Poetic Feete

I had what was for me an unusual experience last year: I read a few hundred pages of Shelby Foote’s history of the American Civil War and didn’t enjoy what I read. The work is massive, and I had read it one-and-two-thirds times, a few hundred pages a year for at least fifteen years, and I had never had a disappointing experience before, even in my previous encounter with the passage that I reread last year. But I loved my reading in Foote this year, so I'm glad to see that last year was just a temporary aberration. The problem may have lain in my circumstances: rushing to pack and move, concerned about selling the house, etc. It may have had to do with Foote’s attempt to downplay Nathan Bedford Forrest’s massacre at Fort Pillow. I didn’t know as much about Forrest the first time I read Foote’s account, but at this time in my life, I really don’t need to hear any defense of the murder of captured black soldiers by the Ku Klux Klan’s first Grand Wizard. Sure, it was an atrocity, Foote says, but no worse than other atrocities committed during the four-year bloodbath of war. I don’t buy it. That war is too full of stories of strangely humane behavior by the combatants between and after battles. Capturing enemy soldiers, disarming them, and then shooting them was not standard practice (except when the captured were black and the capturers were Confederate), and Forrest's act deserves not the slightest amount of extenuation.

I enjoy reading about the Civil War mostly, I think, because of the surprising events that happen when a supposedly civil, supposedly educated, supposedly noble, supposedly pious country descends into violent conflict. I found a lot of amazing characters and stories in the passage I read this year. Here were Admiral Farragut damning the torpedoes in Mobile Bay, Jubal Early attacking Washington, Lincoln standing above the fortifications to watch the action, and the anonymous soldier telling him to “get down, you fool!” Here were the incredible and tragic stupidity of the botched action at the Petersburg crater, Sherman’s march to the sea, Hood’s decision not to defend Georgia against Sherman’s advance and instead to go on the offensive to his destruction in Tennessee, and the inspiring example of a completed, accepted presidential election held during a civil war.

A note on the Petersburg Crater: I had read that thousands of Union troops marched, ran, or fell into the crater caused by an underground explosion and then that Confederate survivors began to fire at the packed, disoriented “attackers” as if, they said, at a turkey shoot. Thousands! I had imagined a stadium-sized crater! So I was surprised and – should I say? – disappointed when I visited Petersburg and saw a hole just a few feet deep that seemed like it could have held no more than five hundred men. I read in the park’s brochure that erosion and plant growth over the years had made the crater shallower and less ominous, so I supposed that I was seeing only a fraction of the original. But Foote says the crater covered about a quarter of an acre. When I read that a couple of weeks ago, I looked across the street at two houses and, remembering that a typical neighborhood plot contained an eighth of an acre, thought, “Those two yards make up about a quarter of an acre, and that was about the size of the crater I saw.” Online just now, I read that the depression measured about 170' by 60'. Yeah, about the size of two house lots. So maybe what I saw was the whole thing after all. But thousands of men? Could thousands of men stand in two neighborhood yards? Maybe I have grossly underestimated the meaning of the word “crowded” in the accounts of the crater.

I also want to read about the Civil War because it tells me like no other story just how stupid and stubborn and cruel humans can be. I remember decades ago reading Bruce Catton say that he thought about these stories every time he heard some “fathead” talk about the glories of war. In my Foote assignment this year, I read of Gen. Sherman saying, “War is cruelty. You cannot refine it.” And I read of a Union soldier in Georgia, seeing the boys and old men they had just shot down, who said, “There is no God in war. It is merciless, cruel, vindictive, un-Christian, savage, relentless. It is all that devils could wish for.”

After the election, Lincoln delivered an inspiring speech to some well-wishers serenading him on the lawn of the White House. In the middle of his remarks, he said, “Human-nature will not change. In any future great national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak, and as strong; as silly and as wise; as bad and good. Let us, therefore, study the incidents of this, as philosophy to learn wisdom from, and none of them as wrongs to be revenged.” Is he wrong? Do we not have today weak and strong, silly and wise, bad and good Americans trying to direct our future? In our endeavor, we must, as Lincoln said, learn wisdom from the past, and we must all try to make things right without seeking revenge. With malice toward none, with charity for all, folks. Every American should say these words ten times every morning and before every political utterance on social media.

By the way, Lincoln said his speech was “not very graceful.” You should read the whole thing and see what this wise, eloquent leader considered ungraceful. It will take you less time than it took to read this post. Just look up “Lincoln response to a serenade November 10, 1864.”

