The Spirit of Appomattox

In 1990, American public television viewers were introduced to the Mississippi novelist and Civil War historian Shelby Foote (1916–2005). The unlikely star of Ken Burns’s epic 1990 PBS documentary The Civil War, Foote proved to have a gift for humorous anecdote and a way of rounding off a scene. Burns and his team shaped the narrative, but it was Foote who gave the landmark series its distinctive register of aubade, leavened by a rich appreciation of the war’s human comedy. We remember the Civil War today largely in his voice, as the event that, in his words, “defined us as the nation we were going to be.”