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from Gainesville, Florida Yeah, yeah, Hello, I'm Mike Cannon. And this is conversation Native Mississippian, now resident in Memphis, Tennessee. My guest on this conversation is a novelist turned historian. His works of fiction include Tournament Follow Me Down, Love in a Dry Season, Shiloh and most recently in 1978.

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September, September 1958 he published the first volume of a three volume history of the Civil War, which 15 nominations for the National Book Award. Our novelist turned historian is Shelby Foote, and we shall be here for a conversation in just a moment. Conversation from the University of Florida.

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A discussion of social, political, scientific and religious issues of the day. Your host is Dr Michael Vegan and professor of history and ethics and assistant dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Florida. Well, Mr Foot, welcome to conversation and welcome to the campus of the University of Florida.

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Thank you. I'm glad to be here. You're here for a series of, uh, seminars and visits with our history, faculty and others. And this evening, immediately following our conversation, you're going to give a public lecture in G p a building on campus. I welcome this opportunity to talk with you about history as well as about fiction, but particularly about your three volume work on the Civil War.

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Ah, were you of a mind to write the kind of three volume series that you did when you first started out? I know that in the beginning of the very first volume, or perhaps it was at the close, I I forget which you said that you were going to bracket the story within certain terms.

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And they were for the first volume, Fort Sumpter to Perryville, the second Fredericksburg to Meridian and the third Red River to Appomattox. You stuck to that scheme, Didn't you write? Actually, at the very beginning, it was something quite different. I had just finished five novels in about five years, and it moved to Memphis from Mississippi, and I was going to start a new series of five novels with a different, uh, goal.

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In any case, at that point, Bennett Cerf asked me if I would inaugurate a new series. Random House was starting of histories by riding a short history of the Civil War, and it seemed like a good idea to mark that pause between these groups of five novels by writing a short history of the Civil War.

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So I said I would. Uhh It was to run about 200 words, and I began it, and I hadn't. I wasn't a week into it before I saw there was no sense in my trying to write a short history of the Civil War. And if I had anything to say about the Civil War, it would come from applying a novelist methods to this material.

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So I wrote to Bennett and to my editor at random then and said that I would rather write a three volume, full fledged histories who I don't know, what the reaction was at the meeting they must have had afterwards. But about 10 days later, uh, I got a letter from them saying, Go ahead, fine.

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So I went, spread eagle at it and organized it first into the three volumes. And then each of the three volumes has three chapters and books and and went all out. I thought at that time it might take me, Oh, maybe as much as five years to do the thing I knew so little about the writing of history that I thought it would go a lot faster than writing a novel way.

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I had to think of what was going to happen was the park. Obviously, all I have to do is pick up a few books and find out what happened. That shows you how little I knew about the writing of history when I began it. But I was totally fascinated from the star, and the fascination never let up.

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I never regretted that I had begun it, though it took me 20 years to do it. And I think I know why. The Civil War at least and maybe any good historical subjects gave me as much room as any writer I ever needed to move around.

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I felt no more cramped by writing about Civil war than I would feel cramped. But writing about life. It's a huge subject. It's the American Iliad, and I was absolutely delighted to start finished to be involved in. It was a fascinating thing that as a novelist, you turn your obvious insights into human nature and writing skills to the task of reconstructing events century before your own time and and to do it not as a work of imagination but as a work of historical reconstruction.

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There's no pointed anybody writing history. If he's not going to do everything he possibly can to stick to the facts. There's no excuse for any invent invention that there's no excuse for any distortion. The truth is always superior to anybody's distortion or invention, so it becomes a question of truth.

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But having discovered what you believe to anyhow, to be the truth, then to bring technical skills that a novelist knows to bear, there's nothing wrong with that, although you'll find some professional historians who a mistrustful of what I call good writing. Yes, and I remember the comment you made in a bibliographies Kel note about Lew Wallace, the author, the fiction writer the novelist writer Ben Hur, among other books whose account of the Council of War before the march on Donaldson was discounted by some professional historians because he was quote a novelist, a writer of fiction.

