"I could redo my entire three volumes on the Civil War without using one bit of source material I used the first time and probably come to very different conclusions" wrote Shelby Foote. Man with the voice like butter, who, if he arose from the dead, so many of us women would dust him down then run off with. Hell yeah.
He apparently hand-wrote all his books. Saw an interview where he was questioned about his writing process. He said to the effect he manages pretty well right up till the point he loses something. A line, a paragraph he's looking for, a bit of research he has somewhere, yet can't quite find for having misplaced the thing. Anyone who's ever worked on a several year long project can relate.
As far as facts vs beliefs:
Foote: "It is absolutely true that no list of facts ever gives you a valid account of what happened."
I love, love this:
Conversations with Shelby Foote Edited by William C. Carter P. 124 (from a 1978 interview)
Foote: "Most historians are, I am afraid, so concerned with finding out what happened that they make the enormous mistake of equating facts with truth. No great column of facts can ever pose as the truth. Truth is order imposed on those facts; truth is the breath of life breathed into facts. It is not the facts. You can't get the truth from facts. The truth is the way you feel about it. It's made me question our judgment on great American political figures, for example. I remember the Kennedy years– both of them– and I don't think history will ever get any kind of true view of John Kennedy and what he meant to us at the time he was alive, because the facts don't support what we felt. What we felt about Kennedy cannot be expressed with facts. It was a feeling and that is going to be very difficult for future generations. They may be able to quote what some of us had to say about him, but that is not enough, either. It was a feeling that has to be communicated and some future historian is– in the course of writing the history of the United States– going to get to the Kennedy years and just be plumb mystified. What in the world was going on? He looks like a pretty ordinary little gent to me, and historians are not going to understand what he was. They are not going to understand that he followed Eisenhower when everybody was so weary of this big Kewpie doll sitting in the White House."
This is where the unsurpassed writers like Catton come in, Whitman.
Then there's this, ooh wee:
Foote re the Lost Cause:
"Trying something, failing gloriously at it, and then getting everybody's admiration. If that's not a novelist's description of what a lost cause is I've never read one."
Last, Foote, which may touch on Southern Pride: "But those people should command our sympathy. The South conducted itself bravely in an extremely difficult situation. Many of the things we're proudest of in the American character were exemplified in the southern soldier, for instance. We take a justifiable pride in the bravery of those men, North and South."
AFA Northern perspective, I like Edward Ayers, Kevin Levin, Joanne Freeman, Heather Cox, Karen L. Cox, Gary Gallagher, David Blight, Jonathan Noyalas, to name a few.
Last, but not least, Barbara Gannon, who kindly wrote me,
"You are a historian by the way. You do history, we academics do not own it."
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