The Civil War on Film 2019057097, 2019057098, 9781440866623, 9781440866630

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The Civil War on Film

Recent Titles in Hollywood History The Vietnam War on Film David Luhrssen The American West on Film Johnny D. Boggs

The Civil War on Film Peg A. Lamphier and Rosanne Welch

Hollywood History

Copyright © 2020 by ABC-CLIO, LLC All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Lamphier, Peg A., author. | Welch, Rosanne, author. Title: The Civil War on film / Peg A. Lamphier and Rosanne Welch. Description: Santa Barbara, California : ABC-CLIO, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019057097 (print) | LCCN 2019057098 (ebook) | ISBN 9781440866623 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781440866630 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: United States—History—Civil War, 1861-1865—Motion pictures and the war. | United States—History—Civil War, 1861-1865—Television and the war. | War films—United States—History and criticism. | War television programs—United States—History and criticism. Classification: LCC E656 .L36 2020 (print) | LCC E656 (ebook) | DDC 791.43/658737—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019057097 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019057098 ISBN: 978-1-4408-6662-3 (print) 978-1-4408-6663-0 (ebook) 24 23 22 21 20   1 2 3 4 5 This book is also available as an eBook. ABC-CLIO An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC ABC-CLIO, LLC 147 Castilian Drive Santa Barbara, California 93117 ­www​.­abc​-­clio​.­com This book is printed on acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents Series Foreword vii Preface ix Acknowledgments xv Introduction xvii Chronology xxvii 1. Gone with the Wind (1939)

1

2. Friendly Persuasion (1957)

19

3. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)

33

4. Glory (1989)

51

5. Gettysburg (1993) 71 6. Andersonville (1996)

85

7. Ride with the Devil (1999)

105

8. Gangs of New York (2002)

125

9. Lincoln (2012)

139

10. Free State of Jones (2016)

157

Bibliography 169 Index 177

Series Foreword Just exactly how accurate are Hollywood’s film and television portrayals of American history? What do these portrayals of history tell us, not only about the events they depict, but also the time in which they were made? Each volume in this unique reference series is devoted to a single topic or key theme in American history, examining ten to twelve major motion pictures or television productions. Substantial essays summarize each film, provide historical background of the event or period it depicts, and explain how accurate the film’s depiction is, while also analyzing the cultural context in which the film was made. A final section of “Resources” provides a comprehensive annotated bibliography of print and electronic sources to aid students and teachers in further research. The subjects of these “Hollywood History” volumes were chosen based on both curriculum relevance and inherent interest. Readers will find a wide array of subject choices, including American Slavery on Film, the Civil War on Film, the American West on Film, Vietnam on Film, and the 1960s on Film. Ideal for school assignments and student research, the length, format, and subject areas are designed to meet educators’ needs and students’ interests.

Preface As historian Thomas Cripps said, “Movies not only wear history at best as a loose garment, but their makers care more for following well-tested recipes for making good grosses than for the niceties of history” (Cripps 1995). There is no movie genre where this is truer than Civil War movies. The American Civil War is a mightily contested arena of scholarship, making it difficult for an amateur historian/screenwriter to discern the best or most factual material. And however divided Civil War scholars are, they don’t bring anywhere near the fervor to Civil War history as “buffs,” reenactors, and fringe groups with racial axes to grind do. Civil War movies almost universally erase the past, and for good reason. The nation’s years of Civil War were painful, destructive, and unpleasant. Psychologists tell us people don’t like to remember bad things, and given the opportunity, we will forget the defects of our personal and national pasts in favor of a story more palatable, more moral, more heroic. No past is more painful than the moment when the United States went to war against itself, so there is a powerful impulse to forget that past. Worse, in our national need to rewrite (and then film) the Civil War, we had to erase its cause—slavery. In so doing, we created a present where we continue to struggle with the legacy of slavery, creating a present where many Americans believe two centuries of legal human bondage left no great national scar. Our movies and television programs tell us enslaved people were happy, their owners were misunderstood men of honor, and the entire slave economy stood as a shining moment of magnolias and gentility. Our Civil War movies, for the most part, allow Americans in all regions of the nation to believe slavery played no part in the war and that all the soldiers fought for a worthy cause. Then there are the gendered messages. Civil War

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movies would have us believe that either women played no part in the war or that the women were all unquestioningly supportive of their soldiers no matter if they wore the blue or the gray. Why not believe these mythologies? In a nation where truth and historical accuracy are treated with disdain by leaders and regular citizens alike, what harm is there in this rosy picture of the past? Isn’t it better to feel good about ourselves than to continue to drag the nation’s shortfalls before the public eye? What good is there in berating ourselves about the failures of the past? These are larger, less glib questions than they appear. What is the truth of the American past, and are there any facts we can agree on? Leaving aside issues of “truth” and “facts” (for just this moment), our cinematic lies about the Civil War do a disservice to the 620,000 men and women who died in that war and to the thousands more who sacrificed and suffered to wipe out the great national stain of slavery. We do a disservice to the descendants of the twenty million-plus enslaved people when we pretend slavery didn’t matter. We betray the democratic ideals of freedom and equality when we pretend the Civil War wasn’t about slavery. Make no mistake, slavery is one of the United States’ great national sins, and Americans know it. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t spend so much energy lying about it. To be fair, the motion picture industry has good reasons for playing as fast and loose with history as artists do with the subjects of their paintings and sculptures. No Picasso character resembles a real human being; nor should they. That is the job of photography; yet, even there, the use of filters and lighting alters the image. Filmmakers, from screenwriters to film editors, are story creators, and good stories only rarely conform to reality. We go to the movies not to be informed but to be entertained. If it were not so, a full slate of documentaries would appear at every multiplex in America. The problem comes not when historically inaccurate films catch the American imagination but when the consumers of these films confuse them with actual history. While any past event is vulnerable to the mythmaking of film, the Civil War might be the most contested event in American history. No national historical moment has been more written about (except perhaps World War II), argued over, and romanticized than the so-called irrepressible conflict. When Jill Lepore said, “How wars are remembered can be just as important as how they were fought and described,” she might have been speaking specifically of the Civil War (Chadwick 2001). Early Civil War and slavery histories were written by a great number of Southern historians who invented the “Lost Cause” mythology. Embedded in the collapse of the Confederacy and white supremacy, the narrative of the Lost Cause contained many cornerstone “realities” now considered, at least by most historians, untrue. First and foremost, Lost Cause ideology embraces the “moonlight and magnolia” school of antebellum history where the South is full of lovely hoop-skirted ladies, dashing white cavaliers, and happy slaves. White

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Southerners are portrayed as more honorable and more gentile than Northerners, whose greed prompted the Industrial Revolution and the downfall of the agrarian tradition (Gallagher 2008; Cox 2003). Confederate generals like Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson preside over the Lost Cause like Jesus at the Last Supper, with many of the same religious overtones. In the years after the Civil War, the marble man myth of Lee took on an almost divine tone, embodying all that was noble, honorable, ethical, and pure in Southern manhood. Jackson, on the other hand, came to embody the tragic fallen hero and thus the personification of the Lost Cause (Korda 2015). In keeping with the binary nature of ideologies, the honorable Southern generals stand in contrast to venal, uncouth Northerners. The Lost Cause insists on the illegitimacy of Abraham Lincoln’s election and his villainy as a backwoods barbarian, miscegenationist, and all-purpose bad person. Ulysses S. Grant fares no better than Lincoln. Always seen in contrast to the myth of the noble Lee, Grant, who it must be remembered defended his country and then won the war against Lee, is still portrayed as a military butcher who coldly sacrificed his men, drank to excess, and generally embarrassed the Union army and the nation. As President Grant, he does no better and is primarily remembered for the corruption of his administration and not the good he did, though he was the single most important figure behind the Reconstruction process in the South. Grant presided over the Fifteenth Amendment, which gave formerly enslaved men the right to vote, and he oversaw landmark civil rights legislation outlawing discrimination in public accommodation. While the nation abounds with monuments to Jackson and Lee, there are few to Grant, suggesting that while Grant won the war, he lost the battle for historical memory (Blight 2001). Also, key to Lost Cause ideology is a belief in the “War of Northern Aggression.” The war, or so the narrative goes, was caused by aggressive Yankees who threatened states’ rights and personal freedom with their federal overreaching and generally uncouth ways. The War of Northern Aggression mythology must ignore the decades of proslavery wrangling that occurred in national politics as well as the fact that the Confederacy illegally seceded from the Union in a massive act of treason and then provoked the war by firing on federal troops. Indeed, the “War of Northern Aggression” is so deeply counterfactual that it suggests the power of Lost Cause mythology. The last component of the Lost Cause, and perhaps the key component, is the cherished belief in happy slaves and subhuman African Americans in need of civilization and Christianity. Lost Cause adherents deny the immorality and cruelty of slavery and insist slavery was a benign and misunderstood institution. Slave masters were benevolent, or so goes the mythology, and Northerners too arrogant to understand the honorable qualities of slavery. The inherent white supremacy of this denial of slavery is the cornerstone of the Lost Cause (Blight 2001).

xii Preface

ON THE MOVIE CHOICES FOR THIS VOLUME This is the problem that confronts anyone writing about (or watching) Civil War films. Both the Civil War films and the critiques of those films are fraught with the old racial and regional arguments of the past and are destined to be evaluated based on where the viewer stands on the continuum of Civil War memory. To widen audiences, some writers have tread lightly around the neo-Confederate arguments of happy slaves, black Confederates, and the glorious cause. The editors of this volume have little patience for Lost Cause ideology or any argument that implies race-based slavery isn’t an entirely repugnant economic, political, and cultural institution. That said, movies that make dubious historical claims can provide rich opportunities for learning. Each of the movies we chose for this volume does a different kind of work and was a “big” enough film that it is still widely available should a reader want to watch it. We also tried to pick films that covered a wide swath of film history or were representative of a certain type of Civil War movie. Most importantly, each film allows for a discussion of different facets of Civil War history. The authors made a conscious decision not to give Birth of a Nation its own chapter for several reasons. Too many words have already been written about the film, and we think it is repugnant enough to not deserve its own chapter; its discussion fits better in this introduction. Thus, we begin with our survey of Civil War movies with Gone with the Wind (1939). While Gone with the Wind’s overarching message is not that different from Birth of a Nation’s, it is a considerably more subtle film, and as Rosanne Welch will argue, one with intriguingly powerful female characters. Gone with the Wind offers opportunities to further discuss “glorious cause” mythology and stereotypes such as “Mammy” and the Southern belle. In chapter 2, Welch examines a film that focuses on the Northern perspective, Friendly Persuasion (1956). Though less well known today than some of the other films on our list, Persuasion earned a handful of Academy Award nominations the year it premiered. The film follows the story of a Quaker family as the realities of wartime challenge their pacifist beliefs. Made at the height of McCarthyism, the film examines the forces that fall upon people as their community pressures them to conform. The film’s screenwriter, Michael Wilson, was blacklisted when he wrote the script, making the film’s contemporary commentary all the more poignant. Though a seemingly unlikely entry, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) offers Peg Lamphier an opportunity to examine the nexus between Civil War films and westerns. One of Sergio Leone’s iconic spaghetti westerns (“spaghetti” because they were made in Italy by Italians), the film is set amid the little-known New Mexico campaign of the Civil War. In contrast to many westerns before and after, particularly John Wayne–type westerns, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly features a morally ambivalent hero and violence that appears more repugnant than heroic. Much like Ride with the Devil (1999), Leone’s film is sadly more sympathetic to Confederates than

Preface xiii

one might expect in a relatively modern film, though it is considerably more nuanced than one might expect. The fourth chapter takes on perhaps the best Civil War movie of the bunch, Glory (1989). Glory breaks movie taboos by featuring black characters and telling the story of the black soldiers of the Massachusetts FiftyFourth Infantry. An examination of the role of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw’s character in the film allows for the beginning of a discussion of the “white savior” trope in films, one the volume will continue in chapter 9 with Lincoln (2012); we move into the newer category of “white ally” with the Newton Knight character in Free State of Jones. Welch will discuss Gettysburg (1993), the only “battlefield” film in the volume and often cited as one of the most historically accurate Civil War films, though that claim comes more often from film critics than historians. The nearly four-hour film was a collaboration between Michael Shaara, whose best seller Killer Angels (1974) inspired the film, and Civil War buff and movie mogul Ted Turner. Both men are sympathetic to pro-Confederate ideologies, so it is no surprise that the film is also widely regarded as the last cinematic gasp of unabashed pro-Confederate “Lost Cause” ideology. Despite the actual battle of Gettysburg being a rout of Robert E. Lee and his army, Confederates still come off as heroes. In chapter 6, Lamphier examines another Turner production, Andersonville (1996). Though many Civil War films have featured prisoner camp scenes, this is one of the few to focus entirely on the Civil War prisoner-ofwar experience. The prison camp Andersonville remains notorious for its poor treatment of Union prisoners, and the film’s catalog of those abuses is difficult to watch, though the film is more interested in the conflict between prisoners that took place in 1864 than those between prisoners and jailers. Ang Lee’s Ride with the Devil (1999) is set during the Missouri border conflict between pro-Union and pro-Confederate guerillas. The film is sympathetic to the pro-Confederate men who rode with William Quantrill’s notoriously violent “Raiders.” That sympathy and inclusion of a “black Confederate” makes the film a favorite among those Americans who embrace it as an example of one of the cherished mythologies of the neo-Confederate movement, that black men fought for the Confederacy and thus supported slavery. In chapter 8, Welch considers Gangs of New York (2002), a movie more often thought of as a general period historical film rather than as a Civil War film. The film’s action centers on the “famous only among historians” 1863 New York draft riot. The riot pitted newly immigrated Irish against the government they felt would force them to fight to free a minority that would flood the city and steal their jobs. Gangs takes considerable liberties with historical reality, portraying it as a class riot and not as a racially motivated antiwar protest. In the volume’s penultimate chapter, Lamphier takes on Steven Spielberg’s monster hit Lincoln (2012). Both sentimental and deifying, this latest entry

xiv Preface

into a long line of “Lincoln films” rides a thin line between accurate and inaccurate. Lincoln is a classic biopic in that it distills great events down to the efforts of one “great man,” ignoring the work by abolitionists, women, and fugitive slaves that drove the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. Welch closes the volume with a look at Free State of Jones (2016), a film inspired by the true story of Newton Knight. Free State of Jones is more accurate than most Civil War movies, and critics liked it, but its earnest attempts to get details correct did little to endear it to moviegoing audiences. The film takes on a fascinating and little-known episode in American history and suggests the gap between good history and good storytelling. Gary Ross recognized the responsibility film makers have to history when he researched the life of Newton Knight before writing the screenplay for Free State of Jones. “Academic history is often overwhelmed by popular history. Les Mis actually becomes the French Revolution, Homeland is somehow the ‘real’ war on terror, and Lincoln is inevitably remembered as he was in Lincoln.” With this volume, Lamphier and Welch hope to keep that from being the only story about Civil War films.

FURTHER READING Blight, David. 2001. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brode, Douglas, and Shea T. Brode, eds. 2017. The American Civil War on Film and TV: Blue and Gray in Black and White and Color. New York: Lexington. Chadwick, Bruce. 2001. The Reel Civil War: Myth Making in American Film. New York: Knopf. Cox, Karen L. 2003. Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Cripps, Thomas. 1995. “Frederick Douglass: The Absent Presence in Glory.” Massachusetts Review 36, no. 1 (Spring): 154. Gallagher, Gary W. 2008. Causes Won, Lost, Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know about the Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Gallagher, Gary W., and Alan T. Nolan, eds. 2000. The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Korda, Michael. 2015. Clouds of Glory: The Life and Legend of Robert E. Lee. New York: Harper Perennial. Osterweis, Rollin G. 2003. The Myth of the Lost Cause, 1865–1900. Washington, DC: Regnery History. Salyer, Robert. 2017. The Myth of Virtue: Histories’ Lies of the Civil War. Mineral Point, WI: Little Creek. Taves, Brian. 2011. Thomas Ince: Hollywood’s Independent Pioneer. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.

Acknowledgments Rosanne would like to thank her single mother, Mary. When Rosanne was twelve, they drove from Cleveland, Ohio, to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. That trip led to a lifetime of reading and watching that culminated in her collaboration on this book. Rosanne also thanks her husband, Douglas, for the travels they continued in their partnership, and her son, Joseph, for tagging along. Finally, she thanks her cowriter Dr. Peg Lamphier. This work wouldn’t be nearly as much fun without her participation. Peg agrees that writing with Rosanne is more pleasure than chore and returns the thanks. Peg is also grateful to her husband, Leo, for his ability to fend for himself when his wife falls into the computer and disappears for hours on end.

Introduction Though the American Civil War took place in the four years between 1861 and 1865, the conflict has its roots deep in the nation’s past. In 1619, a small shipload of African slaves made its way to Virginia. At first, the colonies had no legal category for slavery, so these early slaves were treated much like indentured servants. Nonetheless, some of these early Africans served out their terms of servitude and became free black colonials. But then in 1665, Virginia became the first English colony to legalize slavery. Other colonies followed so that by the mid-1700s slavery was legal in every colony. The American Revolution brought no relief for American slaves, though each army did promise freedom to slaves who fought for them (though few slaves were ever really freed). The Constitution assiduously avoided any mention of slavery, except for the three-fifths rule, which held that for representation slaves could be counted as three-fifths of a person. These political mathematics meant that states with large numbers of slaves benefited not only from the economic realities of slavery but also from the enhanced representation they enjoyed in the House of Representatives. Before 1800, slave labor benefited tobacco, rice, sugarcane, indigo, and hemp growers. Cotton became “king” only after Eli Whitney and Katherine Greene developed a machine in 1794 that made harvesting short-staple cotton economically feasible by mechanically removing seeds and straightening fibers. The cotton gin fundamentally changed American slavery and American history by allowing unheralded profits from cotton farming. The number of slaves in the United States increased from about five hundred thousand in 1800 to nearly four million in 1860. This rapid expansion of slaves brought increased tensions between proslavery and antislavery Americans, as each side hardened its ideological commitments.

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The Industrial Revolution in the Northern states exacerbated the problem of slavery in several ways. A significant wave of European immigrants came to work in factories, many of them textile factories that spun and wove the cotton grown by slaves in Southern states. The North’s burgeoning population also created a market for affordable cotton goods, while newly built railroads allowed those goods to be moved about the country swiftly and cheaply. In the early 1800s, most proslavery adherents argued that slavery was unfortunate, even immoral, but economically and racially necessary. That argument shifted by the 1840s, as many Americans had developed closely held ideologies justifying slavery as a positive good. White supremacist and racist ideas underwrote the notion that slaves were subhuman and not deserving of freedom. While many Americans hardened their ideological and economic commitment to slavery, others developed organizations and networks that resisted slavery. Abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass wrote and spoke about the evils of slavery, while others, like Harriet Tubman, worked actively to help slaves escape their bondage. This political and increasingly sectional foment gave rise to antislavery ideology. Different from abolition, which made moral arguments against slavery, antislavery ideology made economic arguments about the importance of free (not enslaved) workers to American democracy. This ideology allowed for party realignment in the 1850s, with the new Republican Party attracting Americans who disapproved of slavery for moral, religious, economic, and political reasons, while the Democratic Party took in proslavery voters. This party realignment took place during the fractious years of the Kansas-Nebraska conflict and in the wake of the Compromise of 1850. Congress determined that the territory of Kansas might determine for itself whether it entered the United States as a slave state or Free State. “Popular sovereignty” seemed a good compromise but in reality set off an armed struggle for the state’s future, resulting in dozens of acts of violence and hundreds of deaths in the 1850s. Congress meant the Compromise of 1850 to calm sectional tension, but like popular sovereignty the compromise only made matters worse by including a new version of the Fugitive Slave Law, which allowed Southern “slave catchers” to enter Free States and recapture fugitive slaves. The 1857 U.S. Supreme Court decision in the Dred Scott case further enflamed Northerners when Chief Justice Roger Taney declared that slaves did not become free when taken to a Free State. This decision opened the door to slaves in every state, whether a state consented or not, and thus to the undercutting of jobs and wages for white workers. Northerners began to believe in “slave power,” the notion that oligarch slave owners were subverting democracy to spread slavery and thus threaten

Introduction xix

free white working men’s freedom. This issue, not moral objections to slavery, drove Northern voters toward the Republican Party’s 1860 presidential candidate, Abraham Lincoln. The escalation of tensions over this one issue, slavery, meant the 1860 election was largely a referendum on slavery. The election proved an entirely sectional affair, with Lincoln winning all the Northern states and none of the slave states. Meanwhile, the proslavery Democrats divided their base with three candidates, none of whom won a plurality of electoral votes. More importantly, in the 1860 election, voters in all states discovered that when the nation asked voters to decide on slavery, antislavery electoral power far outweighed proslavery. Voters and politicians in slave states saw the writing on the wall and called for secession from the United States. By the time Lincoln took office in early 1860, seven Southern states had already seceded from the Union. Lincoln’s efforts to resupply an American military installation at Fort Sumter caused Southern forces to attack the fort, and so in April 1861 the American Civil War officially began. Shortly afterward, four more states seceded, and representatives from the eleven seceded states formed the Confederate States of America. Both sides mobilized for war, though each side expected the conflict to be brief. After the First Battle of Bull Run (or First Manassas), the combatants came to understand they were in for a protracted military engagement. General Winfield Scott developed the Anaconda Plan to encircle the Confederacy with both army and naval forces, but the naval blockade proved harder to institute than to plan on paper. General Robert E. Lee took charge of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia soon after the war began. General George McClellan took over the Army of the Potomac after the Union loss at Bull Run but hesitated in taking his army out to battle. The War Department developed a four-prong plan of attack, the first south toward the Confederate capital in Richmond, Virginia, and the other three in the west, in Ohio, Kansas, and along the Mississippi River. In September 1862, the two armies met at Antietam, in Maryland. The battle became the single deadliest day in American history with 22,717 dead, wounded, or missing soldiers. Once again, McClellan’s overestimation of Lee’s army allowed the Confederates to retreat, though the Union army did count the battle as a victory. After the dubious victory at Antietam, President Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, declaring that if the Confederates did not surrender by January 1, 1863, all slaves held in enemy territory would be freed. On January 1, the proclamation became law, though it was, for the most part, an unenforceable law (the Confederate or enemy states having established a new government). The proclamation’s importance was that it became an ipso facto declaration that the war was officially about ending slavery. In the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation, Southern slaves began to resist slavery in earnest by running away or engaging in work slowdowns.

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As fugitive slaves flooded Union-held territory, the U.S. Army implemented a plan to enlist black men into the United States Colored Troops (USCT). While the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Regiment is the most famous of these, there were 175 USCT regiments during the Civil War. By the end of the war, black soldiers made up 10 percent of the Union army. Major General Ambrose Burnside replaced McClellan after Antietam, but after the disastrous Battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862, he too was replaced. Major General Joseph Hooker took his army out on the Chancellorsville campaign in the spring of 1863 and suffered yet another Union defeat at the hands of Lee’s Confederate army. General Stonewall Jackson’s death at Chancellorsville provided the only bright spot for the Union army that year, at least until the two armies met again, this time at Gettysburg. Major General George Meade replaced Hooker and took the Union Army of the Potomac into Pennsylvania and met Lee’s army the first three days of July. Gettysburg proved the turning point in the war, though the Union army lost only five thousand fewer men than the Confederate army, and Meade let the Confederates slip away from the battlefield with their army intact. Out west, General Ulysses S. Grant gained a victory over the Confederates at the Battle of Shiloh in the spring of 1862, while the Union navy captured New Orleans in May and Memphis in June of that year. Grant’s army lost the Battle of Vicksburg, and with it, the ability to control the whole of the Mississippi River, but the Union held enough of the river to cripple the Confederacy in the west. There were also many crucial battles in the Trans-Mississippi West, including a series of battles and skirmishes along the Kansas-Missouri border (containing the border war of the late 1850s) as well as in Texas and New Mexico Territory. The Union army failed to take Texas from the Confederacy but did gain control of New Mexico Territory after the Battle of Glorieta Pass in March 1862. In early 1864, Lincoln made what proved to be two decisive command decisions: he put Grant in supreme command of all Union armies and gave General William T. Sherman command of the western army. Grant undertook the overland campaign aimed at the Confederate capital of Richmond, while Cavalry General Philip Sheridan took on Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. General Sherman began his famous “March to the Sea,” moving his army from Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Georgia, laying waste to Confederate farms and plantations and freeing thousands of slaves. Embattled on all sides, General Lee struggled to keep his army supplied, particularly as Union armies took control of and destroyed Southern railroad lines. By the spring of 1865, Grant had besieged both Petersburg and Richmond. The Confederate government abandoned Richmond on April 2, and Grant’s army, including the several black regiments, took control of the city. A week later Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House. Five days later John Wilkes Booth assassinated President Lincoln.

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The war, its causes, and its outcomes continue to be contested in American historical memory. The death of 620,000 men and women, exacerbated by Lincoln’s murder, left the nation in mourning. Worse, war and the Thirteenth Amendment could not wipe out the legacy of two hundred years of slavery and white supremacy. Civil War history was, for a long while, controlled by pro-Confederate or at least pro-Southern historians, who popularized many myths of the war, many of which underwrote the racism endemic in the era of segregation that followed the war. In the 1960s, histories of the war and histories of slavery began to shift their focus from a sympathetic portrayal of the Confederacy and slavery to something considerably more critical. Still, the old ideas did not go away, no matter how many books historians wrote. And certainly professional Civil War historians do write a lot of books, but they write most of them for small academic audiences. Our culture’s most powerful ideas about the past come not from books written by professional historians but from popular images and mythologies, including those that come from films written by screenwriters. Screenwriters write Civil War movies for mass audiences, who tend to believe what they see. And films, unlike books, don’t get relegated to the back shelves of libraries. They stay in circulation through a variety of media, including television, DVDs, and streaming Internet video services. Then teachers, many of them unaware of how inaccurate these movies are, use them as teaching tools. Why? Because however much teachers and professors bemoan the fact, America is a nation of watchers, not readers.

THE BIRTH OF BIRTH OF A NATION As soon as America began to make films, it made Civil War–era films. In 1903, the Edison Manufacturing Company made a thirteen-minute version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin written by abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1852 as an antislavery epic. Five years later the same company made Days of ’61, the first Civil War battle film (though it’s only ten minutes long). Days of ’61 set up a formula for Civil War films where former friends become enemies and are reunited through some plot device and all the whites live happily ever after. Between 1908 and 1910, filmmakers released seventy Civil War films, and another hundred by 1916. The earliest films were pro-Union or at least featured a Union victory, but in 1909, Southern theater owners began to complain about Northern bias. Filmmakers discovered a market for pro-Southern movies. The first of these films was D. W. Griffith’s In Old Kentucky and The Old Soldier’s Story, both released in mid-1909. Griffith, whose father had been a colonel in the Confederate army, grew up on a diet of family stories of Confederate heroism and honor, many of which ended up in his fourteen

xxii Introduction

Civil War films. Griffith released The Honor of His Family later that same year, a movie that featured the first large-scale battle scene (Brody 2017a). Perhaps the most interesting of Griffith’s early films is The House with Closed Shutters, also made in 1910. In it, a Southern soldier hides in his home to avoid the war. His sister, ashamed of her brother’s cowardice, puts on his uniform and goes to war. When she is killed in battle, the mother closes the house to visitors (hence the film’s name) so she and her son can hide in shame. While over six hundred women dressed as men to fight in the Civil War, Hollywood has essentially ignored the stories of “passing” women, so this film lives in a special category all its own, though it makes lack of loyalty a punishable offense. While D. W. Griffith is the most famous early Civil War filmmaker, Thomas Ince’s films cemented the plantation myth. Unlike Griffith, Ince had his family roots in New England, though he fell under the pro-Southern spell early in his filmmaking career. Like many film producers and directors of the 1910s, he made dozens of films each year, including over thirty Civil War films, more than any other filmmaker. In 1913 alone, Ince produced A Wartime Mother’s Sacrifice, Old Mammy’s Secret Code, In Love and War, A Dixie Mother, The Battle of Gettysburg, A Child of War, The Drummer of the 8th, A Slave’s Devotion, A Black Conspiracy, A Southern Cinderella, The Grey Sentinel, Lee in Virginia, The Sinews of War, The Pride of the South, The Lost Dispatch, The Favorite Son, When Lincoln Paid, In the Ranks, The Little Turncoat, and The Great Sacrifice (Taves 2011). Each of these movies features a Confederate soldier hero, an imperiled romance, and villainous Union soldiers. The Battle of Gettysburg (1913) was arguably Ince’s best Civil War movie. Though the film has since been lost, those who saw it proclaimed it a masterpiece (Taves 2011). Old Mammy’s Secret Code, A Slave’s Devotion, and A Black Conspiracy (all 1913) are notable in that they feature the loyal slave trope. In Old Mammy’s Secret Code, a female slave pretends to be a runaway and is taken in by the Union army, where she steals military secrets and signals them to the Confederate army. In a plot even more nonsensical, A Slave’s Devotion features Jim, a slave who first saves his master’s plantation from foreclosure and then saves his master’s family from the Union army. A Union soldier kills Jim, who dies with a smile on his face, happy to have helped his white masters. In A Black Conspiracy, a Confederate soldier purchases Jim and Mammy at auction. The two then spend the rest of the film protecting their master and working to reunite him with his sweetheart. These films played to large audiences who lived in an increasingly rigidly segregated nation (Gordon 2017). By 1920, all Southern public venues were segregated, and many in the North were as well. The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) had its heyday while these films showed in theaters to audiences eager to believe the “Lost Cause” fictions they sold. They also paved the way for that most iconic of early Civil War films, Birth of a Nation.

Introduction xxiii

Lost Cause ideology, in its many iterations, maintained its grip on American movies for nearly eighty years, from Birth of a Nation (1915) to Gettysburg (1993). This national enthusiasm for the Lost Cause suggests that white Americans, regardless of their regional roots, were eager to embrace the racist narrative. Birth of a Nation has become the rogue elephant in the Civil War movie room. No film, not even Gone with the Wind, more fervently embraces the Lost Cause in all its iterations. The film’s messages include an assertion that the era of Reconstruction was unfair to white Southerners, that black Americans are subhuman and can never be integrated into American society, and that the KKK’s violence was acceptable because it served a greater good of protecting whites from the ravages of savages. The film suggests that only the Klan stood between law-abiding Americans and the chaos created by free blacks (Mintz, Roberts, and Welky 2016). D. W. Griffith adapted his silent film epic from Thomas Dixon’s novel The Clansman. Subtitled A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, the novel was the second in a trilogy that valorized the KKK for protecting white Southerners from white carpetbaggers and free Negroes alike. Griffith and Frank E. Woods, a prolific silent-era film writer and reviewer, cowrote the screenplay. The film starred the First Lady of American Cinema, Lillian Gish, along with Mae Marsh, Henry Walthall, and Ralph Lewis. White actors appearing in blackface include Walter Long as Gus and Jennie Lee as Mammy. The film follows friends who come from families who end up on opposite ends of the conflict, the Northern Stonemans and the Southern Camerons. One of the Stoneman sons falls in love with a Cameron daughter on a visit to the Camerons’ idyllic South Carolina plantation. Conversely, one of the Cameron sons falls for a Stoneman daughter after he’s wounded and taken captive and she nurses him back to health. After the army announces their plans to hang young Cameron, his mother visits Washington, D.C., and convinces Abraham Lincoln to pardon him. Lincoln does so because he is sympathetic to the Confederate cause. The first part of the movie ends with Lincoln’s assassination and the evil radical Northern politicians’ plan to punish the South for losing the war. Part II opens with the movie’s most iconic scene. Flora Cameron, a beautiful young white woman, finds herself stalked and chased through the woods by a black soldier named Gus. Gus has been harassing Flora and her family for weeks. Gus chases the innocent girl and at one point catches her and tells her he isn’t yet married. Flora reacts in horror to this obvious reference to biracial marriage, pushes him, and runs away. He chases her, clearly intent on rape. The chase comes to an end at the precipice of a cliff. Faced with a predatory black man, Flora prefers to leap to her death. To avenge Flora, the film’s hero, Ben Stoneman, who is in love with Flora’s older sister Elsie, founds the KKK. He gets the idea for the white sheet coverings after watching a group of white children dress up as ghosts to scare black children. In a triumphant scene, Stoneman and his newly formed Klan

xxiv Introduction

lynch Gus. Meanwhile, the evil mulatto Silas Lynch is elected lieutenant governor because notably inferior black men were allowed to vote. He presides over a legislature of drunken black men who eat fried chicken in the statehouse. After Gus’s murder, the nefarious Lynch forces the legalization of interracial marriage and criminalizes the KKK. The eldest Cameron is arrested when Lynch’s men find Stoneman’s KKK regalia in his house. Elsie goes to Lynch to beg for her father’s release, but he insists he will only do so if she marries him. Stoneman and several loyal black servants rescue Cameron and two Union soldiers and help hide the men. The film’s title card reads, “The former enemies of North and South are united again in defense of their Aryan birthright.” The Klan saves their imperiled founder in a galloping rescue underscored by Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.” Soon after, the Klan heroically prevents freed blacks from voting, thus restoring order to state politics. The film ends with a double wedding of the white heroes and heroines and the promise of their glowing future. This is Birth of a Nation, with institutionalized white supremacy framed not as horrifyingly racist but as a triumph of American democracy. The film premiered in February 1915 in Los Angeles with the title The Clansman. Griffith ordered the film’s title changed not long after to reflect his endorsement of the film’s white supremacist message. No one knows how many people saw Birth of a Nation or how much money the film made because box office numbers weren’t recorded until 1915. It’s likely the film grossed about $5 million, with total earnings after adjusting for box office expenses around $2 million. Though these numbers appear small by modern standards, adjusted for inflation Griffith’s spectacular may have earned the equivalent of $2 billion, putting it in the same ballpark as Titanic (1997) or Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) (Wasko 2015). We do know that in spite of Birth of a Nation’s length, moviegoers flocked to the theaters to see the movie. Movie houses jacked up their ticket prices to as high as $2.20 at a time when the average price for a movie ticket was around twenty-five cents. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) mounted a protest of the film, asking local film boards to ban the movie (Franklin 1979). Griffith dismissed African American condemnation of the film as proof that black men wanted both consensual and nonconsensual sex with white women. The film director went a step further by publishing a pamphlet titled “The Rise and Fall of Free Speech in America,” wherein he used racist language to condemn black Americans for promoting censorship. In Indiana, a man left the theater after seeing the film and killed a black teenager. Riots broke out in some cities, and hundreds of people were injured (Gallen and Stern 2014). Though the NAACP had little success banning the film, in part because film boards were all white and in part because the film was a monster success, they did prompt a national discussion about the film’s racism. Reformer Jane Addams condemned the film as ahistorical and prejudiced, while President

Introduction xxv

Woodrow Wilson, himself an ex-historian (if such a creature can be said to exist), believed the film “terribly true.” Bolstered by the president’s endorsement and box office success, the film inaugurated a new era for the KKK. William J. Simmons refounded the KKK months after Birth of a Nation’s debut. Though Simmons used the original Klan’s founding documents, he also took considerable ideology and imagery from Birth of a Nation. The burning cross, for example, was not a tool in the first Klan’s arsenal. Burning crosses first appeared in Griffith’s film and was adopted by the second iteration of the KKK. Historian John Hope Franklin noted that not only did eminent Reconstruction historians treat Birth of a Nation as a documentary but that the movie did more to give birth to the KKK than any other social factor (Franklin 1979). Recognizing this fact, white nationalist and former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke used the film as a recruiting tool in the 1970s. Long after it ought to have been clear to Americans, including film historians, that Birth of a Nation celebrates the most blatant kind of racism and historical errors of fact, the film continues to earn commendations and positive cultural attention. In 1992, the Library of Congress put the film on its National Film Registry. In a 2011 newspaper column, Roger Ebert dismissed the film’s racism as comic and suggested modern audiences disliked Birth of a Nation because it was a silent film. In 2013, the American Film Institute recognized the film as “a decisively original work of art,” though female directors such as Lois Weber had already used close-ups and other techniques for which film texts continue to credit Griffith. Film critic Richard Brody said, “The worst thing about Birth of a Nation is how good it is,” and Ty Burr called Birth of a Nation “the most influential film in history” and praised the movie’s “brilliant storytelling” (Brody 2017a). In 2018, the film had a 71 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with the review site saying the film “overpowers its narrative flaws through sheer conviction and the strength of its vital message.” Here is the Lost Cause myth and white supremacy masquerading as historical reality even after decades of American historians have proved again and again how historically inaccurate and morally repugnant the myth and its movies are. This is the strength of the American film industry—that it can transform fiction into perceived truth. Birth of a Nation set the tone for American Civil War movies for nearly a century. Even after Glory sounded the clarion call to reject Lost Cause themes in modern American film, strains of those themes continue to appear in movies well into the twenty-first century.