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Yes, he said, testimony by a writer of fiction is all the ways to be taken with a lot of salt, especially a popular one. Well, I in reading your work I I see you in the company of Douglas, Southall Freeman and Bruce Caton, Allan Nevins and my all time favorite, Francis Parkman.

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They were all great narrative writers. Storytellers? Yes. That's good company to be in. I'm pleased to be there, right. Well, you deserve to be. I want to get back to the brackets within which you place the story. I believe anybody who knows the slightest bit about the Civil War and I don't pretend to know more than the slightest bit can place the start of the story at Fort Sumpter.

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But what is Perryville and what did that mean to you as a let me say at the start that each of these subtitles of each of the volumes is an Eastern theater name and a Western theater name. And that helps to emphasize I hope that the story is concerned with the whole geographical panorama of the war.

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As for why they were chosen, Perryville is a is a battle that was fought, uh, on the eve of Bragg's retreat from his Kentucky campaign. And I've always thought that not nearly enough attention was paid to Bragg's Kentucky campaign, which, incidentally, was far more successful than Lee's Maryland campaign, which ended in Sharpsburg, And this helps to emphasize that oversight.

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And so in the second volume with Meridian, which few people ever heard of Fredericksburg to Meridian, right Meridian is Sherman's sort of preview of his march through Georgia. Only he made it on a far more limited scale through the sort of middle of Mississippi, so that the Meridian campaign is a very important campaign.

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If you want to understand what follows in Georgia, using these names in the titles gave them a kind of emphasis that I thought was needed. You have so many Human Touch is in the story when Sherman makes his triumphal march through Washington and finally reaches at the head of his troops, the White House.

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Reviewing stand, he he marches up smartly to salute and shake the hand of President Johnson, and then pointedly ignored Stanton. He thought that Stanton had insulted him and his army, and he was not about to shake up Man. There's so many wonderful human touches that make the telling of the tale so attractive.

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I certainly hope so. They belong there, they part of the story. It must be remembered that Our Civil War is our Iliad. And it was but enacted by men as much as the Iliad was, uh, Abraham Lincoln is is just as real as Agamemnon. Uh, Stonewall Jackson is just as real as Hector and so on, right down the line and they play their roles and anyone who gets involved in the Civil War.

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And as I said before, for all I know, any historical period begins to recognize that he is in a high drama and it is played out before you. And I do not mean by that that you pump any emotion or you're a supply of false theatricality.

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It's not a question of pumping those things in its finding them and tell the truth about them, and they will come out of their own accord. Oscar Wilde. The Many Acute things Oscar Wilde said he spoke often of nature imitating art. You can find an artistic form in a perfectly natural course of events.

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Uh, it does imitate art. It has a first act second and the third act, and, uh, I've seen it time after time again, and things that happened, that's a good paradox. You did not have a thesis as such in your trilogy, If I might call it that as a narrative writer, as a storyteller, you wished simply to recreate the experience of the war and convey that to your reader.

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Yet there was a small thesis hidden among all your words and years, and I think you acknowledge that in your bibliographies, kel note. Namely, that the West was as important in the conflict as was the East. The battle important. The Battle of Vicksburg was just as significant as the Battle of Gettysburg I have.

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I do not claim that it was more important, but to say that it wasn't as important is ridiculous. Certainly, the loss of Vicksburg had enormous consequences. Uh, and very practical. One switch. The Battle of Gettysburg, it seems to me, did not have that doesn't make Vicksburg greater than Gettysburg.

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Makes it absurd to claim the Gettysburg is greater. The battle of the siege of Vicksburg lost us. The trans Mississippi, Missouri, Arkansas, Texas cut off from us, and that is of enormous importance. The Virginians dominated civil Southern Civil War history for 75 years after the war, and when you read a Virginian just as Robert E.

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Lee himself. When he spoke with my country, he met Virginia. That's the way Virginians are to this day. And they think of the Confederacy as Virginia, plus some adjunctive territory out there where vague things went on. I don't I don't agree that at all. You know you well, I haven't gotten to the third volume yet.

