Shelby Foote’s Civil War History Defends America Against Insatiable Haters Like Ta-Nehisi Coates

From PJM:

White House chief of staff John Kelly’s interview Monday night with Laura Ingraham, in which he expressed the mundane and historically straightforward view that “the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War,” has produced a spasm of simple-minded and myopic commentary. 

Our intellectual class, unable to think about the war between North and South in anything but the most reductive terms, has decided not only that Kelly suffers from “nostalgia” about the Confederacy, but that Ken Burns and Shelby Foote should be consigned to the dustbin of history. 

Specifically, Kelly has been excoriated for daring to call Robert E. Lee an “honorable man” and expressing the same view of the Civil War put forward in Burns’ enormously popular 1990 Civil War documentary. Up until this week, Burns’ series had been a celebrated work—a restored version of the series aired on PBS just two years ago. 

But now, at least according to Jonathan Chait of New York magazine, Burns’ masterpiece is a “disaster,” mostly because it relied heavily on interviews with Foote. Foote is, of course, the author of his own celebrated Civil War masterpiece, a three-volume narrative history of the war, each about a thousand pages long, that stands as a triumph of American history and literature. 

The trilogy, which began as a contract with Random House to write a short one-volume history to mark the war’s approaching centennial, took Foote 20 years to write. The volumes, published between 1958 and 1974, were almost immediately hailed as a seminal contribution to American letters. 

Writing in The New Republic, literary scholar and critic Louis D. Rubin Jr. said Foote’s trilogy “is a model of what military history can be.” The New York Times Book Review called it “a remarkable achievement, prodigiously researched, vigorous, detailed, absorbing.” (Presumably by today’s standards these reviewers would be upbraided for praising Foote.) 

So no wonder that Foote, who died in 2005, figures prominently in Burns’ documentary (all told, he’s featured in about an hour of the 11-hour series). His deep southern drawl and magnetic on-camera presence make him captivating figure for the screen, but Foote is compelling above all because he’s an abiding authority on the Civil War. 

For the Left, Compromise Was a Crime But because we live in an ignorant age, Foote’s reputation is getting dragged through the mud. In an article noting that White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended Kelly’s comments by citing the Burns documentary, Chait writes that Burns relies heavily on Foote, and “Foote presented Lee and other Confederate fighters as largely driven by motives other than preserving human property, and bemoaned the failure of the North and South to compromise (a compromise that would inevitably have preserved slavery).” 

This should be dismissed as a simple case of historical ignorance, especially since it’s been repeated so often by a Wikipedia-reliant press corps over the past few days. Even someone with a cursory knowledge of the Civil War should know that the war came about, as all wars do, because of a failure to compromise. 

In our case, the entire history of the United States prior to outbreak of war in 1861 was full of compromises on the question of slavery. It began with the Three-Fifths Compromise written into the U.S. Constitution and was followed by the Missouri Compromise of 1820 (which prohibited slavery north of the 36°30’ parallel, excluding Missouri), the Compromise of 1850, then the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which repealed the Missouri Compromise and eventually led to the election of Abraham Lincoln and the subsequent secession of the southern states. Through all this, we inched toward emancipation, albeit slowly. 

In other words, the breakdown of all those decades of compromise did indeed lead to the Civil War.

GO READ THE WHOLE THING.