didn’t like hurling men to their deaths. Who could blame them? Eventually generals emerged who could stomach the bloody math -- Philip Sheridan, William Tecumseh Sherman and, of course, Ulysses S. Grant.

Lincoln defended Grant when, after a setback, people called for his removal: "I cannot spare this man. He fights."

Foote was born in Mississippi and was steeped in its white parlor culture. You can feel that influence and that bias. There’s a bounce in his writing as he depicts the notorious Nathan Bedford Forest outfoxing yet another Union commander.

Foote has been criticized for short-changing important aspects of the war, namely slavery and the black perspective, and economic factors that weighed heavily on the conflict. But that’s not his project. His project is the conduct of the war itself, to put you in the midst of the turmoil, to see the strain the commanders were under, to feel the horror of it all, the crushing failures and the grim glory. Yet the other issues do come up, often poignantly, when they have a direct effect on the conduct of the war.

And you can feel a turning of attitude as Foote progresses through the three volumes. Lincoln emerges as a towering figure (the passages regarding his death are almost too painful to read) and slavery an evil that must end. This becomes clear in a quote from Lincoln where he defends the Emancipation Proclamation against impassioned criticism coming from many in the North who otherwise supported the war:

I thought that in your struggle for the Union, to whatever extent the negroes should cease helping the enemy, to that extent it weakened the enemy in his resistance to you. Do you think differently? I thought that whatever negroes can be got to do, as soldiers, leaves just so much less for white soldiers to do in saving the Union. Does it appear otherwise to you? But negroes, like other people, act upon motives. Why should they do anything for us if we will do nothing for them? If they stake their lives for us, they must be prompted by the strongest motive — even the promise of freedom. And the promise, being made, must be kept.

I can’t really follow that, so I won’t.