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Let me do that. First Red River to Appomattox again. A mathematics we would all recognize as the place of surrender. But what was Red River? The Red River is prelude to the 18 64 campaign both by Sherman and by Grant. And it was a job Banks was given to move out the Red River in an attempt to move into the cotton lands of Texas.

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It was a total fiasco. He was retreated and sent pell mell down the down the Red River. And it has its farcical aspect in spite of men being killed. And it makes a good opening for the terrific drama and bloodshed of that last year of the war.

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I'm also interested in Jefferson Davis the way you portray Jefferson Davis because he brackets the story told in all three volumes you begin the first volume with his rising from his place in the Senate of the United States to declare the necessity of his resignation. Now that his home state has seceded from the union, and at the end of the third volume, we find him captured by the union forces, and you seem to treat gently or to mitigate the fact that he was found in women's clothing.

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Uh, it was not true is one thing that makes it easy to mitigate it. He had, uh, he and his wife had raincoats made out of the same material, and it was raining. And he grabbed a coat and threw it over his head as he left the tent intended to get on his horse and write off.

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And that's the origin of the myth that he was dressed in a hoop skirt and pantaloons that happened to have been found in his wife's baggage skirt. That's right, Bonham. Later you put on the show is called Jeff Davis in flight, and he put on a show of an actor enacting Jeff Davis in a hoop skirt and pantaloons, running off and being captured.

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How do you read him? Looking back over the story that you told I can best characterized by saying I agree with Robert E. Lee. Someone asked Lee after the war. Uh, what did you think of Mr Davis as president and commander in chief? And, uh, Li said, I don't think anyone could have done a better job, and I person don't know of anyone who could have done as good a job, and I'll go with that.

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I found Davis, uh, to be a very attractive man. It's been almost a historical conspiracy against Davis to make him out a bloodless, patent unbending, stiff man with no walk to him. Ah, that is totally untrue. He's a warm, friendly man, a great admirer and quota of the verse of Robert Burns.

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I can't tell you how many examples I could give you to say that the opposite of that is true. His letter to his wife, his feelings for his Children, his deep sense of responsibility to the people and, in many cases, his very sound judgment as to what should be done in a extremely difficult situation.

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I admire Davis Great. He's one of the heroes. As you might say of my book, I wanted to ask you about Lincoln, too. But first, uh, say that I thought you attempted a very even handed approach to both sides in that conflict. The union and the Confederate story.

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Yes, it's the best story. You allowed a certain sympathy for the underdog, as you said, but allowing for that you made an effort to tell a story of gallantry that appeared on both sides of an epic event in our in our nation's history. That's where the truth is that gallantry was on both sides.

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Indeed it was. And if the Southerners were more daring, that was because they had to take greater risks with the odds against them. Ah, I It interests me that they were in my mind anyhow, to authentic geniuses. That war one was a statesman on the northern side.

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Abraham Lincoln and the other was a military man on the southern side. Bedford Forrest. I do not mean by that that forest was the greatest general of the war. I just mean that he had a particular genius, which came out Ah, when I the first five or six years that I was writing this, uh, in Memphis, of course.

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And I wrote the whole thing in Memphis. Mary Forest Bradley, the general's granddaughter, lived there, and I had thought long and hard about this thing, and I decided these two men were the authentic geniuses in the war. So Miss Bradley, who was always very nice to me and I'm internally in her debt, for she let me swing the general saber around my head one time.

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I appreciate that very much. Anyway, I called her and said, Miss Bradley, I thought long and hard on this, and I've decided that the Civil War produced to authentic geniuses. One was Abraham Lincoln, and the other was your grandfather, Bedford Foreign. There was a long silence until the end of the phone, and she said, Well, you know, we never thought much of Mr Lincoln and my family, and she did not like her grandfather's name being coupled with that scamp Abraham Lincoln.

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You know, you tell so many wonderful stories about Lincoln in the the overall war story. Every once in a while, you pause to say something about him as a human being. I remember when was it Carl shirts or Schultz shirts? Wrote Lincoln, a very bitter, condemning letter and Lincoln wrote back and say and said, Well, you blame me, I blame you.

