The Curse Of Shelby Foote

When "falsely accused adult in the room" John Kelly gave us a Trumpian take on US History, Ta-Nehisi Coates took him to the woodshed on Twitter.

Kelly is wrong about the lack of compromise leading to the Civil War, but he pretty obviously got that from Ken Burns' Civil War documentary.  In it, novelist-not-historian Shelby Foote argues that the reason that the Civil War happened was because of a failure to compromise.  Foote doesn't really offer any evidence for this.  I suppose the rejection of the last minute Crittenden Compromise might qualify, but Lincoln had been elected on a Free Soil platform and the Crittenden Compromise rejected that.  Additionally, the Crittenden Compromise seemed to open the door to slave-based imperialism into the Caribbean.

The Civil War happened because white southerners could not stand ANY restrictions or restraints on the institution of slavery.  They saw threats to the existence of slavery that didn't exist in the moment.  Lincoln was not an abolitionist, or at least not until late in the war.  Even the Emancipation Proclamation was designed to punish secession more than end slavery as an institution.

When Burns did his documentary - which is masterful in so many ways - some of the old interpretations were stripped away.  Burns put slavery right at the heart of the cause of the war and dealt well with the agency of African Americans as abolitionists and soldiers.  But he included Foote to give a certain Southern perspective.  Foote is known for a massive three volume Homeric narrative of the Civil War as a military conflict.  He even bears a passing resemblance to Robert E. Lee.  I heard Foote speak once, and he urged historians to use the tools of perspective and empathy that novelists use in order to understand why historical actors acted the way they did.

It's really good advice, but I wonder how much gets lost when you suspend your own judgment.  Can you take Lee or Davis's position, then turn around and take Frederick Douglass or Sojourner Truth's?  If you can, good.  But Foote left open the crack in the true historical narrative that allows guys like Kelly to make the fundamental mistake he made.

The Civil War was caused by the South because they didn't want anyone messing with their slaves.  That's it.  That's the whole story.  Deny that and you're rewriting history.

UPDATE: You read it here first, before Jon Chait.