Good Stories Make up Good Chapters, Which Make up Good Books

Over the course of forty years or so, I’ve read and reread books on the American Civil War by Shelby Foote and Bruce Catton. For this ten-year reading plan, I wanted to branch out and find some other authors worth visiting over and over. One of my happy discoveries has been Steven E. Woodworth. In rereading just now my post from two years ago on Woodworth’s While God Is Marching On, I was reminded about some disappointing features early in that book. But right now I’m reading his history of the Union Army of the Tennessee, entitled Nothing but Victory, and I’m happy to report that none of the problematic tendencies of the earlier book show up here.

It is odd to read an account focusing on just one of the several armies that the United States deployed in that war; the tightly defined subject matter creates some interesting differences in the way some familiar stories are told. The Battle of Lookout Mountain, for instance (the so-called “Battle Above the Clouds”), is barely mentioned, in just one sentence, having been conducted, as far as the northern forces were concerned, by Joseph Hooker leading the Army of the Cumberland. On the other hand, the accompanying Battle of Missionary Ridge (begun by the Army of the Tennessee, both struggles being part of the greater battle for Chattanooga) is outlined in detail, regiment by regiment. (Regiments make up brigades, which make up divisions, which make up corps, which make up armies.)

Where Woodworth really shines is in the personal stories. I loved reading about the men who scoured Illinois during the summer of 1861 trying to recruit one hundred soldiers each in order to be made captain of the company. (Companies make up regiments, which make up . . . .) Then there were the women and girls who sewed flags for these companies and special hats for the uniformless volunteers to wear and who held parties and public ceremonies in which they bestowed, with eloquent blessings, the precious sewn goods to the departing troops. I’d read often that John McClernand was a political rival to Lincoln whom Lincoln commissioned as a general; Woodworth tells me just how that happened. (It involved McClernand’s help in recruiting in southern Illinois, where many were sypathetic to the seceded states.) I’d read about the Battle of Shiloh before, but I don’t ever remember reading about the crowds of northern civilians who swarmed to the rural Tennessee area after the battle to help the wounded or search for and bury dead loved ones.

Woodworth reads personal journals of soldiers incessantly. I might have expected to read in another book that private George Smith told God that he would serve Him if he survived the siege of Vicksburg. But Woodworth’s reading doesn’t end with the entries from 1865; he tells us that Smith’s journal from fifty years later confirms that he kept his promise. How many pages about sick children and cows bought for five dollars and visits from Aunt Polly did Woodworth have to read through before finding this pertinent detail? Moving from the sublime to the ridiculous, my final example concerns Private Albert Crummell of the 30th Ohio who, in a brief lull in the fighting around Atlanta, made furtive forays into no-man’s land to search for tobacco in the packs of dead rebel soldiers but found one who was, as Miracle Max would say, only mostly dead and who demanded that Crummell carry him to safety in return for the tobacco. Crummell made the trade.

War and Fate

As I did last year, once more I’ve found myself behind on blogging. Only this year, I’ve fallen behind on reading as well. There’s some bad (death in the family) and some good (moving to a beautiful new house) in the cause of it, but still I’m behind. It’s actually December as I write, although I’m dating the post in July (because I want to talk about a couple of books I read in July), and I’ve had to double or even triple up my reading some days in the last few weeks in order to get my list for the year finished. And then that extra reading kept me from keeping up with the blog. But how can I not say something about Tolstoy?

If a million men had not wanted to march across Europe toward Russia, says the philosophical author (loosely), Napoleon could not have made them do it. Great leaders do not shape history, or else the exception would be the law. (Napoleon wasn’t all that great anyway, the Russian patriot assures us.) And yet, we find in a deeper layer of the mystery, the varied wishes of the individual soldiers don’t have any causative effect, either. They only appear to each person the reasons for the great army’s migration. Of course you can choose to raise your arm or to think through a mathematical proof, but as soon as your will comes into contact with the will of another person, you are no longer free. You don’t decide to go. Napoleon doesn’t decide to go. Why do you go to Russia? Because it is inevitable.

Now sometimes Tolstoy seems to say that “the inevitable” is an impersonal fate, and sometimes he seems to say it is the will of God. I think he ultimately thought God directed the events, although, as Tolstoy’s fellow countryman famously asked, who would want to think that God directed the torture of a young girl? On the other hand, a brighter side of Tolstoy’s coin says that if we understood how little freedom that annoying fellow in the office had, we would more readily forgive him. But then, I want to ask, am I free to forgive the other guy if he isn’t free to stop harassing me? What good would understanding him do? Determinism is so very circular, even if it does attempt to step outside the circle in order to point out that nothing but the circle exists.