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Now why don't you come to the White House and we'll talk this over? And And shirts came and, uh, found Lincoln seated before the fire in his slippers. And Lincoln told him to pull a chair up close. And then Lincoln lean forward and patted him on the knee.

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Yeah, and said, No, I'm not such a bad fellow, am I? That's right. When you get when you get all the stress like that, come see me. We can straighten things like that was that Well, Lincoln had a special and powerful relationship with his generals. Didn't he really ran the war and he really ran the war.

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And, uh, if you want to say what was wrong with the Union war effort through at least the first three years of the war, one of the things wrong with the Union war was Abraham Lincoln. Every union general in the field had to look back over his shoulder because Lincoln was practicing being a military genius and he was giving him advice, and the worst thing he was doing is Jake and the rug out from under him, he would say, You go ahead.

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I give you carte blanche. You do what you think is best. The next thing, man, you He'd be fired. You must remember the Army. Potomac had six commanders before Grant and Lincoln was in there when Grant came along. And let's be fair here to Lincoln. It wasn't until he got Grant that he got a man.

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He felt he could trust enough to leave him alone. And he let Grant do whatever Grant wanted to do. Lincoln backed him up and punished him with the troops as best he could. But until then, he was in such distress about these one defeat after another, trying one general after another.

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And he got some strange beliefs. When he appointed John Pope. Some of his advisers said the pope's are all lives and bluster us. I think I don't think you ought to make that man, Lincoln said. I don't know any reason why are the bluster Shouldn't be a good general and appointed him in?

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Yeah, disastrously. How good a general, in your estimation, was Grant? Did he win because he had enormous resources and manpower, or did he win because he was a good tactician and strategist. There are two or three different grants. The grant of the Vicksburg campaign, where it was his side, that was, uh in the difficulty is a very different grant from the grant of the rapid and to the James fight against Robert E.

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Lee. And you never want to belittle Grant by saying that he had enormous resources. He simply fought the way he should have fought with those resources. He did not take chances that he would have taken if he had not had those resources ranch a very great general.

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And anyone who's ever studied his campaign's knows it very soon. He has a simplicity to him. He has a doggedness. He has some unattractive qualities that turn out to be virtues. For instance, he would never accept blame for anything under any circumstances. If he was surprised to shallow, it was somebody else's fault.

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Mules somebody's fault, not here. He would never take blame for anything. One time, he said, he regretted that he that he ordered the attack at Pearl Harbor. That's where he lost 8000 men in about five minutes. Not like the harbor would I say Cold Harbor. Wrong war.

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Yeah. Um, who was the most impressive personality in all the war exempting now, Lincoln and, uh, Davis and Grant, uh, going down to the lower echelon. Sometimes eccentricity can be impressive. And if that's the case, and by no means only for those reasons, Stonewall Jackson is certainly one of the most fascinating people in that war.

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Bedford Forrest, who I mentioned earlier, is a fascinating in their little known ones like Richard Taylor and Patrick Cleburne, men that are almost forgotten now who are enormously attractive, man, It's very difficult to name a favorite with such a crowd of people. Yes, and there was such sadness at the death of the wounded, lying on slopes, crying out in pain.

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You tell this so tellingly and we can't conceive, so we can't conceive of it impossible. And all the bravery if you and I go out to Gettysburg today and we we stand there on Seminary Ridge and look across at Cemetery Ridge and imagine that thing studied with guns and somebody comes up and tells you shall be You're gonna move across that valley and up that ridge you can't conceive of saying anything except no, I'm not.

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There's no way I'm going across that valley. What? Enormous. But they weren't courage. They all went. They went. But there was so much sadness. And I remember you tell the story of a relatively insignificant soldier George would who was shot by an errant round that passed through two tents.

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And after all the body after the war was over. And as he lay dying, he told someone, Was it his physician, the chaplain, the chaplain? He said, I hope that in heaven, you one does not have to remember all the agony of these last three years.

