Critic’s Corner The Civil War: A Narrative Volume Three
By Stephen Davis · Originally published May-June 2025 · pp. 52–53
Critic’s o r n e r
The Civil War: A Narrative Volume Three
Red River to Appomattox (1974)
By Shelby Foote
“H
e was to go for Lee and I was to go for Joe Johnston. That was his plan.” Shelby Foote opens his third volume of The Civil War with these words from Sherman in March 1864, just as he closes his second volume with them. Fort Sumter to Perryville (published in 1958) and Fredericksburg to Meridian (1963) carry the war through their 1,700 pages to the meeting of Sherman and Grant at Washington’s Willard Hotel on March 11. Grant had just been promoted to lieutenant general a few days before, and placed in command over all Union armies, including Meade’s Army of the Potomac. George Meade, “a damned old goggle-eyed snapping turtle,” had saved the cause at Gettysburg, but to the discerning he lacked a killer-instinct. This was what Lincoln saw in the modest Grant, “a man who could be silent in several languages.” Indeed, even in Mexico years ago, a younger Grant had written, “If we have to fight, I would like to do it all at once.” This the new general-in-chief soon set in motion, as Foote’s Volume Three follows the war through its last year: Banks’ Red River Campaign, Meade’s overland march to Petersburg, and Sherman’s advance on Atlanta and into the Carolinas. It was all part of the Union’s “Close-Out Plan,” in which Grant called for simultaneous advances by Federal armies across the South: Sherman in the Carolinas, Canby against Mobile, and Wilson’s cavalry aimed at Selma and Montgomery. Yet in the spring of 1864, Foote observes that the South could still win a defensive war, a hope that animated Jefferson Davis to the conflict’s last days. As for Banks’ abortive effort to reach Shreveport, Foote observes, “Shreveport might have as well have been on
the Gulf of Mexico or the backside of the moon.” Foote, a Mississippian, seems to delight in Bedford Forrest’s raids and conquests, such as at Brice’s Crossroads, “which would be studied down the years, in war colleges here and abroad, as an example of what a numerically inferior force could accomplish.” In a chapter entitled “The Forty Days,” we trace Grant’s campaign against Lee from May 5, its start, to June 15, when the Federal army moved across the James River to begin its investment of Petersburg. Lee’s thrashing of Grant in the Wilderness, May 5-6, was as thorough as that delivered to Hooker the year before. “Lee had never beaten an adversary so soundly,” Foote writes—except that Grant refused to retreat, and instead sidled east to challenge Lee’s lines elsewhere. The Confederate chieftain only begrudgingly gave up the initiative at Spotsylvania, and wherever he could showed fight. Hence ensued the month and a half of combat that culminated in the Federal siege of Petersburg, despite Lee’s wishes. “This army cannot stand a siege,” he warned; “we must end this business on the battlefield, not in a fortified place.” (We know what happens.) Nonetheless, Foote’s characterization of Lee is eye-catching: “one of the most aggressive soldiers of all time,” he writes, “the old gray fox” whose skillful countering of Grant’s huge army at Petersburg “dazzled admirers all over the world.” Foote follows Sherman’s advance on Atlanta, Johnston’s “wily” defense, and Hood’s July sorties. Sprinkled in are descriptions of the Rebel yell (a “weird halloo”) and praise for the Army of Tennessee (“the most resilient of Confederate armies”), particularly after the fall of Atlanta and Hood’s raid toward Nashville late in 1864. Meanwhile,
Sherman’s troops, after wintering in Savannah, set out in mid-February for their escapade through South Carolina. The destruction they wreaked there was as widespread as it was predictable. Sherman’s bummers left a trail of desolation in the state so widespread, Foote declares, “it was as if the friction match had replaced the rifle as the basic infantry weapon.” “Vandalism,” one Union officer observed, “though not encouraged, was seldom punished.” This applied to the torching of Columbia, which Foote implies was as much Wade Hampton’s fault as it was Sherman’s. The author’s narrative, written in the sweeping manner of Thucydides, includes many sidelights, such as Yellow Tavern, where Jeb Stuart met his death— “a blow,” Lee acknowledged, “from which entire recovery was impossible.” Then there is Breckinridge’s victory over Sigel at New Market, with its famous charge of the VMI cadets. The novelist-turned-historian would be the first to affirm that, as the saying goes, you can’t make this stuff up. Meanwhile, Beauregard bottled up Butler at Bermuda Hundred so effectively that the Beast was contemptuously dismissed by a Federal officer as “as helpless a child on the field of battle and as visionary as an opium eater in council.” Throughout the winter of ’64-’65, Lee held his army in the Petersburg trenches, subsisting it as best he could. “Well, Mr. Custis,” Lee angrily declared to his son, “I have been up to see the Congress and they do not seem able to do anything except eat peanuts and chew tobacco, while my army is starving.” All this time Confederate President Davis maintained an unshakable resolve, which he constantly manifested. If only the Southern people stood firm, he urged, the Confederacy would “compel the Yankees, in less than twelve months, to petition us for peace on our own terms.” The last of Foote’s eight chapters, “Lucifer in Starlight,” follows Davis’ flight from Richmond and his hope to continue the fight, which dismayed officers accompanying him (“something like being closeted with a dreamy madman”). More than once, Foote refers to Cannae, the battle of 216 B.C. in which Hannibal annihilated a Roman army. What he doesn’t mention, though, is that classic battles of annihilation were no longer possible in nineteenth-century warfare. Foote writes with a familiarity of Lee’s officer corps-“Old Peter,” “Little Powell” –as if he had somehow been there. This affectionate closeness, repeated through the text, gives The Civil War an immediacy that brings the war of 160 years ago to the forefront of our imaginations. As in earlier volumes of The Civil War, here fifty maps are “drawn by Rafael Palacios, from originals by the author”— further sign of Foote’s immersion in his work. Back in the old days, blacks had a saying about the futility of human endeavor: something about whistling “Old Dan Tucker” to a hurricane. Well, I’d just as soon whistle the tune to a storm as attempt to predict that there will be soon, even in our lifetime, so majestic a triumph of historical narrative as Shelby Foote has bestowed upon us.
Stephen Davis has been writing about the Civil War
for a long time—“since Jesus was in third grade,” he contends. He is author of Texas Brigadier to the Fall
of Atlanta: John Bell Hood (2019) and Into Tennessee
& Failure: John Bell Hood (2020). With Bill Hendrick he wrote The Atlanta Intelligencer Covers the Civil War (2022). His next book, The National Tribune Remembers the Atlanta Campaign: Battles, Skirmishes, Marches and Camp Life as Recalled by the Union Veterans Themselves, is being published by Savas Beatie.
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