Henry Foote
HENRY FOOTE

He is perhaps the most overlooked political leader of his era. But Henry Foote's story amplifies the point that America was a complicated place before, during, and after the Civil War.

Foote was born in Virginia and later moved to Mississippi, where he was elected a U. S. Senator in 1847. In the U.S. Senate, he was one of the chief authors of the Compromise of 1850, which at the time looked as if it might avert Civil War in America. But along the way he developed a rival in Mississippi named Jefferson Davis. On at least one occasion Henry Foote and Jefferson Davis came to blows.

In 1860, Foote was living in Nashville when he was elected to the new Confederate Congress. He went to Richmond and, for the next four years, became the harshest critic of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Foote repeatedly recommended that the Confederacy sue for peace with the Union. In fact, on one occasion, he made his way through Confederate and Union lines all the way to Washington, where he tried to meet with President Lincoln (his request was denied).

After the war, Foote became a member of President Ulysses S. Grant's administration. He was one of the few Republicans in predominantly Democratic Middle Tennessee when he died in 1880.

By the way, the property that Henry Foote once owned in Nashville now makes up a large part of Vanderbilt University.

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