I had no idea he was in his seventies when this was done. He looks so much younger!!

He was an excellent storyteller. Knew how to build character and narrative. Not sure if I would call him a historian.

AgBQ-00 said:

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He made a statement that he remembers going to the old vets home when young and meeting CW veterans. Made me look up his age. Didn't know until yesterday that he was born in the 19-teens.

I think we are losing the accents of the south that were so prevalent. Makes me a little sad

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Just got back from a week in the South Carolina low country… I can assure you , the accent is alive a well in that area.

Towards the end of the War, my dad attended Japanese language school with Burns Foote with both being Marine privates. My dad tried to reconnect with him years later (my dad was a history PhD teaching at a college in TN), but Burns was very aloof.

I don't think my dad knew that Burns had been cashiered from the Army previously, which would explain his disdain for anything that reminded him of that painful period in his life.

I see he has Freeman's volumes on Geo. Washington on eth shelf. Also Dostoevsky.

Cen-Tex said:

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Wikipedia wasn't kind to Foote quoting liberal authors of the Washington Post, Seattle Times, and the Atlantic. He is criticized for his views on Nathan Bedford Forest and his stories on the Lost Cause. Obviously a Southern view of the war was unacceptable.

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A white Southern view. Let's be frank about that. Again, Foote was a good storyteller. He did not interrogate his sources and often seemed disinterested in doing so if it cast doubt on the narrative.

Sapper Redux said:

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Cen-Tex said:

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Wikipedia wasn't kind to Foote quoting liberal authors of the Washington Post, Seattle Times, and the Atlantic. He is criticized for his views on Nathan Bedford Forest and his stories on the Lost Cause. Obviously a Southern view of the war was unacceptable.

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A white Southern view. Let's be frank about that. Again, Foote was a good storyteller. He did not interrogate his sources and often seemed disinterested in doing so if it cast doubt on the narrative.

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There is not anything particularly right about that. Both the war/cause, and motivations for fighting, as well of course as the period of reconciliation/post-war healing were not exactly unified along racial lines. It's a gross oversimplification to state that was his perspective.

Here is one article (starting point being Appomattox) which demonstrates/discusses this.

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General Joshua Chamberlain, a celebrated figure among some of the most hardcore Unionists, ordered a salute of arms to the defeated Confederates at the surrender, an act that he could justify using the plausible deniability that he was saluting the lowering of the Union flag. His words on the matter are powerful and speak to prevailing moods of the time:

"Before us in proud humiliation stood the embodiment of manhood: men whom neither toils and sufferings, nor the fact of death, nor disaster, nor hopelessness could bend from their resolve; standing before us now, thin, worn, and famished, but erect, and with eyes looking level into ours, waking memories that bound us together as no other bond;was not such manhood to be welcomed back into a Union so tested and assured"

General George Meade is reported to have cried out, "it's all over," when he received news of the surrender. While 175,000 Confederate troops remained in the field, they were starving, exhausted, and spread thin. It was all over but for the shouting.

Over 650,000 Americans died in the Civil War, which is the equivalent of six million men today. Because the militaries were organized by location, many towns were left with no young men, only young children, old men, and widows. Part of this can be attributed to innovations in firepower. Due to advances in rifling, men had guns that could hit the side of a barn door at 100 yards for the first time in history.
Reconciliation in Post-Civil War America

After the war, most Americans were eager to reconcile with one another, which included the Southern states honoring their war dead with statues and the naming of military bases after Confederate heroes.

The idea here is that both sides were Americans, both sides were brave, and both sidesfought valiantly in the war. Slavery was de-emphasized because it was a moot issue slaves had been freed and slavery wasn't coming back. The nation wanted to move forward.

It is not difficult to separate the cause from the men who fought for it. However, there is little reason to believe that slavery and the dubious "benefits" of which were only enjoyed by a third of the population were motivating factors for the men in the Confederate Army. To put this into perspective, how eager would you be to fight for the holdings of Citibank or Amazon? Slavery was, by and large, an institution for elites, and even the majority of slaveholders were not big plantation owners, but small farmers who owned a slave or two.

This is not to excuse the institution of slavery which is both morally reprehensible and socially corrosive. We are simply attempting to provide important historical context that is sorely lacking from the current discourse on slavery, the Civil War, and the Confederacy. Much of the current discussion surrounding Civil War monuments in the South is centered around erasinghistory rather than understanding, appreciating, and learning from it.

