Thread 17924554

Revisionist Lost Cause-ism or the greatest history of the American Civil War ever written?

Seems people usually say it's one or the other.
Personally, I thought it was great and didn't get the feeling that it was a work of particular bias.

its literally "a narrative"- so i think some people want him to pick a side
but. foote never really makes an attempt to analyze or draw large conclusions from the conflict, he just presents it and the accounts of people who witnessed it
i hae only read about half of it though i must admit

>>17924569
He tries to keep his bias out of it. The one example where he really shows it, and apologizes to the reader for it, is his frustration with Joe Johnston.

Also, I really like the style of just presenting the events as they occurred without a whole lot of analysis and conclusions. The reader should draw those anyhow.

>>17924554 (OP)
>the greatest history of the American Civil War ever written?
Yes

It is very well-written, but it glorifies the Confederacy to a point that it seems a little excessive.

>>17924628
I've heard this before but nobody ever gives any specific examples of where he was doing it.

Do you have any, anon? I just finished the series a few months ago so I'm happy to discuss.

Bruce Catton's history of the Civil War has a noticeable bias towards Western Union armies and officers as he was a Michigan native and he also knew Union veterans in his childhood.

If Foote aggrandizes anyone in this 3,400 page work, it's Lincoln and Grant. In my opinion, they both get the most favorable spit-shine of the lot which takes away from the "Lost Cause" narrative critics bandy about.

Maybe it's just because he's got that accent and he's from Mississippi.

>>17924631
I don't have a specific page number, I just remember he portrayed certain Confederate generals, especially Robert E. Lee, in a sympathetic light. It seemed to me as if Foote went beyond simply recognizing Lee as a capable general and strategian, and was instead celebrating him. However, considering I read the series a number of years ago, it's not completely fresh in my mind, so I could be incorrect.
Additionally, Foote relied heavily on the works of Hudson Strode, who apparently held some pro-Confederate beliefs.

>>17924775
>I just remember he portrayed certain Confederate generals, especially Robert E. Lee, in a sympathetic light. It seemed to me as if Foote went beyond simply recognizing Lee as a capable general and strategian, and was instead celebrating him.
I'm not sure what you mean, anon. There is a ton to celebrate about Lee's war record and considering the books pretty much focus exclusively on the events of the war, I'm not sure what else you would have had him do to celebrate Lee less. He gives him the business about Pickett's Charge as he should but beyond that, I'm not sure how he could have characterized Lee in a more negative way without straying from the historical record.

He has good things and bad things to say about pretty much everyone else. He speaks well of Jackson's generalship but also more or less portrays him as something of a psychopath who cared little for the lives of his men (which is true). He's brutally critical of Joe Johnston, very critical of Beauregard, etc.
>he relied heavily on the works of Hudson Strode who apparently held some pro-Confederate beliefs
People criticize Strode for his deification of Jefferson Davis but Foote doesn't canonize him at all. I would say his portrayal of Lincoln is more favorable than his portrayal of Davis.

>>17924797
Serving under Jackson would not have been fun, he drove his men along mercilessly on forced marches, was extremely autistic and unrelatable to other human beings, a hardcore Christfag, and arrested officers left and right for displeasing him, often for trivial reasons.

>>17924628
They should be glorified. They fought against a tyrant and sadly lost.

>>17924554 (OP)
Look around at the country yanks, you think you won?

>>17924823
>>17924827
Foote does go into all of this as well.

>>17924554 (OP)
Foote's whole shtick was presenting an ugly worldview through a charming and seemingly friendly veneer. He's the academic equivalent of when David Duke put on a suit and pretended to be the presentable face of the KKK

>>17925481
I'm sure you have some examples to back this up anon

Reminder Foote genuinely believe that he, a white man who grew up in the South, understood the perspective of a black man who grew up in the South better than a black man who grew up in Harlem

>>17925487
Would a white South African be better equipped to write the perspective of a black South African than a black guy from Harlem?

Probably.

>>17924830
Yes.

>>17925490
Literally different continents anon.

>>17925513
The point stands. It's an interesting question and it also depends on at what point in history the story is taking place.

