The Death of the Last "Great Compromise"

Shelby Foote was a popular historian of the Civil War who passed away in 2005. A charming, genteel Southerner and a compelling storyteller best known for his memorable appearance in Ken Burns' 1990 documentary The Civil War, it gives me no pleasure to speak ill of him. What's more, Foote didn't indulge in overt Confederate apologia, like many proponents of the "Lost Cause" mythos. He was not a revisionist historian; he acknowledged the evil of slavery and the racism of the antebellum South. But the interpretation of Civil War history that Foote helped to popularize—which he termed "the Great Compromise"—was arguably even more pernicious, and it is only in recent years that this compromise has died a well-deserved death.

As Foote himself described "the Great Compromise" in a C-SPAN interview, "it consists of Southerners admitting freely that it's probably best that the Union wasn't divided, and the North admits, rather freely, that the South fought bravely for a cause in which it believed." Because of this unspoken compromise, Foote explained, "we're now able to look at the war with some coolness, which we couldn't do before now."

The glaring problem with this is that it's fundamentally a compromise among white people, to the exclusion of black perspectives. Indeed, Foote bemoans "the racial problem" in the same interview, remarking that "the blacks seem not to want to be reminded of history." They ("the blacks") want to "hide from history," Foote says, or "hide history from us." The "us" and "them" dichotomy is revealing—Foote is telling history from a white perspective, for white people. Noting that both Northerners and Southerners had arrived at this "Great Compromise," Foote goes on to lament, "I wish my black friends could do the same." Foote—a staunch defender of the Confederate flag, a widely-recognized hate symbol—referred to black people's objections to the flag as "a violation of the compromise" and "an arousal of bitterness."

"White people should not 'compromise' among themselves on the issue of minority rights"

Foote deserves half-credit for having once remarked, "the people who say slavery had nothing to do with the war are just as wrong as the people who say it had everything to do with the war." Despite his acknowledgement that "the institution of slavery is a stain on this nation's soul that will never be cleansed," Foote consistently downplayed slavery as the cause of the war, saying, "No soldier on either side gave a damn about the slaves—they were fighting for other reasons entirely in their minds" (again, half-true, but a deliberate oversimplification.)

He added: "I would fight for the Confederacy today if the circumstances were similar."

Foote may not have been a revisionist historian himself, but he shared with revisionists a common project to rehabilitate an unjust cause. And his "Great Compromise" interpretation is arguably more harmful than outright revisionism because it is designed to persuade well-meaning Northern liberals to overlook the uniquely heinous sins of the South in the name of "compromise." In so doing, it diminishes our moral clarity.

To give you an idea of just how pernicious Foote's interpretation has been, in 2017, soon after the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville over the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue, General John Kelly, then-Chief of Staff to Donald Trump, remarked that "the lack of ability to compromise led to the Civil War." Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders invoked Foote in Kelly's defense, noting that "many historians, including Shelby Foote in Ken Burns' famous Civil War documentary, agreed that a failure to compromise was a cause of the Civil War."

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In fact, there were many infamous compromises throughout U.S. history designed to placate voracious Southern slaveowners, going all the way back to the "Three-Fifths Compromise" in the Constitution. The Missouri Compromise and Second Missouri Compromise of 1820 and 1821, respectively, the Compromise of 1850, and the proposed "Crittenden Compromise" in 1860 all made concessions to the South that protected the institution of slavery. These abject compromises are seen today as shameful episodes in American history, and rightfully so. And while they may have forestalled the Civil War for a few years (at a grave moral cost), they did not prevent it, and there is no reason to believe that further compromise would have prevented it, either.

Shelby Foote's "Great Compromise" belongs to this lineage of moral equivocation, and its death is well-deserved and overdue. It's important that we recognize this in today's era of racial reckoning, lest we learn the wrong lessons of the Civil War. White people should not "compromise" among themselves on the issue of minority rights, and we should condemn those who did so in the past just as strongly as those who would advocate for such a compromise today.

Let the words of the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison be instructive for us today: "There must be no compromise with slavery—none whatever. Nothing is gained, everything is lost, by subordinating principle to expedience."