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I have not spent these last three years in a good way at all. You're a brave man. No. Bye. Are Americans well advised to study the civil war in order to understand themselves? Yes. Uhh. In fact, I I think that an understanding of the Civil War is a prerequisite to understanding what made America what it is because the Civil War had such a large hand in that, uh, there are a lot of might have been is could the South have wanted what is the most critical battle?

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And it's not in the other. The truth of the matter is, I think it can be seen fairly clearly now that the South only had one chance of winning that war, and that was to get English and French intervention, which they were not going to get.

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No way they were going to get. And they finally knew that Davis any I knew it and abandoned, even hoping for him. But it's it's foolish to say that if the South had done this, it could have won. The North fought that war with one hand behind his back, and if it had had a tougher war, it would have brought that other hand out from behind its back.

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Few of us realized how much the North was doing. In addition to fighting that war, the Homestead Act was an operation. People were settling the West. Great institutions like Vanessa and Emmett began during the war and the bloodiest spring of the war, 18 64 the Harvard Yale boat race as well.

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The North did not put out anything like a fraction of its effort that the South had put of itself at the end of that war, and if the South had brought the crunch down. As people say, if after first Manassas they'd marched on Washington, there would by no means have won the war.

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The world is distant for people in the north. Right? And there was no, uh, no stigma attached to a man who hired a substitute or pages $200 to be exempt. Uh, no stigma attached to that. Uh, you got your contracted in Ireland or Germany or in the South with a black man to come take your place and, uh, in the South.

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You couldn't do that because the young ladies wouldn't speak to you anymore and your family would be disgraced. But there was none of that in the North. A final question, a series of questions. Do you think the South is still the distinctive region of the United States?

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Yes. I don't think there's any doubt about that. I think that its distinctiveness is being diminished by the homogenization that's going on in the whole nation, and I somewhat regret it. But there are gains there, too. We've given up some bad things along with some good things, and there are many traditions that remain from the antebellum period and the war period.

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Yes, I hope that it's the best of them that survive. Sometimes one sees a, a sign, a bumper sticker or a flag with something emblazoned on it that is belligerent in town. Well, the best of us is, uh, I'll find this for each other. I hope are decent manners, uh, is very much present among the poor people as it is among the rich and a sort of independence, which makes its claim as as an individual.

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The yeoman farmer is still a pretty stiff back creature in the South. He doesn't take any a lot of fooling around with, and that's the way a man ought to be. We have virtues, which I think we have not lost, and I hope we will not lose.

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And we have not lost our accent or you at least have not lost yours. You can't grow up in the Mississippi Delta without this thing. That's right. You live in Memphis, but you're close by Mississippi, right? And where exactly in Mississippi were you born and raised right in the middle of the Mississippi Delta?

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The town is Greenville. It's on the Mississippi River, about 150 miles south of Memphis, and you're writing a novel now that has a Mississippi locale. All of my novels have had Mississippi locales, and I suppose I always will. Did you know James Faulkner? William Faulkner? I'm sorry.

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Yes, I knew well spent nights in his home. And, yes, we were good friends, you know, not close friends who also wrote about Mississippi. Indeed, his unique way. Yes, Mr Faulkner did indeed write about it. Have you ever written a novel about the war that you've recounted so thoroughly as a historian?

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Only one novel called Shiloh, which is only about the two day fight at Shiloh. It's an attempt to deal with the facts of the case, it's told from all sides, and any historical character in the novel is not allowed to say or do anything that I don't know for a fact he didn't say or do.

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For instance, Boy God is not going to take the hero aside and give him a little advice on his love life. And if they bore, God doesn't do anything on the field of shallow that I don't know that he did do, and he doesn't say anything that I don't know, he said.

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Well, as a novelist, you have a special gift that you bring to the craft of history. And that's evident from your great work, the Civil War. A narrative, Uh, I've learned greatly reading in its pages and now talking with you. Shelby Foote, distinguished novelist and historian.

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Guest lecture on our campus at the University of Florida. I thank you very much for being with me on conversation. Thank you. I enjoyed being Yeah, no.