I'd like to do something which it doesn't feel like has happened very
much lately on The List: talk about a book (or books) I absolutely love
and why I love them so much.
For Christmas last year, my parents, searching for a gift for my
notoriously difficult-to-buy-for son, found the Shelby Foote three
volume narrative history of the Civil War on sale for a reasonable
price, and bought him that. My son gave the first volume a try, liked
it, but schoolwork intervened and he just couldn't finish it. I have
been directing a play and have had no time at all, which wouldn't
necessarily suggest a perfect time to read three thousand pages of
historical writing, but I saw the first volume laying around and picked
it up, and was completely addicted.
I have always been a huge Bruce Caton fan, especially his series on the
Army of the Potomac, but also his three volume history, The Coming Fury,
Terrible Swift Sword and Never Call Retreat. I really thought I knew the
Civil War pretty well, not in a 'let's visit battlefields for our summer
vacation' sort of sense, but in a 'kinda literary American with an
interest in history' sort of sense. But the Shelby Foote series is
remarkable in its own light. Foote brings the gifts of a novelist to
his work, which would suggest a closer attention to telling details
revealing character, but which could also mean no footnotes and
questionable sourcing. I don't detect any reason to question his
documentation, however, unlike, say, Sam Taylor's biography of John
Taylor, another historical work by a novelist, which makes up dialogue
pretty freely and ends up feeling a touch untrustworthy.
But Foote's mastery of the factual material of his story is quite
extraordinary. I've read several accounts of Gettysburg, for example,
but not until reading Foote did I really understand the terrain, and the
tactics, and the specifics of combat in each of the fronts of that
terrible struggle. And yes, Foote does reveal character through his
choice of detail and anecdote, and I do feel that I know major and minor
Civil War figures with an intimacy that eluded even Caton. But what
Foote really achieves is balance and perspective. We end up seeing the
Civil War through at least four lenses: the North's view of it, the
South's view of it, and our contemporary perspective, both Northern and
Southern. Foote is a Southerner, but this isn't Southern history.
Jefferson Davis emerges as a remarkable and tragic personality, and so
does Lincoln, and so do Lee and Grant and McClellan and Joe Johnston and
Bedford Forrest and Phil Sheridan. And so do hundreds of men who had
previously been unknown to me. It's just an extraordinary book, or
rather, three volume series of books, each nigh on a thousand pages
long.
So I find myself wondering about Mormon literature and Mormon history
and the intersection between them. And I just finished another book, a
much lesser book but equally compelling, William Hogeland's The Whiskey
Rebellion: George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and the Frontier
Rebels Who Challenged America's Newfound Sovereignty. And what makes
Hogeland's book so compelling is that it tells a story I didn't know
very well, and introduces me to historical figures I'd never previously
heard of, and makes them all completely human and believable, if at
times wrong-headed, and then takes Hamilton and Washington (who I know a
lot about), and makes them just as human and believable and just as
wrong-headed at times.
Could we do that? What a great service if we could. Because we've got
this amazing history too, full of characters as lively and colorful as
any in American history: Jedediah Grant and Heber C. Kimball and Sidney
Rigdon and John Whitmer, to name just a few.
I would love to see it. I would love to see great historical writing
that doesn't have quite the agenda so much of our writing often seems to
have. But more than that, I wanted to tell you about a book (or three)
I just finished and can hardly breathe afterwards, they're so
extraordinary.
Eric Samuelsen
