I stumbled across Shelby Foote’s (1958, 1963, 1974) trilogy at the library last month and am entranced by his writing. It’s lively, it’s detailed without bogging down, and it’s more or less neutral.
I, both as a child (ten years old or so) and as an adult, have found Catton to be tedious, limited, and biased.
Had my father owned Foote’s books instead of Catton’s, I think I would have had a much more deep interest in the Civil War. I’m really impressed.
Yes, Foote did a great job. Hired to write a brief, one-volume history of the Civil War, it grew and grew, and became his most important life’s work. He likened it to “swallowing a cannonball.” Catton was also good, but not nearly as lively IMHO.
I had the pleasure of meeting Foote in Sept. 2000 and spending some time with him - he was just the same charming, courtly Southern gentleman you saw in the Ken Burns documentary.
I didn’t watch the documentary. I didn’t even watch Burns’ baseball documentary. I’m far more into books than I am TV.
Would you recommend that I watch it?
Definitely watch the documentary. Certainly one of the two or three best TV documentaries every.
I read Catton as a kid and Foote more recently. Foote was by far more details and a pleasure to read; he lists the casualties for every battle (including very minor ones) yet his writing is so good that you are never bored by it. He also covers every battle and campaign (I never realized there was fighting in New Mexico).
Not that Catton was bad, but Foote was better and had the advantage of more scholarship on the war.
All the above is true, but Foote also had some of his own biases, and scholarly work and perspectives on the War have changed, too. It’s not a bad source - just don’t take it as your only source. He definitely gets some things wrong.
Certainly true–his glossing over Fort Pillow, for instance.
Yes, of course. Both he and Catton published decades ago. Anyone you’d recommend for a recent general history of the war?
Catton is the more scholarly of the two, which I don’t really mean as a compliment or as an insult: he writes more like a history professor (which to my knowledge he wasn’t [his son was, which I know because he wrote the preface to an edition of Mr. Lincoln’s Army that I have). Foote was more conversational.
My personal preference for Foote is because he gives more time to the Army of Tennessee and the Army of the Tennessee than Catton does, though as with Catton and most others who wrote general histories he gives at 80% to the Virginia Theatre and the other 20% is divided among everything else. I admit my preference for this is selfish and genealogical- my ancestors served in Tennessee (and later Georgia and the Carolinas), but it’s surprising how lopsided the books are considering how many major and important battles and how many just plain interesting personalities there were in that region. (Most of those that are about that branch concentrate more on Atlanta and Sherman.)
James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom is also a good “general all purpose” historian of the war, though again it’s mostly on the Virginia campaigns. There’s a nice illustrated version as well- lots of photos I had never seen before.
Such as? I don’t need cites; I’ll look them up myself.
There is a bit of Marsh Bobby worship in it. Lee did pretty well with the hand he was dealt, but not THAT well.
For a really concise but still good general Civil War history it’s hard to beat Robert Leckie’s None Died in Vain. He works in an amazing amount of military and biographical detail into a relatively short single volume work. I recommend all of his single volume war books (he wrote one about all of the major U.S. wars).
Leckie is perhaps most famous now for having been a character in the HBO miniseries The Pacific. (Spoiler: he survived.)
I agree. The Civil War did not only occur in the 100 miles between Washington and Richmond. The actions along the Mississippi, in Mississippi, and in Tennessee and Kentucky in 1862-3 were absolutely crucial to both sides.
And Forrest. Foote was very good friends with some of N.B.Forrest’s descendants which may also explain why he didn’t mention Fort Pillow and some of the other less savory tales of the man.
Trivia about Foote: though he is the almost iconic southern gentleman and spoke of his roots in the Civil War, only his father’s family served fought for the south in the Civil War. His maternal grandfather was a Jewish immigrant from Austria and his maternal grandmother’s family was from “up north” originally.
He was also a bit of a hellion as a young man. Among other things he was court martialled in WW2 for going AWOL to visit a girlfriend in Ireland, then one of his later wives divorced him for carousing. (The last marriage stuck though.)
I just finished that a couple of weeks ago. I really enjoyed it. Yeah, there was a lot of focus on the Virginia battles, but he does talk about the Western campaigns.
