by Tony Horwitz
“Nineteenth.”
“Damn. Some guys got really carried away.”
A moment later, modern medics appeared in an ambulance. They bandaged a broken nose, toted off a man with broken ribs, and stuck an oxygen mask on an older man struggling for breath. I later learned that fifty-seven people were hurt in the weekend’s reenactment, and two required hospitalization. At some events, casualties were mortal: several men had expired from heart attacks and one froze to death during an unseasonably cold night in Tennessee.
Rob had vanished with his new recruit, so I wandered off the field alone as reenactors and spectators streamed toward the parking lots. One woman lingered on the grass long after the others had left. Slim and delicate-featured, she wore a black hooped skirt, a tight black bodice and held a black parasol over her lace-covered head. I bowed slightly and asked what had brought her to the Wilderness.
“A reb shot my husband at Gettysburg,” she said. “I came here to remember him.”
Playing along, I offered the view that the rebel who killed her husband was simply following orders. “But I’m very sorry just the same, m’am.”
“That’s very kind of you, soldier,” she said, wiping away what looked to be a real tear. I asked what she did on the home front now that her gallant husband was gone.
“Empty bedpans and take blood,” she said; “I’m a registered nurse in Tonawanda, New York.”
She smiled, signaling that we were now “out of character,” and reached out a black lace glove so I could pull her from the grass. “This getup weighs ten pounds,” she complained. “I can’t wear it two days in a row because it starts to smell.”
As we strolled toward the parking lot, Karen Meinhold told me how she’d become a Union widow. Six years before, while visiting the chocolate factory in Hershey, Pennsylvania, she’d stopped off at Gettysburg and been stunned by all the graves. Knowing little about the War, she began reading and gradually became obsessed. Now, she often drove twelve hours after work on Fridays to reach Virginia in time for the opening shots of reenactments.
But she didn’t want to play any of the usual female roles, least of all nurse. “After all, that’s what I do in real life,” she said. Thirty-four and single, she’d settled on widowhood, hand-sewing her seven-layer outfit: pantalets, chemise, corset, corset cover, hoop, petticoat and dress. “At Gettysburg last year it was 108 degrees. I almost fainted.”
Her distress must have been fetching; she’d fielded eleven proposals of marriage during the battle and suspected not all were in jest. But Karen brushed off the overtures, intent on remaining a widow. “It may sound silly,” she said, “but I really do mourn the Union dead.”
We’d reached the hot dog stand that divided our two nations; one sign pointed to a parking area marked “Union,” another to a pasture labeled “C.S.A.” A traffic jam had already formed, heading back to the twentieth century.
“After these battles, all the soldiers just get up and walk away,” Karen said, as though she wished the drama ended otherwise. “But in real life, it didn’t happen that way. Glory had a cost. I’m here so people will remember that.”
Footsore and dirt-encrusted, I climbed in my car and crawled toward the highway behind hundreds of other Confederates. I turned on the radio, then quickly turned it off. There was something to what the others had said. Despite the weekend’s discomforts and phony moments, it had provided a pleasant taste of the enforced leisure and sociability of nineteenth-century life: chatting with the women as we peeled carrots, lazing beside Rob as he slow-cooked his breakfast, ambling down the mile-long country lane between the Union and Confederate camps, a distance that a car would have covered in a minute. Modern life rarely allowed for these simple, unhurried pleasures.
Reaching the highway, I stopped for coffee at a 7-Eleven. The store was crowded with black shoppers. Several of them stared quizzically—and, I sensed, with some hostility—at my Confederate uniform. Clunking self-consciously to the counter in my hobnailed boots and gray trousers, I felt like blurting out, “I’m just playacting,” or “It’s only a game.”
Instead, I returned to my car feeling confused and ashamed. This, too, was an aspect of the twentieth century that reenactors were fleeing: a heterogeneous society still raw with historic wounds and racial sensitivities. In principle, remembrance of the War could be a way to probe these scars, many of which trailed back to the 1860s. But reenactments did precisely the opposite, blandly reconciling North and South in a grand spectacle that glorified battlefield valor and the stoicism of civilians.
