Foote maintained that "the French Maquis did far worse things than the Ku Klux Klan ever did—who never blew up trains or burnt bridges or anything else," and that the First Klan "didn't even have lynchings." Foote saw slavery as a cause of the Civil War, commenting that "the people who say slavery had nothing to do with the war are just as wrong as the people who say it had everything to do with the war." Furthermore, Foote also argued that slavery was "certainly doomed to extinction" but was used "almost as a propaganda item," and that "those who wanted to exploit it could grab onto it."