His paternal great-grandfather was Hezekiah William Foote (1813–99), an American Confederate veteran, attorney, planter and politician from Mississippi.

[10] Foote moved frequently as his father was promoted within the Armour and Company, living in Greenville, Jackson, and Vicksburg, Mississippi; Pensacola, Florida; and Mobile, Alabama.

Foote's Jewish heritage led to discrimination at Chapel Hill, an experience that bolstered his later support for the Civil Rights Movement.

[11] Love in a Dry Season (1951) was his attempt to deal with the "upper classes of the Mississippi Delta" around the time of the Great Depression.

The book does showcase Foote's Southern chauvinism, as the author "favored the South throughout the novel, portraying the Confederate cause as a fight for constitutional liberty and omitting any reference to slavery".

"[11]: 227 Although he was not one of America's best-known fiction writers, Foote was admired by peers like Eudora Welty and his literary hero William Faulkner.

He was struggling with the "dark, horrible novel" when Bennett Cerf of Random House asked Foote to write a short history of the Civil War.

He visited battlefields and read widely: standard biographies, campaign studies, and recent books by Hudson Strode, Bruce Catton, James G. Randall, Clifford Dowdey, T. Harry Williams, Kenneth M. Stampp and Allan Nevins.

He developed new respect for such disparate figures as Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman, Patrick Cleburne, Edwin Stanton and Jefferson Davis.

[15]Foote was criticized for his lack of interest in more current historical research, and for a less firm grasp of politics than of military affairs.

Litwack concluded that "Foote is an engaging battlefield guide, a master of the anecdote, and a gifted and charming story teller, but he is not a good historian.

[11]: xix, 69 [8] He relied extensively on the work of Hudson Strode, whose sympathy for Lost Cause claims resulted in a portrait of Jefferson Davis as a tragic hero without many of the flaws attributed to him by other historians.

"[8] Chandra Manning suggests Foote belongs to a school of Civil War historiography that "answers 'where does slavery fit in the Union cause' by saying 'nowhere,' except maybe in the most reluctant and instrumental way".

[21] Joshua M. Zeitz described Foote as "living proof that many Americans...remain under the spell of a century-old tendency to mystify the Confederacy's martial glory at the expense of recalling the intense ideological purpose associated with its cause...we remain very much under the spell of Robert E. Lee, even as we decry slavery and its legacy".

"[8] Foote kept Nathan Bedford Forrest's portrait on his wall and lauded him as "one of the most attractive men who ever walked through the pages of history".

He supported school integration, opposed Eisenhower's hands-off approach to Southern racism, and championed Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.

The work still gave him trouble and he set it aside once more, in the summer of 1978, to write "Echoes of Shiloh," an article for National Geographic Magazine.

In November 1986, Foote figured prominently at a meeting of dozens of consultants gathered to critique Burns' script.

[24] The extent of Foote's apparent apologia for white Southern racism and Lost Cause mythologizing was satirized in the character of Sherman Hoyle in the 2004 mockumentary C.S.A.

When The Civil War was first broadcast, his telephone number was publicly listed and he received many phone calls from people who had seen him on television.

Horton Foote, the playwright and screenwriter (To Kill A Mockingbird, Baby the Rain Must Fall and Tender Mercies) was the voice of Jefferson Davis in the PBS series.

"And while we didn't grow up together, we have become friends; I was the voice of Jefferson Davis in that TV series", Horton Foote added proudly.

Foote also contributed a long introduction to their edition of Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, giving a narrative biography of the author.

Also in 1994, Foote joined Protect Historic America and was instrumental in opposing a Disney theme park near battlefield sites in Virginia.

In 1998, the author Tony Horwitz visited Foote for his book Confederates in the Attic, a meeting in which Foote declared he was "dismayed" by the "behavior of blacks, who are fulfilling every dire prophesy the Ku Klux Klan made", and that African Americans were "acting as if the utter lie about blacks being somewhere between ape and man were true".

"[36] Foote also argued that freedmen had led to the failure of Reconstruction and that the Confederate flag represented "law, honour, love of country.

"[22] In 1999, Foote received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement and an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from The College of William & Mary.

"[44] In 2013, the Sons of Confederate Veterans protested the removal of Nathan Bedford Forrest's statue in Memphis by invoking Foote's characterization of him as a "humane slave holder".

[28] In October 2017, John F. Kelly, the White House Chief of Staff for President Donald Trump, argued that "the lack of ability to compromise led to the Civil War" and praised Robert E. Lee as an "honorable man".

[46] White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended Kelly's controversial remarks by citing Foote's work.