FURTHER READING Brody, Richard. 2017a. “The Worst Thing about Birth of a Nation Is How Good It Is.” New Yorker, February 2017. ­https://​­www​.­newyorker​.­com​/­culture​/­richard​ -­brody​/­the​-­worst​-­thing​-­about​-­birth​-­of​-­a​-­nation​-­is​-­how​-­good​-­it​-­is.

xxvi Introduction Brody, Richard. 2017b. “What Was the Most Influential Film in History.” Atlantic, March 2017. ­https://​­www​.­theatlantic​.­com​/­magazine​/­archive​/­2017​/­03​/­what​ -­was​-­the​-­most​-­influential​-­film​-­in​-­history​/­513863​/. Carnes, Mark, ed. 1994. Past Imperfect: History According to Movies. Chicago: Lakeview. Christensen, Terry. 1987. Reel Politics, American Political Movies from Birth of a Nation to Platoon. New York: Basil Blackwell. Franklin, John Hope. 1979. “The Birth of a Nation: Propaganda as History.” Massachusetts Review 20, no. 3 (Autumn): 417–34. Gallen, Ira H., and Seymour Stern. 2014. D. W. Griffith’s 100th Anniversary: The Birth of a Nation. Victoria, BC, Canada: Friesen. Gordon, Linda. 2017. The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition. New York: Liveright. Mintz, Steven, Randy Roberts, and David Welky. 2016. Hollywood’s America: Understanding History through Film. New York: Wiley Blackwell. Rylance, Mark. 2005. “Breech Birth: The Receptions to D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation.” Australasian Journal of American Studies 24, no. 2 (December): 1–20. Schama, Simon. 1988. “Onward and Upward with the Arts: Clio at the Multi-plex.” New Yorker, January 19, 1988. ­https://​­www​.­newyorker​.­com​/­magazine​/­1998​/­01​ /­19​/­clio​-­at​-­the​-­multiplex. Taves, Brian. 2011. Thomas Ince: Hollywood’s Independent Pioneer. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press. Wasko, Janet. 2015. “D. W. Griffiths and the Banks: A Case Study in Film Financing.” In The Hollywood Film Industry: A Reader, edited by Paul Kerr. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

Chronology 1860–1861 November 6 Abraham Lincoln is elected sixteenth president of the United States. December–January

Seven states secede from the Union.

February 8–9 The seceded Southern states create a government at Montgomery, Alabama, and the Confederate States of America is formed. March 4 Abraham Lincoln is inaugurated as the sixteenth president of the United States in Washington, D.C. April 12 The Confederacy fires on Fort Sumter, beginning the war. May 3 Lincoln calls for an additional forty-three thousand volunteers to serve for three years, expanding the size of the regular army. June 10 The Battle of Big Bethel takes place. It is the first land battle in Virginia. July 21 The Battle of Bull Run (or First Manassas) is fought near Manassas, Virginia. The Union army under General Irwin McDowell loses to Confederate general Pierre Beauregard. August 6  Lincoln signs the Confiscation Act of 1861, allowing the Union to confiscate slaves as “contrabands of war.”

xxviii Chronology

1862 February 22 Jefferson Davis is inaugurated as president of the Confederate States of America. March 9 The naval battle between the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia (the old USS Merrimack) is fought in Hampton Roads, Virginia. April 6–7  Battle of Shiloh in Tennessee ends in Union victory, securing the career of Union general Ulysses S. Grant. May 22  The federal government’s Bureau of Colored Troops establishes United States Colored Troops. May 31–June 1 The Battle of Seven Pines takes place in Virginia. General Joseph Johnston, commander of the Confederate army in Virginia, is wounded and replaced by Robert E. Lee. July John Dix and Daniel Hill establish the Dixon-Hill Cartel, regularizing prisoner-of-war exchanges. August 30–31 The Second Battle of Bull Run in Virginia ends with another Union defeat. September 17 The Battle of Antietam results in the bloodiest single day of the Civil War. December 13  At the Battle of Vicksburg, the Army of the Potomac, under General Ambrose Burnside, is soundly defeated by Lee’s forces.

1863 January 1

The Emancipation Proclamation becomes law.

February Recruiting and training for the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Colored Infantry begins. May 18

The Siege of Vicksburg, Michigan, begins.

May 20  The Confederate government announces they will enslave captured black soldiers and execute white officers leading black soldiers. July 1–3 Battle of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania takes place. It is the most deadly battle of the war.

Chronology xxix

July 4 Vicksburg surrenders to General Grant’s Union army. July 13–16 New York City draft riots take place in New York City. July 18 The Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth leads the Second Assault on Battery Wagner, South Carolina. August 15 President Lincoln announces Order 252, promising retribution if Confederates execute or enslave black soldiers. The order suspends prisoner exchanges. August 21 William Clarke Quantrill leads a band of armed guerillas into the Lawrence Massacre. September 19–20  The Battle of Chickamauga in Georgia takes place. September–November General Grant begins the Siege of Chattanooga, Tennessee. November 19 President Abraham Lincoln delivers the Gettysburg Address. November 23–25  Union wins decisive victory in the Battle for Chattanooga in Tennessee. December 8 Lincoln issues his Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction.

1864 February 9  One hundred and nine Union officers escape from Libby Prison in Richmond, Virginia. February 27  Fort Sumter Prison, known as Andersonville, opens in Georgia. March 2 Ulysses S. Grant assumes command of all Union armies in the field. April 12 Confederate forces massacre black Union soldiers at Fort Pillow, Tennessee. May 4–5  Battle of the Wilderness in Virginia opens Grant’s Wilderness Campaign. May 7 General William T. Sherman begins the Atlanta Campaign.

xxx Chronology

June 8  Abraham Lincoln is nominated for a second term as president. July 6 Union prisoners in Andersonville prison find six prisoners known as “‘Raiders” guilty of murder and hang them. July 17 Confederate general John Hood replaces General Joseph Johnston as commander of the Army of Tennessee. September 1–2 Confederate troops under General Hood evacuate the city of Atlanta. General Sherman’s army occupies the city the following day. September–October  The bulk of prisoners at Andersonville are moved to other prison camps as Sherman’s army advances through Georgia. November 8 Northerners reelect Abraham Lincoln as president of the United States. November 16 General Sherman’s Army of Georgia begins the “March to the Sea.” December 10 Sherman’s Army of Georgia arrives at Savannah, Georgia, completing the famous “March to the Sea.”

1865 February 1  Sherman’s army leaves Savannah to march through the Carolinas. March 4 In Washington, D.C., President Abraham Lincoln is inaugurated for his second term as president. March 11  General William T. Sherman’s army occupies Fayetteville, North Carolina. April 2–3 Confederate general Lee abandons Petersburg and Richmond (the Confederate capital). Union army occupies both cities. April 9 Battle of Appomattox Court House takes place, followed by General Lee’s surrender to General Grant.

Chronology xxxi

April 14 President Abraham Lincoln is assassinated by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theater. Fort Sumter is reoccupied by Union forces. April 26 General Joseph Johnston surrenders to the Confederate Army of the Tennessee. May 4 General Richard Taylor surrenders Confederate Departments of Alabama, Mississippi, and East Louisiana. May 10  Confederate president Jefferson Davis is captured in Georgia. May 12 The final battle of the Civil War takes place at Palmito Ranch, Texas. Ironically, it is a Confederate victory. May 23–24 The Grand Review of the Army of the Potomac and then the Grand Review of General Sherman’s Army both take place in Washington, D.C. May 26  Confederate general Simon Bolivar Buckner surrenders the Army of the Trans-Mississippi. The Civil War officially ends. November 10  Captain Henry Wirz, former commander of Andersonville prison camp, is executed for cruelty and murder.

Chapter 1

Gone with the Wind (1939) For twenty-five years Gone with the Wind (GWTW) reigned as the ­highest-grossing film in Hollywood history. It secured critical acclaim by winning eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Screenplay (Sidney Howard), Best Director (Victor Fleming), Best Actress (Vivien Leigh), and Best Supporting Actress (Hattie McDaniel). Critics felt the film would have completely swept the top awards had Clark Gable not won a Best Actor Oscar in 1935 when It Happened One Night became the first film to sweep the top five categories. In the end GWTW earned around $32 million in its first run, which lasted until late 1943. In rereleases in 1947, 1951, 1961, 1967, and 1971, GWTW realized $390 million in global box office profits, making it the highest-grossing film (adjusted for inflation) for nearly three decades after its release. Based on the novel by Margaret Mitchell (1900–1949), GWTW tells the story of a Georgia woman, Scarlett O’Hara, who survives the Civil War by learning to accept her new circumstances and not dwell in the past. In that way, its historical context covers one woman’s life before, during, and after the Civil War, seen through the eyes of a Southerner. Yet Mitchell created a heroine who never glorified the “Lost Cause” the way other characters in the movie did. In fact, Mitchell urged producer David O. Selznick to hire her friend, Susan Myrick, a newspaper columnist from Macon, Georgia, as a technical consultant precisely because of her “common sense and utter lack of sentimentality about ‘The Old South’” (Flamini 1975). Yet, in spite of Scarlett’s own practical attitude, the film does glorify the Old South and conform to Lost Cause mythology. GWTW continues to gain attention and mention in books on screenwriting and filmmaking history because the narrative of its creation became an epic story on all fronts—from purchasing the rights to adapting the book

2

The Civil War on Film

to casting the lead actor and actresses to hosting the premiere in Atlanta. Written by Margaret Mitchell, GWTW began life as one of the best-selling novels of 1936. Macmillan Publishers offered the rights to the story to several Hollywood producers, including famed boy-genius Irving Thalberg of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios (MGM). Thalberg insisted “no Civil War picture ever made a nickel.” Independent producer David O. Selznick, who had a reputation as an epic filmmaker, paid $50,000 for the rights to Mitchell’s book but would need more money along the way and, oddly enough, that money would come from MGM, which owned the distribution rights and reaped immense profits from the film (Flamini 1975). The search for a cast created miles of newspaper pages and fan mail. Fans insisted Clark Gable was the only actor they would accept as the dashing blockade runner Rhett Butler, but there was no consensus about who should play Scarlett O’Hara. The producers knew they could not cast a Northerner as such a quintessential Southern character, which cut out New Englander Katherine Hepburn, one of the leading actresses of the 1930s. Eventually an Englishwoman, Vivien Leigh, would be found by Selznick’s brother Myron, an agent, after principal filming had already begun. Selznick cast Olivia de’Havilland as Melanie Wilkes, Leslie Howard as Ashley Wilkes, and Hattie McDaniel as Mammy. Selznick chose Sidney Howard to write the adaptation, though everyone from Margaret Mitchell herself (she said no) to Jo Swerling to F. Scott Fitzgerald famously took a shot at the script while under contract to the studios, but no version pleased Selznick. Famed journalist, playwright, and screenwriter Ben Hecht took credit for the wording of the opening scroll. Through it all, Selznick kept coming back to Howard, who won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama for They Knew What They Wanted (1925), to give the script an even tone and voice. Also, as a World War I veteran, Howard kept many of the war elements of the novel in the film, which many critics say helped elevate the adaptation from a mere soap opera into an epic drama. Because the film focused so heavily on female characters, Selznick signed George Cukor to direct. Cukor had a reputation for working well with actresses, but he didn’t work well with Clark Gable and was fired. Victor Fleming took the job as soon as he wrapped principal filming on one of the other major films of 1939, The Wizard of Oz (Flamini 1975). GWTW opens by welcoming the viewer to “Margaret Mitchell’s Story of the Old South.” The credits roll over footage of enslaved people working the plantation in the romantic light of a sunset under a luxurious musical score by Max Steiner. “The Players” at each important location—Tara, Twelve Oaks, and in Atlanta—are then posted, treating the material like a Broadway play and helping familiarize those few who might not have read the book yet with the large, complex cast. Then the scrolling text promises the audience a story about “a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. Here in this pretty world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was



Gone with the Wind (1939)

3

the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind.” As in the book, the film introduces Scarlett and the war in the film’s opening moments. For Scarlett, the truly devastating news comes when Brent and his twin, Stuart, tell her Ashley Wilkes’s engagement to his cousin Melanie will be announced at the Twelve Oaks ball the next day. That opening scene introduces both of the major conflicts of the story and one of the most important characters in Scarlett’s life, the enslaved woman Mammy, who berates the young Scarlett for forgetting her manners and not inviting her young beaus to supper. Scarlett runs to speak with her Irish father, Gerald (Thomas Mitchell), who she catches jumping fences on his horse though his wife, Ellen (Barbara O’Neill), has forbid such recklessness. He introduces one of the main themes of the film in the iconic line “Land is the only thing in this world worth working for, worth dying for—because it’s the only thing that lasts.” Back in the big house, Ellen is returning after a day spent nursing someone from a local poor family. Ellen informs the shifty overseer, Jonas Wilkerson (Victor Jory) that she has assisted in the birth of his illegitimate child. When she meets with Gerald, Ellen insists Wilkerson must be fired, setting up an antagonist for Scarlett’s future. In Scarlett’s bedroom the next morning, the iconic corset scene involves Mammy pulling the stays tight enough for Scarlett to fit her custom-designed gown. Scarlett refuses to eat from the tray provided by the younger enslaved woman, Prissy (Butterfly McQueen), until Mammy reminds her that men don’t like women who eat like hogs. At Twelve Oaks, the Wilkes family, including Ashley’s father, John, and his sister, India, welcome their guests. Scarlett asks to see Ashley in private, but he introduces her to Melanie. Meanwhile, Melanie has a brother, Charles, who is infatuated with Scarlett, though he is affianced to India. Likewise, Scarlett has a chance to flirt with her sister, Suellen’s, beau, Frank Kennedy. Finally, as Scarlett ascends the grand staircase, she sees a visiting guest, Rhett Butler, a handsome but not entirely respectable house guest. Eventually, Scarlett corners Ashley and declares her love. He apologizes for giving her the wrong impression, and she declares she will hate him forever. After Ashley leaves the room, Scarlett discovers Rhett had been lying on the couch listening to the entire exchange. Shortly after, a rider races up to the house to announce President Abraham Lincoln’s call for volunteers. The war has begun. In a fit of anger, Scarlett accepts Charles’s fumbling marriage proposal, and the camera completes two quick cuts: first to her wedding and second to the telegram telling her that Captain Charles Hamilton died of flu in camp without once facing the Yankee enemy. In mourning, Scarlett is sent to live with her now sister-in-law Melanie and her aunt Pittypat in Atlanta and soon ends up at a fund-raising ball. Rhett is

4

The Civil War on Film

introduced as the “most daring of all blockade runners,” though he privately admits to Scarlett that he’s in it “for profit—and profit only.” Rhett loudly offers “one hundred and fifty dollars in gold!” but only if he can dance with the widow Hamilton that night. To the dismay of Atlanta society, Scarlett accepts. Rhett begins romancing Scarlett, and on one of their afternoons he tells her “the war can’t last much longer” and mentions a battle taking place in “some little town in Pennsylvania—called Gettysburg.” Scarlett learns that the Confederate army is evacuating Atlanta the morning Melanie goes into labor, so she delivers the baby and later escapes toward Tara with Rhett’s help. Before they arrive, Rhett leaves the women, announcing he has decided to join the Confederate army. Here Rhett utters the phrase that nods to the Lost Cause myth to come: “Maybe it’s because I’ve always had a weakness for lost causes . . . once they’re really lost.” As the war comes to an end, Scarlett and Melanie work the O’Hara plantation, picking what’s left of the cotton and yams. Their biggest challenge comes when a deserting soldier threatens to rob the house. Scarlett shoots and buries him while Melanie cleans up the blood. Finally, the news the war has ended reaches Tara in the form of the many, many former soldiers walking past the area on their way home, among them Frank Kennedy and, finally, Ashley. With no home of his own to return to, he and Melanie stay on at Tara to help resurrect the plantation. Scarlett visits Atlanta to ask Rhett for three hundred dollars for taxes only to find Rhett in jail and unable to access his funds. Instead, she marries Frank Kennedy, who has the funds to save Tara. As Mrs. Kennedy, Scarlett moves to Atlanta. She arranges for Ashley and Melanie to do so as well by hiring Ashley to help run a lumber mill she now owns. They argue over the use of convict labor when Scarlett finds her mill manager mistreating the men. After the argument, a white man tries to rape Scarlett, but she is saved by the formerly enslaved, Big Sam. In retaliation for the attempted rape, Frank and Ashley join the local KKK (described as a “political club”) to “clean out the woods.” A gun battle ensues in which Frank is killed and Ashley wounded. In order to avoid arrest, Rhett, who used his friendship with Yankee soldiers to gain release from jail, now uses that political collateral to create a grand piece of theater. He claims that he and the men spent the evening at the local whorehouse playing cards. The local madam testifies to the truth of this story in court and Ashley’s life is saved, though his reputation is ruined. Widowed for a short time, Scarlett agrees to marry Rhett. She spends his money building a grand house in Atlanta and funding repairs at Tara until both places become as grand as before the war. They have a baby girl, Bonnie Blue Butler, who seems to make them both happy, but the child is killed when she is thrown off a horse as a toddler. Devastated, Rhett and Scarlett sink into alcoholism and drift apart. Melanie’s death soon after is the final blow. Scarlett realizes Ashley was never all the things she thought. Free from her lifelong infatuation, Scarlett also realizes that Rhett has been the right



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man for her all along. She rushes home to share this news with him only to find Melanie’s death has broken him as well. He leaves, saying, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” Promising herself she will return to Tara, Scarlett vows to win Rhett back, uttering her own immortal last lines, “I’ll think of some way to get him back. After all, tomorrow is another day!” As a producer interested in maximizing his profits, Selznick worked hard to head off any possible protest. The NAACP took issue with the use of the n-word in the book, so the script used the word “freedmen” instead. Selznick also conceded to veterans of the Union army. In the book, Scarlett shoots one of Sherman’s soldiers after he menaces her with rape. In the film the soldier becomes a deserter who was going against Sherman’s orders to not harm citizens on the March to the Sea. The one change Selznick did not grant concerned Scarlett’s slapping Prissy on the night Melanie gave birth. The Daughters of the Confederacy had argued that no Southern woman would ever mishandle a slave and wanted the scene removed. Whether for reasons of logic or drama, Selznick did not comply and the scene remained (Flamini 1975). Selznick’s biggest fight came with the Hays Office, in charge of the production code that kept films acceptable in the days before the Motion Picture Association of America film rating system came into being. In the film’s final scene, Scarlett pleads, “But, Rhett, if you go, what shall I do? Where shall I go?” He iconically replies, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn!” However, the code prohibited use of the word “damn.” Selznick insisted changing this word to “darn” would ruin his meticulous fidelity to the original intellectual property. Selznick’s staff put together a folder of current magazines that used the banned word as evidence of its acceptance by the American public. In the end, the word remained and cost Selznick a $5,000 fine (Flamini 1975). Selznick’s language instincts proved correct, however, when reviewer John C. Flinn Sr. of Variety, Hollywood’s hometown industry newspaper, made the point of noting, “The inclusion of the blasphemous utterance, which is lifted literally from the novel’s text, is indicative of the faithfulness of the translation throughout . . . ‘Gone with the Wind’ is the story as written by the novelist, faithfully and accurately recorded by camera and microphone” (Flinn 1939). Due to the long gestation of the film, many issues with assigning proper directing credit arose. Though Victor Fleming eventually won sole credit for directing the film, Selznick’s paperwork shows that many scenes filmed by other men, including George Cukor, Sam Wood, Bill Menzies, and Reeves Eason, made it into the final cut. The Directors Guild allows only one name to appear in the Directed By slot, and Selznick chose Fleming (Flamini 1975). Sidney Howard received the sole written by credit because he wrote the first adaptation, a middle version, and took the final pass. Once editing was completed, the team turned their attention to how best to market the film. Selznick decided to host a premiere in Atlanta, Georgia,

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home to Margaret Mitchell and a large portion of the story, on December 15, 1939. The Georgia governor declared the date a state holiday. Local politicians and MGM publicists alike planned a gala three-day celebration that involved all the major cast members except Leslie Howard, who had returned to England when he heard his home country had declared war on Germany, and Hattie McDaniel, who would not be allowed in the segregated theater where the film premiered. Another African American was present, though his fame would not come until later in life. Martin Luther King Jr., then a ten-year-old member of his father’s church choir, sang four spirituals at the gala. His mother served as choir director. Many local black Baptist ministers disapproved of African American involvement in the gala, especially a choir wearing aprons and head bandanas in mimicry of slave attire, but the elder Reverend King insisted it was the only way to make black Americans part of the story (Branch 1988). A gala premiere in New York City followed the Atlanta premiere, and then the film moved across the country as a prepurchased event, much like a touring Broadway show. Such a frenzy over the adaptation of a beloved novel did not occur again until Warner Brothers purchased the first Harry Potter novel from J. K. Rowling. The film did not move into general release until it had garnered thirteen Academy Award nominations and won ten of them, including four of the top five. The film also won two honorary Oscars for technical achievement. Hattie McDaniel became the first African American to win an Oscar, a record she held until Sidney Poitier won the Best Actor award in 1963 for Lilies of the Field. The next female to win in McDaniel’s category would come fifty-one years later when Whoopi Goldberg won Best Supporting Actress for Ghost. Though quintessentially an American story, the film did well in London, playing for the entirety of World War II at the Ritz Theatre. Londoners praised both Vivien Leigh’s portrayal and Scarlett O’Hara’s resilience, which some felt bolstered English spirits as they withstood the devastation of the German blitzkrieg (Flamini 1975). On the whole, film critics considered the film a triumph. Writing for the New York Times, longtime critic Frank S. Nugent called the film “a handsome, scrupulous and unstinting version” of the novel. He also praised the cast as so perfectly representing the characters a viewer was “not to suspect that Miss Mitchell had written her story just to provide a vehicle for the stars already assembled under Mr. Selznick’s hospitable roof” (Nugent 1939). Hollywood hometown newspaper Variety focused on the difficult task of adapting such a large and well-loved book, saying, “Skillful construction of story, incident and characterization build to smash climaxes, and then rush onward to other emotional clashes.” The newspaper also took more time than others to discuss McDaniel’s talents among all the other leads, foreshadowing the fact that her work would eventually beat de’Havilland in the Oscar competition: “It is she who contributes the most moving scene in the



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film, her plea with Melanie that the latter should persuade Rhett to permit burial of his baby daughter. Time will set a mark on this moment in the picture as one of those inspirational bits of histrionics long remembered.”

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND By the late 1850s, Georgia’s population exceeded one million with 591,000 of those residents white and about 466,000 black, most of them enslaved since the census recorded 0.3 percent of the state’s black population as free blacks. Only around 40 percent of the whites in Georgia owned slaves, but that human property could be valued at $400 million in 1860, which accounted for nearly half the state’s wealth. Daily life on such major plantations involved the continued dominance, vigilance, and management of an enslaved workforce that had heard of several of the previous slave insurrections. The plantation-owning men managed most of the raising of cash crops, while the women of the family found themselves in charge of anything that fell under the heading of food production. This included keeping the keys to (and therefore an eye on) the smokehouse and supervising work in the gardens and dairy (Clinton 1982). Supervision of the drudgery work done by enslaved women kept women of both positions in daily contact. Enslaved maids slept on pallets on the floors of their various mistresses’ rooms to be awoken whenever necessary through the night. Often these maids were related to their mistresses, as in the case of Sally Hemmings, maid and half-sister to Martha Jefferson on the Monticello plantation, which created complex relationships and widely reported whispers among women of both stations of life. In terms of education for the slave-owning women, that was limited by their attendance at female academies that emphasized social graces like dancing over the more classical education offered to white women of wealth in the North. Such wealth needed to be protected, and so, in the aftermath of abolitionist John Brown’s raid of the arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in October 1859, state militias began to form across the South. Many historians cite this event as the true beginning of the Civil War as it illustrated the willingness of Northerners to take up arms over the idea of slavery. Brown had been financed by an assortment of other abolitionists, including members of New England’s Transcendentalist community, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Shields Green, a runaway slave and former bodyguard to Frederick Douglass, accompanied Brown on the raid and was later hanged as well. Finally, the raid served as a sort of rehearsal for the war as the military officers who arrested Brown—Colonel Robert E. Lee and Lieutenant Colonel J. E. B. Stuart—would go on to become generals in the Confederate army. Shakespearean actor and future assassin of Lincoln John Wilkes Booth attended Brown’s execution. Thus many of the

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major players of the impending war appear in this one prewar episode of sectional violence (Reynolds 2006). After Lincoln’s election in 1860, slave states began seceding from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America. The attack on Fort Sumter by Confederate forces caused Lincoln to call up soldiers, and the war began. As a major railroad hub and trading center, Atlanta became a target of the Union army as it marched south. As the war progressed, refugees flooded in from neighboring cities, followed by the wounded soldiers from the Army of Tennessee, led first by General Joe E. Johnston and then by General John Bell Hood. The Battle of Atlanta took place from mid-July 1864 to early September as part of the “March to the Sea,” Union general William Tecumseh Sherman’s strategy to break the moral and physical support the women of the South provided their soldiers. Sherman left Atlanta on November 15 and marched his troops deeper into Georgia. Going this deep into enemy territory and away from railroad supply lines required his troops to live off the land, simultaneously taking any foodstuffs they needed and destroying anything they left behind so it could not offer aid to the enemy soldiers, or civilians (McDonough 2017). To destroy the possibility of reinforcements or rations moving from the plantations to the major urban centers, Union army soldiers created Sherman neckties, railroad tracks that they melted and bent into unusable condition. By the summer of 1864, those in Sherman’s path were largely women, children, and the elderly, as the majority of white Southern men had been conscripted into the Confederate army. Also true, as Sherman’s troops entered an area, a majority of the enslaved peoples who had not yet escaped slavery took the army’s approach as their chance at freedom. By some counts the group of runaways following the army numbered as many as ten thousand (Catton 1965). So many fled their bondage at Sherman’s approach that it became increasingly clear to Northerners that slavery could not survive the war, providing impetus for an abolition amendment. Though Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865, it took time for the word to travel and for other Confederate generals to come to the same conclusion. Confederate president Jefferson Davis refused to surrender; instead he fled his capital city of Richmond, hoping to continue the war from a reconstructed Confederacy based in Texas, but the Union army captured him on May 10, 1865, in Irwinville, Georgia, and imprisoned him. The final skirmish of the Civil War, the Battle of Palmito Ranch, took place near Brownsville, Texas, on May 12 and 13 (Patterson 2012). On August 20, 1866, President Johnson declared the war over, saying, “Said insurrection is at an end and that peace, order, tranquility, and civil authority now exist in and throughout the whole United States of America” (Presidential Proclamation 1866). Of course, those words masked the truth of how the states of the former Confederacy received Reconstruction. Most state officials balked against



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admitting blame for the destruction war brought to them and worked diligently to return their world to what it had once been. Hence, Southerners rejected the Reconstruction amendments. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments offered a formal end to slavery, rights to citizenship, and, finally, stated that the right “to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” During this more radical period of Reconstruction, which began around 1867, formerly enslaved men began to vote and to win elections to Southern state legislatures and even to the U.S. Congress. Hiram Revels of Mississippi became the first black member of the Senate in 1870. That he took over the seat formerly held by Jefferson Davis became part of his legend, along with the nickname “Fifteenth Amendment in flesh and blood” (Dray 2010). Though African American men won the legal right to vote, women did not. This drew many former abolitionist women out of the black civil rights movement and set them firmly on the road to a newly revived women’s suffrage campaign. Meanwhile, white Southerner politicians fought back against Reconstruction with state laws known as Black Codes. These laws infringed on most newly legalized rights for African Americans by creating rules that resembled many of the rules of slavery without technically allowing slavery. For example, mandatory employment locked many African Americans into sharecropping contracts that bound them financially to a particular plantation for periods of years. President Andrew Johnson was of no use to those who found these new laws offensive. He felt the federal government had no right to legislate voting rules or other questions pertinent to each individual state. Soon codes that required poll taxes and literacy tests before voting became law and would remain on the books until the civil rights movement of the 1960s effectively ending many black Americans’ ability to vote. When freedpersons balked at these boundaries, former Confederate soldiers from all ranks created the KKK, one of America’s first domestic terror and hate groups. Lynching became the penalty for resisting this new form of bondage and the Jim Crow segregation that would last for a century. Officially, Reconstruction is considered to have ended after President Grant’s two terms in office (Chernow 2017). While he held the presidency, he kept military troops stationed in Southern cities to defend the rights of the newly freed. The 1876 presidential election saw a near dead heat between Democrat Samuel Tilden and Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. Disputed electoral votes in Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana were eventually awarded to Hayes after the two parties agreed to the Compromise of 1877, sometimes known as “the Corrupt Bargain.” Republicans agreed to cease enforcing the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments (which had given freedpersons civil rights, including male suffrage) and end the military occupation of former Confederate states in return for the presidency. In abandoning their

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commitment to black civil rights, the Republican Party that had formed to fight slavery ceased to exist, ushering in a new era of national politics where neither party protected the rights that had been constitutionally guaranteed to freed slaves.

DEPICTION AND CULTURAL CONTEXT The criticism GWTW engendered then and now centers on the omission of any real depiction of the horrors of slavery. Outside of Scarlett slapping Prissy on the day the maid admits knowing nothing about childbirth (despite bragging about her expertise for weeks), none of the major characters ever mistreats a slave. Critics might fault Mitchell for not doing enough historical research before undertaking the story, but Mitchell was writing from the only perspective she had been taught, the myth of the benevolent slave master, not from the perspective of an enslaved main character. Still, this first error of omission is the most blatant error. Every slave owner in the film is kind, gentle, and loving to their slaves, from Scarlett’s father to her neighbor, John Wilkes, to her in-laws in Atlanta, Melanie and Aunt Pittypat. Another major omission is the name of the group Frank and Ashley join when they intend to avenge Scarlett’s near-rape. Melanie defends their actions, saying, “It’s what a great many of our Southern gentlemen have had to do lately for our protection.” The men are in fact members of the local KKK, turned honorable in the film’s perspective but actually one of the first recognized domestic terrorist hate groups in the United States (Parsons 2015). Veterans of the Confederate army founded the KKK in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866 with the goal of terrorizing the newly freed men and women of the South in an effort to deny black civil and legal rights. Former general Nathan Bedford Forrest became its Grand Wizard later the next year, but his leadership lasted only a short time before he felt the lawlessness of the group destroyed the “honor” of their mission. Forrest believed the honor came from protecting white women from newly freed black men, despite the fact that before the war masters rarely feared having their wives and daughters living in close proximity to African American men. Worse, while there were few cases of black predation of white women, white masters had a long history of sexually abusing female slaves, and even after the war was over black women were disproportionally vulnerable to sexual assault. Similarly, every slave portrayed in the film, from Mammy to Pork to Big Sam to Uncle Peter, seems to be accepting of their servitude and, more than that, genuinely happy to serve the families who enslaved them. In the novel, Prissy is the daughter of the woman Gerald has bought for Pork to marry, but no mention of the buying and selling—and breaking up of enslaved ­families—ever makes it into the film. Viewers never encounter enslaved people unhappy with their legal position as property. The film does not include



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any scenes of enslaved characters alone together, wherein they might be able to drop the mask they wear to avoid angering their owners. This fictional vision of slavery was pervasive many years after the war, up to and including GWTW. In her book Clinging to Mammy (2007), Micki McElya posits the idea that “the myth of the faithful slave lingers because so many white Americans have wished to live in a world in which African Americans are not angry over past and present injustices, a world in which white people were and are not complicit, in which the injustices themselves—of slavery, Jim Crow, and ongoing structural racism—seem not to exist at all. The mammy figure affirmed their wishes” (McElya 2007). Yet one could also argue that black and white women did make lives together before and after the war. Civil War diarist Mary Chesnut, whose husband had been in the Confederate cabinet, went into business with her formerly enslaved maid, Molly, after the war and the destruction of their plantation. In fact, it was Molly who suggested the two women go into business together (Stern 2012). This story and others suggest the nuance of white and black relationships in the postwar era. Another odd error is the film’s contention that Prissy had no background in midwifery, forcing Scarlett to deliver Melanie’s baby virtually without assistance. In truth, an enslaved woman of Prissy’s age, particularly one whose mother worked as a midwife, would have already assisted in many births. An enslaved woman with such a skill would have assuredly passed that on to her daughter since such a skill would have been a valuable one, helping her avoid working in the fields. One can only assume Margaret Mitchell was working from the societal ideas of the 1930s when she considered Prissy in her mid- to late teens to be too young for such work. Or Mitchell wanted to keep her lead character active rather than passive in such a dramatic situation, so she altered what she most certainly knew to be true. In the scene where Scarlett accepts delivery of the convicts who will work her lumber mill, a line of miserable men silently trudges through the yard, described as “starved, bent, and weary. They are of all ages, but one thing they have in common: all are emaciated” (Howard 1939). They are also all white. This is a clear error, as the majority of convict labor came from formerly enslaved peoples. Thanks to the aforementioned Black Codes regarding curfews, loitering, or going into debt, white officials could arrest former slaves for almost any reason, making black convict labor a legal replacement for slave labor. To be historically accurate, 90 percent of Scarlett’s laborers should have been African Americans. Thanks to an adherence to the original intellectual property—and the author’s adherence to the history of the era—screenwriter Sidney Howard gets many things right in his coverage of the Southern home front before, during, and after the Civil War. In the early scene of the family prayer, he includes a biracial character in “the cook, gaunt and yellow beneath her snowy head-rag.” A great majority of enslaved people in the United States in

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The Civil War on Film

1865 were biracial due to the high incidence of rape on plantations. A sampling of manumission documents from Natchez, Mississippi, shows 96 percent of those freed are described as “mulatto.” Common practice often called for biracial slaves to be assigned as house servants for the twofold reason that lighter-skinned peoples were considered more attractive and because some owners wanted to keep their illegitimate children inside their homes (Welch 2004). Also, the trans-Atlantic slave trade ended in 1807. This led to fewer people of pure African descent being forced into slavery and therefore generations of biracial peoples giving birth to new generations of multiracial peoples. Allowing for some of the characters in GWTW to be biracial is correct. However, none of the major enslaved characters are defined as biracial. Early in the film, Ellen O’Hara spends her day providing charity to her poor neighbors. Ellen is quite correctly shown to be a busy and vital member of her community. In The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World in the Old South (1982) by Catherine Clinton as well as V. Lynn Kennedy’s Born Southern: Childbirth, Motherhood, and Social Networks in the Old South (2010), historians have disproved the myth of the idle plantation mistress. Though the eventual myth of the gentile Southern woman who needed protection from the new freedmen took hold and formed the foundation of segregation, many white women took an active part in the management of their family plantations. This had been true since the days of the American Revolution, when wives such as Abigail Adams ran her family’s farm in Quincy, Massachusetts, while her husband worked in the Continental Congress. Some women did aid the poor in their districts, though that, too, became an overblown idea as the Lost Cause took hold of Southern historians. Many plantation wives detested the proximity of enslaved women and knew rape to be a product of such proximity, often noting in letters and journals how the features of some enslaved peoples matched the faces of their neighbors. During the barbecue, as the other women are taking naps, Scarlett goes in search of Ashley and overhears the men discussing the war. Her father insists “’Twas the sovereign right of the State of Georgia to secede from the Union!” while others insist it will be a fast fight, if the Yankees fight at all when faced with the superiority of the Southern gentlemen. Ashely laments, “Most of the misery of the world has been caused by wars. And when the wars were over, no one ever knew what they were about.” When visitor Rhett is asked for his opinion, he shocks them all by saying, “The Yankees are better equipped than we. They’ve got factories, shipyards, coal mines, and a fleet to bottle up our harbors and starve us to death. All we have is cotton . . . and slaves . . . and arrogance.” While the arrogance of the Tarleton twins and most of the other men at the Twelve Oaks barbecue seems comical to the modern viewer, articles, letters, and speeches from the period show this belief in a quick war to be common. The editor of the Charleston Mercury, the newspaper of Charleston, South Carolina, vowed to eat the bodies of all who might be slain as a result.



