The Civil War and Other Oxymorons

"I’m going to join up with our brave lads in gray. I’ve always had a weakness for lost causes, once they’re really lost."
Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) in "Gone with the Wind"


In a recent interview, Ken Burns, director of the landmark 1990 documentary series "The Civil War," mentioned an eerie phenomena known as "acoustic shadows," referring to newspaper accounts at the time of how, "despite the flash and smoke of cannon," the sound of a nearby battle would be unheard by local inhabitants yet resound clearly to distant observers.






Tuesday, April 12, 2011 marked, to the day of the week, the 150th anniversary of the first Confederate mortar round fired at the Union stronghold of Fort Sumter, South Carolina, the first military engagement of the Civil War. Burns was compelled to ponder, "We ask again whether or not in our supposedly post-racial, globalized, 21st-century world those now seemingly distant battles of the mid-19th century still have any relevance. But it is clear that the further we get from those four horrible years in our national existence - when, paradoxically, in order to become one we tore ourselves in two - the more central and defining that war becomes…The acoustic shadows of the Civil War remind us that the more it recedes, the more important it becomes. Its lessons are as fresh today as they were for those young men who were simply trying to survive its daily horrors."

Two percent of the country’s population, more than 620,000, perished, from disease, gunfire and starvation (more American losses than in both World Wars combined). Time magazine writer and editor-at-large David Von Drehle recently, and succinctly, described the Civil War as "the most traumatic and transformational event in U.S. history." Ultimately, no single writer could possibly abridge such a singular, heartbreaking epoch into a sentence or two. According to Ken Burns, "Maybe Walt Whitman (below), the poet and sometime journalist who had worked as a nurse in the appalling Union hospitals, understood and saw it best. ‘Future years,’ he said, ‘will never know the seething hell, the black infernal background of the countless minor scenes and interiors…of the Secession War, and it is best they should not…The real war,’ Whitman admonished us, ‘will never get in the books.’ We are, nonetheless," Burns offered, "obligated to try."



Roy Kinnard, author of the 1996 book The Blue and the Gray on the Silver Screen, noted, "In the early years of movies, the Civil War was only forty years in the past - distant enough to be classified as ‘history,’ yet still recent enough for that bygone war to have acquired a veneer of ‘nostalgia,’ with many participants still alive." In the 1910 silent film "All’s Fair in Love and War," Confederate veteran Colonel John Singelton Mosby (below), who earned the nickname of the "Gray Ghost" because of his ability to command lightning quick raids and to elude Union troops, portrayed himself, even though he was past the age of 70.



As a matter of fact, during the silent film era between 1903 and 1930, hundreds of 10- to 20-minute films about the Civil War were produced. "The Guerilla" (1908) was motion picture pioneer D.W. Griffith’s first of several films with a Civil War setting, leading to his influential, and still (nearly a century later) controversial, feature-length epic "The Birth of a Nation" (1915), a three-hour saga of the relationship between two families, one Northern abolitionists, the other Southerners, during the conflict and the subsequent Reconstruction.

In the April 18, 2011, Time magazine cover story "Why We’re Still Fighting the Civil War," David Von Drehle remarked that Griffith’s landmark film "brought the Lost Cause to cinematic life, with the (Ku Klux) Klan saving the day in the final reel, rescuing white families from…marauding blacks." During the turbulent postwar years of the Reconstruction Era, the Lost Cause became a popular movement in the South to reconcile the defeat of the Confederacy, depicting Confederate leaders as noble, God-fearing standard-bearers of old-fashioned chivalry and translating their defeat - outgunned and outnumbered by brutish, godless Northern aggressors - as a moral victory. Von Drehle noted that the story of the Lost Cause "pictured antebellum life as an idyll of genteel planters and their happy ‘servants’ whose ‘instincts,’ in (Jefferson) Davis’ words (in his post-war book The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government), ‘rendered them contented with their lot…Never was there happier dependence of labor and capital on each other."

Kenneth C. Davis, author of the 1996 book Don’t Know Much About the Civil War, wrote, "A sense of romanticism was present from the war’s onset. Mark Twain once said that there was a Civil War because Southerners read too much Sir Walter Scott, the nineteenth-century author of Ivanhoe. Twain meant that all of Scott’s notions of chivalry, courtly love, and honor clung fast in the planter’s world and had a great deal to do with the ill-fated Confederate ‘Cause.’" (Twain, who served two weeks in the Confederate Army at the beginning of the war before heading west to begin his literary career, once said, "It was not my presence in the Civil War that determined that tremendous contest - it was my retirement from it that brought the crash. It left the Confederate side too weak.")

D.W. Griffith (above) was born in Kentucky toward the close of the Reconstruction Era, the son of a former Confederate colonel, Jacob "Roaring Jake" Griffith, so it was only natural that his films, especially "The Birth of a Nation," would reflect the ideals of the Lost Cause, depicting the newly freed slaves (portrayed by white actors in blackface) as militant looters (and worse) incited by Northern carpetbaggers and the knight-like riders of the Klan as heroes.