Would a civil war historian be better equipped to write a black character in the south than a regular author without that expertise, regardless of the race of the writer?
Again, probably, yeah. Foote also wrote a ton of fiction and it's not unusual to write different types of characters as a fiction writer, anon. I'm not a man but I still need to write female characters in my stories, most likely.

>>17925487
I mean blacks guys from Mississippi get white guys from Mississippi better than white guys from the West Village.

>>17925487
Blacks and Whites in the South actually interact with one another regularly. Northern Whites rarely interact with Blacks unless the Black in question acts White.

coming from somebody with 0 interest in civil war battles, of the mainstream civil war historians I've read/read about Shelby foote is the only name I remember.

Main criticism I’ve heard of Foote is his reverence for Bedford Forrest and exonerating his involvement in the Fort Pillow massacre

>>17925674
Oh that and Thomas Dixon jr

>>17925687
Every man who's ever been a little boy obsessed with battles and heroes has to revere Forrest as a soldier, though.

It's not like Forrest was exclusively a southern hero. There's a massive list of honors heaped upon him by his Union opponents, guys like Sherman, etc, after the war.

>>17925673
in the South it is far more normal to find blacks working in restaurants, as cooks, hotel maids, janitors, in factories, etc. basically any unskilled grunt labor. that is a lot less common in the North where they mostly loaf around and live off welfare.

>>17924628
He's a Southerner whose antecedents were fucking planters and Confederate veterans, his best friend was descended from a Confederate politician and he downplayed slavery's importance by basically claiming that it was already dying and was just "moral propaganda" or whatever. He's ultimately the shining example of a "sensible" Lost Causer: he wasn't racist per se but he held an extremely paternalistic view of blacks, downplays the Confederacy's moral failings and the intentional sabotage of Reconstruction to promote the idea that the Civil War was nothing more than a simple tragedy fought, especially by the South, by noble men who simply were unable to agree on a way forward.

>>17924775
Foote was super fucking gay for Nathan Bedford Forrest. Like "pictures hung up on his wall, worshipping him like he was Jesus and calling him beautiul" levels of gay.

>>17924797
>There is a ton to celebrate about Lee's war record
Lee's record and reputation are bolstered by facing some of the shittiest generals in the history of the US military. Grant made him look like a complete joke and Gettysburg showed that he wasn't shit when up against anyone with an IQ above sub-human.

>>17924554 (OP)
A common rebuttal to
>Abraham Lincoln didn't declare war through congress; his actions were unconstitutional
is
>you only declare war on foreign countries; he was putting down an internal rebellion
but you'll notice this makes his formation of West Virginia out of Virginia unconstitutional, since states can't be formed from existing states. Either WV was formed from CSA's (a foreign country's) state and was constitutional, but the declaration of war was not, OR the declaration of war was constitutional (against internal rebellion) and his formation of WV was not.

Either way, Lincoln spent his presidency wiping his ass with the constitution. He essentially said
>to hell with the Union's founding principles, I have to salvage the Union's stranglehold on North America!
it was all about power, and Y*nkees would be better off just coming out and saying that rather than grandstanding about slavery

>>17926477
Lee's performance against Grant during Overland is actually one of the best examples of his generalship. It's to his credit that he single-handedly prolonged the war for a year by forcing Grant into an attritional siege.

Grant was an excellent attacking general with a good grasp of strategy and knew how to use his superior numbers. Overland was a campaign of maneuver. That it is mainly remembered for desperate brawling in the Wilderness and suicidal charges at Cold Harbour is down to Lee. He countered Grant at every turn, kept his army between him and Richmond, always ensured he faced Grant behind earthworks and solid terrain. Grant didn't beat him in Overland, it was a stalemate. It just so happens that a stalemate wasn't enough for the CSA at that time.

If you want to see Lee's weakness, it was in the wider strategic political sense. He kept telling Jefferson Davis that he couldn't spare any men for the Western theatre which was caving in, and then wasted 15,000 men on a suicidal charge at Gettysburg.