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Likewise, former U.S. senator James Chestnut boasted he could drink any blood spilled, explaining that all the blood that would be shed would only fill a lady’s sewing thimble (Faust 2008). Certainly, antiwar opinions like the ones aired by Ashley and Rhett were few in number among elite white Southerners, but they did exist. William Tecumseh Sherman, who worked as superintendent of the Louisiana State Seminary of Learning and Military Academy in 1859, agreed with Rhett Butler: Where are your men and appliances of war to contend against them? The North can make a steam engine, locomotive, or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical, and determined people on Earth—right at your doors. You are bound to fail. Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with. At first you will make headway, but as your limited resources begin to fail, shut out from the markets of Europe as you will be, your cause will begin to wane. If your people will but stop and think, they must see in the end that you will surely fail. (Foote 1986)

Charles Hamilton’s death by flu in camp illustrates one of the sad realities of war. Over 620,000 soldiers died in the Civil War, but almost twice as many (412,000) died of disease as of wounds (208,000). Training camps became breeding grounds for all variety of infectious diseases, and as no vaccines had yet been invented, this form of death befell more men than gunfire (Faust 2008). Likewise, Rhett’s activities as an illegal blockade runner represent the many real-life profiteers on both sides of the war. Due to Lincoln’s policy of blocking Southern ports to choke them of supplies with which to prosecute the war, the Confederacy relied on and supported the work of private ships, many of them built in Britain and designed specifically for speed. If spotted, the blockade runners would attempt to outmaneuver or simply outrun any Union ships on blockade patrol, very often successfully, providing a trade route to England for Southern cotton and back to America with guns and other products (Heidler and Heidler 2002). As far as representing the devastation of war, on one of their afternoons together, Rhett tells Scarlett “the war can’t last much longer” and mentions a battle taking place in “some little town in Pennsylvania—called Gettysburg.” This scene fades into a jam of carriages parked haphazardly in front of the Atlanta newspaper office awaiting word on the outcome of the battle and grimly expecting casualties. Whole families from Scarlett’s hometown are wiped out, including her former beaus the Tarleton twins. Ashley admits to Scarlett, “Gettysburg was the beginning of the end, only people here don’t know it yet,” and he says supplies are limited. “My men are barefooted now, and the snow in Virginia is deep.” In fact, though the Battle of Antietam went down in the books as the bloodiest day of the Civil War, the Battle of Gettysburg, which ran three full days (July 1–3, 1863), became the bloodiest

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and most deadly battle. Due to lack of good record keeping and the chaos caused by evacuations at the end of the war, Confederate casualties are still mere estimates. Recent calculations claim 23,231 casualties (4,708 killed, 12,693 wounded, 5,830 captured or missing). The Union kept better records and recorded casualties at 23,055 (3,155 killed, 14,531 wounded, 5,369 captured or missing) (Busey and Martin 2005). As the war dragged on, refugees poured into Atlanta. In the film, Scarlett and Melanie are called to serve as nurses, though Melanie is visibly pregnant, another previously impossible breech of etiquette but one accepted at the height of the war. Soon Scarlett sees a field hand from Tara, Big Sam, who tells her he and others from the plantation have been conscripted to dig the entrenchments around the city, Robert E. Lee’s signature defense tactic. The Battle of Atlanta did involve conscripting enslaved men from nearby plantations to dig trenches as Big Sam indicates in his scene. In fact, enslaved men and women built many of the Confederacy’s breastworks and fortifications. Modern-day neo-Confederates have used this fact to support their desire to believe in “black Confederates,” as proof that slaves enjoyed their slavery so much they fought to stay in bondage. Rather, they were forced to support the Confederate army, and as such their work should not be interpreted as support for slavery. As Rhett and Scarlett watch the Confederate army retreating out of Atlanta, he says, “It’s the South sinking to its knees. It will never rise again. The cause—the cause of living in the past—is dying right in front of us.” But the cause did not die. It invented a glorious, mythical Lost Cause mythology, allowing the South to rise again in memory if not in reality. As Scarlett leads Melanie and Prissy back to Tara, they pass the ruins of Twelve Oaks and learn firsthand of how General William Tecumseh Sherman’s March to the Sea affected the neighborhood. Arriving at Tara, they learn that the Union officers spared her home as they used it as headquarters, but they’ve left nothing to eat. Worst of all, Scarlett finds that while her sisters are recovering from typhoid, her mother died just a day earlier. Her death illustrates the way disease spread throughout armies and infected civilians that encountered the soldiers for any length of time. These losses incurred by Scarlett and her neighbors validate Sherman’s own estimation of over $100 million in damages during that one 1864 campaign. Pork, an ex-slave at Tara, also tells Scarlett that most of the region’s slaves escaped with Sherman’s army (though Pork and Mammy did not). In truth, when Sherman’s troops entered an area, a majority of slaves took the Union army’s incursion as their last chance at freedom. Of course, GWTW shows the Southern perspective, so it is decidedly anti-Sherman. The cultural context of GWTW has changed over the years. In the early days, the film served as an homage to the Lost Cause and the romance of the Confederacy. Later viewers and critics came to see the story as one of home front civilian survival, which may have had particular appeal in the run-up



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to World War II (1939–1945). This story took on a feminist bent as the story of a young woman (or two, including Melanie) who survives a war she had no part in creating. This second perspective can sometimes be lost in the criticisms over the first focus of the film. Some historians feel the film’s huge success was based on the South’s love of the Lost Cause mythology. Others have suggested that GWTW’s placement near the end of the Great Depression allowed women to connect with a character who showed resilience in the face of problems she had not caused. Scarlett’s survival represented hope for other people in trouble. As noted earlier, in London the film offered a similar hope to people surviving a very different war. While the film enjoyed a position high on the artistic pedestal for decades, more recently critics, academics, and audiences argue that its contribution to celebrating the myth of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy should keep it out of classrooms. New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu defines the Lost Cause in this way: The Cult of the Lost Cause had its roots in the Southern search for justification and the need to find a substitute for victory in the Civil War. In attempting to deal with defeat, Southerners created an image of the war as a great heroic epic. A major theme of the Cult of the Lost Cause was the clash of two civilizations, one inferior to the other. The North, “invigorated by constant struggle with nature, had become materialistic, grasping for wealth and power.” The South had a “more generous climate” which had led to a finer society based upon “veracity and honor in man, chastity and fidelity in women.” Like tragic heroes, Southerners had waged a noble but doomed struggle to preserve their superior civilization. There was an element of chivalry in the way the South had fought, achieving noteworthy victories against staggering odds. This was the “Lost Cause” as the late nineteenth century saw it, and a whole generation of Southerners set about glorifying and celebrating it. (Landrieu 2018)

As Landrieu’s quote attests, most Americans born in the southern states took this idea of glorifying the Confederacy and honoring its dead to heart, finding it difficult to see the other side. Therefore, by 2019, southern Americans faced more pushback from African Americans and northerners who studied that other side in school and were insisting on tearing down the physical structures that supported the Lost Cause mythology. In Teaching What Really Happened, James W. Loewen wrote that “the Confederates won with the pen (and the noose) what they could not win on the battlefield: the cause of white supremacy and the dominant understanding of what the war was all about” (Loewen 2018). In fact, from the beginning of Hollywood film, when the medium was still silent, Civil War stories captivated audiences composed of children and grandchildren of those who had fought and died on both sides. A myth of nobility developed around the male warriors, which led to films that glorified moments of battle such as Pickett’s life-wasting charge (which alone resulted in six thousand deaths

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at Gettysburg). Thanks to the work of early filmmakers like D. W. Griffith, himself the grandson of a Confederate soldier, one could now say the Confederates won with the movie camera. Still, one cannot continue to fall back on the excuse that the filmmakers were people of their day and did not know better. African Americans protested the film and even Hattie McDaniel’s work, requiring her to deliver the now famous line, “I would rather play a maid than be one,” that defined her career. Likewise, northern reviewers of the day, such as Frank S. Nugent of the New York Times, acknowledged the issues African Americans had with the film when he praised McDaniel’s performance, saying, “Best of all, perhaps, next to Miss Leigh, is Hattie McDaniel’s Mammy, who must be personally absolved of responsibility for that most ‘unfittin’” scene in which she scolds Scarlett from an upstairs window. She played even that one right, however wrong it was” (Nugent 1939). Historian Richard N. Current offers a similar perspective on Mitchell’s vision: “No doubt it is indeed unfortunate that Gone with the Wind perpetuates many myths about Reconstruction, particularly with respect to blacks. Margaret Mitchell did not originate them and a young novelist can scarcely be faulted for not knowing what the majority of mature, professional historians did not know until many years later” (Castel 2010). On the other hand, from its origins as a novel, the GWTW story works against Lost Cause ideology in several ways. First, Scarlett does not care about Confederate patriotism. In the first half of the story she is too self-­interested, and in the second half too practical to be romantic about the Confederacy. In addition, the man she learns was the right match for her was not the slaveowning Ashley but, rather, Rhett, who is never seen owning a slave and operates, at least in part, outside the slave economy. In fact, his business as a blockade runner insinuates an acquaintance with free black men and, perhaps, fugitive slaves, since many black men found freedom via work on ships. Finally, a great deal is made of the fact that Rhett wants the respect of only two people—Melanie Wilkes and Mammy. A white man worried about earning respect from an ex-slave woman runs counter to Lost Cause mythology. In the end, Scarlett is an ambiguous Southern character. In her 2017 article comparing the toppling of Confederate statues to the canceling of a showing of GWTW in a theater in Memphis, Alyssa Rosenberg wrote: What makes Scarlett an iconic heroine is not that she unquestioningly embraces the perspectives of her slave-holding class during the war or the Lost Cause mythology that congeals after it, but that she sees the hypocrisy and self-­ deception that animate her peers. What makes Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) an appealing romantic hero is that for much of the film, he encourages Scarlett’s rebellion from these ideals when everyone else encourages her to conform to them. The climax of the movie comes when Scarlett recognizes that she never really loved Ashley Wilkes (Leslie Howard), the dreamy but fundamentally weak product of the Southern slavocracy. (Rosenberg 2017)



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In Rosenberg’s opinion, “This is the essential difference between Confederate monuments and Gone with the Wind. Monuments to Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and other Confederate generals are an effort to turn convenient illusion into concrete reality. Gone with the Wind acknowledges what some people might find beautiful about that dream, while arguing that real courage is not in succumbing to slumber, but in waking up from a fantasy” (Rosenberg 2017). In 2019, it can be difficult to champion Scarlett’s story, and one wonders, were it made today, could it provide the feminist spine of a survival story without the gloss of glory to a slaveholding society. Should it be thrown away with all the statues of Confederate generals? Should it be taught as an example of the power of myth? Should it be lauded as one of the greatest cinematic achievements of all time? These are questions film professors and historians continue to debate.

FURTHER READING Barrett, Jenny. 2009. Shooting the Civil War. London: I. B. Tauris. Blight, David W. 2001. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, MA: Belknap of Harvard University Press. Branch, Taylor. 1988. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63. New York: Simon and Schuster. Busey, John W., and David G. Martin. 2005. Regimental Strengths and Losses at Gettysburg. Hightstown, NJ: Longstreet House. Carnes, Mark C. 1995. Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies. New York: H. Holt. Castel, Albert E. 2010. Winning and Losing in the Civil War: Essays and Stories. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Catton, Bruce. 1965. The Centennial History of the Civil War. Vol. 3, Never Call Retreat. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Chernow, Ron. 2017. Grant. New York: Penguin. Chesnut, Mary Boykin. 1905. A Diary from Dixie. New York: D. Appleton. Clinton, Catherine. 1982. The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World in the Old South. New York: Pantheon. Dray, Philip. 2010. Capitol Men: The Epic Story of Reconstruction through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen. Wilmington, MA: Mariner. Faust, Drew Gilpin. 2008. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. New York: Knopf. Flamini, Roland. 1975. Scarlett, Rhett, and a Cast of Thousands: The Filming of Gone with the Wind. New York: ­Macmillan​. Flinn, John C., Sr. 1939. “Gone with the Wind.” Variety, December 19, 1939. Foote, Shelby. 1986. The Civil War: A Narrative. New York: Random House. Gallagher, Gary W. 2008. Causes Won, Lost, Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know about the Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

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Heidler, David Stephen, and Jeanne T. Heidler (2002). Encyclopedia of the American Civil War: A Political, Social, and Military History. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Hernán, Vera, and Andrew Mark Gordon. 2003. Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Howard, Sydney. 1939. Gone with the Wind. Final Shooting Script, January 24, ­1939​. Margaret Herrick Library, Beverly Hills, California. Kennedy, V. Lynn. 2010. Born Southern: Childbirth, Motherhood, and Social Networks in the Old South. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Konstam, Angus, and Tony Bryan. 2004. Confederate Blockade Runner 1861–65. Oxford: Osprey. Landrieu, Mitch. (2018). In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History. New York: Viking. Loewen, James W., ed. 2018. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. New York: The New Press. McDonough, James Lee. 2017. William Tecumseh Sherman: In the Service of My Country: A Life. New York: W. W. Norton. McElya, Micki. 2007. Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press. Nugent, Frank S. 1939. “THE SCREEN IN REVIEW; David Selznick’s ‘Gone with the Wind’ Has Its Long-Awaited Premiere at Astor and Capitol, Recalling Civil War and Plantation Days of South—Seen as Treating Book with Great Fidelity.” New York Times, December 20, 1939. ­https://​­www​.­nytimes​.­com​/­1939​/­12​/­20​ /­archives​/­the​-­screen​-­in​-­review​-­david​-­selznicks​-­gone​-­with​-­the​-­wind​-­has​-­its​.­html. Parsons, Elaine Frantz. 2015. Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Patterson, Benton Rain. 2012. Ending the Civil War: The Bloody Year from Grant’s Promotion to Lincoln’s Assassination. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Presidential Proclamation. August 20, 1866. Message Proclaiming End to Insurrection in the United States. ­https://​­millercenter​.­org​/­the​-­presidency​/­presidential​ -­speeches​/­august​-­20​-­1866​-­message​-­proclaiming​-­end​-­insurrection​-­united. Reynolds, David S. 2006. John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil. New York: Knopf. Rosenberg, Alyssa. 2017. “‘Gone with the Wind’ Is the One Confederate Monument Worth Saving.” Washington Post, August 29, ­2017​. ­https://­www​.­washingtonpost​ .­com​/­news​/­act​-­four​/­wp​/­2017​/­08​/­29​/­gone​-­with​-­the​-­wind​-­is​-­the​-­one​-­confederate​ -­monument​-­worth​-­saving​/. Stern, Julia A. 2012. “Discovering the African-American Civil War through Mary Chesnut.” Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 45, no. 1 (Spring): 3–10. Wallace-Sanders, Kimberly. 2008. Mammy: A Century of Race and Southern Memory. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Welch, Rosanne. 2004. A Family Affair: Emancipation and Slavery in the Old Natchez District, 1795–1860. Los Angeles: California State University Press. Wills, Brian. 2006. Gone with the Glory: The History of the Civil War in Cinema. New York: Littlefield.

Chapter 2

Friendly Persuasion (1957) Friendly Persuasion is a unique example of a Civil War film in many ways, both historically and in terms of production. First, while many Civil War films cover the Southern perspective, Persuasion involves the much rarer Northern experience, this one of a devout Indiana Quaker female minister whose family tries valiantly to uphold their pacifist values in the face of Confederate attack. The novel, by Jessamyn West (1940), is more a collection of short stories following the lead, Eliza Cope, “a fine woman, pious and . . . good-looking as female preachers are apt to be: a little, black-haired, glossy woman with a mind of her own” through forty years of life. Her husband, Jess Birdwell, “knew Eliza had a call to the ministry and was proud to hear her preach in her gentle way of loving-kindness and the brotherhood of man” (West 1940). Also unlike a majority of Civil War films, Persuasion does not focus on a famous battle nor spend very much time on the small skirmish it does include, preferring to highlight the ideals that are sacrificed in times of war. Persuasion may have told a very American story, but apparently the theme had universal appeal, for though the film lost all six Academy Awards it was nominated for (among them Best Picture and Best Screenplay, which went to Around the World in 80 Days), Persuasion won the Palme d’Or, the highest prize given at the 1957 Cannes Film Festival. Likewise, the Golden Globes, handed out by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, named Anthony Perkins, who played the teenage son, Josh Birdwell, Most Promising Newcomer–Male while nominating the film in the Best Film Promoting International Understanding category. Both the script and the casting process involved more contortions than a normal film. Frank Capra first attempted to make the film shortly after

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the novel’s publication but failed, partly because he hoped for Bing Crosby as the patriarch, since Crosby had had such box office success a few years earlier as the gentle priest in Going My Way (1944). Crosby turned down the part, and Capra never liked the versions of the script provided. Then William Wyler, director of The Best Years of Our Lives and Roman Holiday, took an interest in the tale of this Indiana Quaker family and saw Gary Cooper, a success in High Noon, as the lead. At first Cooper also turned the part down. Cooper was old enough to be the father of grown children, being fifty-five, but he did not want to be seen as that old on screen. Perhaps Cooper did not like playing second fiddle to a clear female lead. Cooper also expressed reservations to West, noting that since in his previous roles “‘action seems to come natural to me,’ the father should be shown joining the fight. ‘There comes a time in a picture of mine when the people watching expect me to do something,’ he said. West responded he would do something: ‘Refrain. You will furnish your public with the refreshing picture of a strong man refraining.’” West won (West 1957). As with Gone with the Wind, producers considered many different actresses for the lead, including Jean Arthur, Jane Wyman, Maureen O’Hara, Ingrid Bergman, and Katherine Hepburn. Wyler finally decided on Dorothy McGuire, though in typical Hollywood fashion, at the age of forty she was already being relegated to mother roles, a deeper irony after producers cast Phyllis Love, only nine years younger, as her daughter, Mattie. As for the script, Jessamyn West spent a year with the production as both story writer and technical adviser. She created new characters, especially Sam, who works as a counterpart to Jess (West 1940). Then Michael Wilson came on board to adapt the film. His résumé sported the Academy Award for Best Screenplay for cowriting an adaptation of an earlier great American novel, Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy into A Place in the Sun in 1952. While today Michael Wilson is the sole credited screenwriter, he did not originally receive a screen credit due to having been blacklisted, so Persuasion became the first and only film released with no “written by” credit appearing on the screen. In terms of production, even during filming, Wyler wasn’t sure how far Jess’s involvement in the Civil War should go, so he filmed two scenes. In one he picks up a gun; in the other he does not. After listening to arguments from colleagues over which version to use, Wyler decided to have Jess pick up the gun, prolonging the suspense over whether or not he would shoot the Confederate soldier who had just killed his best friend. Then, fearing location shooting in Indiana would be too expensive, Allied Artists rented director Rowland V. Lee’s ranch in the San Fernando Valley, in California, which the design team turned into a duplicate of the Indiana countryside of the 1860s. They also planted cornfields and sycamore trees in place of the Southern California vegetation. Interiors were shot in the old Republic Studios in North Hollywood.



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For a film focused on a female minister, it is interesting to note that at one time the producers considered the title Mr. Birdwell Goes to Battle as a callback to Gary Cooper’s success in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936). Eventually, the book’s title returned to the film, and it remained balanced between the four major family members sharing these decisions in different ways. The narrative opens not on humans but on Samantha, defined by Little Jess (Richard Eyer) as “my momma’s pet goose” in voice-over. To set up the Quaker beliefs that will soon be challenged by the nearness of battle, Little Jess wants to kill the goose for dinner, but his minister mother, Eliza (Dorothy McGuire), admonishes her son, “Let’s have no more talk of killing.” Soon the rest of the family in Eliza’s charge is introduced. Her daughter, Mattie (Phyllis Love), is practicing courting in her bedroom. She likes to use fancy French vocabulary like “toilette” and “boudoir” and worries over whether or not she’s pretty, though one wonders in a Quaker family how she has a mirror at all. The older men in the family show the mother more respect than her daughter does. Brother Josh (Anthony Perkins) respects his mother by not letting his younger brother talk about famous enemy generals. As in the book, husband Jess (Gary Cooper) is deeply proud of Eliza and tries to follow the tenets of their religion to honor her calling. The film remains focused on the power of the female lead. This is highlighted when a Union soldier accuses the men of hiding behind their religion, in essence hiding behind their women. This questioning of Eliza’s power occupies the plot of several characters. As a female, Mattie questions the actions of her role model mother to her beau, Gard Jordan (Peter Mark Richman): “Momma’s so straitlaced.” Gard responds, “Maybe I can loosen some of those laces,” making the audience wonder if she is wrong for being so true to her beliefs and making scholars question if we would treat a male character so disrespectfully simply for living by his beliefs. When Eliza accepts the new horse Jess has bought merely for the chance to win a race against their neighbor, this indicates that lying is the way to get by a strong woman. Similarly, when a traveling organ salesman arrives and Josh buys the instrument, Eliza forbids it. Jess answers, “When thee asks, or, or suggests, I’m like putty in your hands, but when you forbid, thee is barking up the wrong tree.” She softens her tone and insists, “If thee takes that instrument into the house, I go out.” He brings it into the house anyway and, true to her word, she takes up residence in their barn, though later in the film she will come to accept it as well as the horse. The war is not a focal point in the film for the first hour. Instead, the film focuses on this woman forced to watch her beliefs torn apart day by day due to circumstances beyond her control and still go on believing. One day during their weekly gathering at the meetinghouse, a Union major arrives with the duty to talk to the local Quakers about the war. Eliza notes that while they oppose slavery, they do not believe in killing some men to free others. Unable to gain Eliza’s support for his cause, the major challenges the

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manhood of the local men by asking the whole congregation if they would stand by to see other men die to protect them. He further insults their beliefs by stating that the men are hiding behind their church to avoid fighting. Still, no one joins up on the spot, but both sides of the dilemma are presented as an elder insists he never would commit violence on a fellow human, but Jess says no one knows for sure how they might behave, but he hopes God would reveal a way to them. While it’s one thing to be in a marriage where a man lives with a powerful woman, it’s another to be the son of a powerful woman and be in disagreement. This happens to Josh, who fears for their farm if the Confederates come any closer. Eliza says there is nothing they can do. Josh deeply hopes to follow his mother’s path but questions other paths as well. The only person of color in the film, runaway slave Enoch (Joel Fluellen), explains that he has a child, lost when he ran away from the plantation. This fuels Josh’s interest in fighting for the Union above and beyond simply defending his family’s land. When Eliza questions Enoch’s plans, he promises, “If they are gonna catch me, I’m going down fighting.” Jess says, “Enoch, thee is free to choose.” And Josh responds, “So am I.” In an emotional mother/son scene, Eliza attempts to dissuade Josh: “Our ways are ways of peace. If thou turns thy back on everything I’ve taught you, thou turns your back on me.” Josh does go to the fight and learns he is more like his mother than he thought when he hesitates to pull the trigger when the order to fire is given. Then the soldier lying next to him is shot dead and Josh finally takes a shot at the Confederates while tears roll down his face. He kills one of the enemy soldiers and is wounded. Noticing that the man who died beside him is not much older than himself kills his spirit. As the script notates, “His expression is faint with strain, horror, nausea, fear, as he looks into the face of the first man killed he has ever seen.” Meanwhile, Jess watches his friend Sam die of a fatal gunshot wound and then tackles the Confederate shooter while the man is reloading. In honor of his and Eliza’s beliefs, he elects to let the man escape despite what he did to Sam. The scene illustrates what West had said to Cooper early on, that “the refreshing picture of a strong man refraining” proved more dramatic than one more body falling dead. Returning home after the fight, Josh tentatively asks Eliza, “Thee don’t hate me, mother?” She responds, “I never loved thee more, son.” Then he collapses against her shoulder in a sign that losing his mother’s love and respect would be worse to him than losing his life. Finally, Eliza has to admit she came face to face with living by her ideals when the Confederates entered their yard and attempted to strangle Samantha the goose for dinner. She went after them with her broom, bashing the Confederate. In conclusion, all the family and friends faced moral decisions, and all acquitted themselves as best they could. The movie had its first preview in Long Beach, California. Even though the film broke several times, adding more than an hour to the screening time,



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the audience waited patiently to see it through and responded positively. Wyler knew he had a hit, and he was right. The film grossed $4 million during its first North American release in 1956. After its premiere, the New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther called Persuasion “a picture that is loaded with sweetness and warmth and as much cracker-barrel Americana as has been spread on the screen in some time.” He goes on to say the film achieves an “acquaintance with solid characters whose lives are happily ordered by a simple morality and genuine love. In their very naïveté and simplicity there is a soothing serenity” (Crowther 1956).

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND The small battle that forms the climax of Friendly Persuasion is based on a Confederate raid into Indiana and Ohio that took place in July 1863. Why the film took the artistic license of setting its time one year earlier is unclear, but the rest of the details are closer to fact. The real history involves about 450 members of the Indiana Home Guard who met Confederate General John Hunt Morgan and his band of over 2,400 Confederates, known as Morgan’s Raiders, south of the county seat of Harrison County, Corydon, Indiana. With word of Morgan’s approach and with at least fifteen Ohio units fighting at Gettysburg and as many involved in Vicksburg, Governor Oliver P. Morton called for all able-bodied men to create militia companies. Thousands organized into regiments with Colonel Lewis Jordan taking command of the 450 members of the Harrison County Home Guard (Sixth Regiment, Indiana Legion). His goal was to delay Morgan long enough for Union reinforcements to arrive (Mowery 2013). The Home Guard held off the raiders for about half an hour, helped along by their newer Henry rifles, repeating rifles not yet available to the Confederates. The storm of bullets they unleashed kept back the Seventh Kentucky Cavalry until they dismounted. When the Home Guard saw how both men and guns outnumbered them, many fled and the rest retreated, leaving the field to Morgan. He celebrated by taking a nap at the Kintner Hotel, which allowed his raiders to loot the town with impunity since such behavior was officially against military rules. They demanded mill owners pay ransoms or they would burn down the mills. At 5:00 p.m., the raiders moved on. Despite the odds being balanced against them, the Indiana Home Guard counted only five fatalities during the battle, whereas the raiders had eleven men killed and thirty-three wounded. Attia Porter, a young citizen of Corydon, close in age to Mattie Birdwell, mused after the battle that “it made Morgan so mad to think a few Home Guards dared to fight his men. I’m glad they done it just to spite him” (Mowery 2013). Morgan had captured over three hundred of the Home Guards but paroled them for

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the return of a number of his own men. This would remain the normal pattern of post-battle prisoner exchange until Ulysses S. Grant canceled all such exchanges after the Confederates refused to exchange black Union soldiers for white Confederates. Worse for Morgan, it was in Corydon that he learned of the defeats at Vicksburg but more importantly at Gettysburg, for then he knew he could not count on meeting General Robert E. Lee’s troops in Pennsylvania and carrying the war deeper into the North. Later in his campaign, Morgan recklessly became cut off from his Southern supply chain and trapped in the North; he ended up surrendering his command near the Ohio/Pennsylvania border on July 26. He and his senior officers were sent to the penitentiary instead of a prisoner-of-war camp because Union spies claimed many captured Union officers were being held in such facilities. Eventually, Morgan became even more famous because he and several officers dug tunnels out, traveled by train to Cincinnati, and crossed the Ohio River to Kentucky and safety in the Confederacy. While they succeeded in this escape, the original goal of their raid, to draw Union forces away from the campaigns in both Vicksburg, Mississippi, and Gettysburg, Pennsylvania failed (Mowery 2013). More formally known as the Society of Friends, members of the faith are called Friends and nicknamed Quakers. Several anecdotal histories explain this nickname with no evidence as to the most correct reason. One is that the founder, George Fox, told a magistrate to tremble or quake whenever he heard the name of God; another involves the idea that Friends quaked during religious experiences, similar to how Shakers were named. “Friendly persuasion” refers to the Quakers’ way of communicating, since they do not advocate aggression or violence. Fox founded the Society of Friends after back-to-back revelations in and around 1650 in England. He traveled the country teaching that, since Christ had come to teach people himself, that is how religious instruction ought to be delivered. Despite their eventual separation into factions known as the Evangelical, the Conservative, and the Liberal, all denominations of Friends believe the major tenets that people can have a direct encounter with God because all people are spiritually equal and because God is a living presence available to all via direct experience (Dandelion 2008). This direct connection extends across genders. Quaker women, true to the film’s portrayal of a female leader, have played an important role in Quakerism, beginning with cofounder Margaret Fell Fox. She became one of sixty early Quaker preachers and missionaries nicknamed the Valiant Sixty. Fell’s importance came from her offering up her home, Swarthmoor Hall, as an early meeting place, in writing epistles, and disbursing funds to early missionaries. Lastly, being a widow in charge of her estate made her a member of the landed gentry, so she could intercede in cases of persecution or arrest of other leaders on charges of blasphemy (Dandelion 2008). Various Quaker women also published articles and pamphlets about the religion



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in its earliest days, though this caused dissent among some members, but not Fox. He established a regulatory body, with leadership shared by thirty-five women and forty-nine men, a ratio not often seen in modern times. Though some members still split off in protest of such ideas, the schism eventually healed, largely in the eastern United States (Dandelion 2008). As far as American Quakers are concerned, the first members sailed to the English colonies in 1656. Here, too, women took the lead, with Mary Fisher, another member of the Valiant Sixty, and Ann Austin as the first two Quakers in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. For their efforts, the two Friends were immediately forced to undress in public so their bodies could be examined for signs of witchcraft. Then the local leaders imprisoned the women and burned all their books. Upon their release, Fisher and Austin returned to England. Later Quakers fared a bit better by moving around the colonies, though Boston Puritans hanged four in 1659, and Virginia enacted a series of anti-Quaker laws a few years later. Quakers took refuge in Rhode Island, due to its policy of religious freedom, and in 1661 held their first General Meeting in Newport. The event has been held every year since, even during the American Revolution and the Civil War. Pennsylvania became the other colony most welcoming to Quakers and served as a haven for those who were being persecuted elsewhere (Hamm 2006). The first time war threatened the Society of Friends came when members had to decide whether or not to participate in the American Revolution. Those who did were expelled for failure to adhere to the peace testimony and renamed themselves The Religious Society of Free Quakers or simply Free Quakers. Established in 1781 in Philadelphia, the branch did not last long because the Society of Friends accepted most of them back in after the war, which sets up the main conflict of Friendly Persuasion. In terms of the American Civil War, the Friends experienced the same conflicts of brother against brother that infused the North and the South, except for them it was a conflict of beliefs. They had declared their adamant opposition to the importation of slaves as early as 1696 at their Society of Friends (Quaker) Yearly Meeting. As slavery took hold of the South anyway, many became fervent abolitionists willingly breaking the law to aid enslaved people on their escapes via the Underground Railroad. Prominent Quakers had once held slaves but chose to manumit them to stay true to their faith. For instance, First Lady Dolley Madison’s father, John Payne, a Virginia planter, freed his slaves and moved the family to Philadelphia, where they ran a laundry. Without experience budgeting for paid labor, the business failed, debts accrued, and his new Quaker meeting expelled him, a lesson not lost on other prominent Southern Quakers (Cote 2004). While managing their stance on slavery was one thing, breaking their peace testimony was another matter. Samuel Harper of Chester County, Pennsylvania, explained part of the reason for this disunity when he stated, “The war troubled consciences here, as powerful roots of Quaker pacifism

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tugged one way and patriotism and hatred of slavery pulled another” (Harper 1990). The concept of Quakers applying for conscientious objection came to the United States from Great Britain. A clause in the Militia Ballot Acts of 1757–1762, passed by parliament as a response to the threat of a French invasion during the Seven Years’ War, formally allowed Quakers exemption from military service. Therefore, Quakers enjoyed that right from the beginnings of the new nation, though, as mentioned, some Friends did choose to fight when they felt the cause justified. Those who did not fight faced various penalties based on individual state policies, which included paying large fines or providing other services, and they dealt with differing levels of public disapproval. In the South, where manpower shortages and invading armies caused anger toward men unwilling to fight, Quakers had a harder time. The Confederate Conscription Bill, passed in 1862, allowed an Exemption Act leaving Quakers free from the draft but required they either send a substitute or pay a $500 fine. In the Union, the Draft Act of 1863 made provisions for conscientious objectors without defining the term or naming specific religious sects (which at that time included the Shakers, the Mennonites, and the Amish) for fear of missing the smaller ones (such as the Dunkards). Men of draftable age then flooded the War Department with individual petitions forcing Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton to parole all conscientious objectors held in custody (Wright 2019).