According to disputed accounts, President Woodrow Wilson, the first Southerner to occupy the White House since the Virginia-born Zachary Taylor died in office in 1850, described Griffith’s achievement as "writing history with lightning." Wilson was born in Staunton, Virginia, December 28, 1856. His father, Reverend Dr. Joseph Wilson, who had moved south from Ohio, defended slavery, owned slaves himself, and set up a Sunday school for them. The elder Wilson served as a chaplain to the Confederate Army and cared for wounded soldiers at his church. Woodrow Wilson himself had written a book, A History of the American People, in which he described the Ku Klux Klan as "an empire of the South," created by men "roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation."

The March 4, 1915, review of "The Birth of a Nation" in The New York Times acknowledged the story’s "melodramatic and inflammatory material" but added, "Of the film as a film, it may be reported simply that it is an impressive new illustration of the scope of the motion picture camera."

"The dark shadow of racism taints (Griffith’s) reputation for the modern viewer," Roy Kinnard noted in The Blue and the Gray on the Silver Screen. "Griffith’s racial attitudes…were those of a white Southerner born in the nineteenth century and, although racist…were (sadly) the commonplace, majority point of view when ‘The Birth of a Nation’ was made…"

Fifteen years after "The Birth of a Nation," Griffith, though denied the artistic freedom he enjoyed in the silent film era, delivered a respectful, though emotionally distant and episodic, portrait of Lincoln in the 1930 sound production "Abraham Lincoln" (above),starring Walter Huston (father of director John Huston). Variety kindly called the film "more than an outstanding classic of sound pictures" that "eclipses the most conservative illusion of a modernized ‘Birth of a Nation.’ It is a startlingly superlative accomplishment."

In 1939, according to Time magazine’s David Von Drehle, "a new Lost Cause melodrama made an even bigger impact" than "The Birth of a Nation," namely "Gone with the Wind," based on the novel by Atlanta, Georgia-born Margaret Mitchell, who was seemingly inspired by Griffith’s film. "The story of plucky Scarlett O’Hara and the sad destruction of her ‘pretty world’ of ‘Cavaliers and Cotton called the Old South,’" Von Drehle remarked, "is the top-grossing film of all time, adjusted for inflation…"

"The white women are elegant, their menfolk noble or at least dashing," wrote D.J. Reynolds, a professor at Christ’s College Cambridge and author of America, Empire of Liberty: A New History of the United States. "And in the background, the black slaves are most dutiful and content, clearly incapable of an independent existence." (Actress Butterfly McQueen’s over-the-top characterization of the childlike slave Prissy - notorious for squeaking, "I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout birthin’ babies!" - prompted Malcolm X to say, "I felt like crawling under the rug.")

"‘Gone with the Wind’ presents a sentimental view of the Civil War," Roger Ebert remarked, "in which the ‘Old South’ takes the place of Camelot and the war was fought not so much to defeat the Confederacy and free the slaves as to give Miss Scarlett O’Hara her comeuppance." (The Ku Klux Klan was written out of the script for fear of offending some elected politicians who belonged to it.)




"Gone with the Wind" had its world premiere on December 15, 1939, in, appropriately, Atlanta, Georgia. All of the black performers in the cast, including Hattie McDaniel (above), who would garner an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress for her inimitable portrayal of the outspoken, matriarchal slave Mammy, were barred from attending because of Georgia’s segregationist laws. They, as well, endured the indignity of being excluded from the premiere’s souvenir program.

Cited by Von Drehle, Gary Gallagher, University of Virginia historian and author of a number of books on the Civil War, insists that "the Lost Cause’s Confederacy of gallant leaders and storied victories in defense of home ground retains enormous vitality."

The legacy of the soap-operatic melodrama of "Gone with the Wind" was carried on, over four decades later, in the television miniseries "The Blue and the Gray" and "North and South."

In the mid-1970s into the 1980s, the miniseries genuinely made home viewing must-see TV. At their best, miniseries provided filmmakers the opportunity to create rich, full-bodied adaptations of best-selling novels, more faithful to the literary source than big-screen versions could aspire, beginning with 1974’s "QB VII," based on the book by Leon Uris and starring Ben Gazzara and Anthony Hopkins. Other outstanding achievements in the golden age of the miniseries include "Rich Man, Poor Man" (1976), based on Irwin Shaw’s novel, "Captains and the Kings" (1976), from Taylor Caldwell’s novel, "Roots" (1977), based on the book by Alex Haley, "Jesus of Nazareth" (1977), "Centennial" (1978), based on James A. Michener’s novel, "Holocaust" (1978), "Shogun" (1980), based on the book by James Clavell, "The Winds of War" (1983), from Herman Wouk’s novel, "The Thorn Birds" (1983), based on Colleen McCullough’s best-seller, and "Lonesome Dove" (1989), based on the book by Larry McMurtry.





