Shelby on Shiloh (and more)

Naval History: I know that the Battle of Shiloh is near and dear to your heart.  Why is that?

Foote: For one things, the Shiloh battlefield is within 100 miles of me.  The other reason is even better.  Shiloh is, to my mind, unquestionably the best-preserved Civil War battlefield of them all.

It has been singularly fortunate in many ways.  It’s not so close to a large city or populated area, so it is not clogged with tourists all the time.  But the main thing is, it has had only five or six superintendents, I believe, and each one has been thoroughly conscious to keep the place the way it was when the battle was fought.  It’s not surrounded by hot dog stands the way Gettysburg is.  In the Official Records Pat Cleburne’s report of the attack on what had been [Major General William T.] Sherman’s headquarters describes going through a blackjack thicket and then across marshy ground and up a hill.  You can go there today, and the blackjack thicket, the marshy ground, and the hill are still there.  It’s a beautiful experience.

Shelby Foote interviewed by the Naval Institute Press in 1994.

on the blockade:

The blockade, tenuous and penetrable as it was, still had an enormous effect on little things.  Nobody really knows the effect the blockade had on the people of the Confederacy.

The rarity of little items that you don’t ordinarily think of was hugely important.  They didn’t have needles for sewing; they had to improvise thorns to use for needles.  They didn’t have nails to repair their ramshackle houses.  By the time the war was over, after four years of being without nails, half the houses in the South were being shaken to pieces.  Things like that you don’t normally think about, but the North’s naval blockade caused it.

how about this:

Naval History: As much as any other historians, you and David McCullough are responsible recently for popularizing history, as opposed to doing formal academic studies.

Foote: Yeah.

More:

What I’m calling young historians are people at least in their 40s or 50s.  You have to reach that age before you have enough life experience to be a historian.  I don’t think you can have a 22-year-old historian.  You can have a 22-year-old mathematical genius.  You can have a 22-year-old poet.  But I doubt you can have a 22-year-old historian.

Contemplating possible transition to historian, in my 50s.

(Shelby’s views on the Confederate flag seem less clear, to me)