DEPICTION AND CULTURAL CONTEXT Friendly Persuasion is an anomaly among Civil War films for many reasons. First, the larger story of the film involves the day-to-day lives of a family that is living in the North, supporting the Union, and staying as true to the tenets of their religion as they can in trying times. Previously, directors with Southern backgrounds (e.g., D. W. Griffith) and a fondness for the epic vistas offered by the Southern side of the story had only told stories from that perspective. This time around, the writers felt the real courage of the contest came from those in the North, and in this case, from the story of a family who stood against any kind of violence no matter the cause. While many of those female-centered Civil War stories focused on how the home front supported the military, in Persuasion the story centers on a woman whose religious principles force her not to support any military action. In fact, when the Confederate raiders finally make it to her farm, Eliza treats them civilly and offers them food and drink. While Southern Civil War epics focus on the grandness of battle or the destruction that comes in the wake of battle, for a Northern family, the war was less of a daily concern outside of prayers and knowing family friends who were in the military. Persuasion



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is also an interesting sociological study of a family with a female lead and a man of equal power who appreciates and respects her leadership, possible only in a story set among a denomination that believes in spiritual equality. A deeply antiwar film coming a decade after the end of World War II, Persuasion comments on the issues of its day while presenting a side of the Civil War that is often ignored in cinema. Further, the Birdwell family are members of the Society of Friends, a religion not often depicted in film, so it could be expected that the writers (both of the novel and of the film) took some artistic license in portraying them, West less so than Wilson because she was a Quaker from Indiana, though even West admitted in interviews that her imagination fed her stories as much as what she had been told of the lives of her great-grandparents, Joshua and Elizabeth Milhous. They had lived in rural Indiana, while West, though born in Indiana, spent more of her own childhood in Yorba Linda, California (West 1957). Finally, this is an odd film in that even the circumstances of its production have to be considered in the cultural context of the times. When it premiered, Persuasion received mild criticism for certain inaccuracies, particularly in its portrayal of Quaker views. Most noticeable was representing that Quakers disavowed all music. In fact, they valued the individual practice of playing instruments and singing, mostly spiritual music. In terms of Eliza, whether the movie is trying to make her the strictest Quaker ever or merely blur the difference between organized church music and private expression is unclear. Secondarily, in meetings, Bible passages are not read aloud from a book. Speakers spontaneously recite scripture from memory and explain why that passage came into their mind at that moment. The writers fared better in moments such as when the Union major arrives with the duty to talk to the local Quakers about the war. He says, “Your men don’t fight in it,” and Eliza responds, “Some have.” This is true. Though the Quaker doctrine favors nonviolence, as with most any religion, members have a free will to choose their own behavior. In addition, Friends do congregate in meetinghouses instead of churches because they believe no set of boards and nails is any more holy than another. When the film first opened, film critic Pauline Kael wrote that the Quakers in the film “are there only to violate their convictions” (McBride 2002), and more than thirty years later the film’s Quaker critics still held grudges. Thomas Radecki, an Illinois Friend, condemned Persuasion in a lengthy review in Friends Journal entitled “Film’s Message Esteems Violence” largely because “Quakers are portrayed as opposing going to war but are not shown as doing anything active . . . to nonviolently work against the war. They are accused of letting others do the fighting for them. The values of the Quaker minister are repeatedly mocked. Her younger son participates in gambling . . . her daughter falls in love with a dashing Union lieutenant . . . [and] goes dancing with him . . . [her] husband brings an organ into the house. . . . Later, in the critical part of the film, every Quaker man eventually picks up his gun

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to fight the rebels. . . . At one point, [the mother] becomes angry and . . . strikes a rebel soldier to keep him from killing a pet goose . . . at no time did the Quaker minister witness for peace” (Friendly Letter 1991). Radecki’s criticism seems fair considering how many Quakers took a stand against slavery before and during the Civil War. Quakers in North Carolina, the state that started secession, had protested against the violence of slavery—and of war—and from 1830 on, nearly ten thousand Quakers left North Carolina, choosing to move to western states and territories that did not allow slavery. By 1845, only about 4,500 Friends remained in the state (Hilty 1984). While the Confederacy offered a $500 exemption fee, many Quakers refused to pay since any monies given to the government were thought to be in support of the two things they refused to support: slavery and war. As the war raged on over the three-year mark and the Confederacy became desperate for support, the government gave Quakers the chance to work at places like the saltworks in Wilmington or in leather tanning and shoe industries. Still some refused, while some non-Quakers who shared those ideologies converted and were called War Quakers. A specific example of a Quaker who the Confederacy punished for his beliefs is Thomas Kennedy, a sixty-six-year-old civilian who freed all his slaves. The Confederate government convicted Kennedy of treason and sent him to prison, where the physical abuse given him resulted in his death only a few days after finally being exchanged for a Confederate prisoner (Hilty 1984). Another modern Quaker disagreed with Radecki’s attitude toward the film. Chuck Fager, editor of the Quaker journal Friendly Letter, wrote of the film. “Rather, they simply showed these Friends as less than perfect, as people holding sincere beliefs who are not always able to live up to them completely. Contrary to the cavils of thin-skinned Friendly critics, this is not mockery; it is humanity. It makes not only for a much better drama, but also for a very sympathetic sketch of Quakerism” (Friendly Letter 1991). As mentioned earlier, Friends’ long-standing stance against slavery is likewise respectfully represented. While the film tries to demonstrate that by showing their farmhand, Enoch, as a runaway there were many homesteading free blacks in Indiana available for such work. From the founding of Indiana in 1816, Corydon, located in Harrison County, had been home to free African Americans. As part of the Northwest Territory, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 prohibited slavery, but many of Indiana’s earliest white settlers came from the slave states and brought enslaved peoples with them when they settled. Then, in 1814, abolitionists Paul and Susannah Mitchem brought one hundred enslaved African Americans they had purchased across a few Southern states to manumit them to Harrison County, Indiana, where their descendants became landowners, merchants, and a physician. Between the War of 1812 and the start of the Civil War, many more African Americans came to Indiana, and many settled near Quaker settlements (Thornbrough 1993). They did so because Quakers accepted them and often



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aided them either in settling down after running away or in moving on to the next stop on the Underground Railroad. Enoch, therefore, would more likely have been born a free man. As the Civil War neared, especially after the passing of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, most runaways who reached the North kept going on into Canada, where slavery had been abolished since the Slavery Abolition Act of 1834. Persuasion is both an antiwar film and an early anti-Confederacy film. In 1956, the civil rights movement began to gain both attention and momentum. The Supreme Court had decided unanimously in favor of integrating public schools in the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas ruling in 1954. In 1955, Rosa Parks became the mother of the movement when she refused to move from her seat on a segregated bus to make room for more white customers. One year later, the news was full of the stories of the “Little Rock Nine,” nine black students blocked from integrating Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. The dual themes of Persuasion fit directly into that timeline and represent ideals held by the screenwriter Michael Wilson, who himself had withdrawn from the American Communist Party in response to the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Wilson’s politics had harmed his career long before Friendly Persuasion came into his life—and would keep him hidden for nearly fifteen years. Though he served as a tactical communications officer in World War II, in 1951 Wilson was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and became an “unfriendly” witness because he would not name “fellow” communists. Because he had first written a draft of Persuasion for Frank Capra ten years earlier, but Capra had decided an antiwar film did not suit audiences celebrating the end of World War II, Wilson told the committee in his testimony (which was aired live on television), “This committee might take the credit, or part of it at least, for the fact that The Friendly Persuasion was not produced, in view of the fact that it dealt warmly, in my opinion, with a peace-loving people” (McBride 2002). It was Capra who had given Wilson’s name to the committee. In reference to his work on Persuasion, Wilson explained to the HUAC members, “I am not surprised to be hauled before a Committee that is trying to make peace a dirty subversive word. . . . Had I remained silent before this onslaught on reason, I would not have been summoned here today. But my life has no purpose without the prospect of peace. This Committee has no purpose without the prospect of war” (McBride 2002). The damage did not set in immediately, so in 1952 Wilson won both the Academy Award and Screen Writers Guild award for cowriting A Place in the Sun (1951). After that, things became more difficult. Though he was asked to write both The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Wilson did so from France, where he moved with his family for eight years. Their passports were revoked by the U.S. government while they were abroad, making it impossible for them to return to the United

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States until 1964. In later years, Wilson often referred to the HUAC hearings as “the Great Witch Hunt.” His scripts for both of those films earned Academy Award nominations, and the River Kwai screenplay won, though it had been credited to Pierre Boulle, the author of the 1952 French novel on which the film is based, even though Boulle did not speak or write in the English language. The film rates a small note in world history as President Ronald Reagan’s favorite film. In 1988, he presented Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev with a VHS copy, saying, “There’s one gift in particular that I wanted to mention not only in view of my own former profession but because it has, I think, something important to say to us about what is underway this week in Moscow.” To the fortieth president, the film’s importance came from the fact that “because the family is of the Quaker religion and renounces violence, each of its characters must, in his or her own way, face this war and the moral dilemma it poses.” He wanted Gorbachev to know the film covered issues still relevant to them in their day—“not just the tragedy of war, but the problems of pacifism, the nobility of patriotism, as well as the love of peace.” As noted earlier, Persuasion earned an Academy Award nomination for its screenplay, but special Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences bylaws made Wilson ineligible personally, although the writing achievement itself could be eligible. William Wyler wanted to give writing credit to Robert Wyler and Jessamyn West, but Wilson protested and the Writers Guild was called in to resolve the issue. They decided to grant sole writing credit to Wilson, leading Allied Artists to invoke the “credits escape clause” for fear that conservative groups would picket if he were the only credited writer. When he was left off the credits, Wilson sued Allied Artists, Wyler, West, Wyler’s brother Robert, Liberty Films, and Paramount for $250,000, a suit settled out of court. Wyler’s bitterness over the studio’s position played a major role in his decision not to make any more films there. In January 1959, the bylaw was declared unworkable. The Writers Guild of America had no such bylaws and did award Wilson for the Best Written American Drama of 1957. He later earned the Writers Guild of America’s Screen Laurel Award for career achievement in 1976, but Wilson did not have his credits restored until 1996. During that era, the Writers Guild of America worked to properly credit many blacklisted writers, including several who, like Wilson and Dalton Trumbo, had won Academy Awards they were not allowed to accept (McBride 2002). Scholars have questioned whether Wilson’s situation, as well as his being a Communist sympathizer, affected his adaptation.

FURTHER READING Barrett, Jenny. 2009. Shooting the Civil War. London: I. B. Tauris. Cote, Richard N. 2004. Strength and Honor: The Life of Dolley Madison. Mt. Pleasant, SC: Corinthian.



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Crowther, Bosley. 1956. “Screen: ‘Friendly Persuasion’ Persuasive Film; Story of Quakers Is at the Music Hall Civil War Indiana Is Setting for Tale.” New York Times, November 2, 1956. ­https://​­www​.­nytimes​.­com​/­1956​/­11​/­02​/­archives​/­screen​-­friendly ​-­persuasion​-­persuasive​-­film​-­story​-­of​-­quakers​-­is​-­at​.­html. Dandelion, Ben Pink. 2008. The Quakers: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Friendly Letter. Friends Journal. 1991. ­https://​­www​.­friendsjournal​.­org​/­1989034​/. Hamm, Thomas. 2006. The Quakers in America. New York: Columbia University Press. Harper, Douglas R. 1990. If Thee Must Fight: A Civil War History of Chester County, Pennsylvania. West Chester, PA: Chester County Historical Society. Hilty, Hiram H. 1984. Toward Freedom for All: North Carolina Quakers and Slavery. Richmond, IN: Friends United Press. McBride, Joseph. 2002. “‘A Very Good American’: The Undaunted Artistry of Blacklisted Screenwriter Michael Wilson.” Written By. February 2002. Mowery, David L. 2013. Morgan’s Great Raid: The Remarkable Expedition from Kentucky to Ohio. Mt. Pleasant, SC: Arcadia. Thornbrough, Emma Lou. 1993. The Negro in Indiana before 1900: A Study of a Minority. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. von Tunzelmann, Alex. 2017. Blood and Sand: Suez, Hungary, and Eisenhower’s Campaign for Peace. New York: Harper Paperbacks. Weeks, Stephen Beauregard. 1896. Southern Quakers and Slavery: A Study in Institutional History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. ­https://​­archive​.­org​/­details​ /­southernquakerss00week. West, Jessamyn. 1940. The Friendly Persuasion. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World. West, Jessamyn. 1957. To See the Dream. San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Brace and World. Wright, Edward Needles. 2019. Conscientious Objectors in the Civil War. University Park: Pennsylvania University Press.

Chapter 3

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) Italian filmmaker Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (GBU) is the third installment of what is now called the Dollars Trilogy or The Man with No Name Trilogy. A Fist Full of Dollars (1964) and A Few Dollars More (1965) both starred Clint Eastwood, as did GBU. While GBU is the third film in the trilogy’s production sequence, it is most likely a prequel. In one of the last scenes, Eastwood’s character covers a dying soldier with his coat and picks up a serape to wear in its place. It is the now-iconic serape “the Man with No Name” wears in the first two films. While GBU is a genre-establishing “spaghetti western,” it also stands squarely in the middle of the cinematic tradition of setting American westerns in the midst of the Civil War. Leone got his start writing for “sword and sandal” films. Greek and Roman historical films were popular in Italy in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Like spaghetti westerns, sword and sandal films were filmed silently or in Italian then overdubbed (often badly) in English for American audiences. In 1959, Leone was asked to take over direction for the epic Last Days of Pompeii after the original director quit the film. Two years later, he made his solo directorial debut with The Colossus of Rhodes. Leone earned a reputation as a director who could make films on shoestring budgets look like big-budget extravaganzas. In 1963, a friend of Leone’s saw Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, now a near legendary samurai film, and thought it might be remade as a western. Though A Fist Full of Dollars and A Few Dollars More had not yet been released in the United States, both films experienced enough European success that in 1965 United Artists approached Luciano

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Vincenzoni, who cowrote A Few Dollars More, about securing the American distribution rights to the film. United Artists also wanted the rights to a third film, as yet unwritten. Vincenzoni contacted Sergio Leone and Alberto Grimaldi, who produced A Few Dollars More, about the deal. No doubt the studio found the team’s ability to make movies with miniscule budgets as compelling as the first two movies’ Italian success. Leone made A Fist Full of Dollars for $200,000 and A Few Dollars More for $600,000. United Artists offered Vincenzoni and Grimaldi a $1.2 million budget with a $500,000 advance. Vincenzoni pitched the bare bones of an idea to the studio. Leone took the concept of three men vying for a lost treasure in the American West during the Civil War and expanded it based on his antiwar ideas and some Civil War research. In the meantime, Vincenzoni hired Agenore Incrocci and Furio Scarpelli, colloquially known as “Age and Scarpelli,” to write the screenplay. The writing partners are credited for giving birth to commedia all’Italiana, or Italian comedy, a film subgenre popular in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s that combined comedy with pathos and social criticism. Leone quickly discovered Age and Scarpelli were a spectacularly bad fit for the grim western film he had in mind. He rewrote the script in collaboration with Roman screenwriter Sergio Donati. Because of contractual obligations to Age and Scarpelli, Donati was not credited in the film (he was also an uncredited writer for A Few Dollars More). Everyone connected with preproduction agreed Eastwood had to play the lead role, particularly as the film’s plot was intended as a prequel for the first two films of the trilogy. Eastwood was less than excited about appearing in a third obscure Italian western. He earned $15,000 and a new Mercedes for A Fist Full of Dollars and $50,000 for A Few Dollars More, but neither film had yet been seen in the United States. Knowing he essentially had Leone in an awkward position, Eastwood negotiated a $250,000 payment as well as 10 percent of the North American profits for the third film. Leone was so unhappy with the deal that he never worked with Eastwood again and publicly criticized him on more than one occasion. Leone originally wanted Gian Volante to play Tuco Ramirez. Volante had a major role in the first two films, but Leone changed his mind and decided he needed someone more comic for the role. Having enjoyed character actor Eli Wallach’s work in How the West Was Won (1962), Leone offered him the part. Leone flew to Los Angeles and showed Wallach A Few Dollars More, after which Wallach agreed to do the film. The son of Jewish immigrants, Wallach was an unusual choice to play the vicious Mexican outlaw, but critics now agree his Tuco portrayal was his finest performance. Lee Van Cleef, who played Colonel Mortimer in A Few Dollars More, agreed to play the film’s antagonist, Angel Eyes. Van Cleef joked that the only reason he got the job was because Leone forgot to kill him in the previous movie, but Leone appreciated Van Cleef’s acting skills when most



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THE JAPANESE CONNECTION It’s hard to imagine anything less Japanese than an American western, but it turns out Samurai films and westerns are connected. Indeed, Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill series often comes up in critical discussions of spaghetti westerns. Sergio Leone based A Fist Full of Dollars, the first film in his Dollars Trilogy, on Akira Kurosawa’s film Yojimbo (1961). In that film a Ronin, or Samurai without a master, comes to a small town and rescues the townspeople from some really nasty criminals. Leone remade Yojimbo, intending to redefine the American western, which he (and others) thought had nothing new to say to audiences. Ironically, Kurosawa based Yojimbo on another American western classic, Shane (1952). Leone wasn’t the first filmmaker to steal from Kurosawa. The western classic The Magnificent Seven (1960) is a remake of the Japanese director’s 1954 Seven Samurai, widely considered one of the greatest films ever made. Walter Mirisch wrote The Magnificent Seven straight from the Seven Samurai’s script. Nor is that the only remake of Kurosawa’s famous Samurai film. Nearly forty years later, Pixar released A Bug’s Life (1998), a computer-animated comedy film, based on the Seven Samurai. It’s now a tried-and-true Hollywood plot line: a motley group of outsiders band together to protect innocents from bad men (or bad grasshoppers). And in true twenty-firstcentury Hollywood tradition, the 2016 remake of The Magnificent Seven credited Kurosawa as one of the film’s writers.

Hollywood casting directors saw only a hatchet-faced villain. Despite Van Cleef’s track record with Leone, he was the director’s third choice for “the bad,” behind Italian actor Enrico Salerno, who wasn’t available, and American film star Charles Bronson. Leone filmed in three places: a studio in Rome, then on-site in northern Spain, near Burgos, and also in southern Spain. The film is set during the 1862 New Mexico Campaign of the Civil War, with the deserts and mountains of Spain standing in for the American Southwest. The Spanish army built both Sad Hill Cemetery and the bridge (which they built twice). As he did with all his films, Leone hired his childhood friend Ennio Morricone to compose the film score. Morricone would go on to score dozens of Italian and American films, most notably Kill Bill (2003) and Inglourious Basterds (2009). Morricone’s budget did not allow for a John Williams–style score with a full orchestral sound, so he used electric guitars, mouth harps, and a variety of percussive techniques to create a unique sound. Morricone had the score finished so Leone could play it while filming. While sound cameras were widely available, many Italian filmmakers in the 1960s continued to film silently and then dub in sound in postproduction. Leone used the technique to dub in different languages for different audiences in Spain, Germany, France, and eventually the United States. The director

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also liked to synchronize on-screen action to the music, which he would play so loudly that actors and crew members had difficulty hearing each other. The main theme for GBU remains one of the most iconic pieces of music in film history, as immediately recognizable as the Star Wars and Rocky themes, but at the time the film premiered, critics found the score dissonant and offputting. Today it is considered a masterpiece, both for the way it sounds and the way it changed film scoring. Previous to Leone and Morricone, film scores melded seamlessly with the film, becoming unnoticeable, but Morricone’s music acts as a main character and is so emblematic of the film it’s hard to imagine The Good, the Bad and the Ugly with any other music. The film begins as bounty hunters ride into view and dismount at the far end of a ragged western town. A third man appears, gun hand at the ready. They enter a saloon, and gunfire erupts. A man breaks out the window and rides away. It is the Mexican bandit Tuco Ramirez (Wallach). The viewer has just met “the Ugly.” Angel Eyes (Van Cleef) and Stevens talk over food. Angel Eyes has been sent by Baker to ask Stevens about Jackson, the man who knows about a stash of lost Confederate gold. Stevens says Jackson is using the name Bill Carson and offers Angel Eyes $1,000 to kill Baker. Angel Eyes shoots Stevens and one of his sons before taking the money and leaving. The viewer has just met “the Bad.” Bounty hunters capture Tuco, but Blondie (Eastwood) kills them and takes Tuco to the local sheriff for the bounty. As the townsfolk are about to hang Tuco, Blondie shoots the rope and Tuco rides off. Blondie and Tuco split the bounty. The viewer has just met “the Good.” Fed up with Tuco, Blondie abandons him in the desert. Angel Eyes finds Maria, after she’s clearly been raped by a wagonload of men, and beats her until she tells him Bill Carson left with his cavalry unit ten days ago. Meanwhile Tuco makes it to a town and steals a gun from a storekeeper. In the next scene, the Confederates abandon a town as Tuco gets the drop on Blondie and tries to hang him. Mortar fire hits the hotel, and Blondie escapes. Tuco eventually recaptures Blondie and forces him to march across another desert. Just as Tuco is about to shoot Blondie, a runaway carriage appears. Tuco stops the horses and finds dead Confederates inside. While robbing them, he discovers one of the men is alive. The man is Bill Carson, who tells Tuco he hid the lost gold in a grave at Sad Hill Cemetery. Tuco steps away to get Carson water and on his return finds Blondie with the now-dead Carson, who told Blondie the name on the grave where the gold is buried. Each man now has a piece of the puzzle and must work together. Tuco takes Blondie, both of them dressed in Confederate uniforms, to a church full of Confederate wounded. Still dressed in Confederate uniforms, Tuco and Blondie leave the church and encounter Union soldiers, who capture the pair and march them to a prison camp. At the camp, Angel Eyes is dressed as a Union sergeant. In roll



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call, Tuco answers to Bill Carson, attracting Angel Eyes’s notice. Angel Eyes beats Tuco until Tuco tells him the gold is in Sad Hill Cemetery. Angel Eyes then makes a deal with Blondie, who knows which grave, to split the money. Tuco is loaded onto a train, from which he soon escapes. Blondie, accompanied by Angel Eyes and his men, rides into a town being evacuated by the Union army. Tuco arrives in the same town and shoots a bounty hunter. Blondie hears the gunshot and goes to investigate. Blondie kills one of Angel Eyes’s men before he finds Tuco. The two men make yet another deal and in the ensuing gunfight kill all of Angel Eyes’s men, though Angel Eyes escapes. Tuco and Blondie ride for the cemetery but encounter a regiment of Union soldiers fighting Confederates over a bridge. In the midst of a chaotic battle, Tuco and Blondie destroy the bridge with dynamite. They hide in a foxhole, and when they emerge both armies are gone. They cross the river, and Blondie finds a dying Confederate soldier who he covers with his coat. Tuco takes a horse and rides off. Blondie, now wearing the serape from A Fist Full of Dollars and A Few Dollars More, fires a cannon at Tuco, who falls off the horse and comes up on the edge of a huge cemetery. Tuco runs from grave to grave until he finds the right one, which reads “Arch Stanton.” He begins to dig. Blondie and Angel Eyes appear at the graveside. Blondie reveals that there is no money in Stanton’s grave. In the center of a great, empty circle, the three men step into a classic Mexican standoff. Angel Eyes draws, and Blondie kills him. Tuco discovers he has no bullets in his gun because Blondie unloaded it the night before. Blondie forces Tuco to dig up the grave next to the original grave. Tuco pulls out bags and bags of gold, but when he looks up he discovers Blondie has rigged a noose. Blondie takes half the gold, leaving Tuco balanced on a wooden cross with his head in the noose. When he is nearly out of sight, Blondie turns and shoots the rope, releasing Tuco. Blondie rides away into an immense, empty landscape. The Dollar Trilogy did well at the Italian box office. In 1964, A Fist Full of Dollars made $4 million in Italy, and a year later, A Few Dollars More made even more. GBU grossed $6.3 million in its Italian release. A Fist Full of Dollars made its North American debut in January 1967 and A Few Dollars More in May of the same year. The third film in the trilogy opened seven months later, in December. American filmgoers either loved or hated the trilogy. The first film grossed $4.5 million in its first year of release, and the second made $5 million. Since its release, GBU has grossed over $25 million, making it one of the most successful westerns of its era. Despite the three films’ American box office success, critics nearly universally hated them. New York Times critic Renata Adler opened her review by saying, “The Burn, the Gouge and the Mangling (its screen name is simply inappropriate) must be the most expensive pious and repellant movie in the history of its peculiar genre” (Adler 1968). Los Angeles Times critic Charles

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Champlin agreed with Adler, calling the film “The Bad, the Dull and the Interminable.” To be fair, GBU is an extremely long film, with a run time of two hours, forty-five minutes and much of that with little or no dialogue. Time magazine called the acting “wooden” and criticized Leone’s “insatiable appetite for beatings, disembowlings and mutilations” (Time Magazine Review 1968). The critic for Variety conceded that the film was “visually striking” but “dramatically feeble and offensively sadistic” (Variety Review 1965). In the end, critics nearly all agreed that the only good thing about the film was the cinematography, for which Leone could not entirely take credit. The larger budget for the third film allowed Leone to bring in famed cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli, who would also do the cinematography for Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) and Life Is Beautiful (1997). Despite the trilogy’s mixed critical reception, the films continued to resonate with audiences for decades after their 1967 premiere. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is now considered one of the most influential western movies of all time. The film throws a long and dark shadow. Quentin Tarantino hired Ennio Morricone to score his western The Hateful Eight, a film so bleak and so violent it makes Leone’s films seem gentle by comparison. Films from Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs and Kill Bill to any film made by Clint Eastwood pay homage to GBU. The animated western comedy Rango has a “Man with No Name” character, Yo Yo Ma recorded an album of Morricone music, and the phrase “the good, the bad, and the ugly” is used as a catchy descriptor ad infinitum. Twenty-first-century westerns from 310 to Yuma (2007) to Hell or High Water (2016) must negotiate the blurred boundaries of good and bad, right and wrong, established in Leone’s films or risk box office failure.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND The New Mexico Campaign of 1861–1862 represents a significant Confederate effort to take control of the gold and silver fields of Colorado and California as well as California’s western port cities. At the end of the ­Mexican-American War (1846–1848), the federal government built a series of forts along the new boundary between Mexico and the United States, primarily to protect western settlers from Native Americans. Among those forts was Fort Conrad, on the western bank of the Rio Grande River, near the Camino Real Tierra Adentro, a major western route. Fort Conrad proved susceptible to flooding, so in 1853–1854, the army built Fort Craig nine miles away and situated high on a bluff. Fort Craig, though small (1,050 feet by 600 feet) and in constant need of rebuilding (it was made of adobe mud) became the Union army headquarters for the Department of New Mexico at the start of the Civil War. In June 1861, Colonel Edward Canby arrived at the fort to take command from Colonel William Loring,



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who had abandoned his post to join the Confederacy. Canby found the post manned by two thousand soldiers and in the coming year would organize several additional regiments to fight the Confederate army of New Mexico. In July 1861, the Confederate brigadier general Henry Sibley went to Texas to take over the Confederate army of New Mexico. Sibley devised an elaborate plan whereby his army would capture Albuquerque and Santa Fe on its way to Colorado before securing the supply route to California’s southern ports. While Sibley planned in Texas, Lieutenant Colonel John Baylor led the Second Texas Cavalry and a host of “irregulars” in attacking Union garrisons and Apache towns along the Mexican border. Baylor’s enthusiasm for a genocide of native people would eventually lead to his dismissal from the army in early 1862 (Frazier 1995). In July 1861, Baylor led his soldiers to Mesilla, New Mexico. Union major Lynde marched from Fort Craig, but the Confederates drove the Union troops back and captured eighty-five of the garrison’s horses. Though the Union troops outnumbering the Confederates two to one, Lynde ordered Fort Craig abandoned and retreated north to Fort Stanton. The pursuing Confederates captured over one hundred of Lynde’s men, many of whom had filled their canteens with whiskey before marching north. Later that year, Lynde would be cashiered out of the army for abandoning his post (Whitlock 2006). The Confederate victory at Mesilla encouraged the region’s pro-­ Confederates, and on August 1, 1861, Baylor declared all of the New Mexico Territory south of the thirty-fourth parallel the new Confederate Arizona Territory. Conveniently, Baylor appointed himself territorial governor. In September, the Union army captain John Minks led soldiers from Fort Craig against the Confederates in the Battle of Canada Alamosa. Minks’s men fought until only ten men remained alive and surrendered on September 25, 1861. Colonel Canby sent more men against Confederates in the Mesilla valley, but again the Union army made no inroads in reclaiming former federal territory. The territorial war heated up again in February 1862 after Sibley marched his army, consisting primarily of cavalry units, out of El Paso, Texas, and 140 miles toward Fort Craig. Fort Union sent five regiments south to Fort Craig to reinforce Canby. Sibley’s army made it to Fort Craig with scant rations to spare only to discover Canby would not bring his army out to meet Sibley’s. In an effort to force a confrontation, Sibley marched his army across the river and north to Valverde, thus cutting off Canby’s communication and supply lines from Santa Fe. On February 21, the two armies met at Valverde Ford. Canby deployed most of his army on the river’s eastern bank, leaving Colonel Kit Carson’s regiment on the west bank. The Union army endeavored to keep the thirsty Confederates away from the river, a tactic that was largely successful until late afternoon when a surprise attack caused a collapse in the Union lines. Canby asked for a truce and retreated to Fort Craig. Though the

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Confederates won the battle of Valverde, they gained little from the victory. Fort Craig was too well defended to attack, particularly given how many horses and mules the Confederates lost in the battle. From Valverde, Sibley’s army marched north along the Rio Grande. They reached Santa Fe in early March and occupied the city with little resistance. From Santa Fe, Sibley moved on to Albuquerque, finding the Union army had retreated in the face of Confederate advance. Sibley next sent a force comprised of the Second, Fourth, Fifth, and Seventh Texas Mounted Rifles to gain control of Glorieta Pass, a strategic route through the Sangre de Cristo Mountains that would pave the way to Colorado. Union infantry regiments headquartered in Denver marched south four hundred miles to Glorieta in fourteen days. The two armies skirmished at Apache Canyon on March 26 before meeting in earnest on March 28. At the end of the day, the main Confederate force pushed the Union army out of the pass, though a contingent of Union soldiers at Johnson’s Ranch burned eighty Confederate supply wagons and killed or stole over five hundred horses and mules (Alberts and Frazer 2000). Having failed to capture either Fort Union or Fort Craig, Sibley’s victory at Glorieta Pass did him little good. Canby’s forces pushed Sibley’s Confederates out of Albuquerque in early April. The hasty and disorganized retreat spread exhausted Confederate soldiers over miles of terrain, leaving civilians vulnerable to looting, which did not make the Confederates any friends in the region. Compounding the Confederacy’s problems, the “California Column,” commanded by Colonel James Carlson, set out from Camp Latham and Camp Drum, both near Los Angeles, to reinforce Canby in New Mexico Territory. The column, made up of ten companies of infantry, five companies of cavalry, and one company of light artillery, marched 275 miles across southern California, through the Mojave Desert to Fort Yuma, near the Mexico border. From there the companies marched another 250 miles to Tucson, which the Confederates occupied. The Confederates abandoned Tucson without a fight and withdrew east. Outside Tucson, part of the column defeated a contingent of Apache warriors led by Cochise, who attempted to hold the spring. As the column advanced east across the territory, the Confederate army retreated toward Texas (Masich 2006). On July 1, 1862, Union forces, including some of the advance companies of the California Column, mounted a second attack on Mesilla, the capital of the Confederate-held territory. This time the Confederates lost and had to abandon the town and the territory. The California Column marched as far as Fort Quitman just inside the Texas border before it turned back for California, having marched over nine hundred miles in its five-month expedition. By mid-July, the Confederate army and Confederate Arizona Territory government had been pushed back to El Paso, in western Texas. Not long after, the Confederate army retreated from west Texas to San Antonio, on the eastern end of the state (Masich 2017).



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While the Confederate desire to control western gold and silver mines and California ports was understandable, the plan to march west was never a practical one. Vastly outnumbered throughout the war, the Confederacy could ill afford to commit the numbers of troops it would have taken to subdue the American Southwest. Moreover, however much the Confederacy desired to expand slavery into the Southwest, the region did not lend itself to the “peculiar institution.” Harsh deserts and high, cold mountains could not grow cotton nor any of the cash crops that made slavery so immensely profitable in the American Southeast. Much of the territory’s pro-­Confederate sympathy could be laid less at the door of slavery and more in the desire to wipe out Native Americans. Colonel John Baylor was by no means alone in thinking the Apache and other indigenous peoples should be eradicated to make way for white settlement (Whitlock 2006). Therefore, while the New Mexico Campaign was ambitious, its chance of success was never more than slim.

DEPICTION AND CULTURAL CONTEXT The western as Civil War film is a tried-and-true cinematic trope for good reason. The western theater of the Civil War was second only to Virginia in terms of importance, and the battles fought in the trans-Appalachian west were some of the war’s biggest, including Shiloh, Vicksburg, and Chickamauga. The trans-Mississippi west played a less important role in the Civil War, though there were decisive battles in Texas, Missouri, and in the New Mexico Campaign. Moreover, the Indian Wars that came after the Civil War can be seen as an extension of the Civil War, with the combatants changed from Confederates to Native Americans. In the decades before World War II, Civil War films were largely set in the eastern theater, but as the center for movie-making shifted west to California and studios built permanent western sets (so as to make a great number of inexpensive western films), filmmakers began combining the two film genres. The innovation not only expanded the kind of movie stories that could be told but also allowed filmmakers to avoid the contentious issue of slavery (Bourdin 2018). The 1950s saw so many Civil War westerns that they can be categorized into several different groups. There’s a raft of films where Confederates or pro-Confederate irregulars attempt to steal Union gold shipments from Colorado or California and another subset where Confederates try to steal Union horses or military supplies. Other films of the 1950s show Union and Confederate soldiers, the latter often “Galvanized Yankees” (southern prisoners of war who volunteered to fight for the Union), uniting to fight their common enemy—the Indians (Wills 2006). These films allowed for the “reconciliation” theme that has dominated Civil War films since the silent era. The cavalry officer became a western heroic archetype, as did the

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“embittered Reb.” Westerns often portrayed ex-Union soldiers in the West for new opportunities, while ex-Confederates carried their animosities with them (Chadwick 2001). By the 1960s and 1970s, Civil War westerns either used the war as a metaphor for unseemly violence, much as Leone did in GBU, or as a backdrop, as with Dances with Wolves (1990). In the mid-1960s, a new kind of Civil War western appeared—one that used the genre to take an anti–Vietnam War stance. Major Dundee (1965), which is also a “Galvanized Yankee” film, is one of the first of this type. Ex-Confederate soldiers join with Union soldiers to fight the Apache and Comanche along the Mexican border. While Major Dundee is not explicitly antiwar, it does explore the paradoxes of war, including the way violence distorts personal ideals. Major Dundee responded to a change in American film tastes. Westerns fell into decline in the 1960s, in part because they had become formulaic and stale and in part because they were so often prowar. GBU’s release in December 1967 put it in theaters at about the same time the North Vietnamese mounted the Tet Offensive and American soldiers massacred over five hundred civilians at My Lai. The nation’s mounting antiwar sentiment meshed perfectly with GBU’s portrayal of war as senseless and wasteful. Westerns in general shifted away from Golden Age tropes. As film historian John Lenihan says, “Westerns of the fifties and early sixties idealized a frontier America struggling to substitute peaceful negotiation for wasteful and unjust policy of military defeat. Westerns during the latter half of the sixties and early seventies conveyed a more critical and fatalistic view of a violence-prone nation” (Brode and Brode 2017). Many film historians attribute anti–Vietnam War sentiment to Leone personally, but this is not particularly accurate. Leone is Italian, and he wasn’t making films for the American market, at least not until United Artists approached his producer with a film deal, at which point the first two films in the trilogy had already been made. Leone’s attitude about the futility and ridiculousness of war comes from his own experiences as a child during World War II. Both the Allies and the Axis bombed Rome during the war, and the city was the site of an Allied offensive in late 1943, early 1944, with the Americans taking the city in June. Leone did think it would be interesting to set a movie in the Civil War so he could express his antiwar sentiment, and his antiwar themes meshed well with American audiences in 1967 and 1968. Leone’s films are fundamentally exercises in reworking the western, and in that endeavor he was not alone. Europeans started making westerns as soon as they began making movies. In France, westerns hit the screen in the 1890s, and the Italians began making westerns in the 1910s. In the 1930s and 1940s, Georgio Ferroni made a series of westerns, including comedy westerns. Ennio Morricone, who would score all of Sergio Leone’s films, scored Duello nel Texas, the first Italian-Spanish western, in 1963. Other Spanish-Italian films appeared the same year, and by the next year over twenty more Euro-westerns made it to the big screen, including Fist Full of



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Dollars, though none of them saw American distribution. Leone’s film was by far the best received and most lucrative of the Euro-westerns and so set the standard for the new genre’s rules. Outlaws terrorized ordinary people, unchecked by the law, which was either absent or ineffective. The hero appears and through trickery, cunning, exceptional gun-handling abilities, and a willingness to be more violent than the outlaws, defeats the bad guys. Unlike Golden Age westerns, the hero did not find true love, settle down, and join the community. Rather, the hero becomes antihero, a man only marginally less bad than the bad guys and unredeemed by his dubious heroism. American critics almost universally agreed that this new type of western was bad news. Used to Hayes Code–controlled levels of violence, critics found the films violent and, worse, inappropriately immoral, surrealistic, pretentious, and culturally inauthentic. Critics pejoratively labeled European westerns based on their country: paella westerns (Spain), sauerkraut westerns (Germany), chop suey westerns (China/Hong Kong), and even borsch westerns (Russia). “Spaghetti western” originally meant Italian-made westerns but eventually became an umbrella term for any western not made in the United States by Americans. Leone was called self-indulgent for his long nonspeaking scenes and the way he held extreme close-ups for much longer than normal. While the bulk of criticism about spaghetti westerns focused on violence, another stream of critique contended that Europeans did not sufficiently understand the American West enough to make an authentic movie about it (Frayling 1981). Forty years after the film’s first release, film critic Roger Ebert admitted that he gave GBU a mediocre review based on the widely held belief that no spaghetti western could authentically be art or western (Ebert 2003). Ebert and many other film critics no longer feel that way about the film or the subgenre. In Leone’s film, the Civil War is a fool’s circus, fought over nothing and with interchangeable sides. The war is really no more than an inconvenience for the three main characters, who have to work around the war to fulfill their real mission—competitive and self-centered profiteering. In one scene, Blondie and Tuco don the uniforms of dead Confederate soldiers to enter the church where Tuco’s brother is pastor. The church is full of Confederate wounded, and Blondie needs medical care after Tuco tortured him in the desert. Having passed themselves off as wounded soldiers, the two ride away from the church. They see a column of what looks like Confederate soldiers, only to discover the soldiers are really Union soldiers with uniforms so dusty they look gray. The two sides are literally and metaphorically impossible to tell apart. The two men are hauled away to a Union-run prison camp where Angel Eyes, masquerading as a Union sergeant so he can find Bill Carson, tortures Tuco. No one is who or what they pretend to be and, for the movie’s purpose, it does not matter much which side the characters are on. If there are moral imperatives in the Civil War (and Leone is not so sure), they’re not shared by the film’s main characters.

