James Madison College
Michigan State University
Draft: 8/29/05
With The Civil War: A Narrative, Shelby Foote composed what he meant to
become a classic on America, a book that deserved to survive time’s inevitable
winnowing of texts to become one of the few books that would form the opinions of
future readers. Despite his folksy story-telling and easy-mannered hospitality, Foote
pursued a very elite ambition, one that required a high-opinion of his own skill as well as
of the work of the writer. Stuart Chapman, Foote’s first biographer, claimed in Shelby
Foote: A Writer’s Life, that Foote “longed to be part of the [southern] culture’s elite”
(xix); but this accurate observation underestimated Foote’s ambition by a mile: he wished
to survive not merely among the cultural leaders of a single region and era of America,
but of America itself; even more, he showed by the company he kept (and did not keep,
in the form of footnotes) that he wished to belong among the classic authors of the West,
among Homer and Anaximander, Tacitus and Gibbon, Proust and Faulkner.
Foote himself claimed that his narrative of the Civil War was akin to an American
Iliad. Yet Homer’s war-focused epic was famous for having unified disparate tribes to
form a culture’s central linguistic and religious text. Just how far could Foote’s Homeric
ambition reach under modern multicultural and multi-religious circumstances? At least
this far, we believe: Foote composed his narrative of the American Civil War in order to
present a new non-sectional account of the War, focused on a unified vision of America
which the War made possible. Such a vision of America would inevitably appear
southern and thus merely sectional because Foote judged the reigning cultural consensus
to be too northern or sectional in outlook; the only way to bring about the balance that
Foote sought with respect to all regions and actors in the events was to challenge certain
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Convention