![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
~
Facts, Mr. Foote said, are the bare bones from which truth is made. Truth, in his view, embraced sympathy, paradox and irony, and was attained only through true art. "A fact is not a truth until you love it," he said.
-- Douglas Martin for The New York Times
Shelby Foote died yesterday. After having just recently read through his epic trilogy on the Civil War, this news has some poignant resonance for Monk. In Mr. Foote's memory, we are going to dip back into the final volume of that trilogy, near the very end, and bring out Foote's poetic conclusion as to the significance and meaning of that long and mortal war.
___ ___ ___
Whatever else the veterans brought or failed to bring home with them, and whether they returned to snugness or dilapidation, with or without back pay, bonuses, and pensions, they had acquired a sense of nationhood, of nationality. From the outset Lincoln had had the problem of uniting what remained of his divided country if he was to recover by conquest the segment that had departed, and though he succeeded well enough in this to achieve his immediate purpose, true fulfillment came after his death, after the victory that brought the soldiers home. They knew now they had a nation, for they had seen it; they had been there, they had touched it, climbed its mountains, crossed its rivers, hiked its roads, their comrades lay buried in its soil, along with many thousands of their own arms and legs. Nor did this apply only to those whose return was northward, above the Mason-Dixon line. Below it, too, men who never before had been fifty miles from their places of birth now knew, from having slept and fought in its fields and woods and cane brakes, gawked at its cities, such as they were, and trudged homeward through its desolation, that they too had had a country. Not secession but the war itself, and above all the memories recurrent through the peace that followed - such as it was - created a Solid South, more firmly united in defeat than it had been during the brief span when it claimed independence. Voided, the claim was abandoned, but the pride remained: pride in the segment reabsorbed, as well as in the whole, which now for the first time was truly indivisible. This new unity was best defined, perhaps, by the change in number of a simple verb. In formal as in common speech, abroad as well as on this side of its oceans, once the nation emerged from the crucible of that war, "the United States are" became "the United States is."
-- Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative
Facts, Mr. Foote said, are the bare bones from which truth is made. Truth, in his view, embraced sympathy, paradox and irony, and was attained only through true art. "A fact is not a truth until you love it," he said.
-- Douglas Martin for The New York Times
Shelby Foote died yesterday. After having just recently read through his epic trilogy on the Civil War, this news has some poignant resonance for Monk. In Mr. Foote's memory, we are going to dip back into the final volume of that trilogy, near the very end, and bring out Foote's poetic conclusion as to the significance and meaning of that long and mortal war.
___ ___ ___
Whatever else the veterans brought or failed to bring home with them, and whether they returned to snugness or dilapidation, with or without back pay, bonuses, and pensions, they had acquired a sense of nationhood, of nationality. From the outset Lincoln had had the problem of uniting what remained of his divided country if he was to recover by conquest the segment that had departed, and though he succeeded well enough in this to achieve his immediate purpose, true fulfillment came after his death, after the victory that brought the soldiers home. They knew now they had a nation, for they had seen it; they had been there, they had touched it, climbed its mountains, crossed its rivers, hiked its roads, their comrades lay buried in its soil, along with many thousands of their own arms and legs. Nor did this apply only to those whose return was northward, above the Mason-Dixon line. Below it, too, men who never before had been fifty miles from their places of birth now knew, from having slept and fought in its fields and woods and cane brakes, gawked at its cities, such as they were, and trudged homeward through its desolation, that they too had had a country. Not secession but the war itself, and above all the memories recurrent through the peace that followed - such as it was - created a Solid South, more firmly united in defeat than it had been during the brief span when it claimed independence. Voided, the claim was abandoned, but the pride remained: pride in the segment reabsorbed, as well as in the whole, which now for the first time was truly indivisible. This new unity was best defined, perhaps, by the change in number of a simple verb. In formal as in common speech, abroad as well as on this side of its oceans, once the nation emerged from the crucible of that war, "the United States are" became "the United States is."
-- Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-06-30 07:45 pm (UTC)From:I've not read his Civil War books yet. I I'm still too enamoured of "Battle Cry of Freedom" by James McPherson and compare everything written on the Civil War to that.
I should give him another shot...
no subject
Date: 2005-06-30 08:53 pm (UTC)From:It was Burns' documentary that led me to Foote as well. I know what you mean about Foote's rather authoritative aura. As quoted in the article:
Shelby Foote, the historian whose incisive, seasoned commentary - delivered in a drawl so mellifluous that one critic called it "molasses over hominy"
It was a lot of reading, but I'm happy to have had the experience. It has to be a classic.