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Later in the film, Blondie and Tuco come upon a Union encampment. They are arrayed across the river from a similar contingent of Confederates with a river and rickety wooden bridge between them. They are taken to see the commanding officer, a drunken captain who talks about the fruitlessness of the struggle to take the bridge. Tuco and Blondie, only recently pretend Confederates held in a Union prison camp, tell the captain they have come to enlist. The captain doesn’t much care. If only someone would blow up the bridge, the captain says, they could all go home. Blondie and Tuco need to get across the river to Sad Hill Cemetery, where the gold is buried, and so they wire the bridge, blow it, and hide during the ensuing melee. When they next look around, both the Union and Confederate armies have magically disappeared. Then, demonstrating the fundamental foolishness of the military confrontation, the two men wade across the river with no trouble at all. In the next scene, among the litter of dead Confederate soldiers, they find one still alive. Blondie offers the young man his flask and cigar before covering the dying soldier with his coat. Blondie is “good” because he feels empathy for the man, regardless of the color of his uniform. It nearly goes without saying that GBU gets none of the military details of the New Mexico Campaign correct. The film mentions Canby and Sibley and even shows Sibley in one scene retreating with his bearded bodyguards. In another scene, Tuco and Blondie travel through a battlefield after the battle is over, though it’s never clear which battle took place there. Leone said he wanted to set the third of his Dollars films in the midst of the Civil War because he considered himself an expert, but he may have been overstating his research or simply too Italian to know how much he didn’t know. Some websites claim Leone did “copious research” for the film, and that may be true, but the film doesn’t suggest he was researching the Civil War. Though the New Mexico Campaign took place largely in 1862, the film shows a prison camp full of prisoners. Prisoners were largely exchanged or paroled that early in the war rather than kept in camps. Then Leone has one of his prison camp characters say the conditions are better than Andersonville, though Andersonville was not built until early 1864. Leone also gets the guns and artillery wrong but for entirely understandable reasons; he did not have access to historically accurate American Civil War weapons. In the bridge scenes, Blondie and Tuco lash sticks of dynamite to pilings though dynamite was not invented until 1967. While Eli Wallach’s performance as Tuco is an undeniably brilliant bit of acting, the character he plays relies on a decades-old stereotype, the “Bandido” or “Greaser.” This stock character appears in countless films, from Bronco Billy and the Greaser (1914) to the opening scenes of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1979). More contemporary iterations of the stereotype transmogrify the bandit into an urban gangbanger. Either way, the stereotype suggests the inherent inferiority and criminality of Mexicans and Mexican Americans. The negative traits of el bandido allow majority culture to “other” a



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racial minority group while reinforcing white supremacy. Charles Ramirez Berg describes the el bandido as “dirty and unkempt, usually displaying an unshaven face, missing teeth and disheveled, oily hair. Scars and scowls compete the easily recognizable image. Behaviorally he’s vicious, cruel, treacherous, shifty and dishonest; psychologically he is irrational, overly emotional and quick to resort to violence” (Berg 2002). GBU’s Tuco is el bandido in every detail, and that is no accident. Leone saw Wallach’s work as Calvera, an archetypal Mexican bandit in The Magnificent Seven (1960), and knew he would be perfect for Tuco. For all of Leone’s much-vaunted research, all he knew of Mexicans he learned from American westerns. Tuco is “the Ugly,” suggesting the character is both physically and morally repugnant. He’s ugly inside and out. Real-life Eli Wallach was no more or less visually attractive than Lee Van Cleef, and in the movie both characters are “bad,” or ugly on the inside. The stereotype exists in direct contrast to the western hero, who the audience knows is the hero because he is not el bandido. Moreover, Wallach, a Jewish American, is performing “brown face,” a variant of blackface, where white performers impersonate Africans and African Americans. Blackface originated in the early nineteenth century as part of the minstrel tradition. White actors and musicians appeared on stage before the Civil War in black face makeup to lampoon black people and African American culture as buffoonish, cowardly, stupid, and venal. In the early decades of film history, white performers regularly portrayed people of color, particularly black, Asian, and Hispanic people. This “whitewashing” allows for cultural appropriation while making it difficult for ethnic actors to find work. For example, in 1937, Louise Rainer won an Oscar for her portrayal of the Chinese character O-Lan in The Good Earth in spite of the fact that Chinese American actress Anna May Wong lobbied for the part. As if conflating one ethnic minority with another was reasonable and acceptable, in his memoir Wallach said he could play the Mexican roles because, although he was Jewish, he grew up in New York City among Italian immigrants (Cumbow 2008). Early Civil War films engaged in whitewashing and blackface as a matter of course. Birth of a Nation (1915) both used white actors in black makeup and portrayed black men as predatory rapists. Most Civil War films do not whitewash as obviously or as repugnantly as Birth of a Nation, but the trend has not lost its cinematic allure in over a century of American cinematic history. To be fair, black-, brown-, and yellowface have largely fallen out of favor, but films continue to disappear black characters. Sofia Coppola’s Beguiled (2017) does both. In the 1966 novel on which the movie is based, the main character is mixed race and the secondary character a slave maid, but Coppola’s film leaves out the maid and casts uber-white Kirsten Dunst in the main role. Lincoln (2012) and Cold Mountain (2003) suffer from “disappearing black characters” syndrome, while to differing extents,

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Glory (1989), Lincoln, and Free State of Jones (2016) embrace “white savior” motifs with cultural work similar to whitewashing. In addition to the usual “bandido” sins, Tuco is garrulous in the face of the typical western hero’s taciturn verbal economy. Western heroes typically disdain talk, and western films juxtapose talk against action. Westerns teach lessons in the “school of virility,” where talk is seen as undisciplined and feminine and silence an exercise in masculine self-control (Tompkins 1992). Tuco talks, talks, talks, while Blondie mutely squints and scowls. Blondie and Tuco’s partnership breaks down when Blondie can no longer tolerate Tuco’s ceaseless chatter. Blondie abandons Tuco and rides away into the silence of an immense desert landscape while Tuco impotently shouts threats after him. When it comes to the final gun battle, Tuco’s “gun” is empty because Blondie took his bullets the night before. Blondie triumphs over the bad Angel Eyes while Tuco stands by, metaphorically unmanned. While Tuco functions as a kind of metaphorical woman and symbolic Indian (he is Mexican and thus Indio), actual women and Native Americans are missing from Leone’s film. Of course, Leone is not alone in this absence. Westerns in general leave native people out, or when they do include them do so only as two-dimensional enemies and never as point-of-view characters. The Apache played an important role in the New Mexico Campaign, harassing both Baylor and Sibley’s Confederate soldiers and the Union California Column, but they make no appearance in GBU. Jane Tompkins (1992) points out, “Indians are repressed in westerns—there but not there— the same way women are.” Indeed, women generally play minor roles in both western and Civil War movies, so it’s no surprise that they make only a shadowy appearance in GBU. There are only two roles for women in the film. The first is Steven’s wife, who serves the men lunch before disappearing until she reappears to bear silent witness to her murdered husband and son. Then there’s Bill Carson’s lady friend, introduced to viewers as a woman who’s been gang-raped by a wagonful of soldiers and thrown away. Angel Eyes finds her and beats her until she tells him where Carson has gone. Leone does avoid some of the more common stereotypes of women in westerns, including the whore with a heart of gold, the virginal schoolmarm, the spunky frontier wife, and the Indian princess, but he does so while turning women into “maids and victims of violence” (Indick 2008). These stereotypes appear in Civil War films too, though Civil War films have a long history of erasing women. It would be easy to argue that Civil War films are essentially war films and thus shouldn’t have any women in them, but that’s simply not the case. Civil War–era women went to war as irregulars—cooking, nursing, and laundering for the troops. Some of them dressed as men and fought, and some of them followed armies as sex workers (Schultz 2004; Blanton and Cook 2002). And in any civil war, the line between battlefront and home front was never as clear as the movies would have us believe. And yet women are so invisible to Civil War screenwriters



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and directors that no one has thought to make a movie about the women who passed as men and went to war. Film makers and audiences for Civil War films (and westerns) seem uninterested in women’s stories, except those with traditional gender stereotypes, many of which embrace astonishing anti-female hostility. Leone’s good, bad, and ugly characters account for the three western character archetypes. The bad man is unrepentantly self-interested and takes pleasure in violence, while Leone’s good is good only insofar as he’s not as bad as the other two characters and experiences occasional moments of kindness. The ugly is ugly because he is Mexican and as self-interested as the other two. Leone reinforces his triptych with repeated groups of three. Three men open the film, each main character kills three people before establishing his identity, and later Tuco shoots at and hits three targets. Leone then breaks down his threes into two against one. Tuco and Blondie against Angel Eyes, Angel Eyes and Blondie against Tuco, each partnership incredibly uneasy and temporary. Three times in the movie a character says, “There are two kinds of people in the world,” followed by a different division each time, each designed to demonstrate how the characters are singular and alone (Cumbow 2008). Take, for example, the “Mexican standoff” gun fight. While it appears as a triangle, in reality Tuco’s gun has no bullets, a fact Blondie knows and Angel Eyes and Tuco do not. The standoff is never really a three-way fight because the hero is a trickster who takes unfair advantage. The three-way standoff breaks into a pair as Angel Eyes dies and a single as Blondie stands triumphant over the other two men. In Leone’s films, things fall apart and the center never holds. Leone plays with not just the western character archetypes but also the central themes of westerns: that individualism is the only way a real man can make his way in the world, that good and bad are absolutes, and that violence against anyone designated as “other” is entirely acceptable. In this way, Leone’s films are as much a part of the traditional western genre as anything filmed by John Ford. On the other hand, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is most assuredly not a traditional Civil War film. Though to be fair, Leone didn’t set out to make an accurate Civil War film, or even really a Civil War film at all. He was making a western set in the Civil War, and westerns carry with them a genre specificity that defies historical reality. Westerns are a type of American creation myth. They’re not just how the West was won but how America was won. It’s the American Dream mythology, where selfdetermination and economic independence can be achieved through will and violence (Tompkins 1992). Leone accepts and reinforces the myths of the American West but turns the myths into fairy-tale-like hyperbole. The centrality of landscape to westerns suggests mythos as well, particularly in Leone’s westerns. The landscape is wider, colder, hotter, drier, and larger than life. It’s gorgeous and awe inspiring, and it’s where the hero escapes from the feminizing intentions of civilization. William Indick (2008)

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contends that’s why women play such a shadowy role in westerns. The hero weds himself to the landscape, becoming one with it in a way that maintains the celebration of individualism in a way no heterosexual union ever could. Blondie rides off into a wide, empty vista, his story complete with his triumph over Angel Eyes and Tuco, his escape from the chaos of the Civil War and, lest we get too romantic, his half of the buried Confederate gold. Except what could be more romantic than buried treasure? Larry McMurty (1968) famously observed that “people want [the western] to be a responsible genre,” but that desire is ridiculous. “The working cowboy has never been very important in the western film” because “the effectiveness of the genre has never depended on realism.” Leone echoed McMurty in a 1973 interview: “The man of the West bore no resemblance to the man described by Hollywood directors . . . the characters they present to us come from the same mold: The incorruptible sheriff, the romantic judge, the brothel keeper, the cruel bandit, the naïve girl and so on. All these molds are mixed together before the happy ending in a kind of cruel, Puritan fairystory” (Frayling 1981). McMurty and Leone make points about westerns that could also be applied to Civil War films. They’re not about realism, and never more so than when they pretend to be. In not even trying for realism, Sergio Leone managed to get closer to the incomprehensible chaos of war than any of the other films in this volume. Civil wars must be doubly incomprehensible because the enemy is not some foreign “other,” and the aftermath requires enemies to live in relative peace, pretending they hadn’t been trying to kill each other not that long ago. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is as ahistorical as a Civil War film, but it succeeds because it’s not trying to be a Civil War film. No one could mistake Leone’s film for a Civil War documentary worthy of classroom usage. While all Civil War films are, at least in part, fairy tales about the imagined past, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly never pretends to be anything else.

FURTHER READING Adler, Renata. 1968. “The Screen: Zane Grey Meets Marquis de Sade.” New York Times, January 25, 1968. ­https://​­www​.­nytimes​.­com​/­1968​/­01​/­25​/­archives​/­the​ -­screen​-­zane​-­grey​-­meets​-­the​-­marquis​-­de​-­sade​-­the​-­good​-­the​-­bad​-­and​.­html. Alberts, Don E., and Donald S. Frazer. 2000. Battle of Glorieta. College Station: Texas A&M University Press. Berg, Charles Ramirez. 2002. Latino Images in Film: Stereotypes, Subversions and Resistance. Austin: University of Texas Press. Blanton, Deanne, and Lauren M. Cook. 2002. They Fought Like Demons: Women Soldiers in the American Civil War. New York: Random House. Bourdin, Juliette. 2018. “The West and the Western as Grounds for Reconciliation in the American Civil War.” Revue LISA 16, no. 1: 1–21.



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Brode, Douglas, and Shea T. Brode, eds. 2017. The American Civil War on Film and TV: Blue and Gray in Black and White and Color. New York: Lexington. Chadwick, Bruce. 2001. The Reel Civil War: Myth Making in American Film. New York: Knopf. Champlin, Charles. 1967. “Clint Eastwood and Sergio Leone’s Wild West.” Los Angeles Times, January 16, 1967. ­https://​­www​.­latimes​.­com​/­archives​/­la​-­xpm​ -­2010​-­may​-­30​-­la​-­ca​-­second​-­20100530​-­story​.­html. Cumbow, Robert. 2008. The Films of Sergio Leone. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow. Ebert, Roger. 2003. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. ­https://​­www​.­rogerebert​.­com​ /­reviews​/­great​-­movie​-­the​-­good​-­the​-­bad​-­and​-­the​-­ugly​-­1968. Frayling, Christopher. 1981. Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans, From Karl Marx to Sergio Leone. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Frayling, Christopher. 2000. Sergio Leone: Something to Do with Death. London: Faber. Frazier, Donald. 1995. Blood and Treasure: Confederate Empire in the Southwest. College Station: Texas A&M University Press. Indick, William. 2008. The Psychology of the Western: How the American Psyche Plays Out on Screen. New York: McFarland. Masich, Andrew E. 2006. The Civil War in Arizona: The Story of the California Volunteers, 1861–65. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Masich, Andrew E. 2017. Civil War in the Southwest Borderlands, 1861–67. ­Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. McMurty, Larry. 1968. In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas. Austin, TX: Encino. Schultz, Jane E. 2004. Women at the Front: Hospital Workers in Civil War America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Time Magazine Review. 1968. “Cinema: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” Time Magazine, February 9, 1968. ­https://​­time​.­com​/­2920984​/­eli​-­wallach​-­the​-­good​ -­the​-­bad​-­and​-­the​-­gifted​/. Tompkins, Jane. 1992. West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns. New York: Oxford University Press. Variety Review. 1965. “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” Variety Magazine, December 31, 1965. ­https://​­variety​.­com​/­1965​/­film​/­reviews​/­the​-­good​-­the​-­bad​-­and​-­the​ -­ugly​-­1200421004​/. Whitlock, Flint. 2006. Distant Bugles, Distant Drums: The Union Response to the Confederate Invasion of New Mexico. Boulder: University of Colorado Press. Wills, Brian. 2006. Gone with the Glory: The History of the Civil War in Cinema. New York: Rowman & Littlefield.

Chapter 4

Glory (1989) Many historians and critics consider Glory the best American Civil War movie ever made. The film shatters the great taboo of Civil War movies— making race and slavery central to the story and using black characters to do so (Chadwick 2001). Glory resisted the mythologies that infected the Civil War movies that came before and after, throwing “a cold dash of realism over the moonlight and magnolias portrayals of the Confederacy” (McPherson 1990). Moreover, Glory is as historically accurate as one can expect from a Hollywood movie, and when it gets something wrong it mostly does so for the right reasons. Before his death in 2011, screenwriter Kevin Jarre told two stories about how he came to write Glory. One day as he crossed the north end of the Boston Common, he saw the memorial to the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Infantry, a Northern black volunteer regiment. Designed by Augustus SaintGaudens, the monument is a massive bas-relief bronze of foot soldiers led by a horsed officer. Jarre was struck by the fact that, though he considered himself fairly knowledgeable about the Civil War, he’d never heard of African American soldiers fighting in it. Jarre also said he became interested in the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth after a friend told him he looked like the regiment’s commanding officer, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. Conveniently, the friend was Lincoln Kirstein, who was in the process of researching a book about the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth. Jarre set out to write a movie that would shine light on a lost story. Jarre, whose only writing credits at the time were a couple of made-fortelevision movies and Rambo: First Blood, Part II (1985), wrote the Glory script for himself, never thinking anyone would be interested in making the movie. Civil War movies had fallen out of fashion in the 1970s and

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1980s, and Hollywood has always had trouble selling “black movies” to white moviegoers. Worse, when Jarre shopped his script around Hollywood, he was accused of racism, both for being a white man writing black men and because the language in the film is strongly racial. Columbia, which had shown early interest in the project, dropped it. Producer Freddie Fields sold the script to Tri-Star, which signed Edward Zwick to direct the film (Champlin 1990). Initially Zwick looked like a poor bet. He had only one other directorial credit and that for the romantic comedy About Last Night. After Glory, Zwick would go on to direct a host of Hollywood films, including Legends of the Fall (1994), Courage under Fire (1996), The Last Samurai (2003), and The Great Wall (2017). Zwick and Tri-Star signed what would later look like an all-star cast for the movie, though each of the top-billed actors had yet to reach the heights of fame that would come after Glory. Though Matthew Broderick had been making movies since 1983, he was best known as the title character in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), a role that did little to suggest he might have the dramatic chops required for Glory. Denzel Washington’s primary claim to fame before Glory was his six-year stint on the television program St. Elsewhere, though he had made several movies. English actor Cary Elwes played Major Cabot Forbes, a character based on Colonel Robert Gould Shaw’s real second in command, Lieutenant Colonel Norwood Hallowell. Previous to Glory, Elwes’s principal acting credit was for the swashbuckling Wesley in the critically acclaimed cult hit (but box office disappointment) Princess Bride (1986). Zwick divided filming between Massachusetts and Georgia and hired Civil War historian Shelby Foote as technical adviser. The film also greatly benefited from the volunteer services of hundreds of Civil War reenactors. From the first scene at Antietam to the attack on Fort Wagner, the film’s battle scenes set new standards for realism in part because reenactors from twenty states appeared in the movie in period-appropriate costumes and weaponry. Sensitive to the critiques of Jarre’s script, Zwick made sure his cast understood they were not making a “black story with a commercially convenient white hero.” Zwick said of his goals for the film, “There is a segment of the American population that has been excluded from the national myth and that should be redressed” (Perry 1990). In fact, Glory was the first film to depict black soldiers since Shenandoah (1965), and that film used black soldiers primarily as background and did so in a manner that suggested the Union army was integrated. American composer James Horner, who scored films from 1982 until his death in 2015, wrote the film’s soundtrack. Horner, who scored Field of Dreams the same year as Glory, considered the latter some of his best work. Critics called the soundtrack “haunting” and “majestic,” particularly the segments where the Harlem Boys Choir sang without words.



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RAWLINS VERSUS HOKE: MORGAN FREEMAN’S VERY DIFFERENT 1989 MOVIE ROLES Morgan Freeman experienced a breakout year in 1989. A late bloomer by any ­Hollywood standard, Freeman was over fifty years old when he starred in both Glory and Driving Miss Daisy. The films couldn’t have been more different. In Miss Daisy, Freeman played Hoke, a man hired to drive a wealthy white woman in the three decades after World War II. The movie won Best Picture that year at the Academy Awards, and Freeman received a nomination for Best Actor. In Glory, Freeman plays Sergeant Rawlins, a fugitive slave who fights with the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth during the Civil War. Glory garnered few awards, though Freeman’s costar Denzel Washington won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar. Freeman’s Rawlins character is a model of leadership and strength, while Hoke is often accused of “Uncle Tom-ism.” The Uncle Tom stereotype portrays black men as faithful, submissive servants to white folks, much as Hoke is submissive to Miss Daisy until the last scene of the movie. While critics still agree that Freeman’s performance in Miss Daisy was Oscar worthy, the film itself is often seen as an Oscar mistake for whitewashing the era of segregation. Freeman’s 1989 successes with these two movies would lead to a film career that would make him one of the top-grossing actors in the country and include films as notable as The Shawshank Redemption (1994), Million Dollar Baby (2004; for which he won an Oscar for Best Actor), and Invictus (2009). In the latter film, Freeman played Nelson Mandela, the first black president of South Africa, a character far removed from the Uncle Tom-Hoke role.

Glory opens in the midst of Antietam. Captain Robert Gould Shaw (Matthew Broderick) is injured in a chaotic melee and falls. He lies on the ground, unconscious, until gravedigger John Rawlins (Morgan Freeman) shakes him awake. The movie jumps to a party at Shaw’s parents’ Boston home. Shaw’s parents’ abolitionist credentials are established by the presence of Frederick Douglass at the party as well as Governor John A. Andrew. Andrew announces that he has permission from the War Department to form a regiment of black soldiers and offers the regimental command to Shaw, a post that comes with a promotion to colonel. John Rawlins reappears in the recruiting scene alongside a number of the movie’s other central characters, including Silas Trip (Denzel Washington) and Jupiter (Jihmi Kennedy). Scenes of the regiment’s training, including bayonet practice and marching drills, clarify Shaw’s intent to make the regiment a serious fighting unit. In the midst of training, Shaw reads his men a telegram that tells them the Confederate government has issued an order that will reenslave all black soldiers taken as prisoners, while all white officers of black troops will be shot for treason. Shaw offers an honorable

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discharge to any man who wants to leave the regiment. The next morning he finds that not one man has elected to leave. When Trip is discovered away from his post, he is charged with desertion. Shaw orders Mulcahy to whip Trip over Forbes’s objections. Afterward Shaw visits Trip in the hospital tent. Rawlins tells Shaw the man left to find shoes. While his men stand guard outside the building, Shaw forcefully demands the quartermaster release shoes and socks to his men. Shaw further cements his relationship with the Fifty-Fourth when the men discover they are to be paid less than white soldiers. Trip first discovers the pay discrepancy and tears his pay stub in half, calling out “tear it up” to the men. Other men tear their pay stubs. Shaw steps to the fore and, though the men clearly expect him to discipline them, he announces that if they will have no pay, neither will he. Their training complete, the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth goes south, to the South Carolina Sea Islands region. Put under the command of General Harker and his second in command, Colonel Montgomery, the Fifty-Fourth is ordered to loot and burn a Southern town. Montgomery explains to Shaw that though he comes from a slaveholding family, he views slavery as a sin that has to be washed away by violence. Shaw first refuses the order and then complies after Montgomery threatens to remove him from command. Shaw orders the regimental colors furled as the town is destroyed. The ensuing scene contrasts Montgomery’s soldiers, who are chaotic and violent, with the Fifty-Fourth’s military discipline. Afterward the Fifty-Fourth spends its time in manual labor, much to the glee of racist white soldiers who taunt them. After the Fifty-Fourth has proven it can fight, General George Strong announces a campaign to take the Charleston Harbor by assaulting Battery Wagner. Shaw volunteers his regiment to lead the charge, telling the general that his men are ready. In the penultimate scene of the movie, the soldiers gather around a fire in a quasi-religious service the night before the battle. Jupiter, Bible in hand, makes an eloquent speech for their safety, while Rawlins talks about how the day will prove to the nation that black men can fight as bravely as white men. The next morning the men assemble on the beach. They charge and take heavy fire. As night comes upon them, Shaw rallies the men and surges forward. He’s shot several times. The men breach the wall to a barrage of gunfire. The film ends with a shot of the beach, littered with dead men. Closing narration states the Union army never took Battery Wagner but that the bravery of the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth inspired three hundred thousand black men to enlist in the Union army. The film opened in limited release in December 1989, just in time to put it in the running for that year’s award nominations. Glory went into larger release the following February. In its three-month theatrical run, the film grossed nearly $27 million, making it the forty-fifth-highest-grossing film of the year. Though these numbers seem small, the film more than covered its $18 million budget, though it could by no means be considered a huge box office success.



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Film critics universally embraced the film as both a cinematic success and social justice tour de force. Leonard Maltin called it “breathtakingly filmed” and “faultlessly performed” (Maltin 2008). Historians liked the film nearly as much, though some took issue with the way a movie about black soldiers focused on the regiment’s white colonel, but most critics tempered their criticisms with some discussion of the need to make movies for diverse audiences. Civil War historian James McPherson embraced the film on a number of levels and recommended teachers and professors show it in classes. Interest in the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth rose after the movie’s release, resulting in a small flood of popular and academic books about black Civil War soldiers. Black Americans, who’d previously largely avoided Civil War reenacting, expressed so much interest in reenacting that black reenacting regiments had long waiting lists. Glory earned a number of nominations from the Golden Globes and eight nominations in five Academy Awards categories. In addition to Denzel Washington’s Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, the film won Best Cinematography and Best Sound, though it failed to garner nominations in the Academy’s big categories. James Horner won a Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Composition for a Motion Picture. The NAACP Image Awards gave the film its Outstanding Motion Picture award and awarded Washington Outstanding Supporting Actor in a year in which Driving Miss Daisy, Lean on Me, and Do the Right Thing provided considerable competition. Even years later the film hits the top of many “Best Civil War Movie” lists.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND The Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts was part of a larger movement to recruit black soldiers for the Union army, and while the Fifty-Fourth is without a doubt the most famous colored regiment of the war, it was by no means the only one. Nor is its genesis as simple as Glory suggests. The Fifty-Fourth was one of nearly two hundred regiments that made up the USCT, and the formation of the USCT was the product of a complicated set of congressional acts, preexisting volunteer units, and social pressures. In early 1861 at Fort Monroe in Virginia, Union general Benjamin Butler sheltered a handful of escaped slaves, calling them “contraband of war.” President Abraham Lincoln and others disapproved of Butler’s position because it recognized the Confederacy as a hostile nation rather than a region of the United States in rebellion. In spite of official objections to Butler’s practice, popular opinion in the North held that slaves should not be returned to their masters. As a result, the Confiscation Act of 1861 allowed the Union army to confiscate any property used by the Confederate army, including slaves. In March 1862, another law made it illegal to return confiscated slaves to the Confederacy. Then, in July 1862, Congress passed yet another Confiscation

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Act, this one allowing the U.S. government to seize Confederate property, including slaves. The Confiscation Acts made it increasingly clear that the war was about more than forcing eleven seceded states back into the Union. Then, on January 1, 1863, Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation. The order exempted slaves in Union states, including Missouri, Maryland, Delaware, and Kentucky, and had no power over slaves living in the Confederate States of America, so it freed very few slaves. Lincoln and his advisers didn’t intend for the proclamation to free slaves but rather to signal that the war was officially about ending American slavery. The consequences of the proclamation were myriad. Slaves in ­Confederate-held territories understood that the approach of the Union army meant the approach of freedom, and four million slaves eager for freedom did the Confederacy no favors. Moreover, black Americans living in Union states understood that their nation had committed itself to ending slavery, and that was a fight they were willing to join. Prior to the establishment of the USCT, several black regiments existed at the state level, though most were folded into the USCT after its establishment. For example, the Corps d’Afrique formed from the Louisiana Native Guard in April 1862 after New Orleans fell to the Union army. In May 1863, the War Department established a Bureau of Colored Troops to encourage African American recruitment. The USCT included 6 cavalry regiments, 15 artillery regiments, and 138 infantry regiments; a total of 175 regiments and nearly 180,000 soldiers swelled the Union army by 10 percent by the end of the war. Only weeks after the Emancipation Proclamation, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton wrote John Andrew, the governor of Massachusetts, telling him to begin raising colored regiments. Andrew asked Robert Gould Shaw to be the first such regiment’s colonel and Norwood Penrose Hallowell to be the regiment’s lieutenant colonel. Boston’s free black community, including abolitionist Frederick Douglass, played a significant role in the regiment’s recruitment. From the beginning of the war, Douglass contended the war’s aim had to be ending slavery, and to that end he insisted black men should be allowed to fight for their own freedom. Recruiting began in February 1861. The Fifty-Fourth trained at Camp Meigs, near Boston, before shipping out to Beaufort, South Carolina, in May 1863 to join Major General David Hunter’s X Corps. Early in the war, the Union took the Sea Islands and Port Royal, after white slave owners fled, leaving behind over ten thousand slaves. Northern abolitionists, backed by progressive charity organizations, used the area as an experiment for transforming slaves into self-sufficient freed persons. Called the Port Royal Experiment, the area no doubt seemed an appropriate place to ship a new regiment of black soldiers. In Beaufort, the Fifty-Fourth joined James Montgomery’s Second South Carolina Volunteers. Under Montgomery’s command, the two regiments



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raided Darien, Georgia, and found the town empty. Montgomery ordered the town looted and burned, an action that distressed Shaw, who thought his model military unit should not take part in such shameful activities. The Fifty-Fourth next skirmished with the Confederate army at James Island, South Carolina, where they lost forty-two men. On July 11, the Union army first assaulted Fort Wagner, a Confederateheld fortification protecting Charleston Harbor. The Union suffered an overwhelming defeat with 339 casualties compared to twelve Confederate dead. Union high command immediately began planning a second assault on Fort Wagner. It was in this engagement that the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts led the frontal assault on the fort. The unit suffered 54 official casualties, including Colonel Shaw, with another 52 men listed as missing, presumed dead, and 125 men wounded. Despite the fact that the regiment suffered a defeat at Fort Wagner, word of their courage changed public and political opinion about black soldiers, paving the way for the recruitment of many more black regiments. Lieutenant Colonel Edward “Pen” Hallowell took command of the FiftyFourth after Fort Wagner and Shaw’s death. The new colonel led his regiment in the Battle of Olustee (also called the Battle of Ocean Pond) in Florida in February 1864. The unit garnered additional fame when they pulled a broken-down train full of wounded soldiers three miles to Camp Finnegan, saving the wounded from Confederate capture. At the time, the regiment was embroiled in a pay controversy. White soldiers were paid thirteen dollars a month, while black soldiers earned seven dollars. As the men of the Fifty-Fourth pulled the train, they chanted, “Massachusetts and seven dollars a month.” In November 1864, the Fifty-Fourth participated in William Tecumseh Sherman’s now famous March to the Sea at the Battle of Honey Hill in Grahamville, South Carolina. The Fifty-Fourth also took part in a number of siege operations in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, as well as fighting in the Battle of Boykin’s Mill (also in South Carolina), one of the last battles of the Civil War. The regiment was mustered out of the U.S. Army on August 20, 1865, in South Carolina, and on September 1 they returned to Boston. In total, nearly 180,000 enlisted black men and 7,122 black officers served in the Union army during the Civil War. The Confederate army used black men and women, most of them slaves, as laborers during the war. In the last few weeks of the war, the Confederate government approved the enlistment of black men into the army, though none of those volunteers ever served. Slave volunteers were offered freedom in return for military service, so it is unwise to conflate black Confederate volunteers with a black endorsement of slavery (Levine 2005). Black women worked on both sides of the conflict, though only rarely were they officially connected to the military. Harriet Tubman worked as a spy for the Union army, as did other black women, though many of those women’s names have been lost to history.

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In the Confederacy, slave women built many of the army’s fortifications as noncombatant military labor. Again, these women’s involuntary work for the Confederacy should not be interpreted as support of that nation nor its proslavery ideals. Black men continued serving in the U.S. military after the Civil War, as did some black women. Four regiments of black soldiers served on the Great Plains in the Indian Wars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most famously the Tenth Cavalry Regiment or Buffalo Soldiers. These regiments continued the tradition of white commanders, though some regiments had black men in the lower officer ranks. Five infantry regiments and eight National Guard units made up of black soldiers served in the SpanishAmerican War (1898), and a small number of black women served in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps. During World War I (1914–1918), 350,000 African Americans served, including a small contingent of black nurses; however, men and women continued to serve in segregated units. The army remained segregated through World War II (1939–1945), with over 125,000 men serving in overseas military operations. Much as the Massachusetts FiftyFourth’s military excellence helped make the case for black soldiers in the Civil War, famed World War II units like the Tuskegee Airmen made the case for ending military segregation (Leckie and Leckie 2012). In 1948, President Harry S. Truman signed Executive Order 9981, ordering the end of segregation in all branches of the U.S. military.

DEPICTION AND CULTURAL CONTEXT Glory makes two glaring errors of omission. First, it essentially deletes Frederick Douglass from the story of the regiment’s creation and entirely ignores the women who served with the regiment as cooks, nurses, and spies. Frederick Douglass does appear in the film (played by an uncredited Raymond St. Jacques), in the drawing room scene where Broderick’s character is recruited to act as the regimental colonel. By mid-1860, Douglass had become one of the most famous people (black or white) in America. The forty-four-year-old abolitionist was a powerful lobbyist for black soldiers and one of the Fifty-Fourth’s most effective recruiters. Instead the Douglass character sits silently by as Governor Andrew explains the new regiment to young Shaw. He has one line, saying colored soldiers “will offer pride and dignity to those who have known only degradation.” Later Douglass is seen from afar, saluting the regiment as it marches out of Boston. After these ephemeral appearances, Frederick Douglass disappears from the movie. Douglass understood the symbolic and real importance of black men serving in the U.S. Army, once saying, “Let [the black man] get an eagle on his button and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket and no power on earth can deny he has earned the right to citizenship” (National



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Archives 2017). Douglass so believed in the Fifty-Fourth that two of his sons, Frederick Jr. and Charles, served in the regiment. They too are missing from the film. Lewis achieved a rank of sergeant major and made it through the assault on Fort Wagner with only a minor wound. Charles, also a sergeant major, missed deploying with the Fifty-Fourth because he was too sick to leave training camp and later joined the Fifth Massachusetts Cavalry (Blight 1995). While Glory included Douglass in very minor appearances, Harriet Tubman and other women connected with the Fifty-Fourth are entirely absent from the film. Tubman’s connection to the Fifty-Fourth may have come from Lewis Hayden, a Boston abolitionist who acted as a recruiting agent for the regiment. Prior to the war, Lewis and his wife, Harriet, used their Beacon Hill home as a safe haven for escaping slaves on their way to Canada, and they would have known Tubman. Not long after the war began, the Union took control of the South Carolina Sea Islands and Tubman joined a number of Boston abolitionists there, assisting the hundred thousand slaves left in the area by fleeing masters and the thousands more fugitive slaves that poured into Union-held territory. There she worked as a nurse until early 1863, when she began scouting and spying for the Union army. In June 1863, she became the first woman to lead a military assault when she guided federal troops up the Combahee River to assault Confederate-held plantations. After the Combahee raid, Tubman took up with the Massachusetts FiftyFourth, acting as cook, spy, and nurse for the regiment, much as thousands of other women did during the war. It was Tubman who cooked and served the regiment’s dinner the night before the assault on Fort Wagner. When the regiment marched down the sand, Tubman stood on a spit of land above them, along with many other observers, and watched them go. When the battle was over, she culled through the dead and injured, nursed the injured, and helped bury the dead. Later she wrote of the battle, “And then we saw the lightning and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling and that was the drops of blood falling; and then we came to get in the crops, and that was the dead men we reaped” (Taylor and Wagner 2004). Shaw’s wife is also missing from the film. The two knew each other before the war began and wrote letters to each other while Shaw was away, first with the Seventh New York State Militia and then with the Second Massachusetts Infantry. In fact, it is in a letter to Annie that Shaw reveals he first refused command of the Fifty-Fourth, writing that while undecided, “I felt ashamed of myself, as if I were cowardly” (MacLean 2011). He traveled to New York City to marry Annie Haggerty, a friend of his sister’s, before the regiment deployed. Annie Haggerty Shaw makes no appearance in the movie, nor is Shaw’s marriage mentioned, in keeping with the film’s almost total absence of women.