Driving back north across the Rappahannock and the Rapidan, I felt like a farb of the heart. Flags and muskets and uniforms weren’t just toys for adult boys to play with, nor could their symbolism be shed like so much dirty clothing. When I arrived home, a grungy Confederate foot soldier, even the dog didn’t recognize me. Peeling off my socks and boots and gray wool trousers, I resolved that next time I’d be true to my views and wear blue.
7
Tennessee
AT THE FOOTE OF THE MASTER
The Southerner talks music.
—MARK TWAIN
Soon after the Wilderness battle, I headed south again to keep an engagement of a different sort. From the start of my journey, I’d thought about contacting Shelby Foote. This proved surprisingly easy to do. His number was listed in the phonebook. But after picking up the phone a few times, I decided to type a long letter instead, requesting an interview. He responded with a succinct message, handwritten on delicate white notepaper. “I’ll be glad to talk with you if we can find the time.”
I took this as a summons to Memphis. Foote lived in a 1930s Tudor ringed by blossoming plum, dogwood and magnolia trees. A maid showed me into a handsomely appointed den with a pitched timber ceiling, dark wood flooring and liquor bottles set on a trolley. The setting wasn’t quite what I’d expected: suburban baronial, more Henry the Eighth than William Faulkner.
The figure who strode briskly into the room a moment later also surprised me. Wearing trim gray trousers and a polo shirt, the silver-haired sage of Ken Burns’s Civil War documentary looked as though he might have played a few sets of tennis before breakfast.
He also seemed more aloof than the grandfatherly figure on television. Without so much as a handshake or hello, Foote led me into a study with a throw rug at the door that said, “Go Away.”
A bed occupied most of the study and Foote pointed me to a chair on one side of it. He took a seat across the bed, as far away as he could get. Angled with his back half-turned to me, he reached for one of a dozen pipes scattered across the desk behind him, tamped tobacco into the bowl, and said by way of small talk, “What can I do for you?”
I wasn’t exactly sure. Foote’s mellifluous drawl and folksy stories on television had captivated me, as had his three-volume narrative history of the Civil War, still a hot-selling classic twenty years after its publication. The seventy-eight-year-old writer had become a curious phenomenon—a Civil War celebrity—and I’d somehow imagined that my cathode-tube acquaintance with him would make it easy to just chat about my travels, and to get his views on some of the impressions I’d formed.
Instead, I found myself groping for one of a dozen Big Theme questions I’d rehearsed just in case on the taxi ride over. When I finally lobbed one across the bed—why was memory of the War so enduring?—Foote smashed it straight back. “Because it’s the big one. It measures what we are, good and bad. If you look at American history as the life span of a man, the Civil War represents the great trauma of our adolescence. It’s the sort of experience we never forget.”
Foote lit his pipe. I lobbed another one: Why did the South in particular cling to remembrance of the War? “It was fought in our own backyard,” he immediately replied, “or front yard if you will, and you’re not apt to forget something that happened on your own property. I was raised up in a rough-and-tumble society. I was in a lot of fistfights, maybe fifty in my life. The ones I remember with startling cla
rity are the ones I lost.”
How did the experience of defeat define the post-War South?
“It gave us a sense of tragedy, which the rest of the nation lacks. In the movie Patton the general talks about how ‘We Americans have never lost a war.’ Well, Patton’s own grandfather was in Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. He damn well lost a war.”
We went on like this for half an hour, each question prompting a perfect sound bite of the sort Foote had mouthed for interviewers a hundred times before. I felt as though we were working our way through a responsive liturgy. I also felt like a jerk for wasting his time. It was a relief when the telephone rang.
“You’re speaking to him,” Foote gruffly told the caller, who, like me, must have been surprised to reach the Great Man so easily. As Foote answered a question about rebels in Missouri, I looked around his study. The room appeared as though it hadn’t changed much in the thirty years since Foote began writing there. The phone had a rotary dial. There was no computer, printer or modem. I’d read that Foote wrote longhand, using an antiquated pen dipped in ink. He regarded even the fountain pen as a “mechanical intrusion” and a concession to a modern era of which he didn’t wholly approve.
Foote hung up the phone. “It’s a nightmare, ever since that Burns thing,” he grumbled. “I’m trying to write a novel but mostly I work at answering that phone.”
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:
Abraham Lincoln was a son of a bitch,
His ass ran over with a seven-year itch,
His fist beat his dick like a blacksmith’s hammer,
While his asshole whistled the Star-Spangled Banner.
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.
