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To: robowombat
July 1, 2005
Historian, author Foote, 88, buried

By Woody Baird
The Associated Press





MEMPHIS — Southern author Shelby Foote was buried Thursday under a huge magnolia near the graves of Civil War combatants whose exploits he chronicled in one of the best-known histories on the war.

Foote's three-volume history, The Civil War: A Narrative, runs 3,000 pages and took 20 years to complete. It was a main research resource for an 11-hour PBS documentary on the war that first aired in 1990 and made Foote a national celebrity.

Foote, a Mississippi native, died at a Memphis hospital Monday night at age 88.

Following a brief graveside service, Foote was buried on a tree-covered hill in Elmwood Cemetery, one of the South's most historic graveyards and the burial ground for more than 1,000 Civil War soldiers, including 22 generals.

"His wife told me he didn't want anything that even came close to a eulogy," said the Rev. John Sewell, pastor of St. John's Episcopal Church of Memphis. "He didn't want a lot of people standing around praying and talking about what a wonderful man he was."

Foote, a longtime Memphis resident, also wrote six novels, all set in the South. But it was the Civil War history for which he will be most remembered.

His soft, Southern drawl, passion for storytelling and gentlemanly manner made Foote an instant hit after documentary-maker Ken Burns picked him to be the featured historian on The Civil War.

Foote wrote the introduction to Elmwood's official history and picked the site for his grave years ago, said cemetery director Frances Catmur.

Elmwood opened in 1852, and among its more than 70,000 "inhabitants," as Foote called them, are senators, governors, business tycoons, yellow fever victims, rascals and ruffians.

Foote's grave is beside the family plot of former Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, one of the war's most celebrated, and sometimes reviled, commanders.

Forrest was buried at Elmwood in 1877, but his remains were moved in 1904 to a city park that bears his name.

Though buried but a few feet from the grave of Capt. William Forrest, a brother of the infamous Confederate general, Foote was no apologist for the South or champion for the Southern cause in his novels or history.

"We're all glad secession didn't work," he once said in an interview.

The service for Foote drew several rangers from Shiloh National Military Park near the Tennessee River at the Tennessee-Mississippi line. Foote often visited Shiloh, the scene of some of the most vicious fighting of the war, and it as one of his favorite battlefields.

Stacy Allen, Shiloh's chief historian, said park flags were lowered to half-staff in Foote's honor.

"He had a deep place in his heart for Shiloh," Allen said, "and he wrote one of the most readable and emotional histories of the Civil War."

Foote is survived by his wife, Gwyn; daughter, Margaret Shelby Foote; and son, Huger Lee Foote.
2 posted on 07/05/2005 8:53:49 AM PDT by robowombat
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To: robowombat
Foote's The Civil War: A Narrative is a truly a marvel -- over 3000 pages and not a dull one among them. I read the entire thing, covers to covers, in sequence, when I was laid up after back surgery a decade ago. I cannot remember enjoying a book as much as I enjoyed Shelby Foote's "book" (which in fact, is one, very long, single book, not a trilogy). Foote was a superb historian and a great writer. May he rest in peace.
4 posted on 07/05/2005 9:00:48 AM PDT by Cincinatus (Omnia relinquit servare Republicam)
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