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Most of Glory’s other errors are understandable if one takes into account that Jarre and Zwick were trying to tell the story of not only the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth but also black soldiers in general. For example, the film suggests volunteers for the Fifty-Fourth were mostly fugitive slaves, when the majority of the men were freeborn, Northern men. Nonetheless, fugitive slaves made up a large portion of the USCT’s enlistment, and the characters played by Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman, and others suggest that reality. Complaints about the film’s composite characters can be divided into two broad categories: first that the movie misleads the audience about the soldiers of the Fifty-Fourth and second that the composites are stock characters and thus stereotypes. Andre Braugher, who played Corporal Thomas Searles, said, “Stock characters are what make war films go. There’s the sharp shooting country boy, the guy with a chip on his shoulder . . . the wise old man, the smarty-pants from the city” (Wertz 2009). Braugher’s

WILLIAM CARNEY, THE FIRST AFRICAN AMERICAN MEDAL OF HONOR WINNER Of the 3,470 Medals of Honor awarded to date, only 89 have gone to African Americans and 25 of those during the American Civil War. William Harvey Carney was the first black soldier to win the nation’s highest military honor. Carney was born a slave in Virginia in 1840. It’s unclear if he was freed by his master or escaped slavery through the Underground Railroad, but we do know he enlisted in the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Regiment in March 1863. As the Fifty-Fourth attacked Battery Wagner, Carney saw the regiment’s flag bearer stumble and fall after being shot. Though he’d taken at least two bullets himself, Carney caught the falling flag and carried it up the hill through a deadly barrage. After he recovered from his injuries, he was promoted to sergeant and the following year received an honorable discharge from the army. In Glory, during the scene on the beach just before the assault, General George Strong asked, “If this man should fall, who will lift the flag.” Thomas, a recruit who’d been a notoriously bad soldier, steps forward and says, “I will.” Then in the final assault, the flag falls and Trip, who’s been vocal that he fights not for honor or for the country but to end slavery, picks up the flag and carries it forward. He too is killed, making for a terrific and heart-breaking battle scene. Yet, in real life, the substitute flag bearer William Carney planted the flag at the base of the fort and held it, even while his wounds bled and weakened him. Though several of his fellow soldiers offered to take the flag from him so he could seek help for his wounds, Carney refused their offers and kept the flag upright until the Fifty-Fourth was forced to retreat. After the war, Carney became a mail carrier in New Bedford, Massachusetts, a job he held for thirty-two years. In 1900, thirtyseven years after his heroic charge of Battery Wagner, Carney won the Medal of Honor for exceptional valor in battle.



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character, Thomas, is the closest to a realistic portrayal of the typical Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth soldier. As an educated, Northern free black, Thomas accurately reflects the regiment’s composition; only one-quarter of the FiftyFourth’s recruits came from slave states. One of the conventions of war films is what historian David Blight calls the “platoon drama,” where individual soldier characters represent “a microcosm of American life” (Wertz 2009). Jarre’s screenplay consciously used composite characters in part to tell a wider story about black soldiers and in part to pay homage to a tradition in the making of war films. By applying cinematic stereotypes traditionally used to tell stories of white soldiers, the film offers the viewer a much-needed glimpse of forgotten history within a familiar narrative arc. And while the Fifty-Fourth was not made up of illiterate fugitive slaves, many of the regiments that would make up the U.S. Colored Troops would be. Thus Private Trip, Corporal Rawlings, and Jupiter represent real persons who fought in the Civil War, if not in the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth. Colonel Robert Gould Shaw is the movie’s only historical character (a character based on a real person from the past), and most of the Shaw material in the movie is correct. His parents were committed abolitionists, as was he; he did come from an influential family; and he participated in the Battle at Antietam, after which he was offered command of the Fifty-Fourth. The movie shows the offer and Shaw’s acceptance happening on the same day, after which he is immediately promoted to colonel. In reality Shaw at first said no to the chance to lead a colored regiment then several days later changed his mind. He continued as a major while the regiment was organized and trained and was made a colonel when the regiment was about to be deployed south. The pay controversy and boycott did happen, though not quite as the film portrayed it. When the army began recruiting for the Fifty-Fourth, it promised enlisted men thirteen dollars per month, plus subsistence, which would include food and uniforms. When they arrived in South Carolina, the Fifty-Fourth found out they would be paid ten dollars a month, with three dollars deducted for their uniforms, leaving the pay at seven dollars. In the movie the idea to boycott their pay comes from Private Trip, who rallies the men to join him in rejecting their pay scrip with cries of “tear it up.” Colonel Shaw appears surprised at first, but seeing an opportunity to support his men joins them and declares that he too will take no pay. In reality Shaw was the first to protest his regiment’s pay inequity (Emilio 1995). In December 1863, Massachusetts offered to make up the pay difference, but the regiment decided to continue the payday boycott in an effort to ensure that all black Union soldiers were paid a fair wage. Pay inequality persisted well after the assault on Fort Wagner. The FiftyFifth Massachusetts, a black regiment made up of men who volunteered for the Fifty-Fourth after its ranks had been filled, joined the pay boycott.

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While the Fifty-Fourth was in Florida, the tensions around the boycott came to a head after Private Wallace Baker was executed for striking an officer, which he’d done after refusing to fall in for inspection as part of his pay protest. Finally, in June 1864, Congress agreed to pay black soldiers the same amount as white soldiers, including back pay, and by September 1864, most of the soldiers received their pay (McPherson 2014). The film suggests that the white people who volunteered to work with the fugitive slaves in the South Carolina Sea Islands were corrupt. While certainly some of them may have been, the vast majority of people who volunteered were idealists who genuinely wanted to help “contraband” slaves adjust to a life of freedom. Known as the Port Royal Experiment, escaped slaves, members of the Union army, and white volunteers worked together to create a farming model on the two hundred plantations abandoned by slave owners that would prove black Americans could be self-sufficient once released from bondage. Though the land was eventually returned to its original owners, the Port Royal Experiment proved beyond a doubt that black Americans could work independently of slave masters. The scene where Sergeant Mulcahy whips Private Trip is a moving evocation of the violence of slavery, but soldiers would not have been punished for desertion with a whipping. Desertion was a military crime punishable by execution, though in reality very few soldiers were executed. President Lincoln and many commanding officers shared a strong dislike for such harsh punishment and generally pardoned deserters and sent them back to their regiment (Lonn 2016) . Lastly, the movie claims the Confederate government announced its policy regarding the treatment of black prisoners of war after the Fifty-Fourth’s formation. While the Confederacy did promise to enslave any captured black soldier and execute any officer leading them as the film suggests, it did so in December 1862, two months before the Fifty-Fourth’s creation. When the men volunteered for the Fifty-Fourth, they already fully understood that they risked enslavement if captured in battle. They may have been encouraged by the federal response to the Confederacy’s break with traditional treatment of prisoners of war. In the summer of 1863, President Lincoln issued General Order 252, declaring, “For every soldier of the United States killed in violation of the laws of war, a rebel soldier shall be executed. For every one enslaved by the enemy or sold into slavery, a rebel soldier shall be placed at hard labor on the public works, and continued at such labor until the other shall be released and receive the treatment due to a prisoner of war” (Commager 1973). In fact, the Confederacy’s intransigence with regard to black prisoners of war essentially ended the prisoner-of-war exchanges between the two sides by late 1862. Because the Confederacy refused to exchange black soldiers for white ones, the Union army ended prisoner exchanges in general, causing increasing pressure on both sides’ ability to care for the swelling numbers of men held in prison camps.



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Glory’s last serious mistake comes at the end of the film, when the afterword claims that “over half” of the regiment died in the assault on Fort Wagner. In fact, about 40 percent of the regiment sustained wounds in the assault and just under 20 percent died. This error is more perplexing than the others because there’s no real reason for it beyond the Hollywood tendency for hyperbole. Worse, this error suggests the central significance of the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth lies in the regiment’s high mortality rates and the heroism of black soldiers slaughtered in battle, when nothing could be further from the truth. First, that attack on Fort Wagner is far from the most deadly Civil War battle. Over fifty-one thousand men died over three days at Gettysburg, and twenty-three thousand died in a single day at Antietam. Too many Civil War regiments suffered mortality rates as high or higher, and the war created multitudes of stories of heroism in the face of insurmountable odds. The Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth’s actions at Fort Wagner were remarkable because the regiment proved black men could fight, not more bravely but as bravely as white soldiers. The men of the Fifty-Fourth silenced critics who said black men were not “man enough” to stand up to the rigors of battle and in so doing opened the door for the recruitment of thousands more black soldiers, and they did that while losing 20 percent of the regiment. In contrast, Zwick took particular care to accurately portray Glory’s battle scenes. Even better, the three battles in Glory are filmed in different styles and tones, depending on the battle itself, real soldiers’ thoughts about the battle, and the storytelling purpose of the scene. In so doing, Zwick balanced two approaches to cinema war—one where war is portrayed as meaningless butchery and the other featuring moments of individual honor for a greater good. Historian Paul Haskell contends that “Glory points out, in a responsible manner, that all wars are bloody exercises in death, maiming and pain, while suggesting that some causes are worth fighting for” (Haskell 2014). The film opens at Antietam, and the violence in those scenes is portrayed as chaotic and meaningless. This is not to say that Antietam was meaningless, but Robert Gould Shaw’s letters make it clear he experienced the slaughter that day as terrible and unjustifiable (Duncan 1992). Moreover, the battle predates the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth and so has no real part in their story except insofar as it suggests the challenges the Union army faced in defeating the enemy. To get the scale and horror of the battle, Zwick and producer Freddie Fields took a film crew to the 1988 Gettysburg reenactment and filmed twelve thousand reenactors. Zwick and Fields participated in the Gettysburg reenactment all three days and later said the experience helped them understand the physical realities of combat (Mateiski and Street 2003). The film’s second battle scene takes place after the regiment shipped out to South Carolina. The skirmish at James Island in July 1863 justified Colonel Shaw’s harsh training techniques and first demonstrates that black

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soldiers can and will fight. This battle scene, though relatively short, is far less chaotic than Antietam and significantly more meaningful. The film portrays all the men, from Thomas, who wasn’t a very good soldier in training, to Jupiter, who learned to reload under pressure, as capable soldiers. Captain Luis Emilio, who commanded Company E of the Fifty-Fourth, called the regiment’s first battle test “a supreme moment.” Ex-slave Corporal James H. Gooding wrote, “It is not for us to blow our own horn, but when a regiment of white men gave us three cheers as we were passing it shows that we did our duty as men should” (Adams 1991). Jarre’s script moves this moment of white soldiers’ approval of the men of the Fifty-Fourth to the scene where the regiment marches to its ready position for the assault on Fort Wagner. “Give ’em hell, Fifty-Fourth,” a white enlisted man yells, and his fellow soldiers echo his cry. It’s a scene of redemption, for both the black soldiers and the white soldiers who doubted the men of the Fifty-Fourth would ever be men enough to stand up under fire. Zwick’s filmmaking shines the brightest in the Fort Wagner battle scenes. Historian James McPherson called the penultimate scenes in Glory “the most realistic combat footage in any Civil War movie I have seen” (McPherson 1990). Unlike the Antietam battle scenes, the viewer’s sense of direction is never confused, the goal never unclear, not even as night falls and shells explode around the men in showers of sand and blood. Shaw isn’t confused or unsure in this battle. Shaw’s death in that battle makes his feelings about the regiment’s performance unknown, but in truth, the colonel and many of his men made it all the way to the fort’s rampart (though the movie has Shaw dying on the final assault, before the rampart). The scenes leading up to and including the battle are beautiful, and the violence less harsh and more heart-rending. The assault on Fort Wagner is shot differently not only because it was different but also because the Fifty-Fourth’s actions that day transformed its history into super-heroic, near-romantic legend. As Zwick explained his approach to filming the Fort Wagner scenes, “The attempt was to make visual the accomplishment of that myth—the myth that was accomplished by virtue of this battle. In history the battle took on a life beyond itself, in memory and in importance to the culture. Somehow, without romanticizing it, keeping it scary and violent, we gave it an elevated style” (Heuring 1990). The film’s depiction of the June 11, 1863, raid on Darien might also be considered a battle scene in that it addresses one of the more uncomfortable historical realities of the Civil War—military attacks on civilian targets. The Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth joined the Second South Carolina Volunteers in a raid of Sea Islands communities in an effort to break the local will to fight (much as Sherman’s March to the Sea would do the following year). As the film depicts, Colonel James Montgomery ordered Darien looted and burned, much to Colonel Shaw’s discomfort. Montgomery’s roots as an antislavery Kansas Jayhawker make him particularly hostile to anyone sympathetic to



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slavery, including nonmilitary targets like women and children. While Montgomery gave his troops free rein in the action, Shaw ordered his men to take items that would be helpful in camp. Often called “The Sack of Darien,” the raid is considered either a military necessity or an example of the Union government’s cruelty. The film walks the line between those two interpretations while making it clear that Shaw understood the public relations problem created by black troops sacking a white town (Edgerton 2016). One of the reasons Glory’s cinematic battles succeed is because Zwick could call on a veritable hoard of Civil War reenactors. Reenacting extras not only volunteered but also brought with them their own historically accurate uniforms and weapons. Given Glory’s budget, the film could not have been made otherwise. Organized Civil War reenacting can be traced to the 1913 Gettysburg reunion. Over fifty thousand Civil War veterans, all but eight thousand of them from the Union side, gathered to remember the battle. In between speeches and statue commemorations, the men organized a reenactment of Picket’s Charge. In 1961, on the century anniversary of the first year of the war, Civil War reenacting entered its modern phase. For many participants, Civil War reenacting was a direct response to the black civil rights movement, with positions taken on either side of the issue depending on the reenactors’ regional and racial affiliations. Ten years after Glory, Civil War reenacting peaked in popularity. Over three hundred thousand reenactors and fifty thousand spectators turned out for the 135th anniversary celebration for Gettysburg, making it the largest battle reenactment ever. Glory not only took advantage of the rise of the reenacting phenomenon but also encouraged it. Black men and women took to the reenacting phenomenon as a way to reclaim and rewrite Civil War history. Indeed, while general reenacting has seen a decline in numbers since the end of the twentieth century, black Civil War reenactors have seen a rise in numbers and popularity. Black Americans see uniform costumes and performance as a way to add African American stories into American history. For example, the Female Re-Enactors of Distinction reminds people of the important role black women played in the war. Black reenactors see their activities as crucial to the work of encouraging the recognition of a multiracial American past in the hopes of creating a more tolerant and equitable future. Reenacting, whether it be white neo-Confederates or black New Englanders, is fundamentally a declaration of political ideology and one that has become more fractious, not less, in the twenty-first century. In addition to its excellent battle scenes, Glory excels at its explicit and implicit discussions of black manhood. Nineteenth-century Northern citizens and politicians alike energetically resisted the idea of black soldiers, and not just because they would signal the war was about the abolition of slavery. Fundamentally, black men engaged in that most manly of undertakings, soldiering, challenged racist ideology. White supremacists, a category that

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would have included both Northerners and Southerners, insisted that “real men” and thus “real humans” were white and male. Antebellum stereotypes held that black men were childish, lazy, and sexually uncontrolled—the very antithesis of the qualities that would make a soldier (Black 2016). By this definition, black men were viewed by most Americans as unsuitable soldiering material. Moreover, the specter of armed black men allowed to shoot at white men made all but the most ardent abolitionists nervous. Nonetheless, after the Emancipation Proclamation made it clear the war was about the abolition of slavery, many Northerners came to believe that black men should be allowed to fight. The untried nature of the black soldier experiment, laid on top of decades of racist ideology, caused even proponents of black soldiers to worry the men would fail at the task. A New York Tribune editorial opined, “The great majority have no faith that [black men] will fight. Many hope they will prove cowards and sneaks—others greatly fear it” (McPherson 1990). The Fifty-Fourth’s actions in the assault on Fort Wagner answered all the doubters. That Fort Wagner came just four days after the New York draft riot made the Fifty-Fourth’s valor all the more pointed. Mobs consisting of poor whites, many of them Irish immigrants, attacked and killed black men, women, and children in protest for what they saw as a draft that would force them to fight and die to end slavery. In a public letter to the rioters, Lincoln said, “You say you will not fight to free Negroes. Some of them seem willing to fight for you” (Response to the Riots). In one of the movie’s best-loved scenes, the men gather around a fire the night before the attack on Fort Monroe. As tambourines rattle and the men clap, Sergeant Rawlins steps up and says, “If tomorrow we have to meet the judgment day, our heavenly Father we want you to let our folks know that we died facing the enemy. We want them to know we went down standing up, amongst those who are fighting against our oppression. We want them to know heavenly Father that we died for freedom.” Rawlins then pushes Trip to the fore. Reluctantly Trip says, “Ain’t not much matter what happen tomorrow. We men isn’t we? We men.” The men agree and, tears streaming down his face, Trip steps back. The next day, as the men make their way to the beach, one of the white soldiers yells, “Give ’em hell, Fifty-Fourth.” The other watching soldiers echo that cry. It’s a tremendously effecting scene, one that acknowledges the grand and simple achievement of the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth. They proved that they were as brave and as able as white soldiers. What happened after that didn’t much matter. For all that, some critics have taken Glory to task for embracing the “white savior” trope. As Roger Ebert explained, “I didn’t understand why it [Glory] had to be told so often from the point of view of the Fifty-Fourth’s white commanding officer. Why did we see black troops through his eyes— instead of seeing it through theirs? To put it another way, why does top billing in this movie go to a white actor” (Ebert 1990). Ebert wasn’t alone in his impatience with the film’s white point of view, and it’s a point worth



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making. America likes white savior films, and Hollywood makes them by the hundreds. They soothe white movie viewers’ racial anxiety and reinforce a racial hierarchy for many white movie viewers. Ebert theorized that perhaps one of the keys to the Massachusetts FiftyFourth’s story is that it changed white perceptions of black soldiers. Seeing the black soldiers through Colonel Shaw’s eyes allowed Jarre and Zwick to show that shift. One might also argue that giving Matthew Broderick top billing and using Shaw’s point of view was a practical choice designed to allow the movie the widest viewing audience possible. Certainly 1989 was a better year than some for black actors in Hollywood films, and in many ways Glory stands solidly between the two other critically acclaimed “black films” of that year, Driving Miss Daisy and Do the Right Thing. The former follows the changing relationship between an older Southern Jewish woman (Jessica Tandy) and her amiable black driver (Morgan Freeman). Driving Miss Daisy is a gentle, friendly film, one that suggests racial understanding can be found in patience and familiarity. American moviegoers loved the film, as did the Academy of Motion Pictures come awards time. Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing makes no concessions to white viewers. After a day of racially charged language and simmering violence, the police kill a young black man and a riot ensues after Mookie (Spike Lee) throws a trashcan through a white business’s front window. While in retrospect critics agree that Do the Right Thing was the far better film, the Oscars and audiences at the time preferred Driving Miss Daisy. As New York Times critic Vincent Canby put it, “Do the Right Thing won’t play the game. It talks back . . . it doesn’t call attention to progress, it asks for more. Now” (Canby 1990). Though it was considered by many to be a shoo-in for Best Picture and Best Director nominations, the Academy snubbed the film. Zwick and Jarre wouldn’t have known any of that when they set out to make Glory, but they’d have known the kind of movies American audiences want to see and the kind of movies that gain recognition come awards time. And even though Glory arguably played to white audiences, it still struggled at the box office, and its snubbing by the Academy caused nearly the uproar as did Spike Lee’s film. The New York Times critic asked, “Did the nine nominations for Miss Daisy, in which blacks and whites are reconciled . . . spoil the chances of Glory?” (Canby 1990). Certainly Hollywood has a long and unsavory history with “black films,” and one unresolved in the twenty-first century, as the near complete 2014 snubbing of Selma proves. Decades later, Driving Miss Daisy is widely considered an Oscar mistake, while both Glory and Do the Right Thing are considered film classics (though for very different reasons). Despite its imperfections, Glory remains a great Civil War movie. Before it, literally hundreds of American films reduced black characters to happy slaves, smiling Mammies, or dangerous animals. The more battle-centric movies reinvent the fighting empty of the politics of race and class while overflowing with a mishmash of ahistorical notions of manly honor. It is

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true that Glory makes too much of the white hero in a film that ought to have been about black soldiers, but Jarre and Zwick (and Tri-Star Pictures) were after a mass audience. White Americans had demonstrated time and again that they won’t pay to see “black films.” One can hardly blame the filmmakers for that reality, however disappointing it might be. And one would be hard-pressed to say that Matthew Broderick’s character is the only hero or even the main hero of Glory. The film also includes a multitude of black heroes, most notably Freeman’s Rawlins and Washington’s Trip. In the end, Glory’s strength lies in the way it tackled issues that still trouble and divide Americans. Discrimination, racial violence, and wage inequity still plague the nation, but Glory allows viewers a glimpse of how these issues might be faced and perhaps even overcome. Perhaps more importantly, the film disallows racist (and widely accepted) notions that black Americans have played no important role in American history. If Abraham Lincoln was right that the Union won the war, at least in part, because of the contributions of black soldiers, then Glory provides a cinematic glimpse of the forgotten men who saved the United States from its own ruin. And it does so while walking that fine line between compelling storytelling and historical accuracy.

FURTHER READING Adams, Virginia Matzke, ed. 1991. On the Altar of Freedom: A Black Soldier’s Civil War Letters from the Front. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Black, Daniel P. 2016. Dismantling Black Manhood: A Historical and Literary Analysis of the Legacy of Slavery. New York: Routledge. Blight, David W. 1995. “The Meaning or the Fight: Frederick Douglass and the Memory of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts.” Massachusetts Review 36 (Spring): 141–53. Canby, Vincent. 1990. “Oscar Is Sometimes a Grouch.” New York Times, ­February 25, 1990. ­https://​­www​.­nytimes​.­com​/­1990​/­02​/­25​/­movies​/­oscar​-­is​-­some times​-­a​-­grouch​.­html. Chadwick, Bruce. 2001. The Reel Civil War: Myth Making in American Film. New York: Knopf. Champlin, Charles. 1990. “Threads That Led to the Making of Glory.” Los Angeles Times, January 19, 1990. ­http://​­articles​.­latimes​.­com​/­1990​-­01​-­18​/­entertainment​ /­ca​-­423​_1​_kevin​-­jarre. Commager, Henry S. 1973. Documents in American History. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Duncan, Russell, ed. 1992. Blue-Eyed Child of Fortune: The Civil War Letters of Robert Gould Shaw. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Ebert, Roger. 1990. Glory. ­https://​­www​.­rogerebert​.­com​/­reviews​/­glory​-­1989. Edgerton, Douglas R. 2016. Thunder at the Gates: The Black Civil War Regiments That Redeemed America. New York: Basic Books.



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Emilio, Luis F. 1995. A Brave Black Regiment: The History of the Fifty-Fourth Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, 1963–65. New York: Da Capo. Haskell, Paul. 2014. “The War in Film: The Depiction of Combat in Glory.” In The Civil War in Popular Culture: Memory and Meaning. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Heuring, David. 1990. “Glory—The Rockets’ Red Glare.” American Cinematographer 71 (November): 58–62. Leckie, William H., and Shirley A. Leckie. 2012. The Buffalo Soldiers: A Narrative of the Black Cavalry in the West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Levine, Bruce. 2005. Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves during the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press. Lonn, Ella. 2016. Desertion during the Civil War. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith Publishing. MacLean, Maggie. 2011. “Annie Haggerty Shaw: Wife of Union Colonel Robert Gould Shaw.” Civil War Women: Women of the Civil War and Reconstruction Eras, September 28, 2011. ­https://​­www​.­civilwarwomenblog​.­com​/­annie​ -­haggerty​-­shaw​/. Maltin, Leonard. 2008. Leonard Maltin’s 2009 Movie Guide. New York: Signet. Mateiski, Marilyn, and Nancy L. Street. 2003. War and Film in America: Historical and Critical Essays. New York: McFarland. McPherson, James. 1990. “The Glory Story.” New Republic 202 (January 8, 1990): 22–3. McPherson, James. 2000. Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press. McPherson, James. 2014. The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionist and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. National Archives. 2017. “Black Soldiers in the Military during the Civil War.” National Archives, September 1, 2017. ­https://​­www​.­archives​.­gov​/­education​ /­lessons​/­blacks​-­civil​-­war. Perry, Michelle P. 1990. “Glory Director Edward Zwick Discusses Motivations Behind the Film.” The Tech Online. ­http://​­tech​.­mit​.­edu​/­V109​/­N60​/­zwick​.­60a​ .­html. “Response to the Riots.” Mr. Lincoln’s New York. h ­ ttp://​­www​.­mrlincolnandnewyork​ .­org​/­new​-­york​-­politics​/­response​-­to​-­riots​/. http://​­www​.­mrlincolnandnewyork​.­org ​/­new​-­york​-­politics​/­the​-­1863​-­draft​-­riots​/. [Cite discontinued.] Taylor, Marion, and Heather Lehr Wagner. 2004. Harriet Tubman: Antislavery Activist. New York: Chelsea House Publications. Wertz, Jay. 2009. “Looking back Fondly on Glory: 20 Years Later.” HistoryNet, March 26, 2009. ­https://​­www​.­historynet​.­com​/­looking​-­back​-­fondly​-­on​-­Glory​-­20 ​-­years​-­later​.­htm​.

Chapter 5

Gettysburg (1993) When Gettysburg premiered in 1993, Washington Post film reviewer Ken Ringle called it an “endless war spectacle,” finding it “long on historical shoot-’em-up and short on the reasons why” and expressed disappointment that such a film could be contemplated a mere four years after Glory redefined the genre of the Civil War film. For writer-director Ron Maxwell, who had spent fifteen years shopping his adaptation of Michael Shaara’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Killer Angels, making the film became almost an obsession. Maxwell even went so far as to sell his home in New York to finance work on the project until finally producer Ted Turner came to his aid. If he hadn’t written his adaptation on spec, Maxwell would have been an odd choice for both writer and director of such a film since his track record up to that point involved much less epic fare. He had only written and directed one film, a feature-length documentary on the Nicaraguan civil war, In the Land of the Poets, and directed a handful of teen-oriented or soap opera–style films, including Little Darlings (1980), The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia (1981), and Parent Trap II (1986). In his career to date, Maxwell has only written two films, Gettysburg and the prequel, Gods and Generals (2003), both steeped in Civil War lore. Two things finally came to Maxwell’s aid: Burns’s documentary on the Civil War aired on PBS to record-breaking audience levels, and Ted Turner loved the script, seeing in it something to draw audiences to his cable network TNT (Turner Network Television). He then bought both the project and Maxwell’s services. As with Gone with the Wind many years earlier, the team gave much consideration to casting just the right men for the parts of such hallowed heroes. For the pivotal role of Confederate general Robert E. Lee, Maxwell and Turner first courted Oscar winner William Hurt, then Tommy Lee

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Jones. Robert Duvall approached the producers himself, having researched the role and already sporting a legitimate Virginia accent. In the end, Martin Sheen won the role as he was an actor versatile in both television and film. This proved an important ability since originally Turner planned Gettysburg as a miniseries. Later, seeing the scale of the visuals Maxwell achieved during filming, Turner changed course and decided to finance a short theatrical release for the purpose of qualifying for Academy Award nomination. An actor known in both mediums became a smart choice. The producers filled other roles with equally strong and masculine men who could also be considered thinkers, such as Tom Berenger, Jeff Daniels, and Sam Elliott. Realizing the location would be as much a character as any person, Turner negotiated for some of the scenes to be filmed on the actual battlefield itself, an unprecedented National Park Service allowance, though strict federal regulations ruled out any scenes showing opposing fire or combat. In this way, Turner can be compared to David O. Selznick in terms of the way he too obsessed over every detail of the production in ways producers do not always do. The gamble paid off for both men when the film grossed nearly $11 million in theaters during the winter of 1993 and then earned over 34 million viewers when it aired on TNT in June 1994. Gettysburg opens with a credit sequence of sepia-toned photos of the actual soldiers involved that fade into photos of the actors who will play them, insinuating from the beginning that this film will bring a historical event to life. The opening scene involves Confederate spy Henry T. Harrison (Cooper Huckabee) reporting to Lieutenant General James Longstreet (Tom Berenger) that several units of Union cavalry are but two miles down the road. Longstreet reports to General Robert E. Lee (Sheen), who would rather wait for confirmation from his scout, Major General J. E. B. Stuart, but Stuart and his division rode too far ahead to keep contact with Longstreet. Together Lee and Longstreet decide the best strategy is to take the high ground before the Union army arrives. On the other side of the city, in the Union camp, Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain (Daniels) wakes up to the news that he will be receiving 120 new men who committed mutiny rather than fight further. He gives a speech that sets one of the themes of the film, explaining why men joined the Union army and why they fight in this conflict, not for the reasons of past conflicts but to be “an army out to set other men free” and for “the idea that we all have value.” At yet another location near the city, Brigadier General John Buford (Elliot) of the Union army spots some Confederate forces marching toward the city. Buford decides to fortify the town and calls for reinforcements. The following morning, July 1, 1863, both armies begin the engagement, with the Confederates pushing the Union army out of the city and to Cemetery Ridge, which will prove to their advantage. In the Confederate camp, Longstreet favors moving the men to the south of the city for a defensive strategy, but Lee orders Lieutenant General



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Richard S. Ewell (Tim Scott) to fight and take the Union’s position, but Ewell refuses to engage. The armies concentrate at their chosen positions for the remainder of the first day. Back in the Union camp, when Chamberlain is told about a wounded runaway slave in his camp, he has a second chance to solidify the film’s theme by saying, “The thing is, you cannot judge a race. Any man who judges by the group is a pea-wit. You take men one at a time. To me, there was never any difference.” Confederate major general George E. Pickett (Stephen Lang) arrives at the Confederate headquarters with reinforcements and is considered by Longstreet as their ranking strategist, though teasing ensues since Pickett graduated last in his class at West Point. At this time the film notes that Longstreet lost his three children to scarlet fever the previous Christmas, making him a more somber leader. That evening men in both camps play poker and talk trash about the other side, yet there is time for considering how they were all once on the same side. Pickett likens the conflict to what would happen if they all belonged to a gentlemen’s club and some members changed the rules, showing that resignation is an acceptable choice by the South. In the Union camp, Longstreet grieves over losing a friend on his side in battle and wonders about the fate of another who joined the Confederacy and was, he learned, even now across the ridge leading one of Pickett’s brigades. The second day of the Battle of Gettysburg dawns, and Colonel Strong Vincent (Maxwell Caulfield) takes his brigade to Little Round Top, with Chamberlain’s Twentieth Maine regiment serving as the crucial flank. Lee orders Longstreet to deploy two divisions to take the local hills, named Little Round Top and Big Round Top. The commander of one of those divisions, Major General John Bell Hood (Patrick Gorman), protests against a strategy that asks his men to attack the high ground, is told to do it anyway, and obeys. Lee muses about the similarities between the men of both armies and knows the English will never come in on the side of the Confederacy because the English have ended slavery. The next morning, as they prepare to attack, he is still nostalgic for when he last fought side by side with the men he is now attacking, remembering serving with George Pickett and his “old friend Ulysses Sam Grant.” On Little Round Top, Chamberlain and his men fight off the attacking Confederates but are dangerously close to running out of ammunition. Chamberlain orders them to charge in a right wheel down the slope using nothing but their bayonets and hand-to-hand combat. The attack successfully drives the Confederate assault back, and the Union flank holds the higher ground. That evening, Stuart finally arrives, and Lee reprimands him for being out of contact when they needed his scouting information. Once again in both camps talk turns to nostalgia and the great price war extracts in loss of the lives of friends. This is exemplified when Chamberlain reminds his brother,

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Lieutenant Thomas D. Chamberlain (C. Thomas Howell) to keep his distance during the battle or “it could be a hard day for Mother.” On the third and last day of the battle, July 3, Lee decides on yet another dangerously risky attack, on the center of the Union line. Once again, Longstreet questions a move that requires men to march a full mile across open ground toward men protected by a stone wall. Again, Lee ignores Longstreet. The strategy goes badly, yet when Pickett, commanding the third of three divisions assigned this task, asks if his men should begin their march, Longstreet only nods, unable or unwilling to give the order verbally. Only one of Pickett’s brigades, commanded by Brigadier General Lewis Armistead (Richard Jordan), makes it over the wall, only to be wounded and captured by Union troops. Confederates begin a chaotic retreat that Lee tries to quench by ordering Pickett to send his division back out, but he replies with the now famous phrase: “General Lee, I have no division,” an announcement that effectively ends the battle of Gettysburg as that evening Lee tells Longstreet that they will retreat. The film ends by rolling these statistics across the screen: “US deaths in WWI = 116,516, In WWII = 405,399, Korean War = 43,891, Vietnam = 58,167, Civil War = 625,511.” The ending credits detail the histories of all the major characters and end with the phrase “The decisive battle sought by Lee had ended in failure, but the spirit of the Southern army was far from broken, and the war would rage on for two more devastating years.” Since the final cut had a running time of four hours and eight minutes, theaters were limited to only two screenings of the show a day, so debuting at number ten on the weekly top ten box office list gave Turner bragging rights. When broadcast over two nights on TNT, Gettysburg earned the all-time highest rating for a dramatic film on cable television: more than twenty-three million people watched. The video and DVDs sold in the millions, but many critics found the film to be cotton candy for Confederate sympathizers. Gene Siskel described it as “bloated Southern propaganda” but praised several performances (Pengelly 2014). Writer Martin Pengelly saw the propaganda on both sides when he called the film “My Guilty Pleasure” in a piece for The Guardian nearly twenty years later: “It becomes clear that this is not propaganda for one side over another. It is propaganda for both. Daft propaganda, maybe. Cheap, certainly. But therein lies my love of the film” (Pengelly 2014).

