Shelby Foote (17 November 1916-27 June 2005) was an American historian and novelist who was known for his propagation of the "Lost Cause of the Confederacy" ideology, which stated that the Confederacy was fighting for noble ideals during the American Civil War.
Biography[]
Shelby Foote was born in Greenville, Mississippi in 1916, the great-grandson of Confederate American Civil War veteran and Vanderbilt University co-founder Hezekiah William Foote. While attending the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he was more interested in learning than classes, and he wrote for the school's award-winning literary journal; he was discriminated against for his maternal Jewish ancestry, leading to his later support for the Civil Rights movement. He served in the US National Guard from 1940 to 1943, when he was court-martialed and dismissed for visiting his future wife in Belfast two miles beyond the official military limits of his deployment. From January to November 1945, he served in the US Marine Corps, and he never saw combat in World War II. He became a full-time writer after the war's end, and he often wrote about the transition of the American South from the agrarian Old South to the Civil Rights movement-era, modern South. He was little-known to the public until he appeared in Ken Burns' PBS documentary The Civil War in 1990, where he introduced a generation of Americans to a war which he believed was still central to all Americans' lives. Foote had controversial views, including his view that Nathan Bedford Forrest was "one of the most attractive men who ever walked through the pages of history" (comparing him to Abraham Lincoln and saying that he had tried to prevent the Fort Pillow massacre), condemning the Freedmen's Bureau as corrupt in all ways, said that emancipation was the second-greatest American sin since slavery itself, defended the first Ku Klux Klan as "the shield of justice and virtue of southern women" and as an organization which never performed lynchings, rejected slavery as a cause of the Civil War, portrayed Radical Republicans negatively in his work, denounced the Memphis NAACP chapter for its removal of Forrest's statue, argued that the Confederate flag represented many noble things, and supported Mississippi's Confederate flag design against a 2001 referendum to replace it. Foote identified as a "Blue Dog Democrat" who no longer voted for individuals, but for the party. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1994, and he died in 2005.