I don’t know if Napoleon moved la Grande Armée, but I know that Tolstoy moves me, even when he leads me into circular conundrums of snakes eating themselves. The story of young people in love and full of promise getting caught up in a tremendous war and trying to keep their individualities and free wills within the seemingly predetermined cataclysm brings me to the edge of all meaning. It shows me the infinite and the infinitesimal within us: the head that is large enough to encompass the globe and the heart that is too small to entertain a neighbor’s needs for a moment. He convinces me that, even if the great General Kutuzov was too insignificant to affect the battles he seemed to lead, the humble Marya is worth all of Josephine’s jewels and more. At the end of the book, she is, her author tells us, so happy she feels sad “as though she felt, through her happiness, that there is another sort of happiness unattainable in this life.” Behind the noise of battle stands Marya. Behind her stand her feelings. Behind her happiness stands a blessedness of another world. The battle plans and marches and bungled orders and meetings between emperors and childhood marriage vows and houses being sold and humanitarian societies and all the rest – these are only line drawings on a curtain behind which the real drama takes place just outside our total comprehension.

If history is predetermined, can it be foreseen by human eyes? Some people, Tolstoy points out, seem to understand great movements, to have the ability to pinpoint key influences and to predict battles. But, he explains, there are always plenty of people predicting one thing or another, so that eventually every outcome is predicted. As a result, when the actual outcome happens, there's always someone to say, “I told you so.” At the same time I was finishing up War and Peace, I also read the central part of the central book in Shelby Foote’s history of the American Civil War, which naturally told about the central battle of the War, and I couldn’t help finding Tolstoy’s view critiquing Foote’s. One could read this account of the events in Pennsylvania and come away with a Great Man theory of history. The U.S. won the war because it won Gettysburg, and it won the battle of Gettysburg because it held Little Round Top, and it held Little Round Top because Joshua Chamberlain ordered a bayonet charge when his troops were out of bullets. Thank you, Joshua Chamberlain.

But Foote also tells about James Longstreet, who, while Pickett charged the center of the bluecoats’ line on the third day, sat on a rail and watched the disaster, which he had forecast to Lee. But did Longstreet really know what would happen? He was right, as it turned out. But I could say that it’s raining in Kyoto just this minute and be accidentally right without knowing whether it’s raining in Kyoto. Tolstoy would say that the only reason a story as boring as that of a man sitting on a fence rail for a day survives is that Longstreet merely proved in the end to have guessed correctly. Everybody predicted something that day, and if Pickett had made it through the lines – which doesn’t seem an impossibility to me even though I don’t think he personally would have had much to do with the changed outcome – some other general (Pickett himself, perhaps) would have said to Lee, “See? I told you so.”

Which did Foote believe? Did he believe that Chamberlain was the great man because he established history? Or did he believe that great men only recognize the futility of will and the inevitability of events? The title of his Gettysburg section, “The Stars in the Courses,” suggests the latter, even if the view is adopted only to make the reading as compelling as the fate behind the events.

Three Stray Comments and a Joke

Donald Trump walks into a bar. The bartender says, “Mr. President, I didn’t think you drank.” “I don’t,” says the President, “and people ask me all the time. But if you look at what’s going on; and I tell you it’s very simple. See, I give you $5, and all I get: it’s just a glass with a beverage. And believe me, trade deficits are bad.”

Donald Trump never actually had this conversation, and you know it. Dorothy L. Sayers, in the commentary to her magnificent translation of The Divine Comedy posits that Dante’s readers never took his placement of real people in Hell, Purgatory, or Heaven as literal statements, either. The celebrities Dante assigns to one place or another were accepted as recognizable types that helped make the points he was trying to make. As much as I love this classic of classics, I’ve always placed a little mental bracket around what I saw as Dante’s untoward willingness to judge. But Sayers has convinced me that he wasn’t predicting the eternal state of souls much more than someone telling a joke does. In looking up Trump jokes, I found some that put him in Heaven and some that put him in Hell, and I don’t take any of them as prognostications.

That’s the first of just a few stray comments I have to make on my reading this month. Living in south-central Texas for the school year put my bioliogical calendar out of whack. I wake up, go out for a walk on hot, humid mornings, and think, “Isn’t summer about over?” Then I realize that it’s June and that summer has just started. How can this be? Walking has become such a part of my reading routine, it’s difficult to read with full concentration when the walking is so uncomfortable, and I only feel enough energy for disconnected notes.