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND Today the Battle of Gettysburg is known for two things: for being the three-day battle that became the bloodiest of the Civil War and for the speech made four and a half months later by a war-weary yet exhilarated President



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Abraham Lincoln. It is also frequently considered the turning point of the war and has been the focus of many “what-if” questions for historians and writers of historical fiction. Some historians point to events in the western theater as being equally as decisive toward an eventual Northern victory. So the controversy continues. At the beginning of the battle, Lee held a reputation for having “never yet left the enemy in command of the field,” but by the end, he would tender his resignation to Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America, a document Davis refused to accept. Likewise, though his army won the battle, General George Meade offered his resignation to President Lincoln in response to the number of casualties endured. In the beginning of July 1863, Gettysburg stood as a quiet Pennsylvania town with a population of 2,400, mostly farmers with some engaged in small factory work. Ten roads led into a town housing some 450 buildings, which included carriage manufacturers, shoemakers, and tanneries as well as banks, taverns, a college, and a finishing school for girls. On July 1, the city became a meeting engagement, the military term for when an army on the move, not prepared for battle, engages with an enemy at an unplanned location and/or time (Ward, Burns, and Burns 1994). Two years into the war, Lee knew he did not have the manpower or supply chain to wage war in the North, but he believed in the dual power of intimidation against the Union and morale boosting among his own men. He hoped that by bringing the carnage and destruction of the war to citizens of the Union, those citizens would demand their politicians sue for peace. He also knew that after all the damage wrought on Southern towns, inflicting the same on a Northern city would be a balm for his troops. Lee’s original plan called for attempting to reach Philadelphia and all the history that city represented to both sides of the conflict. As his Army of Northern Virginia moved in that direction, Union general Joseph Hooker followed far behind, wanting to be free to swing back to Washington, D.C., if that turned out to be Lee’s objective. Rather than engage Lee and his army in Pennsylvania, Hooker thought the better move would be to attack the Confederate capital at Richmond. Lincoln disagreed and replaced Hooker with General George Meade, who followed orders (Trudeau 2003). As Lee’s army moved into Northern territory, they caused the commotion they hoped to by paying for supplies they took with Confederate monies, which were naturally not considered legal tender, and seizing free black men and women and shipping them south into slavery. Lee’s scout, Major General J. E. B. Stuart, stayed so far ahead they had no idea of the proximity of the Union army until the division nearly ran into Brigadier General John Buford. However, Buford spotted the Confederates first and made the important strategic decision to fortify the town and call for reinforcements. Though statistics prove the Battle of Antietam the bloodiest day of the Civil War, the Battle of Gettysburg, because it ran three full days, became

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the bloodiest and most deadly. Due to a lack of good record keeping and the chaos caused by evacuations at the end of the war, Confederate casualties are still mere estimates. Recent calculations claim 23,231 casualties with 4,708 killed, 12,693 wounded, and 5,830 captured or missing. The Union kept better records and recorded casualties at 23,055 with 3,155 killed, 14,531 wounded, and 5,369 captured or missing (Busey and Martin 2005). Most died on the second day of fighting when the Union suffered 9,000 casualties and the Confederates 6,000. By the end of the third day, the wagon train of casualties that Lee carried home to the South was seventeen miles long and had to wait at the Potomac River for a week in order to see that they all had crossed. During that time, Meade chose not to attack the beleaguered enemy, a choice Lincoln derided and that helped him choose to eventually replace Meade with General Ulysses S. Grant, who was responsible for winning the war two years later. Reasons for the large casualties mostly revolve around the fact that their weapons were ahead of their tactics. Commanders on both sides still sent men shoulder to shoulder across open fields as they loaded their rifles while the other side fired directly at them from positions of cover. Brigadier General John Buford’s cavalry was able to hold out for so long against Heth’s larger infantry force because they were armed with breech-loading carbines, which had a much faster rate of fire than the typical muzzle loaders used by the infantry. Also, when Chamberlain and his men needed to defend the higher ground from the Confederate army though they had run out of ammunition, they used an old textbook maneuver, charging down the hill with bayonets, causing high casualties on both sides. The fact that Lee’s army won the first two days emboldened him to order the now infamous Pickett’s Charge, a mile of marching across an open field in the desperate hope of taking over Cemetery Ridge, held by the Union army with over 365 cannon. Only two men made it over the wall, one being the flag bearer, and both were taken prisoner. The rest were slaughtered, leading to Pickett’s famous response when Lee asked him to redeploy his division: “I have no division.” An example of how all these men once came from the same country, even the same military, comes when one learns that it was a small-town Illinois lawyer named Abraham Lincoln who submitted George Pickett’s name to secure his placement at West Point. Much of the heroism slathered on the men who survived Gettysburg on both sides, but mostly regarding the Confederates, came from the literary work of their wives and widows published for years after the war. For example, in 1913, La Salle Corbell Pickett published The Heart of a Soldier as Revealed in the Intimate Letters of Genl. George E. Pickett C.S.A. Due to his wife’s efforts, his reckless and ill-conceived charge became synonymous with heroism—and with her husband and her husband alone—despite the fact that two Confederate divisions charged up Cemetery Ridge that day: Pickett’s division on the southern half of the attacking force and a division



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commanded by Brigadier General James Johnston Pettigrew on the northern half plus elements of two more, under Major General Isaac R. Trimble. Two reasons are often cited for why their efforts have been forgotten. Well-off men from Virginia comprised most of Pickett’s division, while the others were populated by men of lesser standing from North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi. Also, apparently none of these men had writers for wives, and therefore their names are not enshrined in history (Thompson 1998). Some historians claim the Battle of Gettysburg changed the culture of death, though others claim that as the outcome of the entire Civil War. Before the war, a “good” death involved dying at home surrounded by family and being buried in a family plot on family-owned land. Then the war came and men died in droves miles away from home. While richer families could afford to have soldiers’ bodies brought home, most could not. This created a need to redefine a “good” death in letters written to families after their sons, husbands, fathers, and brothers had been killed. The story commanders spun in those letters that made such devastating deaths acceptable involved promising that the dead men had been ready to die for their cause and, perhaps more importantly, that they were deserving of salvation based on whatever religion they claimed (Faust 2008). This aftermath of battle is something few films ever cover, but for the citizens of Gettysburg, as after any battle, the first order of business became burying the thousands of bodies left rotting in their local fields. Usually, an army tries to take their dead away or bury them properly where they lay, but Lee had too many wounded to transport to waste wagon space on the dead, and Meade made himself too busy slowly following the retreating Confederates to take the customary time. This left the town surrounded by corpses in various states of decay that required hasty burials, often with no identification given, followed by even more hasty dis-interments and reburials as relatives came searching for their lost soldiers in hopes of bringing their bodies home. Hence, the governor of Pennsylvania hired men to buy land nearby and design a cemetery, once again disinter the dead, and rebury each man in a government-provided coffin in the new area (Wills 1992). Once this process was complete, a dedication seemed appropriate, and so the organizers hired famed orator Edward Everett to make a dedication speech expected to last two hours. President Lincoln’s invitation to the ceremony came second, but he arrived in Gettysburg and made the shorter speech (272 words) that lasted the longer time.

DEPICTION AND CULTURAL CONTEXT Being a historical film based on a novel of historical fiction, The Killer Angels, and not on primary documents, means there are two degrees of

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separation between the event and the film’s fictional representation of the event. It is also important to remember Angels won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1975, not the Pulitzer Prize for History. So the Battle of Gettysburg here turns into a bit of a game of phone tag where primary documents were consulted, creative writing was employed in the novel, and then a screenwriter added his own level of creativity. Yet the film is often presented as fact. As to the presentation of the battle scenes, most critics felt Maxwell did a fair job in terms of depicting the number of men involved, the style of warfare, the type of weapon, and the amount of carnage. Again, though, adherence to the novel veers a bit from the truth when it comes to whether Lee’s arrogance caused him to blunder so badly on the third day of the battle. Up to this point, Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia had been spectacularly successful despite having fewer men and materials to prosecute war than the Union army owned. Prior to Gettysburg, Lee’s men won two uneven and so unexpected victories, first at Fredericksburg (December 11–15, 1862) and then at Chancellorsville (April 30–May 6, 1863). Also, on the first two days of the Battle of Gettysburg, the Confederates had inflicted much damage on the Union troops. Lee had the right to believe his troops could continue to do so, which makes Pickett’s Charge seem far less arrogant and far more one of the kinds of risky gambles that had won Lee previous victories. There have been numerous books devoted to assessing blame for the Confederate defeat, including quoting Lee, who, as a general, should accepted blame: “With my present knowledge, & could I have foreseen that the attack on the last day would have failed to drive the enemy from his position, I should certainly have tried some other course. What the ultimate result would have been is not so clear to me.” When asked who should be blamed for the slaughter of his many men, Pickett later came to say, “I always thought the Yankees had something to do with it” (Reeves 2018). Yet this myth of the equality of heroism on both sides prevailed for most of the twentieth century. In pondering this question, historian David Blight found that this choice to consider sacrifice on the field of battle heroic no matter your side became central to the way the country healed in the postwar years. Rather than correcting the original sin of the United States, its acceptance of slavery at its birth, by pushing for civil rights, war-weary Americans on both sides opted instead to focus their attention on reuniting the country. For this, they had to find and concentrate on their shared similarities and shared experiences, something they apparently could not do in the lead-up to the war, and they now found a way to pursue the financial stability of a longer-lasting peace. In this way, respect for the shared trauma of battle brought the men of both sides back into the fold, and this myth of the heroism of battle became the one story of the war (Blight 2001). This myth allowed former Union soldiers to respect—and begin again to do business with—former Confederates.



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Finally, Robert E. Lee added to this goal of reunion when he took that oath of allegiance at the end of the war. For all the famed meticulousness Maxwell and Turner pledged toward realistically portraying the battle from the perspective of soldiers, they sacrificed a wider nuanced view encompassing the other players involved in the Battle of Gettysburg. While it is true that one film cannot tell every story, this film told only one—the one that had been told countless other times. This tends to make Gettysburg, though filmed near the beginning of the twenty-first century, seem more a throwback to the early twentieth. While one of the main issues with Gettysburg is the continued coddling of “Lost Cause” mythology, another is its lack of gender representation. In 116 credited characters in Gettysburg, not one is female, despite the fact that camp followers existed in large numbers on both sides of this conflict. Camp followers generally consisted of wives, children, and sometimes unconnected refugees who provided services the military did not supply, including cooking, laundering, nursing, and often selling sex. Also, if the army was stationed close to a city, as these armies were, local women would sometimes come out to write letters for illiterate troops, though they would not travel with the army when it moved on. For the Union soldiers, photographs show several Northern women who staffed the U.S. Sanitary Commission (created in 1861) to support sick and wounded soldiers present at Gettysburg. On the Confederate side of this conflict, the added element would be the enslaved men and women brought along to do such services for Southern soldiers; yet again, these characters do not appear in Gettysburg. Beyond camp followers and enslaved peoples, civilians of both genders and races served as spies, and war documents note several female soldiers disguised as men who fought (and died) for both sides at the battle. They remain nameless as they had no identification on them when they were wounded. Confederate cousins Mary and Mollie Bell, who served under General Jubal A. Early, survived battles at Gettysburg, Chancellorsville, and Spotsylvania Courthouse. When their true identities were discovered in 1864, they were sent to a Confederate prison for their efforts. Finally, all wars create civilian casualties, and this one is famous for leaving only one: the twenty-year-old Jennie Wade, the only civilian killed during the battle, hit by a stray bullet that passed through her kitchen door while she was making bread on the last day of battle (Blanton 2003). Oddly, Maxwell took pride in this omission, as if refusing to alter Shaara’s book would somehow make the film more historically valid. “There are no women in this,” he said in interviews during production. “No romantic story line. I refused to add one. It’s a book about men and battle. You take the miniseries North and South and Blue and Gray—they were cartoon visions of the Civil War. They were just excuses to do a soap opera. I said there is no sense doing this unless you keep the integrity of the book”

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(McGuire 1992). In dismissing a “romantic story line,” Maxwell falls into the mistake of believing that romance is the only story line that can involve a female character. Again, oddly, Maxwell is wrong when he says there are no women in the book. There are some women who briefly cross paths with the soldiers, and such characters offer a glimpse of the real world the men were fighting to save. Likewise, the memory of lost wives and wives left behind and known only through letters haunts several male characters. As to the film’s contribution to Lost Cause mythology, Gettysburg belongs to an earlier century as well. While in serving as both writer and director Maxwell claimed he was not taking sides, rather he was illustrating the horrors of war, the closing credits end with praise not for the spirit and strength of both armies but rather only for that of the Southern army. “The decisive battle sought by Lee had ended in failure, but the spirit of the Southern army was far from broken, and the war would rage on for two more devastating years.” By omitting any mention of how the Union’s success here is often counted as the fuel that turned them into winners, especially after Grant took over, Maxwell demonstrates his own bias toward the fictional romantic myth of the Confederacy. Even the official trailer released by Turner Pictures used words like “gentlemen” when showing a close-up of Southern general Pickett. The narration focused on how the men came from all over the United States, creating a war of neighbor against neighbor, and highlighted this moment in dialogue when a Confederate salutes a Union soldier and says, “See you in hell, Billy Yank,” and the Union soldier responds, “See you in hell, Johnny Reb.” Further narration underscored the idea by using the phrase, “Fate made them soldiers. War made them brothers. Courage made them heroes.” Again, this kind of exchange, underscored by the rousing soundtrack written by Randy Edelman, makes the men equal in their heroism and sacrifice. Finally, the trailer ends with Lee asking, “Does it matter after all who wins? Was that really ever the question?” It seems absurd that such a question could have been relevant in the early 1990s where the vestiges of the institution of slavery and the resistance to the civil rights movement had stalled progress in the South to the point that Virginia elected its first African American governor, Douglas Wilder, three years before the film premiered. Carol Moseley Braun became the first African American woman elected to the U.S. Senate in 1992 in California where, that same year, the Los Angeles riots raged after the acquittal of four white police officers who had beaten Rodney King. In response, historians wrote many op-ed pieces about the continued interracial strife in the United States, explaining that Americans had yet to come to terms with their heritage of slavery and accept that slavery was the major cause of the war, a conclusion many Southerners still chose to ignore despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Historians demonstrate their statements by showing how each Southern state that seceded wrote its own new constitution in which it enshrined the institution of slavery.



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Further evidence that many people of their day knew slavery caused the war comes from the oath of allegiance Robert E. Lee took at the end of the war. He solemnly swore that he would henceforth “support, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States and the Union of the states thereunder” and “abide by and faithfully support all laws and ­proclamations which have been made during the existing rebellion with reference to the emancipation of slaves” (Robertson 2018). Finally, when Grant himself talked about defeated enemy soldiers who fought hard for their cause, he said, “That cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse” (Grant 2017). Another argument that kept falling to the wayside in Gettysburg was the reminder that men in the Confederate army had committed two cardinal sins against the United States. First, they had committed treason by taking up arms against their country. Some Southern historians argue that Lee did what he had to do when Virginia seceded and he explained, “Virginia, in withdrawing herself from the United States, carried me along as a citizen of Virginia, and her laws and her acts were binding on me.” But the U.S. government, in the form of a federal grand jury in Norfolk, Virginia, had in fact indicted Robert E. Lee for treason on June 7, 1865. Likewise, legal scholars of the time, including Salmon Chase, chief justice of the Supreme Court, called out all Confederate leaders for committing treason, saying, “There is the Constitution, and it is so plain that it can’t be made plainer.” Before the war, Lee himself had written to his son about the seriousness of the choice he faced: “Secession is nothing but revolution. The framers of our Constitution never exhausted so much labor, wisdom, and forbearance in its formation, and surrounded it with so many guards and securities, if it was intended to be broken by every member of the Confederacy at will” (Reeves 2018). The second cardinal sin the Confederates made was that they had engaged in a war to continue the ownership of other human beings, a stand as far from the American promise of all men being created equal as could be. Finally, there are some small incorrect ideas scattered throughout the film. At one point, in speaking to the English envoy Arthur Fremantle. whom they hope will suggest England support the Confederacy, Longstreet says, “You English had your own civil war, didn’t you?” At this time, and for nearly a hundred years after, Southerners did not consider this as a civil war, since a civil war is a conflict among factions within one country. Southern politicians framed the conflict as being between two distinct nations. They insisted the Constitution gave them the right to exit the United States when they chose, so the term “civil war” offended them. Most Southerners referred to fighting either a “war between the states” or a “war of secession.” Though it is possible a man as well informed as Longstreet knew that the Union newspapers called it a civil war, it is unlikely he would ever have chosen the phrase for himself.

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In the end, while Gettysburg hued as closely as it could to actual battlefield accounts, this proved both an attribute and a detriment to the film, which creaks a bit as it ages. While more recent films, television, and other media are sometimes criticized for including stories about women and other underrepresented voices, academics always knew such people populated history. Historians considered previous media to be the creators of the myth that such people did not exist. Being made in 1993, near the end of the ­century that birthed the Lost Cause mythology, Gettysburg could have righted that course, but it did not. Had it been named, as originally intended, after the novel The Killer Angels, perhaps the audience would have understood it to be a fictional account of the battle. But changing the film’s name to Gettysburg also changed the promise the film made. Perhaps as new generations arise that are further and further away from connection to the conflict, this veneer of romance will read as less and less believable and the film will cease to rank so high on lists of favorites.

FURTHER READING Barrett, Jenny. 2009. Shooting the Civil War. London: I. B. Tauris. Blanton, DeAnne. 2003. They Fought Like Demons: Women Soldiers in the American Civil War. New York: Vintage. Blight, David W. 2001. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, MA: Belknap of Harvard University Press. Busey, John W., and David G. Martin. 2005. Regimental Strengths and Losses at Gettysburg. East Windsor, NJ: Longstreet House. Faust, Drew Gilpin. 2008. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. New York: Knopf. Grant, Ulysses S. 2017. The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant: The Complete Annotated Edition. Cambridge, MA: Belknap of Harvard University Press. McGuire, Patrick. 1992. “Among the Angels: Director Conjures Ghosts of Longstreet, Lee at Gettysburg.” The Baltimore Sun, August 12, 1992. ­https://​­www​ .­baltimoresun​.­com​/­news​/­bs​-­xpm​-­1992​-­08​-­12​-­1992225189​-­story​.­html. Pengelly, Martin. 2014. “My Guilty Pleasure: Gettysburg.” Guardian, March 21, 2014. ­https://​­www​.­theguardian​.­com​/­film​/­filmblog​/­2014​/­mar​/­21​/­my​-­guilty​-­pleasure ​-­gettysburg​-­jeff​-­daniels​-­civil​-­war. Pickett, La Salle Corbell. 1913. The Heart of a Soldier as Revealed in the Intimate Letters of Genl. George E. Pickett C.S.A. New York: Seth Moyle. Reeves, John. 2018. The Lost Indictment of Robert E. Lee. Lanham, MA: Rowman & Littlefield. Robertson, James I. 2018. Robert E. Lee: A Reference Guide to His Life and Works. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Shaara, Michael. 1974. The Killer Angels. Philadelphia, PA: Random House. Thompson, Bob. 1998. “The Legend of Pickett’s Charge.” Washington Post, June 28, 1998. ­https://​­www​.­washingtonpost​.­com​/­archive​/­lifestyle​/­magazine​/­1998​/­06​/­28​



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/­the​-­legend​-­of​-­picketts​-­charge​/­8b9b63a7​-­5585​-­401e​-­93df​-­7164aa8fc1f7​/?­utm​ _term​=​.­80c009d38b2d. Trudeau, Noah Andre. 2003. Gettysburg: A Testing of Courage. New York: HarperCollins. Ward, Geoffrey C., Ken Burns, and Ric Burns. 1994. The Civil War. New York: Vintage. Wills, Brian. 2006. Gone with the Glory: The History of the Civil War in Cinema. New York: Littlefield Publishers. Wills, Gary. 1992. Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Chapter 6

Andersonville (1996) Andersonville tells the story of Camp Sumter, better known as Andersonville Prison. Not surprisingly, few Civil War movies explore the prisoner-of-war experience, probably because the topic is so unremittingly unpleasant. Set in 1864, the film is grimly unpitying, and while it contains historical inaccuracies, it gets closer to Civil War prison camp realities than any film before or after. Unlike most of the movies in this volume, Andersonville was a made-for-television production. It originally aired on two successive nights in two-hour segments before being cut down to a two-and-a-half-hour-long movie. Since the two-and-a-half-hour movie is widely available, unlike the four-hour version, this chapter deals with the contents of the former, not the latter. Self-described Civil War buff Ted Turner funded the original miniseries, the production of which fell between his Civil War blockbusters Gettysburg (1993) and Gods and Generals (2003). Turner made a significant financial investment in the film, from paying for huge, complicated sets with thousands of historically accurate extras to hiring John Frankenheimer to direct. A critically successful director, Frankenheimer worked on a number of box office blockbusters before Andersonville, including Bird Man of Alcatraz (1962), The Manchurian Candidate (1962), and The French Connection II (1975). The director also had significant experience with television movies and miniseries, winning four Emmy Awards in the 1990s. David Rintels wrote the film’s script and acted as one of the film’s producers. Primarily a television movie and miniseries writer, Rintels was Turner’s pick for the project because he was a prodigious researcher. Rintels loosely based his script on John Ransom’s Andersonville Diary (1881) as well as MacKinlay Kantor’s 1955 novel Andersonville. The latter won the 1956

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Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and shaped the popular imagination’s understanding of Civil War prison camps for decades, making it a required foundational text for any popular representation of the prison camp. Like Rintels, Kantor loosely based his novel on a prison camp memoir, though he used John McElroy’s Andersonville: The Story of Rebel Military Prisons (1879). The novel is uncredited as a source for the 1996 film, probably because in the late 1950s Kantor sold the film rights to a major Hollywood studio (which did nothing with it). Andersonville features no big-name actors, unless one counts a minor role by William H. Macy, who would shoot to stardom ten years later after his starring role in Fargo (1996). Notable for his role in Glory (1989) as Colonel James Montgomery, Cliff DeYoung plays Sergeant John Gleason, leader of the tunnel diggers. Character actor and Academy Award nominee Frederick Forest plays Sergeant McSpadden, while Jarrod Emick played the film’s nominal lead actor, Josiah. Primarily a theater and musical actor, Emick is best known for his award-winning work in the Broadway production of Damn Yankees (1994). William Sanderson, notable for his work on The Bob Newhart Show and Bladerunner, plays Munn, a prisoner who belongs to the Raiders, a nefarious prison camp gang. Frankenheimer began filming on location in 1994 on a Georgia farm not far from what is now the Andersonville National Historic Site. The film company constructed a nine-acre camp, taking pains to accurately reproduce the stockade walls, the officer quarter, the stream that ran through the camp, and the prisoners’ makeshift tents. It rained during filming, adding to the finished product’s verisimilitude by turning the film camp into a muddy quagmire that exhausted actors and crew. Turner also provided funds for over four thousand extras, many of them Civil War reenactors, to fill in the camp, though some scenes still looked underpopulated so they used an additional three thousand cardboard “prisoners” in the distant background. Frankenheimer had to undertake a costly reshoot of many of the trial scenes when several reels of film were lost in transit from Georgia to Los Angeles, but the sets were rebuilt so exactly it’s impossible to tell which scenes are original and which are reshoots in the finished product. The film opens at the Cold Harbor Battle, June 1, 1864, where a group of Massachusetts soldiers are taken prisoner. The men are separated into enlisted and officers, and the enlisted men are loaded onto the train. The company captain puts Sergeant McSpadden (Frederick Forest) in charge, telling him to “take care of the boys.” On the train they’re so crowded they must stand. The exhausted men arrive at a prison camp, where Captain Henry Wirz (Jan Triska) tells them they’re in Andersonville. Collins (Frederick Coffin), the leader of the Raiders, and his second in command, Munn (William Sanderson), offer to show the new prisoners around. A ragged prisoner steps forward. Josiah (Jarrod Emick) and the Massachusetts men discover the ragged man is their old comrade Dick Potter (Gregory Sporleder),



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who they haven’t seen since Antietam. Potter explains that the Raiders run the prison, not the “Rebs.” In a series of scenes, we see a group of men all chained to a massive iron ball that they have to drag around the camp, a stream so polluted it’s not drinkable, and two young guards shooting a man who stepped over the “dead line,” a space near the prison walls. Confederate colonel Chandler (Macy) comes to inspect the camp and speaks briefly with Wirz about the camp’s horrifying conditions. Meanwhile the Massachusetts men discover a company of men digging an escape tunnel. The two groups agree to work together on the tunnel. The film shifts to the Raiders, who appear to have plenty to eat and drink. Their leader, Collins, tells them they’re going to rob the day’s new prisoners. In the attack, Munn kills Potter and steals another man’s banjo. The next day Munn taunts Tyce (Justin Henry) and Martin with the banjo. Tyce fights a huge Raider named Georgie and loses when the Raiders cheat. Sergeant Gleason tells the Massachusetts men there will be no more fighting because they should save their strength for tunneling. The day comes when the tunnel is complete and an escape is planned. In a nighttime scene, men emerge from a hole in the ground outside the prison walls. One by one they go. The guards see the last man and shoot him. The dogs are loosed, and Confederates on horses give chase. Nearly all the men are recaptured and put in stocks. Several of the men die in the stocks and the rest are returned to the camp. Soon after, the Raiders set out to attack the newest batch of prisoners and the prisoners attack the Raiders. After the Raiders’ defeat, the men decide to put the Raiders on trial. At the trial, a parade of men testify to the Raiders’ predations. The jury finds the Raiders guilty and orders them hanged. After the execution, life in the prison camp gets no worse. Starvation and disease take their toll as the camp continues to fill with new prisoners. Wirz orders the prisoners assembled. A Confederate colonel tells the men if they join the Confederate army they’ll get a cash bounty and a farm after the war. The camera shows a small group of black soldiers react to this news with slumped shoulders, but the prisoners reject the offer and march away. As the movie comes to a close, prisoners continue to die. Bodies are piled into a wagon; they look like skeletons with skin. In the film’s last scene, the men file away as the Confederate flag is taken down. The scene fades to the Andersonville cemetery. An end card states the men weren’t exchanged. Instead they were taken to other prisons, where they remained until the war’s end. Wirz, the viewer is told, was the only Confederate to be tried and executed for war crimes. The four-hour miniseries aired on Sunday and Monday nights in March 1996 on Ted Turner’s TNT network. Audience and critical response was mixed. Los Angeles Times film critic Howard Rosenberg credited photography director Ric Waite and production designer Michael Hanan for creating a film of “stunning visual potency.” Rosenberg also called the movie

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“slow” and “grim” (Rosenberg 1996). Critics agreed with Rosenberg that Andersonville was depressing, though why they thought a movie about the deadliest prison camp in the Civil War would be otherwise is anyone’s guess. Nearly everyone agreed that the four-hour miniseries, more so than the cutdown movie, suffered from pacing problems, particularly as the viewer becomes desensitized to the prisoners’ relentless suffering. Nonetheless, the miniseries was nominated for Emmys in Art Direction, Cinematography, Miniseries, Costume Design, Single Camera Editing, and Sound Mixing. Frankenheimer won an Emmy for Best Direction of a Miniseries or Special. Predictably, some Civil War movie fans didn’t like the film because it was insufficiently sympathetic to the Confederate point of view. Neo-­ Confederate viewers, who surely expected a different film from Georgian Ted Turner, pointed out Confederate soldiers in Union prison camps suffered as greatly as Union soldiers in Andersonville. On the whole though, Andersonville fairs well with Civil War movie fans who enjoy (or at least tolerate) a Northern point of view. Online lists of “Best Civil War Movies” that include the notably pro-Confederate Ride with the Devil (1999) do not include Andersonville and vice versa, suggesting the politically fraught nature of Civil War films. Movie rating websites give Andersonville relatively high ratings, suggesting that while it may not be the best Civil War film ever made, it was far better than a television movie had to be.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND By the end of the war, 211,000 Union soldiers and 464,000 soldiers in total had been captured by the opposing army. Of them 410,000 soldiers were held in prison camps—215,000 held by the Union and 195,000 held by the Confederacy. The great bulk of these prisoners were held in the second half of the war, after parole and exchange systems broke down. When the Civil War began, both sides of the conflict thought the fighting would be over in a matter of weeks. Certainly the U.S. military had few institutions in place to meet the needs of a prolonged conflict. In the first months of the war, both armies paroled captured combatants after the men promised not to return to combat. The parole system meant neither side had to shoulder the immense economic and logistical burdens of housing, feeding, and clothing prisoners in a war that would have 3.8 million combatants. Within months both sides shifted from parole to exchange. Each side released prisoners and allowed them to return to their regiments once the opponent released a man of the same rank. The Union had resisted exchanges, fearing a system governed by the rules of war might suggest the federal government recognized the Confederacy as a legitimate government. The sheer numbers of Union soldiers captured by the Confederates at the First Battle of Bull Run (July 21, 1861) caused a public outcry that forced



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a change in policy. In December 1861, Congress passed a joint resolution asking President Abraham Lincoln to formalize and systematize prisoner exchanges. Two months later, Union and Confederate officials met, but talks broke down. The near cessation of fighting that winter meant that prisons and prison camps gradually emptied as the two sides informally exchanged prisoners. The resumption of fighting in the summer of 1862 pushed both sides back to the negotiating table. Major General John Dix and General Daniel H. Hill met with Confederate officials in Virginia in July 1862 and agreed on equivalents for captured officers and enlisted men. For example, one army colonel was worth fifteen privates. The “Dixon-Hill Cartel” called for an equal exchange (taking into account equivalents) of prisoners until one side or the other had no prisoners left. The balance of leftover prisoners would be paroled and not be allowed to return to their regiments (McPherson 1988). By mid-1863, prisoner exchanges based on the Dix-Hill Cartel began to break down. In response to the Union army’s organization of regiments of black soldiers, the Confederate Congress issued a resolution on May 20, 1863, that promised dire consequences. Captured officers of “colored troops” would be executed and black soldiers tried as insurrectionists and hanged or sold into slavery. The Confederacy’s near hysterical response to black soldiers alone suggests the primacy of slavery to the Southern cause. President Lincoln responded with Order 252, suspending prisoner exchanges until such time as the Confederacy honored the rules of war with regards to all soldiers, not just the white ones. Lincoln called the Confederate threats to black soldiers “barbarism” and promised that the Union would execute one Confederate prisoner for each Union soldier executed by the Confederacy. He also promised that for each black soldier enslaved “a Rebel soldier shall be placed at hard labor” until the Union soldier was released or treated in a manner in accordance with military law (Neely 1999). The Confederacy backed down on some of their threats, but they refused to exchange black soldiers, insisting most of them were escaped slaves who should be returned to their masters. The mistreatment of black military prisoners became a major stumbling block to ongoing prisoner exchanges for the rest of the war. It was that conflict, not General Ulysses S. Grant’s personal wishes, that ended prisoner exchanges, though countless popular sources hold Grant responsible for the Confederate inability to properly care for mounting numbers of Union prisoners. Prisoner exchanges ended well before Grant took charge of the Army of the Potomac in May 1864. Confederate officials did ask Union general Benjamin Butler, who was stationed in New Orleans, to act as intermediary in talks to resume the Dix-Hill Cartel in 1864. Grant and other Union generals believed prisoner exchanges would prolong the war. Army officials believed exchanged Union soldiers would go home but exchanged Confederate soldiers would return to the war. Simply put, the Union came to believe that exchanging prisoners would benefit

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the Confederacy and lengthen the war. In addition to this theory, the Confederacy remained obdurate about its treatment of black military prisoners (Simpson 2000). When the war began, both the Union and Confederacy housed prisoners of war in existing prisons and jails, and then, as prisoner numbers mounted, in converted warehouses. The Union originally kept prisoners of war and captured spies, including the notorious Confederate spy Rose Greenhow and the Lincoln assassination conspirators, in the Old Capitol Prison. Andersonville camp commander Henry Wirz would be held and hanged in the Old Capitol Prison. The building began as a hotel in 1800 before becoming a boarding house for congressmen. When the British burned the Capitol building in the summer of 1814, Congress rebuilt the hotel/boarding house to serve as a temporary capitol, thus the building’s name. Five years later, Congress returned to the original capitol, and the Old Capitol again became a boarding house. At the start of the war, the federal government purchased the building and repurposed it as a prison (Blackman 2005). At first the Old Capitol Prison sufficed for Union needs because regular prisoner exchanges kept the numbers of prisoners to a manageable minimum. Indeed, by mid1862, both Union and Confederate prisoner-of-war camps and prisons were nearly empty. By mid-1863, after the collapse of the Dix-Hill Cartel, both sides committed to building camps specifically for prisoners of war. While Andersonville is by far the most infamous Civil War prison camp, there were over two hundred military prisons in all, some of them huge and no better than cattle pens, some former jails in small towns, and everything in between. Sometimes described as “The North’s Andersonville,” Camp Douglas was the largest of the Civil War prison camps. Situated south of Chicago, Camp Douglas opened as a permanent prison camp in January 1863. It quickly became overcrowded and deadly for prisoners. Historians put the death toll for Douglas somewhere between 5,000 and 6,000, though the official number is 4,454, resulting in a 17 percent mortality rate (Keller 2015). Perhaps the most notorious of the Union prison camps was Elmira Prison. Built in upstate New York, Elmira operated from June 1864 to July 1865. Nicknamed “Hellmira,” the camp held just over twelve thousand prisoners. Approximately one-quarter of the camp’s prisoners died from malnutrition, complicated by a New York winter where temperatures were often below zero. Prisoners also had little or no medical care and died of all the diseases that crowding, poor sanitation, and starvation can cause (Horigan 2002). In that, Elmira was not unique. Prison camps in the North and South had little or no formal medical care for prisoners, in part because qualified doctors and nurses were busy with the war. The Confederacy struggled as much or more than the Union with the problem of prisoners of war. During the war’s first year, the Confederacy used converted tobacco warehouses like Libby Prison and Castle Thunder.



