Confederates in the Attic (23 page)

I asked him why he bothered answering it. “Stupid stubbornness,” he said. “I’ve worked my whole life without a secretary or research assistant. I will not let all this hoorah make me hire one, or take my name out of the book. I don’t want to live in a different way.”

Then, leaning back in his chair, Foote began to speak a bit more personally, as I’d hoped he would. “It’s been a helluva century,” he went on. “I was born during the First World War, spent my adolescence in the Depression and came of age in the Second World War. This is the bloodiest century there ever was.” He paused, smiling into his pipe. “Now I’m living to see another terrible thing—the South joining the party of Lincoln.”

Republicans had recently won a number of congressional seats across the South, in some cases for the first time since Reconstruction. I asked Foote how the party of Lincoln had been viewed in his youth. He put down his pipe, cleared his throat and recited a tuneless ditty:

Foote chuckled. “When I was thirteen or so, I knew reams of obscene doggerel about Lincoln, but that’s the only bit I remember.”

I threw away the rest of my canned questions and listened to Foote reminisce about his childhood in Greenville, Mississippi. In the 1920s and 30s, he said, the sting of Civil War defeat was still so vivid that Mississippians refused to observe July 4th, the day Vicksburg fell. Only the post office—a federal facility—closed for the day.

“I remember in the 1930s there was a family from Ohio in town, God knows why,” Foote recalled, “and on July Fourth they drove their car up on the levee and spread a blanket and had a picnic. They didn’t set the brakes on the car and it ran down into the Mississippi River and everyone said, ‘It served them right for celebrating the Fourth of July.’” Foote chuckled again, adding, “We despised Yankees, just on the face of it.”

Greenville was more tolerant of other outsiders. The Delta town attracted large numbers of foreign immigrants. Foote’s maternal grandfather, Morris Rosenstock, was a Viennese Jew who emigrated to America in the 1880s, found work as a plantation bookkeeper and married his employer’s daughter. Until the age of eleven, Foote attended synagogue each Saturday with his mother. He didn’t recall any anti-Semitism in Greenville; there were more Jews than Baptists in the local country club. But Foote never took to Judaism, and as he got older he realized the broader society wasn’t so accepting as Greenville. This became painfully obvious at college in North Carolina, when the fraternity his friends had joined turned Foote down because of his background.

“I knew all the trouble I’d have down the line,” he said of his Jewish heritage. “I was always not wanting to take on that kind of trouble. It just added one more problem, an added awkwardness to life.” So in his twenties he was baptised and confirmed as an Episcopalian. But he didn’t take to Christianity, either. “I never had much use for turning the other cheek,” he said. “I always buck back, particularly when any authority leans on me.”

This combativeness cost him dearly. Eager to fight the Germans, Foote joined the National Guard in 1939 and rose to the rank of artillery captain. While stationed in Northern Ireland, preparing for
the Allied invasion of the Continent, he tangled with a colonel who he felt had insulted one of his men. Soon after, Foote fudged a mileage report so he could visit Belfast, two miles beyond the fifty-mile limit for weekend trips in army vehicles. The colonel and another superior had him court-martialed for falsifying documents.

Returning to America, Foote enlisted as a private in the marines and went through boot camp. But the war ended just as he was bound for combat again, this time in the Pacific. To paraphrase what he’d said of the Civil War, Foote had missed the great trauma of his own generation’s adolescence.

“I felt cheated, as though I was dealt out of the big adventure,” he said. Foote also wondered if the experience of war might have enriched his later writing. “I often wonder how much I could have learned from being shot at and having others fall all around me—assuming I wasn’t one of the ones who fell.”

What Foote had done instead was marry the Belfast woman he’d gone to visit on the fateful trip that led to his court-martial. This struck me as more romantic than going off to fight, but Foote didn’t see it that way. “I felt as though I’d made a fool of myself,” he said. Foote also felt he’d fallen short of what was expected of him as a Southerner and a descendant of Confederates. “Growing up in Mississippi, they were the embodiment of gallantry and chivalry,” he said. “You were expected to measure up to those standards, most of all with regard to physical and moral courage.”