Honoring the Confederate dead does not imply support for the Confederate cause. These statues are an acknowledgment of the tragedy of war and the bravery of individuals whose only crime was valuing their homeland and family over abstract principles. Currently, the left is attempting to paint this as simple "Lost Cause" -ism, but nothing could be farther from the truth as honoring the dead does not require accepting the Southern cause as noble or honorable. There were brave and moral men on both sides of the conflict, and each is worthy of reverence and respect for doing what they thought was right. Reconciliation began in the 1880s and 1890s, and during these years, Civil War monuments were built in the North and South alike.

In April of 1898, a statue was completed in Wisconsin of a soldier rescuing downed regimental colors from a fallen comrade. The statue was not greeted with ire by the South, but admiration. A Virginia Congressman wrote a letter to the local paper stating, "a soldier of the Old Dominion in the war between the states, a representative of the suffering and heroic people of Richmond, Va., wishes you success in commemorating your heroic slain."

Likewise, when Virginia unveiled a large equestrian statue of General Robert E. Lee, largely seen as the embodiment of Southern values, the North did not kick up a fuss but sent similar regards to the city in honor of Lee. The New York Times wrote that "There is no question at all that his conduct throughout the war, and after it, was that of a brave and honorable man."
It's worth noting that the erection of statues came after the Black Codes, Radical Reconstruction, and the KKK the tumultuous period following the War's end. Nor was every Confederate statue made for men of Lee's stature, many are for more obscure local figures and lesser lights. But the generation of young men who fought the Civil War, now entering old age, were firmly in control of the country and the culture.

The goal was not to justify slavery or rebellion, but rather it was, as President Lincoln put it, to "bind up the nation's wounds."

What We Can Learn from the Surrender at Appomattox

Lincoln's famous remark, "With malice toward none; with charity for all," largely sums up the prevailing, mainstream attitudes of the time. Americans had just suffered through four years of war that literally tore the country apart. The cliche about "brother against brother" was true especially in the border states that were hardest hit by the conflict, as many families had members on both sides of the conflict.

The war took an immense physical, psychological, and financial toll on the nation. Few were eager to see the conflict extended any further than it needed to be, despite knowing that there was still some work to be done regarding the integration of former rebellious states back into the Union.

The men who were most directly involved in the final battle of the Civil War were not eager to boast or punish the South for their rebellion. Although part of this can surely be ascribed to the fatigue coming from years of open warfare, there is something else going on here that is hinted at by General Chamberlain's words. There was respect due to any group of brave men who can lose honorably and maintain their dignity, but there is also the knowledge that many of these men were not fighting to preserve slavery.

We will not attempt to pull out the old chestnut that the Civil War was not about slavery. It was about slavery, but it was also about much, much more. The United States prior to the Civil War was effectively a northern industrialized nation and a Southern agrarian nation shackled together. American history between 1776 and 1861 is largely about repeated attempts to cobble these two nations together. The key difference was between industrialized free labor and agrarian bonded labor, but there was a myriad of other social and cultural differences.

It is also worth pointing out that the North did not attempt to use the war to end slavery until several years in and then half-heartedly at that. President Lincoln once famously remarked that "If I could save the union without freeing any slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that."

The North fought to keep the Union intact and everything else was just a window dressing. While it would be disingenuous to say that no one in the South was fighting to preserve human bondage, this was not the motivation for all, nor even for most men fighting what they called "The Second American Revolution."

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Nortex you do know that the Chamberlain story is all BS?

The real story was a pretty acrimonious affair. The Confederates stood the Feds up at the scheduled time to surrender their arms and instead held a final review at their camps and stacked their arms in that field and told the Feds to come get them. The Feds were pissed off and made them do it again and stack the arms in front of watching Federal troops. There were no salutes or brotherhood. Chamberlain made up the story and in later years, Gordon liked it and added it to his memoirs. No one but no one else from general to private recorded such a story as that.

Curiously, your article has no voices from the enslaved or the freed? Why is that?

