the civil war is over

Fuck Shelby Foote.

I started listening to his immense (three volumes, more than three thousand page) work a little less than two years ago. I can’t remember why I wanted to know more about the American Civil War. Idle curiosity, probably. I also don’t remember why I thought the Foote work was the one to get. I think that it had good reviews on audible.com and perhaps I thought that three volumes meant that it would be comprehensive. I listened pretty faithfully until the war got to Gettysburg and I had to stop. It’s a brutal battle, a stupid one too. I’d had enough of war. I started listening again back in March just to be finished.

Now after I’d listened, up to Gettysburg anyhow, I rented a couple of the Ken Burns Civil War episodes. Shelby Foote is pretty prominent in the series. He knows a great deal about the different battles and the different players, particularly from the Southern side. Initially, this was something I liked about the books. As a Northerner, not the mention as a black woman, I never thought much about how the Southerners considered the war. As far as I knew, there was nothing good on their side of the argument, nothing at all. And although I don’t think there was any virtue in the decision to secede, the early parts of Foote’s book allowed me to understand a little of their point of view, messed up as it was. He also showed some of the machinations on the Northern side pre and during the war.

Foote seemed like a charming man in the documentary, wry, insightful. He probably was a charming man, being dead now and all. And if nothing else, through him I developed a great liking for Stonewall Jackson, religious maniac and general.

So why did I write fuck Shelby Foote? Because after all these hours of listening to his books, his Southern bias and subtle racism has driven me around the bend. Much of the end is a nauseating hagiography of Jefferson Davis, the megalomaniacal president of the Confederate States. Foote called Davis’ two years in prisons a martyrdom equivalent to Lincoln’s assassination and described Davis’ ironing (manacles on the ankles) as though it were an unthinkable punishment. He somehow managed to forget to mention that the ironing only lasted three days, unlike the years that blacks spent ironed and whipped and imprisoned under slavery. Foote’s inconsistent reference to African Americans as Negroes or blacks throughout the books also began to get on my nerves. Even though he started the books in 1958 when Negro may have been the best polite choice, the final book came out in 1974 and the persistent use starts to feel like a sneer.

And does he sneer. Any retreat by the North is a terrified rout. Any by the South, a strategic tactical ploy in the face of overwhelming odds. He makes little of Ulysses S. Grant as a strategic general, even though you can see Grant out-thinking the South from Vicksburg on. Foote smears Grant as a president, implying that he was as corrupt as the (truly) corrupt men in his administration, but manages not to mention Grant’s real commitment to black suffrage. He refers to Grant’s Memoirs as though they were a desperate attempt to make money. (Grant was dying of cancer as he wrote them and they did make a lot of money.) Foote passes over the fact that Memoirs are still highly regarded, still in print, unlike the work of Jefferson Davis. (And Grant was a friend of Mark Twain, who knew?)

Oh and that Reconstruction thing? All wrong. The worst of it was the disenfranchisement of ex-Confederate soldiers, not the brutal disenfranchisement of blacks when it ended.

Foote had nothing but praise for the Southern side. He praises Robert E. Lee, who basically screwed the South with the Gettysburg adventure. From the second Wilderness campaign on, he’s wearing down, wearing out Confederate troops. At times, Lee seems insane. The massacre in Lawrence, Kansas is not as bad as evicting people from their homes. Southern marauders? No problem.

Time for bed, more on this later.