While opinions varied from person to person, there are plenty of examples of Union/Confederate soldiers and Union/Confederate supporters getting along with one another perfectly fine after the war at least after the end of reconstruction. Simultaneous with the lost cause narrative and the spread of Jim Crow, lynchings, etc. in the south there was also a northern fascination with the confederacy especially when it came to southern generalship and the bravado of southern troops. The current levels of butthurt about the civil war that makes it impossible to talk about without pissing off some bubba redneck or smarmy atun-shei dickrider are a relatively recent phenomenon of the past 30 years or so. We get way more heated about the civil war now than union/confederate veterans would have in the 1880s or 1910s.

>>17926815
This anecdote from Sherman's funeral always sticks out in my mind:
>On February 19, a funeral service was held at his home, followed by a military procession. Joseph E. Johnston, the Confederate officer who had commanded the resistance to Sherman's troops in Georgia and the Carolinas, served as a pallbearer in New York City. It was a bitterly cold day and a friend of Johnston, fearing that the general might become ill, asked him to put on his hat. Johnston replied: "If I were in [Sherman's] place, and he were standing in mine, he would not put on his hat." Johnston did catch a serious cold and died one month later of pneumonia.

>>17926815
Confederate soldiers and Union soldiers respected each other.

It's the politicians that CSA soldiers didn't trust, and not just the Union ones but also their own.

During the Spanish-American War there was some initial concern about moving Army units through the South for the journey to Florida and debarking to the Caribbean, but most Southerners greeted them warmly and there was no evidence of lingering butthurt especially among the younger generation who didn't remember the war.

>>17927185
Literally relatives from different migrations in the US. What a stupid senseless war

>>17927193
There were some ex-Confederates in the Army, including Joe Wheeler as a general. The Spanish American War did a lot to reconcile the two sides and further the “tragic misunderstanding between two brothers” narrative.

We do not know how Southern politics would have evolved postwar in a free and fair electoral system; perhaps the region would have become Republican-ized much earlier but for how artificial voter suppression was used to preserve Democrats' monopoly on power.

>>17927232
Wheeler was given a general's commission by McKinley as a means of extending the olive branch to the South. That was a deliberate political move.

>>17927223
The enlisted men were a lot more gung ho in the early days of the war as the horrible slaughter at Shiloh demonstrated. By 1864 the average private was less bitter towards the enemy than he was in 1861 because everyone was tired of war by then and wanted it to be done with and there was a growing feeling in the Confederate ranks that defeat was a foregone conclusion.

>>17927243
And McKinley was the last president to fight in the war.

>>17925851
You know there is no data supports this idea.

>>17926698
He should have hung every Dixoid politician from Congress down to the local level. They were murderous traitors and that he didn't have all of them executed showed too much kindness.

>They were almost incredibly different, these three--Sherman quick, nervous, and volatile, Grant stolid and unemotional and relentless, Lincoln ranging far beyond them with brooding insights, his profound melancholy touched by inexplicable flashes of light--but each held the faith that the whole country, North and South together, must ultimately find in reunion and freedom the values that would justify four terrible years of war.

>The discovery of these values would by no means be automatic. Much hatred and bitterness existed, and there would easily develop a program of revenge and reprisal that would make real reunion forever impossible. There was talk of hangings and proscriptions and of conquered provinces. There were powerful leaders in the North who meant to see these threats carried out in all their literal grimness and it was not in the least certain that they could be kept from having their way. So the principle order of business for the president aand the two generals was not so much to checkmate the Confederacy as to checkmate the men who would try to make peace with malice and rancor and a length of rope.

>>17927812
kino passage

>>17927812
>rapes and pillages the south
>ah man, imagine if the politicians were here
why? so they could bore the people to death?

>>17928343
Anon, you're too damned uneducated to even know what that passage anon posted is even about.

Do yourself a favor and read the books in OP.

>>17928351
aye, even a bastard half jew is bound to make mistakes

>>17924554 (OP)
The only unfortunate thing I think about the Confederacy losing is that they would likely have a Latin American Empire by now, and naturally if they kept control of the entire Union I think even the continued existence of Canada might have been in doubt considering how close the Southern dominated Polk government came to war with Britain over Oregon. Several other flashpoints with Britain and Spain later in the century could have led to considerably more land grabs, like the annexation of Cuba people were creaming themselves over even in our own timeline. Not that it would have been good being part of a Confederate Government, almost certainly it would have been as more or more miserable than Latin America’s actual history, but it would have made for kino historical reading.