There are plenty of holes to poke in a selective, anecdote-heavy argument. The states themselves were crystal clear about why they seceded. Texas held a popular vote on the subject and had white supremacy front-and-center in their declaration of causes. "Apostles of Disunion" makes it abundantly clear what arguments resonated from the secession commissioners that various states sent out. And the Southern newspapers were hardly reticent in supporting both slavery and white supremacy as topics worth fighting a war over. Explicit white supremacist arguments were used over and over against Republicans in 1856 and 1860. The North was certainly divided about what to do with slavery, but the quote of Lincoln's that gets pulled out over and over and over ignores something key: he had already written the Emancipation Proclamation and set in motion its adoption when he made that statement. It was pure politics aimed at wavering moderates.

It's easy to claim that slavery only benefited the wealthy, but the entire social system had strong support across class divisions. Racial divisions mattered. The fact that the overwhelming majority of white Northerners were racists doesn't change that basic math for the South. They feared slave revolution and being displaced by freed slaves. They had racialized fears about rape and "miscegenation." Slavery mattered to them.

After the war, white supremacy still mattered. If anything, it mattered more. That's why you had a terrorist insurrection against the government of the United States led by ex-Confederates and including veterans of the war from every economic class and occupation. The Klan, Red Shirts, and "Rifle Clubs" included doctors, lawyers, generals, farmers, and privates. The brutality visited upon freed slaves simply trying to enjoy their rights and freedoms is almost unimaginable.

But we're supposed to ignore that to honor some supposed virtue of brave, moral Confederates. Many of whom came home and participated in, or supported, terrorist violence that involved raping and brutally murdering freed slaves. Hey, at least whites North and South became unified when they finally ignored all that, right?

What your article fails to mention is that the 1880s and 1890s were not quiet on racial issues. This is when Jim Crow came into being. This is why you get dedication speeches which are pretty explicit about celebrating the maintenance of the old racial social order. And this is when lynching becomes a common way to enforce that racial social order. The "celebration" of unification after the war was made over a pile of black bodies. Bodies that Foote absolutely ignored.

That is a long wall of words on a lot of topics I won't debate. My point in linking to that piece was just that (a) slavery itself didn't motivate 95% of the civil war army of the confederacy (nor the union side) at least as to why they fought, and (b) the postwar period promoted reconciliation with the erection of monuments to leaders on both sides.

I don't have a lot of emotion about the subject and that much seems clear to me, you are free to disagree.

Yes, in the postwar period race relations/many wrongs were committed. Foote, you might note, lamented as much, and I think he was right there as well; more should have been done to provide for a solid employment/education/civic opportunities for blacks.

Slavery was, again, part of the reasons for the civil war. It would be great if, in an alternative history, the former slaves really won true equality/freedom in the 1860's as a result of the war. That did not, clearly, happen.

No, and not necessary. It's a valid critique.

Shelby's Civil War is a great read and for the most part he gets it pretty correct. There definitely is a flavor of the Lost Cause Narrative in it. The Lost Cause Narrative unfairly gets totally trashed today, even though there is some factual basis in it. To say that the north wasn't better equipped for a long term war due to economic and manpower advantages is just ignorant and that is part of the Lost Cause mythology.

But Shelby was a storyteller and that is why his book is a great read. He has no notes to attribute his information like a good historian does. As Sapper said he was lazy and perpetrated many of the myths and anecdotes that have been told about the war for many years and he just repeated them. In his defense, some pretty good historians have been just as lazy over the years and done the same thing he did.

Shelby did want to have a good ending or interesting ending to the anecdotes over what may have happened (he did take The Liberty Valence approach-- print the legend not the facts). Several myths that he perpetrated in his CW: Narrative that come to mind right away are the Chamberlain surrender account and Forrest's threats to kick both Bragg and Hood's butt at various times. The reality is Forrest never made those threats and in the case of Bragg, he actually liked and respected him.

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The reality is Forrest never made those threats and in the case of Bragg, he actually liked and respected him.

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Those command and staff meetings with Bragg and his generals must have been a psychotherapist's dream.

I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall the day Davis came to his HQ and everyone of Bragg's immediate subordinates ripped him a new one while Bragg sat their and listened to it all without saying a thing.

BQ78 said:

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I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall the day Davis came to his HQ and everyone of Bragg's immediate subordinates ripped him a new one while Bragg sat their and listened to it all without saying a thing.

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You just know part of Bragg wanted to complain about himself, too.