I have more respect for him. I had my fill of Southern gentleman snoozefests when I was a kid and he seemed like more of the same. Superannuated Southern belles were a lot more fun.
Jon Meacham was a guest on THE DAILY SHOW last year to promote a re-release on Foote’s Civil War in which he was involved as an editor and as author of “American Homer”, an essay on Foote. There’s a funny opening to the interview of Stewart pulling out three huge volumes of Foote and then a light booklet of Meacham’s that accompanies it (for no real reason).
I’m about halfway through the third book in Catton’s Civil War trilogy and I’m enjoying it. I read my father’s copy of A Stillness at Appomattox year ago, but I enjoyed that, too, not just the information but the writing style. They’re not exactly lively, but every so often I annoy my family by reading a passage out loud.
I have, but haven’t read yet, Foote’s trilogy. I think it might be next on the list. I did love watching him in the Burns documentary. I think my favorite bit from him was his story about a conversation with one of Forrest’s descendants, where he told her that he thought the war had produced two genuine geniuses, Nathan Forrest and Abraham Lincoln. Her response? “In our family, we don’t talk much about Abraham Lincoln.” He was amused, but gently, I think.
Foote was a very nice and modest man, insightful into literature in surprising ways–he once wrote me an unsolicited letter about an American writer I admire who had nothing to do with the Civil War. I tried to get him to write a whole essay on this writer, for a collection I later published, which he was perfectly qualified to do, but he said he’d rather leave literature to the lit. scholars.
Definitely. McPherson won the Pulitzer Prize for it, and he deserved it.
Geoffrey C. Ward’s companion volume to the Ken Burns PBS series is also an excellent, concise, well-illustrated history of the war: http://www.amazon.com/Civil-War-Illustrated-History/dp/0679742778/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1331042924&sr=8-1
I’ve never heard the phrase “Marsh Bobby,” but I have heard “Marse Robert.”
It’s hard to believe the McPherson book is 25 years old already. I suppose it’s time for a new general history, for a new generation.
Some misconceptions here. Bruce Catton was never an academic. He was a writer and reporter and the founding editor of American Heritage magazine. He had an excellent serious magazine style that contrasts with Foote’s more literary, novelist style, but definitely not at all academic.
He also wrote two major Civil War trilogies. The first was the Army of the Potomac trilogy: Mr. Lincoln’s Army (1951), Glory Road (1952), and A Stillness at Appomattox (1953). This of course concentrated on the Virginia theater, and was north-biased. It made him a superstar in sales.
The second was the more comprehensive Centennial History of the Civil War trilogy: The Coming Fury (1961), Terrible Swift Sword (1963), and Never Call Retreat (1965). This is not quite up to the level of the first, since it tries to cover more political and social issues and those aren’t his specialty.
There is in fact a third trilogy, about Ulysses S. Grant, and a number of other books on the war. He wrote a couple of the major American Heritage histories of the Civil War and those were top-notch for the day, although 50-year-old research on the war has been superseded in lots of ways.
Foote’s books are not exactly neutral. They were written deliberately to balance out the northern bias of Catton and others. In total, they are pretty even-handed but he spends time trying to straighten the record, as he saw it.
For me the big problem, pun not intended but I’ll leave it in, is the sheer bulk of Foote’s trilogy. After it became famous the section of Gettysburg was published as a small independent book. It’s still 250 pages. His emphasis on blow-by-blow battle accounts makes him popular, I admit, but I find that once you take out the battles, what’s left get slighted in a number of ways, not all of them due to his writing before the post Centennial surge in Civil War research from a variety of perspectives. Studies of slavery didn’t really exist when he was doing his research compared to the enormous volume today. And the whole field of looking at the economic, industrial, technological, and bureaucratic underpinnings of the war, now thought to be what really won for the North far more than the battles themselves, was also almost nonexistent.
To be honest, I wouldn’t recommend either history today unless you’re looking for battle porn. There must be newer works that incorporate this newer scholarship, though I admit I haven’t kept up. Looking at the History Book Club’s Civil War page, I see mostly books that concentrate on aspects and pieces of the war. Comprehensive histories may be out of style. I do second Elendil’s Heir for the recommendations of McPherson and Ward.