"The Blue and the Gray" (1982) tells the saga of the families of two sisters, one family Southern farmers in Charlottesville, Virginia, the other family Northern newspaper publishers in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Episodic highlights of the Civil War, from the trial of radical abolitionist John Brown (a moving final performance by the one-of-a-kind actor Sterling Hayden, above) to the stirring delivery of the Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln (a flawless cameo by Gregory Peck, below), are witnessed by the protagonist, an idealistic sketch artist-war correspondent, the youngest son of the above-mentioned Virginia farmers who, unlike his older brothers, refuses to join the Confederate Army and heads north to become a journalist for Harper’s Weekly.


Although the acting career of the youthful lead, John Hammond, never really took off (whether intentional or not), the rest of the cast featured a number of familiar faces, including Stacy Keach, Lloyd Bridges, Colleen Dewhurst, Warren Oates, Paul Winfield, Robert Vaughn and, as General Ulysses Grant, Rip Torn.

"The Blue and the Gray" was filmed in Arkansas with over 160 characters and 6300 extras, and noted Civil War historian Bruce Catton (author the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Stillness at Appomattox) contributed to the script, however, one web reviewer, James Plath, commented, "The second half at times…feels like an episode from ‘Bonanza’ rather than a big-budget miniseries."




Filmed back-to-back in 1985, "North and South Book I" and "North and South Book II," based on the expansive historical novels by best-selling author John Jakes, traces the enduring friendship between South Carolinian Patrick Swayze and Pennsylvanian James Read (of course, the respective families are Southern plantation farmers and Northern industrialists), who become fast friends at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point only to find themselves on opposite sides of the war. John Jakes claimed he was inspired by a list he found at West Point of generals who had graduated and fought against each other in the Civil War. Producer David L. Wolper, who was responsible for the seminal miniseries "Roots," stated that "Roots" had told the story of the Old South from the black point-of-view, while "North and South" tells the story from the white perspective.




Patrick Swayze was a rising star at the time, having just starred (alongside Charlie Sheen) in the violent action picture "Red Dawn." Kirstie Alley (above, who received top billing) and Lesley-Anne Down costarred as the belles, Northern and Southern, along with a bevy of daytime and prime-time soap beauties: Genie Francis, Terri Garber, Mary Crosby and Morgan Fairchild. The impressive array of guest stars included Elizabeth Taylor (as a bordello madam), James Stewart, Robert Mitchum, Gene Kelly, Jean Simmons, David Carradine, Robert Guillaume as Frederick Douglass, Lloyd Bridges as Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Johnny Cash (below) as John Brown.




Abraham Lincoln was portrayed by Hal Holbrook, who, a decade earlier, won an Emmy for his performance in the miniseries "Sandburg’s Lincoln."





As if the makers of "North and South" weren’t striving enough to emulate "Gone with the Wind," they tracked down the sole surviving major star from the cast of "Gone with the Wind" (and today, at the age of 94, very much alive), Olivia de Havilland, who portrayed Scarlett O’Hara’s high-spirited sister-in-law, Melanie Hamilton Wilkes (above), and gave her a guest role in "Book II" (below).




"The Civil War "is by far the most important event in U.S. history," Gary Gallagher said. "It’s a time when America grappled with questions fundamental to what kind of nation this is, what kind of nation it would be. The questions they grappled with…are ones we’re still dealing with."

Historian James McPherson, who won the Pulitzer Prize for the 1988 book Battle Cry of Freedom, recently commented, "Americans in both North and South were willing to fight on despite…horrific casualties because their respective nations and societies were at stake. Would America move toward a free-labor capitalist economy and a democratic policy in all regions or would a slave-labor plantation economy and a hierarchal society persist in half the country?"

"When I was in school in the sixties," Kenneth C. Davis noted in Don’t Know Much About the Civil War, "it became fashionable to say that the Civil War was not about slavery. Instead, ‘The War of Northern Aggression’ was brought on by other issues, such as states’ rights…There are still people who cling to the idea that the Civil War was not fought over slavery…the Civil War was clearly fought because of African slavery."

Gallagher maintains that coming to terms with slavery is vital to understanding the Civil War. The "Emancipation Cause, which was the least embraced of the four coming out of the Civil War, is the one that is best understood by Hollywood," Gallagher said. Slavery represented a $3 billion investment in property, more substantial than any other element of the economy at the time. "The people who controlled the most wealth in the United States were slaveholders," Gallagher noted. "The idea that anything else would cause states to leave the Union…that’s someone who isn’t in touch with reality."

Kenneth C. Davis wrote, "The Civil War never really ended…we’re still fighting over race in America…It is clear that this deep-seated racial chasm is the most pernicious legacy of America’s slave past and the Civil War. Until we all understand that chasm and how it has been part of the American experience since colonial times, this country will never heal the wounds, get over them, and move on."

"Our Civil War was a blot on our history," Mark Twain observed, "but not as great a blot as the buying and selling of Negro souls."