Random House

Hardback, 3 volumes, 2,934 pages

Vintage Books

USA Paperback, 3 volumes

Shelby Foote, who published the first volume of this trilogy in 1958, died a few weeks ago. It seemed like a good time to reread it, the best books I’ve ever read on the Civil War.

As a novelist, Foote used careful, thorough research and an elegant style to bring the period of the war and the people who lived and died in it into focus.

His strength is in the details that often may not make it into a more formal, history-text approach.

The historical facts are all there: the mind-numbing casualty figures, the hardships, the blunders and successes. But they’re made human and comprehensible by Foote’s ability to get into the minds of the nature of the places where the battles were fought and the minds of the people – from presidents to generals to ordinary soldiers – who fought them.

For example, when he wrote of the Battle of Murfreesboro in Tennessee on the last day of 1862 and the dawn of 1863, the third year of the war, he sets the stage by describing how, the night before the battle, the regimental bands of the two armies began to play songs.

It became a sort of contest, with the Confederate bands playing songs like “Dixie” and the bands of the Union Army responding with “Yankee Doodle” and the like.

Foote wrote: “Finally, though, one group of musicians began to play the familiar ‘Home Sweet Home,’ and one by one the others took it up, until at last all the bands of both armies were playing the song.

Soldiers on both sides of the battleline began to sing the words, swelling the chorus east and west, North and South.

As it died away on the final line – ‘There’s no-o place like home’ – the words caught in the throats of men who, bluecoat and butternut alike, would be killing each other tomorrow … .”

Kill each other they did.

The final tally of the battle, which ended on Jan. 2, was 24,988 casualties. The North lost 1,730 killed and 1,294 Southern soldiers were killed, nearly 10 percent of the men fighting. I’m not sure what makes the Civil War so interesting to so many people. There are plenty of readers like me who are fascinated by the subject.

A lot of them know a lot more about it than I do, and make pilgrimages to visit the sites of many of the great battles. Maybe it’s the epic scope of the whole thing, so vast that it’s hard to get the mind around it, to understand casualty figures as terrible as those listed for battles such as Murfreesborough.

Maybe it’s because the war shaped what this country has become, often in ways we probably don’t even realize. It’s hard to comprehend the way people thought then. Think how distressed the nation is over the number of American soldiers killed so far in the Iraq War. In many battles of the Civil War, more American soldiers were killed in a few hours than have died in Iraq.

How did the people of the country, North and South, cope with that kind of tragedy? Maybe Americans haven’t changed much. American soldiers are just as brave and willing to face death now as they were then; they prove it every day in Iraq.

Foote made more sense of it and brought more understanding of the period than any writer I’ve ever encountered. Some readers will remember him and his clear, compelling and eloquent accounts of events from the Ken Burns documentary on the Civil War that aired on PBS. A Mississipian himself, Foote brought a balanced perspective with an understanding of the Southern viewpoint.

Although the Northwest mostly played onlooker to the Civil War, there are connections. U.S. Grant served in the Northwest as a Regular Army officer in 1852.

Lincoln, at one point in his political career, was offered the post of governor of the Oregon Territory, but he declined. How would the history of the United States have played out if he had taken that job?