It isn't necessary to read the three volumes of Shelby Foote's "The Civil War" in order, but my experience from doing so imparted the feeling that I had been exposed to the whole grand majestic scope of this struggle. Foote is all-inclusive in his choice of the war's significant struggles. His motive is revealed literally on the last page of prose (page 1065) in which he states that his writing aim was to provide a "more fitting balance" than many histories provide, by showing the patient reader how the actions outside the state of Virginia, vaguely labeled as in "the West", had no less importance to the war's outcome than the well-known battles such as Gettysburg and Chancellorsville.
Foote shows how these geographically wide pieces fit into the 1864 puzzle in his first chapter, aptly titled "Another Grand Design". In the spring of that year, another recently-appointed Union commanding general, Ulysses Grant, launched a multi-pronged attack designed to hit the Confederate forces in numerous locations ranging West-to-East from Arkansas to Virginia. The greatest Union concentration of forces, personally accompanied by Grant, was the Army of the Potomac, which had had three years of up-and-down morale as various of Grant's predecessors tried to crack the nut of opposition to Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia.
All of these various conflicts occurring on land and water are narrated by Foote, who never loses the magic touch of making you feel the gravity of the struggle between blue-and butternut-clad armies, while making the reading experience compelling.
As we know in retrospect, the time period covered in this third volume parallels the long, painful series of events leading to the Confederate downfall. Not that anyone knew for sure what the outcome would be, or when it would occur, as Grant started his spring, 1864 invasion. He may have been the national hero of Donelson, Shiloh and Vicksburg in the Western theater, but he was up against the best general in the Civil War now. With Grant, Lee continued his pattern of keeping his forces from being smashed by larger Union armies, while always inflicting heavier casualties against his opponent. Grant found himself being set up on numerous occasions for a smashing blow from Lee which would force him to withdraw from the field; he countered these sometimes surprising threats by "sidling" his army eastward across Virginia in a campaign we now know as "The Forty Days", as violent, bloody clashes occurred from The Wilderness, to Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor.
Foote graphically describes the "concentrated terror" of one terrible day, when the struggle at the "Bloody Angle" at Spotsylvania involved fighting by both sides across a parapet at literally arms' length, a "waking nightmare" going on for sixteen hours, a defense as much as it was an attack by either side, where neither victory nor defeat mattered, and fighting continued on and on, under the influence of pure adrenalin, and "Slaughter became an end in itself" (p. 221). This one day resulted in 3000 Confederate soldiers captured, killed or wounded compared with 6820 of their enemy. And this day followed numerous others already involving many thousands of casualties on each side, to be followed by many more.
Lee would somehow be able to block Grant again and again, in order to protect Richmond, the Confederate Capital. The cost of constant attrition of his forces during the spring, summer and fall of that year would find the two armies facing each other outside Richmond, at Petersburg. By November, Lee knew he was on the verge of calamity because his forces were spread very thin, and there were no more reinforcements to be had. Grant would continue to plan for the breakthrough that would send Lee's forces reeling from their intrenched positions, and it was provided by one of his most aggressive generals, Phil Sheridan, whose
thrust at Five Forks on April 1st, 1865
tarnished the reputation of George Picket and began the unravelling of Lee's defenses. One of the Civil War's most dramatic chapters occurred while the Confederate government abandoned Richmond, beginning its itinerant railroad journey to avoid being captured, while Lee evacuated his army westward in the long-shot attempt to get the survivors of his forces to meet with General Johnston's army in North Carolina.
Foote shows how Lee and his exhausted army never considered giving up trying to keep the fight going until Grant's relentless pushing of his forces finally boxed in the Confederates at Appomattox Courthouse. There were other Confederate forces still in the field, but Foote makes it clear how Lee's April 9th surrender gave really no alternative to the holdouts, forcing Richard Taylor to surrender his army of the Department of Alabama, Mississippi and East Louisiana to Federal General Canby, and Johnston to surrender his army of the Department of North and South Carolina and Georgia to William T. Sherman. Meanwhile, President Jefferson Davis was pursuing the hope of some kind of Confederate government-on-the-run survival, moving from town to town with his cabinet, on the Danville and Richmond Railroad, as cabinet members gradually gave up the cause and bugged out of Davis' retinue. Foote, a Southerner sensitive to the not-so sympathetic treatment given to Davis' memory by historians, documents the treatment and mistreatment received by the forever unrepentant leader from his capture in Georgia, to his long, harsh imprisonment and beyond.
The war bestowed two legacies to Americans. Regarding the first, Foote notes the struggles Abraham Lincoln had in uniting what remained of the remainder of the United States in order to militarily recover the section that had departed, living to see this goal fulfilled, but not living long enough to observe how his returning veterans realized that a nation emerged from the crucible of strife. He writes: "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 ....their comrades lay buried in its soil, along with many thousands of their own arms and legs." (p. 1042).
The second legacy directly affected the southern veterans, who would also be part of the new nation but would claim membership in a new country south of the Mason-Dixon line; as their claim to nationhood through secession was denied, they claimed unity through pride in enduring a terrible war, the end of which was marked by a villification of their former leaders as instruments of Lucifer, and which was followed by Reconstruction and its aftermath. As Foote states: "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." (p. 1042).