1/20/2025

Last week’s curation at RealClear’s American Civics portal features an interview that Jack Miller Center Resident Historian Elliott Drago conducted with JMC network scholar Lorien Foote, a specialist in the Civil War, Reconstruction, and 19th century America. She notes that the 1989 movie “Glory” “sparked [her] interest in the Civil War.” Foote realized she wanted to teach history after taking a graduate seminar on the origins of World War I in her hometown of Norman, Oklahoma.

Her published books include “The Yankee Plague: Escaped Prisoners and the Collapse of the Confederacy,” which tells the story of the mass escape of 2,800 Union prisoners of war from camps in South Carolina and North Carolina in the winter of 1864-1865. Foots notes that some “escaped prisoners communicated to enslaved people that the time had come to escalate and organize their resistance to enslavement and to the Confederacy.” Slaves also helped the escapees, which caused some big problems in certain states in the South. As Foote reports, “The government of South Carolina had to devote resources to suppressing some organized slave rebellions that occurred in the wake of the mass prisoner escapes.” Their rebellion against the Confederacy helped the Union cause, diverting some of their attention away from the Union, and hastened the fall of slavery in the region.

Finally, answering the question of what’s one thing she wishes everyone knew about American history, Foote says that the media and the American public need to realize that the divisions in this country are not the worst they’ve ever been. “Any study of the election of 1800, or the events of 1861, 1919, or 1968, exposes that claim as false. Americans have had many times in our history when politicians demonized opponents, when violence and riots ruled in the streets when people feared that the republic would not last much longer, and when people attacked the very founding principles.”