Foote gestured toward a framed certificate on the wall from the United Confederate Veterans. It was dated 1892 and honored his great-grandfather, Colonel Hezekiah William Foote. Before the War, Hezekiah owned five plantations and over one hundred slaves. “I was given clearly to understand as a child that I was a Southern aristocrat,” Foote said.

His great-grandfather had opposed secession but fought without hesitation for the South. “Just as I would have,” Foote said. “I’d be with my people, right or wrong. If I was against slavery, I’d still be with the South. I’m a man, my society needs me, here I am. The difference between North and the South in the War is that there was no stigma attached to the Northern man who paid two hundred
dollars to not go to war, or who hired a German replacement. In the South you could have done that, but no one would. You’d have been scorned.”

Foote’s retroactive allegiance to the Confederacy surprised me. It was the honor-bound code of the Old South. One’s people before one’s principles. The straitjacket of scorn and stigma. “It’s a bunch of shit really,” Foote conceded. “But all Southerners subscribe to this code to some degree, at least male Southerners of my generation.” In Foote’s view, this same stubborn pride had sustained Southerners during the Civil War. “It’s what kept them going through Appomattox, that attitude of ‘I won’t give up, I will not be insulted.’”

It took almost a century after Appomattox for Confederate blood to cool. Southerners’ “abiding love” for Franklin Delano Roosevelt tempered their prideful regionalism, Foote said; so, too, did the patriotic fervor surrounding World War II. It was in 1945 that Mississippians finally dropped their eighty-year ban on celebrating Independence Day. This was also when many Southerners stopped referring to the Civil War as the War Between the States. “It was a big admission, if you think about it,” Foote said. “A civil war is a struggle between two parts of one nation, which implies that the South was never really separate or independent.”

Nonetheless, Southern identity—Foote’s included—remained fierce. His National Guard unit was known as “the Dixie Division” and its members stood at attention each time the anthem of the Old South was played. As he trained for war against the Germans, Foote devoured books on Stonewall Jackson. He saw a Union monument for the first time in 1946 when he traveled to Santa Fe with his boyhood friend and fellow writer, Walker Percy. “We immediately made plans to dynamite it,” Foote said.

They didn’t, though the idea obviously stuck with Percy, who later used it in his writing to mock the South’s obsession with the Civil War. In his 1967 novel
The Last Gentleman
, Percy’s young Southern protagonist confides to a doctor: “When I was at Princeton, I blew up a Union monument. It was only a plaque hidden in the weeds behind the chemistry building, presented by the class of 1885 in memory of those who made the supreme sacrifice to suppress the infamous rebellion, or something like that. It offended me. I synthesized a liter of
trinitrotoluene in the chemistry lab and blew it up one Saturday afternoon. But no one ever knew what had been blown up. It seemed I was the only one who knew the monument was there. It was thought to be a Harvard prank.”

Like Percy, Foote valued fiction above all else. He never finished college, nor did he ever receive any formal training as an historian. It was only as a break between novels that Foote accepted a commission to write a “short history” of the Civil War—a project that grew to three volumes and consumed twenty years of his career. “It took me five times as long to write a history of that War as it took the country to fight it,” he said.

When he finished in 1974, Foote told Dick Cavett in a TV interview that he was busily “forgetting everything I know about the Civil War” so he could return to fiction. Despite having spent so long on the history, Foote regarded himself as a novelist, not a scholar (many professional historians agreed, sniping privately about his success and his anecdotal style). But the Ken Burns series catapulted Foote back to his historical work, and forward into the strange world of Civil War renown. Five years after the Burns series aired in 1990, Foote still couldn’t go anywhere without having copies of his books thrust at him to sign—something he refused to do.

“When you sign a book for a friend, it means something, but it means nothing if you sign everyone’s,” he explained. “Also, I find autograph-seekers obnoxious, very unmannerly. I rebuff them for that reason, too.”

