Academic historians began to register their complaints about Foote’s appearance in the series even as The Civil War was being broadcast. His sudden stardom, which made him wealthy through renewed sales of his enormous three-volume history, The Civil War: A Narrative, generated resentment. Some also complained of a lack of balance in Burns’s documentary. Foote, a white Southerner who emphasized the fighting itself—and who had no formal training as a historian—was on camera for forty-six minutes; Barbara Fields, a black Columbia University professor who had written extensively on the war’s ideological conflicts, was given less than nine minutes.
Foote made things worse by presuming to instruct other historians on how they should approach their craft. Before he began his Civil War epic, in 1954, he had been a fiction writer, publishing five novels mostly set in his native Mississippi Delta. In writing his history, he stuck to the tools of a novelist, emphasizing narrative shape and vivid characterization—history, he often said, “has a plot.” In interviews, he suggested that the historians on whose work he relied could improve their craft by “learning to write well, which most of them have never bothered to do.” “The reader must sense behind the work,” he said, “a credible author, and find in his pages an artistically constructed point of view.”
The Civil War: A Narrative, the final volume of which was published in 1974, was initially accepted as a masterwork. Out of the carnage of the fighting and the torpor of ancient political skirmishes, Foote had wrought coherence and even inspiration. In her appraisal of Foote’s accomplishment, “Shelby Foote’s Iliad,” published in a 1979 issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review, Helen White identified one of the trilogy’s undeniable strengths:
Shelby Foote exhibits in this book undeviating interest in human character and enjoyment of human experience.… There is a magnanimity for the men who break or fail.… He is an afficionado, not necessarily of war, but of the testing of men under extreme pressure; for he has faith that some, at least, will rise to the occasion and set a standard.
Recently, however, the complaints about Foote’s putative Confederate bias have grown louder, and his legacy has been called into question. In September 2020, the Washington Post published a sustained attack on Foote’s role in the Burns series by Gillian Brockell, who argued that “Foote’s screen time is dripping with Lost Cause fables as thick as his accent.”Later the same year, in The Journal of the Civil War Era, Ella Starkman-Hynes wrote that Foote was “dangerous as a historical source.”
