The Stonewall Brigade Shelby Foote Summary

In 1958, a historical narrator by the name of Shelby Foote of Greenville, Mississippi published his first volume of a trilogy series of the history of the American Civil War. Some one thousand pages later, Foote shows his brilliance and quality of vision through the history of a nation in pure shambles, and on the break of certain destruction, and elimination from the face of the earth. Written in Memphis, Tennessee, Foote a native southerner like any other published author faced criticism and critique of his work, especially for focusing on the history of the war by discussing the decisions and actions of conflicts that boiled over into large blood pools on the battle field. Douglass Mitchell, Stuart Chapman, and James Cox developed complex
“Immediately Jackson began to receive urgent requests for reinforcements all along the front. One officer rode up to report the brigade commander had been shot down and the survivors were badly shaken. They needed help. ‘What brigade sir?’ Jackson told asked, not having caught the name. ‘The Stonewall Brigade.’ ‘Go back,’ Jackson told him. ‘Give my compliments to them, and tell the Stonewall Brigade to maintain her reputation’.” (Foote 637). Foote sets up the scene of the south losing numbers in a dramatic fashion and creates a dialog between Jackson and a commanding officer of the Confederate army not to make them seem as tragic heroes, as Jackson’s flaw is the inability to give in or have his “Stonewall” reputation tarnished, or even romanticized, but on the contrary, Foote uses this scene to create the suspense to keep the reader going and to even create the feeling many of the soldiers had in the Stonewall Brigade. Foote here focusses on the decisions made by Jackson and throughout the book decisions made by generals because it is the history, the battles themselves decided the fate of our country and the future we were going to have as a nation, either as a free country or a slaveholding