What can Patrick O’Brian not write about? Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin give their author cause to write about history, naval tactics, geography, anthropology, biology, geology, economics, politics, fashion, music, meteorology, family relations, literature, espionage, and more. In chapter 7 of H. M. S. Surprise we get an experiment in ethics, as Stephen walks around Bombay in amoral observation. He doesn’t judge prostitution, slavery, idolatry, or any other practice his church and countries might tell him to condemn, and as he brings me along into this morally neutral view, he reveals very clearly a new line of morality. Judging institutions he cannot change is pointless. Judging people who have grown up in a foreign environment is pointless. But Stephen must help one little girl who crosses his path.

Somehow, Shelby Foote conveys beauty in the pageant of stupidity and blood that we know as the American Civil War. He does it partly through focusing on individual stories: Lincoln and his yarns, Grant and his self-doubts, Jefferson Davis and his dyspepia, Longstreet and his hubristic disobedience, and a host of generals, colonels, quartermasters, abolitionists, senators, spies, reporters, ambassadors, diarists, soldiers, wives, authors, humorists, slaves, freemen, and others with a story to tell. He does it partly through phrases packed with powerful imagery: the “stars in the courses,” the “awful arithmetic” (did Lincoln actually coin the combination?), “Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees,” and “We are all Americans.” And he does it partly by letting events lead (in stellar courses) toward known conclusions: the reader can sense for scores or even hundreds of pages the coming of the shots at Fort Sumter, the Emancipation Proclamation, Stonewall Jackson’s death, Pickett’s Charge, the crater at Petersburg, the surrender at Appomattox Court House. The effect is very similar to that of reading Othello or Oedipus the King for the umpteenth time – except that it lasts for three thousand pages.

I complained about the heat earlier in the post. Distraction from adjusting to the first month of retirement may have something to do with it, too. But whether I can put together a train of thought or not, it’s clear to me as I write these stray comments, that my reading has placed in the midst of the disorientation and weariness some profound, unforgettable moments.

General Characters

Military generals can be fascinating characters: Caesar, Patton, MacArthur. Civil War generals have a special tendency toward eccentricity. And Civil War generals as described by the novelist Shelby Foote in his history of the war could have come straight out of Dickens.

Take Union General Irvin McDowell, for instance. His troops never had much respect for the man who lost First Bull Run. But he certainly did nothing to limit the complaints and wisecracks by regularly wearing, not a regulation cap, but a helmet made of a straw basket covered with canvas. Then there’s his colleague John Pope, who, when taking over the federal Army of the Potomac, told his men to think only of going forward while letting the lines of retreat take care of themselves. When he discovered Stonewall Jackson sitting in his rear with an entire corps, he found that lines of retreat sometimes need a little oversight. He often ended his letters with the sign-off “Headquarters in the saddle,” naturally eliciting from his men the observation that he had his headquarters where his hindquarters should be.

Sometimes the quirks dramatically altered life-and-death situations. Stonewall Jackson got his nickname from standing firm as a stone wall during battle, but he also constantly found ways to nap during action. George McClellan was always quicker to write to his wife than to lead his men into battle and always wrong in his opinions as to which politicians did or didn’t support his vision of single-handedly saving the Union. (He eventually lost the support of the only politician that ultimately mattered: President Lincoln.) Southern General Leonidas Polk once found himself behind Federal lines by mistake and, the color of his uniform hidden in the twilight, calmly ordered the soldiers to cease firing. (The ruse worked.)

Few characters can top Braxton Bragg. His very name indicates a man set apart, for the parents who would give a son such a name raised him. Once while serving as his unit’s own quartermaster, he filled out a requisition as general and then denied it as quartermaster. As general again, he appealed to his superior officer, who again made the request to Quartermaster Bragg, who again denied it.

But my favorite story from this year’s chapters in Foote tells of northern General John T. Wilder. When 20,000 of Bragg’s men surrounded his small garrison of 4000 and asked for surrender “to avoid unnecessary bloodshed,” Wilder retorted that the only way to avoid bloodshed was to retreat beyond the range of his weapons. General James Chalmers, who conducted the negotiations from the Confederate end, urged the rationality of surrender considering the size of his force. Wilder still refused, asking in his reply: How do I know you have 20,000 men? The southern commander sent a new, testier message, saying that the only proof he could offer of the strength of his army was the overwhelming use of it. Wilder, wanting neither to spend the lives of his men without cause nor to fall for an outrageous con, thought of another way to receive proof. He walked to the Confederate lines under a flag of truce and asked his former comrade, Gen. Simon Buckner, C.S.A., what he should do. “War doesn’t work that way,” said his old friend. “I can’t tell you what to do. But I can give you a tour of the camp.” After seeing the size of the enemy troops up close, the deflated Wilder announced that he supposed he had no choice: every soldier under his command surrendered. Then they were all given leave to go back home under their word that they would not take up arms against the Confederacy until properly exchanged.

