Shelby Foote's Civil War

I just finished listening to the audiobook version of volume 2 of Shelby Foote's three-volume opus The Civil War, A Narrative. I finished volume 1 a few weeks ago. This is a second reading for me as I originally read all three volumes about twenty years ago. Since it looks like it will be some weeks before I get my hands on volume 3, I think I'll write a few things about the first two volumes now.

For starters, I'd recommend that people not be intimidated by the heft of these volumes. The late Shelby Foote was a master at taking massive amounts of material and presenting the results in a lucid and engaging manner. Once you pick up his account of the Civil War, you will find it very hard to put down.

Otherwise, I'll limit this post to three main points.

My first point is that, unlike most books on the Civil War, the sheer size of Foote's history is about the only thing I've ever run into (short of the 100 odd volumes of the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion) that gives the reader a notion of the true scope of the conflict. Anybody who has a passing familiarity with the war has heard of Chancellorsville, Manassas, Vicksburg and Shiloh. How many people, though, have heard of Pea Ridge, Bristoe Station, Port Hudson, or Kelly's Ford?

There were probably a couple of hundred of these mostly unknown, often desperate and bloody fights. Some of them, in fact (such as Pea Ridge and Port Hudson), were battles of critical importance. Yet the Civil War was so large that a battle had to be absolutely titanic for people to remember it. Foote describes dozens of these forgotten engagements in the scope of his history and, yet, manages to keep his history interesting, despite the obvious hazards involved in discussing countless battles that not many people have ever heard of.

My second point has to do with the quality of both the leaders and the soldiers who fought on each side.

It's impossible not to be impressed by the boldness and skill consistently displayed by Robert E. Lee and his generals. The problem is that the focus on Lee's victories has created an impression that all of the South's military leaders were in the same league as Lee. Foote makes it clear that they weren't.

The focus on the way Lee consistently ran rings around Federal opponents has also created an impression that Federal leadership was fairly inept. Sometimes it was. Often, though, it was anything but. To give an example, when it comes to leadership, no bold and dazzling maneuver ever made by Robert E. Lee ever surpassed the way Grant advanced on Vicksburg.

As for the soldiers, history has remembered many events such as the Federal rout at Bull Run, McClellan's retreat on the Peninsula and the collapse of Howard's corps at Chancellorsville and, then, at Gettysburg. The impression has come down to us that, unlike their Rebel opponents, the Yankees were often inclined to run.

Well, often enough, they did. So to though, as Foote points out, on occasion after occasion the Rebels did the same thing in just as embarrassing a manner. In fact, easily the most inexcusable rout of the war, a tale well told by Shelby Foote, was the collapse of a veteran Confederate army on Missionary Ridge.

For those who are not familiar with this fight, it happened just outside Chattanooga Tennessee, in late November of 1863. Ordered to make a frontal assault on a line of rifle pits at the base of Missionary Ridge, 20 to 25,000 men of the Federal Army of the Cumberland, did as ordered. They were not ordered to assault the ridge itself, though. Missionary Ridge was held by the bulk of the Rebel Army of Tennessee and regarded, by both sides, as impregnable. Turns out it wasn't. The Federal infantry, ignoring the orders of their leadership, just kept on going, stormed the impregnable 500-foot high ridge and utterly routed the Confederate Army of Tennessee.

Then there is another, fairly unexpected, matter that even the most casual reading of The Civil War, A Narrative makes clear.

Pretty much everybody familiar with the history of the Civil War is familiar with Lincoln's endless search for a general who would fight. Eventually he found his man in Grant.

Much less often remarked upon, though, is the interesting fact that after the death of the well respected but not exactly successful Albert Sidney Johnston (killed in April of 1862 at Shiloh) Davis had exactly the same problem in the West as Lincoln had in the East. Beauregard, Joe Johnston, Pemberton, Bragg, and others came and went and, in the case of Joe Johnston, came again and went again as Davis also hunted for a leader who would fight.

Years back a historian named Kenneth P. Williams wrote a multivolume history called Lincoln Finds a General: A Military Study of the Civil War. Well, to his credit Lincoln found one but it certainly took him long enough to do it. In Robert E. Lee, Jeff Davis found a general in the East in only about a year but, in the West, he never found one at all. The result was an endless series of Confederate disasters in the West.

The Civil War is to America what the Illiad is to Greece. If you want to learn about it, you can't do better than to read Shelby Foote's The Civil War, A Narrative.