The Civil War historian Harold Holzer was a further critic of Foote's presentation of Forrest. "Ken Burns always looks for varied voices and he always looks for characters, and Shelby Foote was certainly a character," Holzer says. "The most amazing thing he said was that the two great geniuses of the war were Lincoln and Nathan Bedford Forrest. Foote somehow compared the great emancipator with a man who owned slaves, murdered blacks and joined the Ku Klux Klan." The historians of slavery and the Civil War era Eric Foner and Leon Litwack added to these criticisms, suggesting that Foote consistently underplayed the extent of Southern white racism, in effect treating "white southerners" as synonymous with all "southerners." 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."