It was a different world.

Monuments of Literature, Literature of Monuments

Traveling can make reading difficult – traveling that doesn’t involve long flights, that is. I’m eager to get away for an hour in the middle of a work day, find a lonely table in a restaurant, and read some history or philosophy. But why would I take time away from the very things I traveled so far to see? Still, here and there, in the early morning or on the Metro, I’ve been reading Greek dramas and Tennyson poetry the last few days during my visit to Washington, D.C., with my daughter.

But it occurs to me this morning that my most thought-provoking reading lately has involved displays in museums and on monuments. On Thursday, for instance, we walked the circuit of memorials on the west side of the National Mall and around the tidal basin. There’s not much to read, of course, on the Washington Monument. But then we entered the fairly new World War II Memorial, the bright stones of which are replete with text and ideas. Like the War itself, the memorial is too large to comprehend in one glance (or one camera frame). So we moved slowly around the fountains of celebration and peace and unity, and read the quotations by presidents and generals about purpose and achievement, liberation and sacrifice, and we felt an awful thankfulness and that true pride that walks on humbled knees.

From there we walked along the Reflecting Pool and watched some ducks point their tailfeathers up as they fed from the penny-strewn bottom, oblivious to the sacred memories surrounding them. At the west end of the pool, we turned right and started descending a path lined by solemnly dark slabs, reading only a tiny sampling of the thousands of words there. As unlike the World War II Memorial as gabbro is from granite (i.e., as black from white), the Vietnam Memorial has nothing to say about why we went or what we accomplished; even the most tentative statement along those lines would have raised inappropriate controversy. But no one can argue with the meaning of its overwhelming litany of names: These People Did Not Come Back.

Noting that the eastern wall of the Vietnam Memorial points to the obelisk of the Father of the Country, we turned back west to see the Lincoln Memorial reflected in the western wall. Now there’s a mystery not written in words. I know not exactly how, Robert B Emro, but your sacrifice serves the memory of our two greatest leaders, and we honor you for it.

Our breath gradually returned as we made our slow way back up the western ramp to go pay our respects to the Great Emancipator. Since the last time I visited the Lincoln Memorial, both of the speeches memorialized on its inner walls have become dearer to me. I analyze the Gettysburg Address at least once a year with my students as a model of writing. And Ronald White’s book about the Second Inaugural Address has me convinced that what he dubs Lincoln’s Greatest Speech is in fact one of the greatest speeches of history.

We discussed school textbooks on our journey up the hill. Now there’s some weird reading. My teachers and books taught me that the Civil War was not about slavery but about states’ rights. My daughters’ teachers and books taught her the same. But on three separate occasions in the last year, I’ve read the view that history textbooks offer this theory only so they can be sold in the Deep South. Lincoln’s Second Inaugural tells us that “all knew” that slavery was the cause of the war. The Republican Party was founded as the Anti-Slavery party, and the southern states seceded because the openly Anti-Slavery Lincoln was elected. Yes, Lincoln followed his duty to restore and preserve the Union, but for the first year of the war, that meant a Union in which slavery was at least confined to a limited area, whereas the southern states did everything they could to spread slavery to new territories. Of course the Civil War was about slavery!

The question arose as we approached: How much worse might things have been if this extraordinary man had not been here to lead the country through its greatest crisis? Well, first, if Lincoln hadn’t been elected, the country would not have split, and the Civil War as we know it would not have happened. But based on what I’ve read by Shelby Foote, Bruce Catton, James MacPherson, Eric Foner, and others, I believe that American slavery would have continued its legal status, definitely through the 1960s and perhaps even until today. And it would have spread. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, the U. S. may well have taken even more of Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean (through wars which, along with the Mexican War of the 1840s, might even get monuments on the National Mall) in order to spread the “peculiar institution.” More of these territories would have become states, and the representatives they sent to Congress would have given slavery an unstoppable majority in the Senate and perhaps even in the House. This means the federal government would never have sponsored a transcontinental railroad or land-grant colleges, both of which Congress authorized while southern representatives were gone. The Homestead Act probably would have come about, but it may have required two houses on every tract of free land: one for the family and one for the slaves. In other words, the growth of wealth, education, and freedom would have been stunted in our country. Perhaps some northern states would have eventually seceded (led by Massachusetts probably). And then would America have been prepared to tip the scales in 1941? Would the waters dance in a World War II Memorial on the National Mall? The Mall, in fact, would represent a pro-slavery country, and if there were a Memorial to WWII, it wouldn’t sit between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, because there wouldn’t be a Lincoln Memorial.