I was glad I’d forgotten to bring several of his books to sign. I also sensed that Foote’s initial aloofness, which I’d taken for a distinctly un-Southern frostiness on his part, was more akin to gentlemanly reserve: an old-fashioned, rather English sense of friendship and respect for personal space. There are people one knows and people one doesn’t. One shouldn’t cheapen the former by feigning intimacy with the latter. Like so much else about Foote, there was irony here. A private, almost reclusive man who wrote with a dip-pen and distrusted modernity, Foote had gained his greatest fame appearing before millions of television viewers in the guise of a warm and folksy raconteur.

Many Southerners I’d spoken to felt betrayed by Foote’s appearance
in the Burns series, which diehards regarded as wicked Northern propaganda. Foote disagreed, though he did feel “there is some justice to the claim that slavery was overemphasized.” To Foote, the Confederacy’s avowed commitment to states’ rights wasn’t simply a fig leaf for a defense of slavery. “It’s ridiculous now to talk about the right to secede; it was not ridiculous in 1861,” he said. “Not one of those thirteen colonies would have joined the Union if they hadn’t believed they could get out of it.”

Foote’s views on race were also complex. He’d been raised during a period of frequent lynchings and unthinking bigotry. “Brazil nuts were called ‘nigger toes’ and a sling shot was a ‘nigger shooter,’” he said. But Foote had bucked the Southern trend and supported integration early on. He also quit his Sons of Confederate Veterans’ chapter when it chose to honor George Wallace on a visit to Memphis, and later abandoned plans to build a home on the Alabama coast because of a strong Klan presence there.

Nor did Foote subscribe to romantic Southern views of the Lost Cause. Militarily, he believed, the Cause was always lost. Ideologically, the Cause was easy to mythologize precisely because it was lost. “The Civil War monument in my hometown calls the Confederacy the ‘only nation that lived and died without sin,’” he said. “Well, it’s easy to stay pure if you’re never put to the test.”

The victorious North
had been
put to the test, and in Foote’s view it had flunked. “Slavery was the first great sin of this nation,” Foote said. “The second great sin was emancipation, or rather the way it was done. The government told four million people, ‘You are free. Hit the road.’ Three-quarters of them couldn’t read or write. The tiniest fraction of them had any profession that they could enter.”

Foote felt the consequences of Reconstruction were still with us. But the fault wasn’t all with the government or with white Americans. “What has dismayed me so much is the behavior of blacks. They are fulfilling every dire prophecy the Ku Klux Klan made. It’s no longer safe to be on the streets in black neighborhoods. They are acting as if the utter lie about blacks being somewhere between ape and man were true.”

Like the obscene ditty about Abraham Lincoln, this was a side of Shelby Foote that hadn’t come through in Burns’s documentary.
Foote also displayed an intricate sympathy for the early KKK, which ex-Confederates formed immediately after the War to combat what they regarded as the cruel excesses of Reconstruction. “The Klan takes some careful talking about, it’s easy to misinterpret what I’m fixing to say,” Foote cautioned. “But in some ways the Klan was very akin to the Free French Resistance to Nazi occupation. To expect people who fought as valiantly as these people did to roll over and play dead because there was an occupying army is kind of crazy.”

Foote also admired Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Klan’s first Imperial Wizard, a slave trader before the War, and a rebel commander who allegedly permitted the slaughter of surrendering black troops at a battle called Fort Pillow. Foote regarded Forrest as one of the “two authentic geniuses” of the War (Lincoln being the other). A daring cavalry commander, Forrest was the only soldier on either side to rise from private to lieutenant general in the course of the War, and his lightning tactics later inspired Rommel’s use of blitzkrieg in World War II.

In Foote’s view, Forrest was also “a fine man. My black friends abhor him. They want to take his statue down, dig up his and his wife’s bones, and throw them to the wind. But it is not known generally that he dissolved the Klan when it turned ugly.”

Disbanded around 1870 (owing not only to Forrest, but also to a government crackdown), the Klan revived in 1915 following the success of the movie
Birth of a Nation
and quickly became a potent force nationwide. “The Klan that people remember today is the Klan of the 1920s,” Foote said. “Anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish, anti-black. Forrest’s Klan was anti-black but not opposed to all black people. It was trying to keep illiterate blacks from occupying positions like sheriff and judge.”