Endgame

By LANCE MORROW

THE CIVIL WAR, A NARRATIVE: RED RIVER TO APPOMATTOX

by SHELBY FOOTE 1,106 pages. Random House. $20.

Starting in the mid-'50s, perhaps after publication of Bruce Catton's A Stillness at Appomattox in 1953, Americans developed a kind of hobbyist's passion for the Civil War. It may even have been a subliminally sinister fad. The Supreme Court's 1954 Brown decision reawakened sectional fervors--an Impulse in some to fight it out again, not on crass and specific racial grounds but over the once bloody, somehow romantic battlegrounds of history. Buffs dragged their children in Yankee or Rebel caps over the cemetery farm land of Gettysburg, fast growing commercial. Book clubs offered multivolume histories such as Allan Kevins' The Ordeal of the Union and Carl Sandburg's grandiloquent Abraham Lincoln. Catton, with his 13 volumes, became the distinguished popularizer of the Civil War, his work deeply researched and written with a vivid immediacy.

The same year that Michigan-born Catton won his Pulitzer Prize for A Stillness at Appomattox, Mississippi-born Novelist Shelby Foote began what was to have been a short, one-volume history of the war. Now, 20 years and 2,934 pages later, he has completed his history with this third volume. It is a pity that the Civil War fad seems to have abated; a historical narrative as rich in detail and purely exciting as Foote's deserves an audience of amateurs as well as professionals.

Unlike Nevins and Catton, Foote devotes little space to the political context of the war--the angry riptides of the 1850s, the drift into disaster. His attention is focused on the righting itself --fortifications, tactics, the strange chemistries of leadership, the workings in the generals' minds. Among other things, Foote moves armies and great quantities of military information with a lively efficiency. This volume covers the final year of the war, from the campaigns in western Louisiana and Arkansas to the terrible endgame in the East, with Grant clamping down on Petersburg and Richmond and Sherman burning his way through the guts of the rebellion with his hard-war sayings: "War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it... I can make this march, and make Georgia howl!"

Pleasure Expedition. Though a Southerner, Foote's judgments are evenhanded. He admires Sherman as an implacable tactician while amply describing the depredations that Uncle Billy's "bummers" committed as they marched to the sea. Sherman, says Foote, "hoped to keep nonmilitary damage to a minimum, but he made it clear that if guerrillas or other civilians attempted to interfere with his progress, 'then army commanders should order and enforce a devastation more or less relentless.' " Sherman's people got the idea. All over the countryside, Yankees were seen jamming rods into the earth, searching for the jewels and silver that plantation owners' wives had buried. One Yankee veteran declared: "This is probably the most gigantic pleasure expedition ever planned." In Georgia alone, before he swung north for the Carolinas, Sherman inflicted about $100 million in damages.

Foote deals almost too fairly with Grant as well, although the general in chiefs meat-grinder warfare down through the Wilderness and Spotsylvania to Richmond amounted to a kind of condemnation of the man, no matter what his ultimate success. Grant sometimes spent soldiers so profligately that at last even the seemingly limitless manpower of the North seemed about to run out. At Cold Harbor, Lee devised such an intricate system of crossfires for the ill-prepared Grant that as Foote says, "never before, in this or perhaps any other war, had so large a body of troops been exposed to such a concentration of firepower."

Grant lost more than 7,000 men, most of them in the first eight minutes of battle. Before the fight, a young West Pointer noticed "that the men were calmly writing their names and home addresses on slips of paper and pinning them on the backs of their coats, so that their bodies might be recognized and their fate made known to their families at home." A bloodstained diary taken from a dead Federal had this final entry: "June 3. Cold Harbor. I was killed."

Foote's scholarship is obviously extensive, but he is also a gifted storyteller and assembler of vignettes. He includes nice touches of grand illusion. When Bedford Forrest led his Confederate cavalrymen on a raid into occupied Memphis, one of his officers captured the uniform of the Federal commander, C.C. Washburn, and proudly displayed it as a trophy. Forrest gallantly returned the uniform to Washburn under a flag of truce. Some weeks later, also under a flag of truce, Washburn sent Forrest a fine gray uniform made to measure by the cavalryman's own prewar Memphis tailor. As Jefferson Davis' special train left Richmond, abandoning the city to the Yankees, Foote writes, it was followed by others bearing "the marvelous and incongruous debris of the wreck of the Confederate capital." As one young lieutenant observed, "There were very few women on these trains, but among the last in the long procession were trains bearing indiscriminate cargoes of men and things. In one car was a cage with an African parrot and a box of tame squirrels and a hunchback! Everybody, not excepting the parrot, was wrought up to a pitch of intense excitement." As the Confederacy was closing down, a woman diarist wrote in wonderful magnolia prose: "There they go, the gay and gallant few, the last flower of Southern manhood."

The war was begun in a sense by one madman, John Brown, and ended by another, John Wilkes Booth, as Foote says. At any rate, it introduced modern America. Perhaps it was a sardonic premonition that after Lee and Grant met at Appomattox, souvenir hunters wrecked the house where the surrender was signed.

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