The state of Georgia has chosen to represent itself in the Statuary Hall of the Capitol Building by a sculpture of Alexander Stephens, Vice President of the Confederacy. Now in what other country would you ever see the Second-in-Command of a failed rebellion honored in the nation’s capital? After talking about and thinking about Lincoln and the Civil War and slavery, I looked up Stephens just to check my memory. And sure enough, Stephens said clearly that the Confederacy was based on slavery, that the conflict began because of slavery (pace high-school textbooks), that the Founders of 1776 were wrong to believe all men were created equal, and that the Confederacy was the first country ever to be founded on the “natural law” of white supremacy. And yet he sits in the Capitol Building of the nation that defeated his rebellion, sharing a room with some of those Founders he so firmly disagreed with. It’s a good thing for Georgia that the Founders they so despise believed in free speech, because the presence of their statue of Stephens constitutes the greatest exercise of that right in the history of the world.

Traveling on Foote

Fifty years ago, my family went to Springfield, Illinois, and I got interested in the Civil War; I didn’t know then exactly when I would visit other sites associated with the war. Ten years ago, I drew up my current ten-year reading plan; I didn’t know then what I would be doing in March of year 9. Last year, I got a job at the University of Tennessee; I didn’t know then exactly when I’d travel to see any given Civil War sites in the area. A couple of months ago, my wife and I decided to go to Virginia for a Spring Break trip; I didn’t remember then that I had scheduled Shelby Foote’s The Civil War for March.

This past Monday, we traveled up I-81 to New Market and then went east on US-211 to cross Massanutton Mountain and visit Shenandoah National Park. That very morning I had read about part of Stonewall Jackson’s Valley Campaign of 1862, in which he went north through the wider part of Shenandoah Valley, then turned east at New Market and took his army through the gap in Massanutton Mountain. We followed in his very footsteps. Wednesday, we visited battle sites east of Richmond. That evening, I went back to the motel and picked up the book to resume my steady pace of fifteen pages per day; it turns out I read that evening about the Seven Days battles east of Richmond, which even took place in the order in which we had visited them that very day. Stonewall’s footsteps are difficult to account for in those June days of 1862, but I can say we followed in the footsteps of Robert E. Lee. Seldom (if ever?) has my scheduled reading so closely coincided with the rest of my life.

Someone has called Foote the American Homer. One surface-level detail in Foote’s massive three-volume narrative that justifies the comparison to my mind is his use of various sobriquets for the characters. The blind bard calls Achilles variously “son of Peleus” and “the swift-footed” as well as “Achilles.” Similarly, while Foote usually calls General G. P. T. Beauregard “Beauregard,” he sometimes styles him as “the hero of Sumter and Manassas” (especially when Beauregard is about to mess up), and often as “the Creole.”

But perhaps a better basis for likening Foote to Homer is that Foote concentrates not on the clearest exposition of orders of battle (as a few curmudgeonly raters on Amazon enjoy pointing out) but on the emotions of the characters and groups. I know that the Confederacy survives 1862 and eventually loses in 1865, but Foote has me feeling the dread that filled Jefferson Davis’s people in that second summer of the war. It really feels like the war could end any minute. The author does this partly by shifting his narrator’s eye from Tennessee to Virginia, from the Valley to Richmond. He achieves the effect partly by quoting both generals and privates. I may not know exactly where Magruder’s corps was during the battle of Savage’s Station, but I know what it feels like to be in those woods.

But then again, I was just in those woods.

Life Imitates Foote

It seems fitting that I would make a comment about layers of meaningless organization on tax day. But the timing of today’s post is just as much a matter of happenstance as the coincidence that occurred last week.

On Wednesday morning, I read a passage in Shelby Foote’s history of the American Civil War in which General George McClellan became frustrated with his generals and with President Lincoln. Actually, I’ve read passages about that topic on several recent mornings, because McClellan was always frustrated with people who disagreed with him or thought him too dilatory. And since he liked unusual plans that elicited disagreement and was always dilatory, he spent all of his days of action on the stage of history in a state of frustration.

