Shelby Foote Interview (page: 6 / 7) Novelist and Historian	Print Interview

For you, what are the great lessons of the Civil War?

Shelby Foote: This country has two great sins on its very soul. One is slavery, which we'll never get out of our history and our conscience and everything else, the marrow of our bones. The other one is emancipation. They told four million people, "You are free. Hit the road." Two-thirds of them couldn't read or write. Very few of them had any trade except farming, and they went back into a sharecropper system that closely resembled peonage. I'm not saying emancipation is a sin, for God's sakes, and I'm not saying there shouldn't have been emancipation, but it should have been an emancipation that brought those people into society without all these handicaps on their head. And that now, my black friends, they are tremendously protective about slavery. They don't want to hear the word. The opposite of the Jews, who are very proud of coming out of Egypt. And it was this short-circuiting, of instant emancipation, that certainly was a good thing, but it had a very bad effect on them.
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I don't know whether it's a lesson or not, but I think it needs to be looked at as if you were in that time and place. A lot of things change when you move back to being a part of it, without being caught up in the emotion of the time, but to understand the emotion of the time.

You hear people in the Civil War saying, "I can't believe this terrible thing is going on right here in the middle of the 19th century." They talk like it's the end of the 20th century. It's very modern to them. These weapons of destruction are almost unbelievable to them.

Go back to the time. Muzzle-loading weapons sound awful primitive. They didn't seem primitive to them. They were a new kind of infantry rifle that is deadly at 200 yards. That was a tremendous step forward. And the tactics were based on the old musket, which was accurate at about 60 feet. And they lined up shoulder to shoulder and moved against a position, and got blown down because they were using tactics with these very modern weapons. They were using the old-style tactics with very modern weapons. A few of the men realized that, Bedford Forrest for instance. He would never make a frontal attack on anything with this new weapon in their hands. But too many of them, including Robert E. Lee and U.S. Grant, followed the old tactics against these modern weapons. That's why the casualties. There were 1,095,000 casualties in the Civil War. If today you had that same ratio, you'd have something like 10 million casualties, to give you some idea of what happened.
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It was far worse in the South than it was in the North. One out of four southerners of conscriptable age was a casualty in that war. In the year after the war, the state of Mississippi spent one-fifth of its income on artificial arms and legs for the veterans. Very few people today realize how devastating that war was, especially to the South, but to the North too. A lot of fine men went into graves in that thing. There's no telling how many Miltons or John Keatses got buried.

Now that we have 130 years of hindsight, did the war have to be fought?

Shelby Foote: There's a lot of argument about that.

The fact that it was fought seems to me to prove it had to be fought, but even at the time, Seward, Lincoln's Secretary of State, called it "an irrepressible conflict." And indeed, the differences were so sharp, especially by the extremists on both sides: the Abolitionists in the North and the Fire-eaters in the South. The differences were so sharp that there was scarcely any way to settle it except fighting. Just as two men can get so angry at each other, the only way to settle a thing is to step out in the alley and have a fistfight. People don't do that much any more. They're more apt to take some blind-side swing at somebody instead of a real fight. But I think there probably wasn't any other way to settle it. Now if we were the superior creatures we claim to be as Americans, we would not have fought that war, but we're not that superior by a long shot.
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What figures out of that conflict do you most admire?

Shelby Foote: I admire an awful lot of people on both sides, but the admiration in every case has to be modified somewhat.

I'm crazy about Grant: his character, his nature, his science in fighting and everything else. But I don't like the idea that he never accepted the blame for anything, always found someone else to blame for any mistake that was ever made, including blaming Prentiss for Shiloh. And Prentiss saved him! Things like that. Robert E. Lee, I admire him enormously, but I don't like a certain sort of stuffiness and non-humor about Lee. I don't like his sanctimoniousness, which comes out all the time.
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If I said that in Virginia, I'd get lynched next week, so I'll stay away from Virginia. I would have a hard time now saying who I liked best. I sometimes think Bedford Forrest is my favorite because of his innovative nature and his enormous courage and intelligence. But then I get to thinking about others, some minor characters that I became very fond of. There's an Arkansas general named Pat Claiborne that I like as well as anyone in the Civil War. He was probably the best division commander on either side. So you get great favorites, and you feel enormous sadness when they die, as so many of them did, in combat.

Over the course of that 20-year project, did you ever feel that you weren't up to it?

Shelby Foote: Never at any time.

I drove myself the whole time. The war had always interested me. I'm a novelist, and what novelist is going to write a book that's got Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, Tecumseh Sherman, Bedford Forrest, Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis? Those are people, and I felt very happy writing about them. I don't mean it wasn't hard work. That goes without saying, but the basic happiness I had. No matter how many difficulties I ran into, the basic happiness was there, even with the difficulties.
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A big sustaining thing was I believed firmly that I was doing important work, and I thought it was going good, so I felt good. There's nothing that makes a writer truly as happy. Nothing anywhere makes him as truly as happy as going to bed at night, putting his head on the pillow with the idea of getting up and getting at his desk the next morning. That's a happy man, and I had that for all that time.
	[ Key to Success ] Passion

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