The Civil War: A Narrative

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The Civil War: A Narrative (1974), a three volume, 3,000-page, 1.2 million-word history of the American Civil War by Shelby Foote, is the work for which he is best known. While it touches on political and social themes, the main thrust of the work is military history. The individual volumes include Fort Sumter to Perryville (1958), Fredericksburg to Meridian (1963), and Red River to Appomattox (1974).

Contents

[edit] Writing

On the strength of the novel Shiloh, Random House asked Foote for a short Civil War history. Foote soon realized that the project would require much more time and energy. Random House agreed, and using the money from his 1955 Guggenheim Fellowship (Foote won Guggenheims also in 1956 and 1959), Foote set out to write the trilogy’s first volume, Fort Sumter to Perryville. This 400,000-word account was published in 1958. By 1963 Foote had finished the second volume, Fredericksburg to Meridian.

In 1964 he began Volume 3, Red River to Appomattox, but found himself repeatedly distracted by the ongoing events in the nation and was not able to finish and publish it until 1974. Writing the third volume took as many years as had the first two combined.

[edit] Volumes

[edit] Fort Sumter to Perryville

The first volume covers the roots of the war to the Battle of Perryville on October 8, 1862. All the significant battles are here, from Bull Run through Shiloh, the Seven Days Battles, Second Manassas to Antietam, and Perryville in the fall of 1862, but so are the smaller and often equally important engagements on both land and sea: Ball's Bluff, Fort Donelson, Pea Ridge, Island No. Ten, New Orleans, Monitor versus Merrimac, and Stonewall Jackson's Valley Campaign.

[edit] Fredericksburg to Meridian

The second volume is dominated by the almost continual confrontation of great armies. The starting point for this volume is the Battle of Fredericksburg, fought on December 13, 1862, between General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac commanded by Maj. Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside. For the fourth time, the Army of the Potomac attempts to take Richmond, resulting in the bloodbath at Fredericksburg. Then Joseph Hooker tries again, only to be repulsed at Chancellorsville as Stonewall Jackson turns his flank, resulting in Jackson's death.

In the West, one of the most complex and determined sieges of the war has begun. Here, Ulysses S. Grant's seven relentless efforts against Vicksburg demonstrate Lincoln and Grant's determination.

With Vicksburg finally under siege, Lee again invades the North. The three-day conflict at Gettysburg receives plenty of attention in the book. (The lengthy chapter on Gettysburg has also been published as a separate book, Stars in Their Courses.)

[edit] Red River to Appomattox

Foote brings to a close the story of four years of turmoil and strife that altered American life forever. The final volume opens with the beginning of the two final, major confrontations of the war: Grant against Lee in Virginia, and Sherman pressing Johnston in North Georgia in 1864. The narrative describes the events and battles from Sherman's march to the sea to Lincoln's assassination and the surrender of Lee at Appomattox.

[edit] Shelby Foote's comments on writing

I am what is called a narrative historian. Narrative history is getting more popular all the time but it's not a question of twisting the facts into a narrative. It's not a question of anything like that. What it is, is discovering the plot that's there just as the painter discovered the colors in shadows or Renoir discovered these children. I maintain that anything you can possibly learn about putting words together in a narrative form by writing novels is especially valuable to you when you write history. There is no great difference between writing novels and writing histories other than this: If you have a character named Lincoln in a novel that's not Abraham Lincoln, you can give him any color eyes you want to. But if you want to describe the color of Abraham Lincoln's, President Lincoln's eyes, you have to know what color they were. They were gray. So you're working with facts that came out of documents, just like in a novel you are working with facts that came out of your head or most likely out of your memory. Once you have control of those facts, once you possess them, you can handle them exactly as a novelist handles his facts. No good novelist would be false to his facts, and certainly no historian is allowed to be false to his facts under any circumstances. I've never known, at least a modern historical instance, where the truth wasn't superior to distortion in every way. — Shelby Foote seminar excerpt, New York State Writers Institute, March 20, 1997.

[edit] Detailed release information

  • The Civil War, A Narrative (3 volumes), Random House, 1974. ISBN 0-394-74913-8
  • The Civil War: A Narrative. Vol. 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville. New York: Random House, November 12, 1958. 848 pages. ISBN 0-394-41948-0
  • The Civil War: A Narrative. Vol. 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian. New York: Random House, October 12, 1963. 1,000 pages. ISBN 0-394-41951-0
  • The Civil War: A Narrative. Vol. 3: Red River to Appomattox. New York: Random House, November 12, 1974. 1,120 pages. ISBN 0-394-46512-1

[edit] References