On Lee as commander: "He had a cheerful dignity and could praise them (his men) without seeming to court their favor.

With geographic and cultural roots in the Mississippi Delta Foote's life and writing paralleled the radical shift from the agrarian planter system of the Old South to the Civil Rights era of the New South. In 1987 he became a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. When Foote was 15 years old Walker Percy and his brothers LeRoy and Phinizy Percy moved to Greenville to live with their uncle — attorney poet and novelist William Alexander Percy — after the death of their parents.

With geographic and cultural roots in the Mississippi Delta Foote's life and writing paralleled the radical shift from the agrarian planter system of the Old South to the Civil Rights era of the New South. Foote was relatively unknown to the general public for most of his life until his appearance in Ken Burns's PBS documentary The Civil War in 1990 where he introduced a generation of Americans to a war that he believed was "central to all our lives. ".