On the particular occasion I have in mind, the source of his frustration involved his twelve division commanders. In a straw vote, eight of the twelve agreed with McClellan’s tedious plan of moving the Army of the Potomac by water for an amphibious assault east of Richmond. That afternoon, after hearing about the vote, Lincoln made an executive order to organize the twelve divisions into four corps, and appointed the commanding generals himself, including three of the men who had voted against McClellan’s plan that morning. The furious McClellan could never understand that Lincoln actually intended the reorganization as a means to protect McClellan’s tenure. Some Senators, tired of waiting for the army to advance, had started calling for McClellan’s removal, and this mostly meaningless gesture of promoting a handful of generals who disagreed with a plan (but who, of course, dutifully followed it later) calmed the barking dogs for a while.

Then, at lunch on that same Wednesday, I heard that a certain director of a certain school of music in a certain university with which I have a certain relationship had created a new level of organization within the school. This unnamed school already has five levels of internal organizational structure, as well as a monthly meeting of the entire faculty. (Honestly. You can’t make this stuff up.) But some of the professors recently went together to the director’s office to complain that one of the structures (the one that mattered to them, I guess) was not sufficiently representative in that it did not proportionately reflect the constituency of the faculty. So the director concocted a new divisional scheme and declared the existence of a new committee, the members of which will be elected in a representative fashion by the faculty according to discipline or instrument type. Maybe this new (entirely powerless) body will quell hot tempers for a while. I won’t say that this director is as wise as Abraham Lincoln, but it sure seems that he took a page from Lincoln’s book – or from Foote’s.

Grant the Difference

Lincoln dealt with a lot of confident generals during the Civil War – at least vocally confident. To cut straight to the clearest example, George McClellan spent nine months amassing troops for an amphibious assault in eastern Virginia, sure that his plan offered the best way to win the war in one quick campaign. He defended his plan vehemently against every concern Lincoln raised over the course of those nine months, all the while taking the opportunity to parade his army through the streets of Washington and receive the adulation of the capital’s residents. But in the end, he accomplished little with his plan, except to bring Robert E. Lee onto the big stage.

In the meantime, Grant showed up in Missouri and Kentucky and Tennessee and started accomplishing things without much fanfare and with no parades. As Shelby Foote tells the story, Grant exhibited his unusual character right from the start. That character included a cool, phlegmatic acceptance of the unexpected. Born Hiram Ulysses Grant, West Point made a clerical mistake and enrolled him as Ulysses Simpson Grant. But Grant just went with it. Why fight the Army Academy? Or maybe he just enjoyed having the combination U. S. for his initials. His first expedition of the Civil War, at Belmont, Missouri, in November of 1861, resulted in defeat. But, true to his character, he kept his head during the fight and learned from his mistakes. (He made very few in the next four years.)

Three months later, having taken Ft. Henry, Grant delivered his famous ultimatum to the commander of nearby Ft. Donelson: “No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted.” And no other terms were offered. But quietly confident Grant let his commander, Henry Halleck, wire Washington and take credit for the good news. Still, the soldiers knew who had orchestrated the victory, and they found a new meaning for those mistaken initials: Unconditional Surrender Grant.

Later in the war, Grant developed a reputation for grim indifference to death. But the man just seemed able to accept the conditions of his job and showed no signs of turning duty into personal animosity for his opponents. During the Mexican War, he wrote to his fiancée, “If we have to fight, I would like to do it all at once and then make friends.” Twenty years later, when accepting Lee’s surrender, Grant displayed the same sentiment, letting the defeated officers keep their ceremonial swords and allowing all the defeated soldiers to head home with their horses so as to have means to start up their farms again. At his second inaugural address, Lincoln urged, “With malice toward none, with charity for all, let us strive to bind up the nation’s wounds.” Grant embodied those words.

Four Foote Deep

Over the last week, I read four passages of interpretation in Shelby Foote’s The Civil War that especially caught my interest. The first is just a phrase: the South, he says, started a “Conservative revolution.” The historical events that the word revolution most readily calls to my mind – the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Russian Revolution – all involve (theoretically) large segments of society overturning a smaller, privileged aristocracy. The leaders of the southern American states of 1861, by contrast, fought as an aristocratic minority. Foote’s simple phrase helped me see that rather astonishing difference.

Next comes a character summary of William L. Yancey, an Alabamian sent by the Confederate States to Europe to try to gain the support of France and England. “Nothing in his personality,” says Foote, “had shown that he would be armed with patience against discouragement or with coolness against rebuff, or indeed that he was in any way suited to a diplomatic post.” I don’t care so much about Yancey himself (except in that I’m happy that his mission failed) as I do about the generic description of diplomacy. If I judge myself honestly according to Foote’s short list of criteria, I have to blame myself for some past failures in negotiation.

