Me and Shelby Foote

I became a Shelby Foote fan after seeing him on Ken Burns’ “The Civil War” in 1990. Last fall, I finally started reading his three volume narrative, “The Civil War.” This was no chore, it kept me up late turning pages over 100 nights, but be warned, if you doze off reading a tome like this, you can hurt your nose.

Check out this bit, from Virginia in 1864:

“As we lay there watching the bright stars,” one veteran lieutenant was to say, “many a soldier asked himself the question: What is this all about? Why is it that 200,000 men of one blood and one tongue, believing as one man in the fatherhood of God and the universal brotherhood of man, should in the nineteenth century of the Christian era be thus armed with all the improved appliances of modern warfare and seeking one another’s lives? We could settle our differences by compromise, and all be at home in ten days.”

-Foote spent twenty years writing these Pulitzer Prize winning books. In his epilogue he points to the future, quoting Senator John Sherman:

“The truth is, the close of the war with our resources unimpaired gives an elevation, a scope to the ideas of leading capitalists, far higher than anything ever undertaken before. They talk of millions as confidently as formerly of thousands.” Soon the nation was into a raucous era whose inheritors were Daniel Drew, Jay Gould, Jim Fisk, and others of that stripe, operating in “a riot of individual materialism, under which,” as Theodore Roosevelt was to say, “complete freedom for the individual… turned out in practice to mean perfect freedom for the strong to wrong the weak.”

-And discussing the failings of President Grant, he points ahead to two other Republican Presidents of dubious reputation:

“Grant, with his mistrust of intellectuals and reformers… admired the forthrightness of the Vindictives, as he did that of certain high-powered businessmen, who also profited from his trust; with the result that the country would wait more than fifty years for an administration as crooked in money matters, and a solid hundred for one as morally corrupt.”

-The Republicans to this day refer to themselves as “the party of Lincoln,” they don’t talk much about Harding and Nixon.