The last two comments concern arguably the most fascinating figure in American history. Abraham Lincoln, the only American ever to lead military operations in the field while President, studied strategy textbooks in the first year of the War. Gen. George McClellan humored his Commander-in-Chief’s recommendations for battle plans, but as Foote tells it, Lincoln was the first Northener to understand the overall strategy that geography and population dictated: the South could quickly concentrate forces to win battles, so the North would have to make simultaneous attacks in multiple theaters. Well, if anyone else saw saw that truth earlier, it certainly wasn’t the cunctative McClellan. Lincoln, though, may only have been the first one with any authority to see the big picture. Neither Grant nor Lee were in charge of much by the end of 1861, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find that they were already thinking grand strategy themselves.

Any time I see a mention of Lincoln’s melancholy condition now, my attention is piqued. Joshua Shenk’s examination of Lincoln’s temperament (I wrote a little bit about it here) changed the way I think both about the sixteenth President and about myself. When Foote reports Lincoln’s statement from near the end of 1861, “The bottom is out of the tub,” he says that bemoaning the end of all hope was only Lincoln’s way of dealing with his melancholy, a plaint uttered to make reality seem less dire by comparison. “Lincoln was his own psychiatrist,” he comments. I know the danger in speaking out fears and doom. But I also know that some vocal worrying often jump-starts the process of solution-finding. I’m glad to see Foote recognize the possibility and praise Lincoln for it.

Shelby Foote’s Tragic Muse

Every time I start an account of the American Civil War, I get the feeling that I’m entering into a scripted tragedy. It helps that nineteenth-century people, especially public figures, spoke as if a playwright were crafting their words for posterity. So many memorable phrases pepper the exposition leading to Civil War: Calhoun’s “peculiar institution,” Seward’s “irrepressible conflict,” Lincoln’s (OK, actually Jesus’s) “house divided.” Seward and Lincoln together came up with “the better angels of our nature.” But sometimes the lines ironically sound too scripted to come from an author. What playwright would have dared to put John Brown on the scaffold and give him the line, “I John Brown an now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood”? Or how about Lincoln telling his friends at Springfield, “I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return”? It’s so improbably stilted and sentimental, he must have actually said it. (Come to think of it, maybe the nineteenth-century authors that sound so stilted and sentimental to us now were strict realists.)

But tragic drama is not just a series of line. Lines are spoken by characters, and characters push forward a plot. And in the Civil War tragedy, the plot’s events roll down with the pull of gravity to their inevitable cataclysm. Take Stephen Douglas and the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Thirty years of negotiation and compromise in Congress had kept the ripping seams of the nation held together by a few delicate threads. And then Douglas proposes overthrowing the compromise, tossing away the peace, for what? What did he care whether Nebraskans got to vote on slavery in their territory? His home state of Illinois was a free state, after all. And what did he get out of it in the end? A couple of years in the Senate and then an overwhelming loss to Lincoln in the presidential election. But once the blood started flowing on the Kansas-Missouri border, nothing would stop it until the surrender at Appomattox Court House.

Shelby Foote captures all the flavor of the tragedy in his monumental telling of the Civil War. His section on Gettysburg  – this section alone, published also on its own, has the length of a complete book – bears the title “Stars in Their Courses,” a biblical phrase suitable to the whole three-volume work and the predestined somberness that it shares with the book of Judges. Perhaps the most amazing aspect of Foote’s achievement is his ability to tell both the character-driven stories and the military actions with equally convincing detail.

The people who played out the tragedy of the American Civil War were my great-great-grandparents. I have pictures of some of them. I’ve talked to people who talked with them. With just two degrees of separation, they don’t really seem all that distant to me. But then Foote shows me just how different they were. When representatives of the seceded South Carolina come to Fort Sumter under a flag of truce, U. S. Army General Robert Anderson tells them he cannot give up the fort without losing his honor, although he knows his situation is untenable. His enemies, the men who will within hours pull the lanyards of the guns that will force the surrender, understand perfectly and shake his hand before departing to start four years of killing. During the bombardment, when after a couple minutes of silence the poorly supplied Federal fort resumes its meager, futile counter-volley, the South Carolinians actually cheer and applaud the determination of their foes. Oh, yes, these people come from a different culture. I grew up during the Vietnam War, and I don’t remember any handshaking or cheering.