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Mounting prisoner numbers forced officials to transform Belle Island, in the James River, into a massive open-air prison every bit as brutal and deadly as Andersonville. Intended for three thousand prisoners, Belle Island eventually held over ten thousand men. The only buildings on the island were for officer and guard quarters, so prisoners were left exposed to the rain and snow of Virginia winters. Union cavalry colonel Louis Cesnola wrote about the horror of Belle Island after his parole in early 1864. Taken prisoner after his horse collapsed atop him in one of the battles of the Gettysburg Campaign, Cesnola found himself in Libby Prison. Because of his rank, Libby’s commanding officer put Cesnola in charge of distributing goods donated by Northerners to the enlisted men imprisoned on Belle Island. Cesnola’s account of his incarceration paints a vivid picture of the increasingly difficult conditions inside Libby Prison, but Cesnola discovered it was many times worse out on Belle Island. During the winter of 1863, dozens of men froze to death while they slept (Lamphier 2018). Belle Island prisoners were moved to Andersonville in early 1864. One thousand of the twenty thousand prisoners died en route, and most of the survivors weighed less than a hundred pounds when they arrived in Georgia (Davis 2006). Andersonville remains the best-known and most notorious of the Civil War prisoner-of-war camps. Officially named Camp Sumter, the prison lay to the east of Andersonville, Georgia, hence its better-known name. Opened in February 1864, the camp was expanded from 16.5 to 26.5 acres in June 1864. At its height, the camp contained four times more men than its listed capacity, stretching the already inadequate water and food supplies to starvation levels. Sanitation, never one of the camp’s strengths, complicated an already difficult situation. Of the forty-five thousand men held at the camp, thirteen thousand would die of sanitation- and starvation-related diseases (Cloyd 2010). Like many other Civil War camps, Andersonville was really no more than a large open area surrounded by a fifteen-foot wooden stockade. There were no barracks, and prisoners were not provided with tents. A nineteenfoot-wide perimeter around the inside of the wall, called “the deadline,” kept prisoners from storming the none-too-sturdy camp walls. Prisoners who stepped inside the line were shot dead by guards in irregularly spaced “pigeon roosts.” From the beginning, prisoners were underfed because by 1864 the Confederacy was struggling to feed its soldiers, and civilians and had little left over for prisoners of war. The creek that ran through camp, meant as a water source, was polluted by latrine overflows and men washing in it and became dangerous to drink from. Dysentery and diarrhea, both caused from contaminated drinking water, and vitamin C deficiency (scurvy) killed men, as did gangrene and hookworm, a parasitic roundworm that spread when the men walked barefoot through areas contaminated with human feces (Drisdelle 2010). Prisoners were largely left to their own devices inside the camp. Prisoners who made friends and social networks were more likely to live than

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lone prisoners (Costa 2007). The most infamous of these social networks was the Andersonville Raiders, a group that robbed and terrorized fellow prisoners. The Raiders particularly targeted new prisoners, who generally had better clothes and more personal goods worth stealing than longtime Andersonville inmates. Six “chieftains” led the Raiders, and each chieftain ran his own Raider subgroup. Prisoners organized against the Raiders from the beginning. Social groups called platoons or squadrons had code names, and a member under attack or who saw an attack would call out the name so the others would know to come help. Swiss-born captain Henry Wirz commanded the prison camp for the entirety of its existence. He began the war as a thirty-seven-year-old private and was wounded, either in the Battle of Seven Pines or in a stagecoach accident after the battle. Having lost the use of his right arm, Private Wirz was promoted to captain by the Confederate army and assigned to General John Winder, the man in charge of Confederate prisoner-of-war camps. Wirz worked with Winder in Richmond until late 1863, when President Jefferson Davis sent the Swiss-born Wirz to England and France to deliver letters to Confederate diplomats (Singer 2019). In early 1864, Winder chose Wirz, recently returned from Europe, to oversee the construction and command of Camp Sumter. The camp opened in late February 1864 and quickly filled to capacity. Wirz never had enough guards to do more than hold the prison perimeter, so Union prisoners were largely left to their own devices. Defense against the Raiders regularized after Wirz allowed prisoners to form the Regulators, an informal police force, to stop Raider attacks. Wirz then empowered the Regulators to arrest and punish Raiders. A number of men associated with the Raiders were tried, found guilty, and sentenced to terms in the stocks and other nonlethal punishments. In late June, the Regulators put the six Raider chieftains on trial and found them guilty of murder and other crimes. On July 11, the six men were hanged from a gallows other prisoners had built that morning (Futch 1968). The execution of Raiders leaders ended the prison gang’s brief term of power. Eleven days after the Raider hangings, General Sherman captured Atlanta on his “March to the Sea.” Confederate leaders, alarmed at the Union army’s proximity to the camp, moved the prisoners in September and early October 1864. The men were told they were being paroled to keep them from escaping or otherwise resisting their continued imprisonment. Ten thousand prisoners went to the forty-two-acre Camp Lawton outside Millen, Georgia, but six weeks later those prisoners were again evacuated as Sherman commenced his march through Georgia. Eighteen thousand prisoners went to the 23.5-acre Florence Stockade near Florence, South Carolina. Only the weakest Union soldiers remained at Andersonville on the principle that they would not survive the move. As Sherman left, he sent General Stoneman and seven hundred cavalry soldiers toward Andersonville to liberate the camp.



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WHY DIDN’T SHERMAN LIBERATE ANDERSONVILLE? General William T. Sherman has been much criticized for his failure to liberate Andersonville Prison on his 1864 “March to the Sea.” After all, Andersonville lay only 126 miles south of Atlanta, and Sherman marched southeast on his way to Savannah, Georgia. As part of Sherman’s army, Major General Osterhaus’s XV Corps, consisting of four divisions and accompanied by General Kilpatrick’s cavalry, came within sixty miles of the notorious prison camp when they swept past Macon. Rather than send the full strength of the XV Corps or even one of the corps’ four divisions to liberate the camp, Sherman sent Lieutenant Colonel Stoneman and one cavalry regiment to destroy Confederate general John Hood’s supply lines and, if possible, proceed to Andersonville. Confederates discovered the cavalry advance before it got past Macon and captured Stoneman and his aide-de-camp, Miles Keogh. Having lost their lieutenant colonel, the Fifth Indiana Cavalry beat a hasty retreat back to the XV Corps main body. That’s as close as the Union army came to the prison camp until the war ended the following spring. Sherman had several reasons for his rather halfhearted attempt to liberate Andersonville. Intent on marching to the Georgia coast, Sherman had no desire to shift any significant number of regiments or divisions away from the army’s southeasterly march. The Confederates in Georgia had proved an aggressive foe, and the Union general could ill afford to split his army. The Union army high command quite correctly believed victory hinged on Sherman’s success in the summer of 1864. To that end, Sherman also didn’t need thousands of sick prisoners slowing down his army. Critics of Sherman’s failure to liberate Andersonville forget Confederates had moved the vast majority of Andersonville prisoners to other prison camps as Sherman’s army approached Atlanta. While it’s easy in hindsight to shame Sherman for callously ignoring the plight of thirty thousand desperate Union prisoners, the reality was that the general’s job was not ending the suffering of captured soldiers but ending the war once and for all.

Stoneman was captured and held as a prisoner of war for three months. When the Union army liberated Andersonville in the spring of 1865, only a small percentage of the camp’s once thirty thousand–strong population remained (Davis 2006). Officers of the Fourth U.S. him to Washington, D.C., where he was held at the Old Capitol Prison. A military commission tried Wirz for conspiring to harm Union prisoners. General John Winder’s nephew Richard Winder, who’d been in charge of the prison’s construction, and others were named in the conspiracy charge, but only Wirz stood trial. He was accused of running an “unwholesome” prison camp as well as thirteen acts of cruelty and murder, including personally killing prisoners, ordering guards to kill prisoners, confining prisoners to stocks, and ordering prisoners attacked with dogs. Over 150 men gave evidence against Wirz, many of them former prisoners. In November 1865, the military commission found Wirz guilty of conspiracy

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and eleven of the thirteen counts of personal cruelty and sentenced him to die. The former commander of Andersonville was hanged inside the Old Capitol Prison on November 10, 1865. His neck failed to snap, and the two hundred spectators had to watch him struggle as he slowly strangled (Cloyd 2010). He was buried at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Washington, D.C., where his grave marker calls him a hero and martyr.

DEPICTION AND CULTURAL CONTEXT Andersonville doesn’t make many fatal errors of historical accuracy, though like all movies it leaves out some details and gets others wrong, though usually in the service of telling a manageable story. For example, Andersonville had a camp hospital, though it’s never shown in the film. The hospital stood outside the stockade, and only prisoners too ill to escape were admitted. As prison demands outstripped the tiny hospital’s capacity, Wirz ordered prisoners to construct additional hospital sheds. The jobs were considered plum assignments because they got men outside the prison walls and away from the camp’s fetid conditions. The men who built the hospital additions had to promise not to attempt escape, and apparently they kept their word (Skoch 2007). In June 1864, the Confederate army’s surgeon general ordered established an additional hospital at the camp, this one to treat Southern soldiers. Confederates suffered from many of the same diseases as Union prisoners, including gangrene, scurvy, and dysentery, which the medical corps erroneously thought was caused by eating coarse ground cornmeal. Dysentery was really a by-product of scurvy, hookworm, and contaminated water (Devine 2017). The movie also suggests the men had no source of drinking water but for the polluted creek and rainwater, but that’s not the case. Within weeks of the camp’s opening, prisoners discovered that if they dug down eighteen feet they’d find relatively clean water. Prisoner and sergeant Clark Thorp described the process in his memoir. “The soil was sandy and apt to cave so that it was necessary to dig the well considerably wider at the top so that it would prevent caving in. The means for removing the earth were generally a pair of pants legs tied at the bottom and were hauled up with ropes made from strips of cloth, blankets, etc.” (Skoch 2007). They may also have gotten the idea for tunneling out of Andersonville from their well-digging experience. As one critic pointed out, the film makes a basic logic mistake when in one scene it shows men laboriously wringing rainwater out of clothing while buckets and basins sit upturned and ignored behind them. It would have been more sensible to set out the containers to catch rain than to soak and wring out dirty clothes. The film also scrupulously avoids any portrayal of food supply and sanitation realities. This is not to say Frankenheimer needed to show prisoners



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going to the bathroom, but that many men crowded into one place would have required bathroom facilities and the film might have shown them. Nor does Andersonville show the prisoners being fed, except for one scene where Wirz taunts the men with bread and doesn’t give them any. In reality the men were fed once a day, at 4:00 p.m., with raw and cooked food disbursed on alternate days. Ration distribution was the high point of most prisoners’ day, particularly if they had some wood and could build a fire to warm up or cook their food. Wood was in short supply inside the camp, but there was a “wood squad,” consisting of one man for every group of thirty. Wood squads were allowed to leave the camp and gather wood from the surrounding forest. Which, as ex-prisoner Henry Harmon described, wasn’t as helpful as it might seem. “As the wood that could be picked up (no axes were allowed) had been pretty well cleaned up near the prison, we were obliged to go over a mile before finding any. The piece of wood that one man in our enfeebled condition could carry that distance would be small indeed. The idea of having a fire to get warm by was preposterous. Most of the time we had none to cook with” (Harmon 1996). In one of the film’s early scenes, the captured Massachusetts men enter Andersonville and almost immediately are met by Munn, a weasel-faced Raider who tries to lure them with promises of food and good places to sleep. A bone-thin blond man steps forward to warn the Massachusetts men away and seems surprised when the men do not immediately recognize him. It’s Dick Potter, and he’s been in the camp since he was captured at Antietam, two years previous. The problem here is twofold. First, if Dick Potter had been taken prisoner at Antietam that would have happened in September 1862, well before prisoner exchanges ended. He most likely would have been exchanged before the winter of 1862–1863. And he couldn’t have been in Andersonville for the two years because the camp opened in February 1864. If Andersonville had prisoners who’d been taken at Antietam, they’d have only recently arrived there from other camps. Rintels’s screenplay also makes the same mistake many people make about prisoner-of-war overcrowding in laying the blame at General Grant’s feet. This is a pet theory of pro-Confederate history buffs. Conditions at Confederate prison camps were no worse than Union prison camps, or so the theory goes, and the overcrowding problem was caused by General Grant’s policy of ending prisoner exchanges. As discussed in the section above, prisoner exchanges ended in mid-1863 when the Dix-Hill Cartel broke down in the wake of the Confederacy’s promise to enslave or execute captured black soldiers. This is not to say the Union high command didn’t encourage the policy of nonexchange. By 1864, General Grant and Sherman had come to see the end of prisoner exchanges as one way to strangle the Confederacy into surrender. The eleven seceded states had 5.5 million free people and nearly 3.5 million slaves, while the North had 18.5 million people and half a million

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slaves. When the war began, the two armies had nearly the same numbers, but by 1863 Union soldiers outnumbered Confederate soldiers two to one. Over the course of the war, the Union fielded over 2.5 million soldiers (including 180,000 black soldiers), while the Confederacy had 1.2 million (with some estimates as low as 750,000). And the two sides experienced similar numbers of soldiers killed in battle, with 110,000 for the Union and 94,000 for the Confederacy. Given that the Confederate army was so much smaller, these similar numbers mean the Confederacy lost a higher percentage of its soldiers in battle (National Park Service, n.d.). Thus, the Confederacy disproportionately benefited from prisoner exchange because they had significantly fewer soldiers in the field. Also, the Confederacy was fighting a defensive war. The South didn’t so much need victory as they needed to avoid defeat. The Union, on the other hand, needed a victory by Confederate surrender to end the war. The regional demographics, combined with the need for a Union victory, made trading soldiers a bad deal for the Union. Nonetheless, while there’s little doubt that Grant and Sherman weren’t particularly interested in resuming prisoner exchanges, neither general was in charge of determining that policy (McPherson 1988). The notion that the Confederates’ poor treatment of Union prisoners can be laid at Grant and Sherman’s door has immense cultural power for several reasons. First, neo-Confederates have long been uncomfortable with the Confederacy’s mistreatment of Union soldiers. It stands at odds with Lost Cause notions of Southern nobility and graciousness. In reality, both sides ran horrific prison camps. Union-run prison camps had an average 12 percent mortality rate, or about twenty-six thousand dead Confederate soldiers, while Confederate-run camps had mortality rates around 15.5 percent, or about thirty thousand dead Union soldiers (Cloyd 2010). The four-thousand-man difference seems negligible given that over six hundred thousand men died in the Civil War from either battle wounds or diseases. The problem lies not just in the overall numbers of dead prisoners but also in the mortality rates for individual camps. The Confederacy had several prison camps with death rates far above the norm. Salisbury Prison in North Carolina had a 28 percent mortality rate, as did Andersonville. Belle Island’s mortality rate may have been as high as 50 percent if one believes Union prisoner testimony and as low as 1 percent if one believes Confederate records. Only Elmira Prison in New York came anywhere near these numbers, with a 25 percent mortality rate (Horigan 2002). Misplaced guilt isn’t the only reason to blame Grant and Sherman for the Confederacy’s prisoner-of-war record. The mythology of “Northern Aggression” plays a part in the blame game as well. The flip side of Lost Cause ideology, which argues for the nobility and greatness of the slaveholding South, Northern Aggression ideology argues for the barbarism and general nastiness of Northern states and the federal government (Gallagher and Nolan



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2000). Unlike the Lost Cause, which insists on the fiction of happy slaves or, in its most white supremacist iteration, persons so inferior they deserved slavery, the Northern Aggression mythology ignores slavery entirely, including the Confederate response to black soldiers. Rather it argues that the war was caused by federal overreach, Yankee imperialism, and a capitalist/ industrial complex set on wiping out a Southern, agrarian way of life. Despite all the facts to the contrary, including the secession of eleven states in the wake of the legal election of Abraham Lincoln and the Confederacy’s firing on Fort Sumter to begin the war, the Northern Aggression trope insists a belligerent North started the war. Even when proponents of the Northern Aggression mythology acknowledge the South played a part in starting the war, they contend that the North’s actions pushed Southerners into it. As Alexander Stevens, the Confederate vice president, argued, “The aggressor in a war is not he who strikes the first blow . . . but the first who renders the force necessary” (McPherson 2000). Thus, Northern Aggression mythology argues the Confederacy bears no culpability in the 1863 termination of prisoner exchanges or any responsibility for its inability to take adequate care of Union prisoners because the war wasn’t the South’s fault. The ideologies of the Lost Cause and Northern Aggression also allowed white Southerners to transform their military defeat into a political and cultural victory by normalizing white supremacy and making it a lynchpin of post–Civil War America (Blight 2002). It was not willful cruelty (for the most part) that caused the deaths of so many prisoners on both sides of the war. The Confederacy in particular found it harder and harder to feed itself as the war ground on. Much of the war was fought on Southern soil, disrupting agriculture, particularly in areas controlled by the advancing Union army. Additionally, much of Southern agriculture was devoted to growing cash crops, not food. Cotton, hemp, sugar cane, and tobacco aren’t edible. And because the Confederacy didn’t industrialize, it shipped goods out to other regions or countries in return for cash. The increasingly effective Union blockade squeezed that economy down to a trickle. And 3.5 million enslaved and unwilling agricultural workers didn’t help the problem. The April 1864 Richmond bread riot is the most famous of dozens of food-shortage protests that rocked the Confederacy during the second half of the war. Even the Union struggled to feed prisoners of war, though oftentimes the death tolls in Northern camps could be attributed to harsh weather as much as bad food. And both sides struggled with prison camp diseases. Nineteenth-century science hadn’t yet discovered germ theory, and what standards for hygiene and sanitation existed flew out the window in the face of each side’s need to hold thousands of men in relatively small areas. For example, the harsh winter of 1864–1865, combined with the usual camp diseases, killed over twelve thousand Confederate prisoners at Elmira Prison in New York (Cloyd 2010). Thus, Andersonville’s portrayal of increasingly

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desperate camp conditions is realistic insofar as any movie can adequately portray the realities of any military prison camp. The emotional centerpiece of Andersonville is the camp’s uprising against the predatory Raiders and the subsequent trial and hanging of Raider leaders. Postwar memoirs by Andersonville prisoners all discuss Raider violence and trickery. In the film, for example, a Raider named Munn tries to get the new Massachusetts prisoners to come with him, explaining he’ll help them find the best place to make their camp, until Dick Potter (looking suspiciously Christ-like) foils Munn’s plans. Real-life Raiders engaged in much the same behavior. They were also infamous for sneaking into sleeping men’s tents and stealing anything they could get their hands on. If a man woke during the burglary, he’d be threatened, and if he resisted, beaten, killed, or both (Futch 1968). While Andersonville does show prisoners resisting the Raiders, particularly the Massachusetts men who make up the film’s main characters, it avoids any mention of the Regulators. In June, one of the prisoners complained to Captain Wirz about the Raiders. Wirz ordered the Raiders’ rations withheld as punishment and allowed the prisoners to form a police force to stop the intercamp violence. It was the Regulators who demanded Raiders be brought to trial for their crimes. The film does a fair job with the trial and execution of the Raiders leaders, though it leaves out the preceding trials where a handful of Raiders were sentenced to lesser punishments. The film portrays Munn as a coward who tries to run from his execution, and Collins, who is incorrectly portrayed as the Raiders’ sole leader, as a blustering bully until the end. In reality Munn faced his end with remarkable dignity. Each condemned man was allowed last words before his death, and Munn used the opportunity to tell the assembled prisoners he was sorry for his behavior and hoped God would have mercy on his soul. Raider chieftain Charles Curtis tried to escape the execution and then refused to express remorse, while William Collins proclaimed his innocence and begged for mercy even while the rope went around his neck (Davis 2006). The film also suggests that Raiders held sway over the camp for some indefinably long period of time. The camp opened in late February 1864, and there’s no mention of Raiders until May 1864. In late June, Regulators arrested the Raider leaders, who were hanged on July 11. That means the whole sordid episode took no longer than two months of the camp’s thirteenmonth history before the bulk of the prisoners were moved to other camps. After the war, Union veterans developed a theory about the men who abused and robbed fellow soldiers and prisoners. Raiders were made up of vile bounty jumpers, or so the story went. Bounty jumpers were men who joined the army under false names, collected the enlistment bounty, and deserted at the first opportunity, only to do it all over again with a different regiment (Cloyd 2010). War veterans regarded bounty jumpers as the lowest of the low. While Raiders as bounty jumpers may have been a comforting



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explanation, only one Raider leader didn’t use his real name to enlist (Terry Sullivan/W. R. Rickson). The others are identifiable, legitimate Union soldiers. Still, the notion that only bounty jumpers would have engaged in such nefarious behavior continues to carry weight on popular Civil War websites, suggesting even a century and a half later it is difficult to believe soldiers in the same army would behave so dishonorably toward each other. The bulk of dishonor in the Andersonville story is reserved for the camp commander, Captain Henry Wirz. The film ends before April 1865 and so doesn’t account for the end of the war, the liberation of prisoners, or the arrest of Captain Wirz. Northerners hailed the arrest of “The Demon of Andersonville” as a strong first move in punishing the Confederacy. Despite Southern claims to the contrary, the trial was no kangaroo court. The U.S. military commission called 158 witnesses in a trial that lasted two and a half months and created an 899-page official transcript. Confederate and acting assistant surgeon for the camp John C. Bates gave damning testimony about prison conditions and missed opportunities to ameliorate prisoner suffering, though he also testified that the Confederate army gave them no medicine and few medical supplies with which to treat prisoners. Dr. James Jones also proved a disastrous witness for Wirz. Portrayed as Colonel Chandler (the William H. Macy character) in the film, Jones was sent by Confederate ­officials in Richmond to investigate the camp in mid-1864. Jones reported that the camp was so repugnant that he’d managed to spend only an hour inside the walls, during which time he vomited twice and contracted influenza. The testimony of these two ex-Confederates proved as fatal to Wirz’s cause as the virtual parade of Union prisoners who testified to dozens of acts of cruelty and murder. Wirz’s defense argued the captain was only following orders from higher up the army chain of command and not responsible for camp conditions. When handing down the sentence, the presiding judge said Wirz was not condemned for the Confederate army’s failures but for the way he personally treated prisoners, noting that the captain had not only tortured and murdered prisoners but took pleasure in his “nameless blasphemy” (“Trial of Henry Wirz” 1866). The commission found the Andersonville commander guilty of conspiracy and murder and sentenced him to hang. Wirz wrote to Lincoln’s successor, President Andrew Johnson, to ask for clemency, but Johnson ignored the letter and Wirz was hanged soon after. Andersonville’s end card claims Wirz was the only Confederate executed by the U.S. military, and while that’s a commonly held belief, it’s simply not true. There were over a thousand military tribunals during and just after the war. Champ Fergusson was tried for war crimes, as were Marcellus Clarke and Henry Magruder. John Beall was executed by military tribunal for spying and Robert Kennedy for plotting to burn New York City. Eight people arrested in connection with President Lincoln’s assassination were tried and executed by military tribunal, including Mary Surratt. Additionally,

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thirty-eight Sioux men were executed by military tribunal in 1863 for their part in a revolt. Wirz quickly became a symbol of Confederate martyrdom. Southern historians in the postwar South contended that Wirz received an unfair trial because he was tried by the military commission of a government not his own. The federal government’s position, which mirrored Lincoln’s belief, contended that secession was unconstitutional and the eleven seceded states had not legally left the Union. The Wirz controversy got caught in the decades-long argument about whether or not the Confederate States of America was a legitimate government. Ex-Confederates also pointed out, quite correctly, that prison camps were deadly places on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line and, less correctly, that the Union ended prisoner exchanges and caused the conditions that killed so many men in Andersonville. Both these arguments bolstered postwar claims that Wirz was scapegoated in an act of judicial murder. The United Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy helped create a shared narrative of Wirz as a victim. By the 1910s, Lost Cause ideology had reached its full flowering, resulting in memorials, monuments, and statues to “lost Confederate heroes.” While Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson led the way in statue representation, Wirz had his fan base as well. In 1890, the United Daughters of the Confederacy in Georgia bought the site where the prison had once stood and erected an obelisk memorial to Wirz in Andersonville. The monument generated controversy before and after its erection. Many supporters thought it would be better to put the monument in Richmond, Virginia, or Macon, Georgia, rather than near the prison site, but the local Daughters of the Confederacy prevailed and the monument was built in downtown Andersonville. Union veteran groups immediately held protests and flooded newspapers with letters of protest. Confederate veterans countered with demonstrations of support. For years, the Sons of the Confederacy paraded to Wirz’s monument, and in 2018 the Sons of Confederate Veterans held the Forty-Third Annual Captain Henry Wirz Memorial Service in commemoration of the day Wirz was executed (Horowitz 2002). Modern historians agree that Captain Henry Wirz made a convenient scapegoat for the horrors of all Civil War prisons. His contemporaries say he was gruff and grumpy, while the film portrays him as shrill and weird. To be fair, Wirz spent most of the war in near constant pain from the damage done to his right arm early in the war, causing him to sleep poorly and be short-tempered in his waking hours. Also, Wirz was a man under considerable daily strain. He had charge of as many as thirty thousand prisoners at a time and not near enough supplies to feed, house, and care for them. That kind of stress could make anyone unpleasant. Wirz may have been scapegoated because he was an immigrant, or because unlike many Confederate officials, he was available for arrest when other



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Confederate officials were in hiding. The problem with this latter theory is that Confederate president Jefferson Davis was captured and imprisoned only a month after the end of the war, so he was available for scapegoating months before Wirz’s trial began. Fundamentally, Wirz was vulnerable to postwar blame because he was “middle management,” unlike the Confederate president, and because he was the most visible representation of a horrific prisoner-of-war camp system (Davis 2006). The film’s portrayal of Wirz reverts to an old idea of the camp commander as psychologically unbalanced and pathologically disassociated from violence. This view is balanced by the portrayal of the main bulk of Union prisoners as good and honorable. Indeed, in typical film fashion, characters are either all good or all bad, and the film’s main characters are notably heroic. In one of the film’s most stirring scenes, Captain Wirz gathers the prisoners for an announcement by a visiting colonel. The colonel tells the men they have been cruelly abandoned by their government, but if they will join the Confederate army they will be paid a cash bounty, fed, clothed, and at the end of the war, rewarded with farmland. Sergeant McSpadden, titular leader of the Massachusetts men, pushes his way to the front of the crowd and salutes the colonel. The colonel grins and bows. McSpadden announces, “I have the honor to speak for my detachment, sir.” Then he orders his men to form ranks, turns, and limps back through the crowd. He and his men march away to the cheers of the assembled prisoners. The black soldiers of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts, who most assuredly would not have been eligible for free farms, form ranks and follow as the music swells. Other detachments form ranks and march away, their military order at odds with their ragged uniforms and disease-ravaged faces. It’s good storytelling, backed by a heroic score and grand directing, but it’s not the truth. About three hundred Andersonville prisoners joined the CSA’s Tenth Tennessee Infantry, along with some Union prisoners from Camp Lawton in Millen, Georgia. Both the Union and Confederate armies made offers to prisoners like the one portrayed in the film, and about 5,600 Confederate prisoners joined the Union army in the last months of the war. The Union began recruiting Confederate prisoners, called “Galvanized Yankees,” as early as 1862. Approximately 1,600 Union prisoners joined the Confederate army, most of whom were German and Irish immigrants who’d been drafted into the Union army against their will (Brown 1985). In many ways the “reconciliation” strand of postwar memory has won Andersonville. The original prison ground is now the Andersonville National Cemetery, administered by the National Park Service. The National Prisoner of War Museum, commemorating the experience of all Civil War prisoners, opened on the site in 1998. The film straddles the reconciliation fence as well. It does a more-than-credible job telling the gut-wrenching story of Union prisoners of war and avoids portraying Wirz as a misunderstood martyr to the Lost Cause. On the other hand, the film does fall for the

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Northern Aggression argument that overcrowded prisons were the Union’s fault rather than the fault of a Confederate government that could not honor the rules of war when it came to black soldiers. Andersonville doesn’t quite disappear the black soldier problem, but black soldiers have only nonspeaking, background parts, and the film never alludes to the Confederacy’s refusal to exchange them. Andersonville is a tough movie to watch, but that is as it should be. Too often film and television prison camps are portrayed as places of spunky resistance to incompetent keepers where prisoners alternate between escape and high jinks. Rintels’s script, Frankenheimer’s direction, and Turner’s enthusiasm for accuracy combine to create a film that viewers will be glad they saw once, but most will never want to see it again.

FURTHER READING Blackman, Ann. 2005. Wild Rose: Rose O’Neal Greenhow, Civil War Spy. New York: Random House. Blight, David. 2002. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brown, Dee. 1985. The Galvanized Yankees. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Cloyd, Benjamin G. 2010. Haunted by Atrocity: Civil War Prisons in American Memory. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Costa, D. L. 2007. “Surviving Andersonville: The Benefits of Social Networks in POW Camps.” American Economic Review 4 (97): 1467–87. Davis, Robert S. 2006. Ghosts and Shadows of Andersonville: Essays on the Secret Social Histories of America’s Deadliest Prison. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press. Devine, Shauna. 2017. Learning from the Wounded: The Civil War and the Rise of the American Medical School. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Drisdelle, R. 2010. Parasites: Tales of Humanity’s Most Unwelcome Guests. Berkeley: University of California Press. Futch, Ovid L. 1968. History of Andersonville Prison. Gainesville: University of Florida Press. Gallagher, Gary W., and Alan T. Nolan, eds. 2000. The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Harmon, Henry. 1996. Giving Up the Ghost: Diaries and Recollections of Prisoners. Kearny, NJ: Belle Grove Publishing. Horigan, Michael. 2002. Elmira: Death Camp of the North. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books. Horowtiz, Tony. 2002. Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from an Unfinished Civil War. New York: Pantheon. Keller, David. 2015. The Story of Camp Douglas: Chicago’s Forgotten Civil War Prison. Mount Pleasant, SC: Arcadia. Lamphier, Peg. 2018. Soldier, Diplomat, Archaeologist: The Bold Life of Louis di Palma Cesnola. Reston, VA: Barbera Foundation.



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McPherson, James M. 1988. Battle Cry Freedom: The Civil War Era. New York: Oxford University Press. McPherson, James M. 2000. Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press. National Park Service. n.d. Civil War Facts. ­https://​­www​.­nps​.­gov​/­civilwar​/­facts​.­htm. Neely, Mark E. 1999. Southern Rights: Political Prisoners and the Myth of Confederate Constitutionality. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Rosenberg, Howard. 1996. “Swamped in Andersonville.” Los Angeles Times. ­https://​ ­www​.­latimes​.­com​/­archives​/­la​-­xpm​-­1996​-­03​-­03​-­tv​-­42378​-­story​.­html. Simpson, Brooks. 2000. Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph over Adversity, 1822–1865. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Singer, Jane. 2019. The War Criminal’s Son: The Civil War Saga of William A. Winder. Lincoln, NE: Potomac. Skoch, George. 2007. “Inside Andersonville: An Eyewitness Account of the Civil War’s Most Infamous Prison.” Civil War Times 46 no. 8 (October): 40–7. “Trial of Henry Wirz.” 1866. House of Representatives, 40th Congress, 2nd Session, Executive Document 23. ­https://​­www​.­loc​.­gov​/­rr​/­frd​/­Military​_Law​/­pdf​/­Wirz​ -­trial​.­pdf​.

Chapter 7

Ride with the Devil (1999) Written by James Schamus and directed by Ang Lee, Ride with the Devil (RWTD) follows a group of pro-Confederate militia members before and after the 1863 Lawrence massacre. The central character, Jake Roedel, played by Tobey Maguire, joins the “Bushwhackers” after the Union army attacks his neighbors. Though little more than vigilantes, Schamus and Lee’s portrayal of the Bushwhackers imbues them with a nobility of purpose at odds with modern Civil War movies; the movie’s handling of the Lawrence massacre suggests the morally troubling nature of that attack. In one of the film’s last scenes, Jake Roedel confronts two Bushwhackers who want to kill him for abandoning the proslavery cause. After a standoff, the two men tell Jake and his friend Holt that they plan to ride into a Union army–held town for a drink. Jake tells them they will surely be killed, but the two go anyway. As they ride away, Holt says, “It ain’t right.” Jake replies, “It ain’t right. It ain’t wrong. It just is.” In those lines are summarized director Ang Lee and writer James Schamus’s thesis for the film. The movie suggests there was no right and wrong in the Civil War and that both sides were equally violent in their dealings with the other. While the movie is greatly esteemed by persons sympathetic with the Confederacy, viewers and movie critics were considerably less enthusiastic. The film is based on Daniel Woodrell’s 1987 novel Woe to Live On. Most of Woodrell’s novels are “country noir,” or crime novels set in the Missouri Ozarks. Woe to Live On was Woodrell’s second novel, based on three serial short stories. Because his first was a hard-boiled crime drama, the author’s switch of genre confused his readers and publishing house. Woodrell switched back to crime novels, leaving his pro-Confederate western languishing in the remainder bins until Lee fell in love with it (Boyle 2017).

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Lee was so struck with the book that his reading of it nearly interrupted filming on Sense and Sensibility (1995). Lee asked screenwriter and producer James Schamus to write the script, hoping to shift his filmmaking to action movies. Later Lee admitted that his first attempt at an action movie owes much to his work on more traditional, domestic dramas. “At first I wanted to get away from a family drama and do something with more action and scope, but it turns out Woe to Live On does both. Family values and the social system are tested by the war. It’s a family drama, but one where characters represent a larger kind of ‘family’—the warring factions of the Civil War and the divisions in the national character” (Mahon 2013). Lee asked Schamus to write a script that closely adhered to the novel in an effort to show the transformation of a pro-Confederate guerilla into a family man uncomfortable with the violence of war. RWTD stands in the middle of a long collaboration between Lee and Schamus. Before RWTD the two made Pushing Hands (1991), The Wedding Banquet (1993), Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), Sense and Sensibility (1995), and The Ice Storm (1997). The two continued to collaborate with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), Hulk (2003), Brokeback Mountain (2005), and more. In spite of Schamus and Lee’s filmmaking successes, the script for RWTD bounced around a little, from Fox to Universal to USA Films. Universal Studios offered the starring role to a number of Hollywood actors before Tobey Maguire agreed to play Jake Roedel. Skeet Ulrich plays Jake’s best friend, Jack Bull Chiles, while Jeffrey Wright took the dubious job of playing an ex-slave riding with proslavery guerillas. Schamus said they cast singer-songwriter Jewel (born Jewel Kilcher) to play Sue Lee, Jake Roedel’s love interest, because they wanted “a fresh face,” though undoubtedly the moviemaking team also understood that Jewel’s country music fans might provide the film with additional audience members. Simon Baker played George Clyde, the man who bought and freed Holt, and Jonathan Rhys Meyers played the determinedly hateful Pitt, rounding out the central cast. Filming began in March 1998 in Sibley, Missouri, and Kansas City, Kansas. As with Glory, many of the actors had yet to have their breakthrough hit: Maguire would later star in Spider-Man (2002), Simon Baker in Mentalist (2008–2015), and Margo Martindale as Wilma Brown with numerous supporting movie roles and recurring characters in Justified (2010–2015) and Dexter (2006–2013). Lee put his actors through a three-week intensive training course on riding and Civil War weaponry, though apparently Jewel needed no coaching in the riding department (Hassenger 2016). The film begins with Jake Roedel’s arrival at his friend Jack Bull Chile’s sister’s wedding. The setting is bucolic; slaves in the background set up a post-wedding feast. That night Union soldiers burn the Chiles plantation and kill Jack Bull’s father. One year later, men in Union uniforms ride up to an outdoor store where Union soldiers congregate. Among them are Jake and Jack Bull. After drinks, the Union soldiers reveal they are the men who



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killed Jack Bull’s father. The new arrivals reveal they are really Bushwhackers, and a gunfight erupts. The Bushwhackers kill all the men and loot the store. At the Bushwhacker camp, Jake and Jack encounter a white man, George Clyde, with his black friend, Daniel Holt. Jake and Jack refer to Holt as an n-word several times before the men go raiding and find themselves in a gunfight with Union soldiers. The Bushwhackers shoot their way out of the back of the house and make their escape. As winter comes, the Bushwhackers divide into groups of four and go off to winter camps. Jake, Jack, George, and Holt set up camp with the Evans family. Sue Lee, a pretty young widow, lives with them. As the winter passes, Jack and Sue Lee become intimate and plan to marry, while Jake and Holt yearn for home. Holt talks about his mother, who was sold away to Texas. Union soldiers burn the Evans house and kill Mr. Evans. The men ride after the Union soldiers to exact vengeance. Jack is shot in the arm and eventually dies. After burying him, the two remaining men take Sue Lee south to the Browns. Afterward, Holt and Jake head back to the Bushwhackers’ camp. Men report that there are “riches to be had” and “n****** to scalp.” There is also talk of a jail that collapsed, killing the Southern women who were kept inside. The next scene opens on William Quantrill (played by John Ales) mustering men for a raid on Lawrence, Kansas. When the raiders arrive outside of Lawrence, Quantrill hands out a “death list” of people to be killed. The raiders remove their blue jackets and attack. After the attack, Quantrill’s raiders ride out of Lawrence, flames in the background, wagons full of looted goods. The Union army arrives, and there’s yet another battle scene. George is killed and Holt is injured. Pitt shoots Jake in the leg. Later Holt and Jake examine their wounds and decide to leave the raiders to recover. They go to the Brown farm, where they discover Sue Lee now has a baby. The Browns think the baby is Jake’s because he brought Sue Lee to the farm. They hear Quantrill is headed for Kentucky, on the run and out of support. Most of the old gang is dead and the rest are robbing and killing, regardless of sympathies. Holt tells Jake that when George died he felt free for the first time in his life. Meanwhile Mr. Brown forces Jake to marry Sue Lee, after which the three of them, Jake, Holt, and Sue Lee, ready a wagon to leave Missouri. Holt says he’ll ride with them for a while, but then he’s going to look for his mother in Texas. In the penultimate scene, Jake, Holt, and Sue Lee make camp. Pitt and Turner ride down into camp. Pitt reports that Black John is dead and Quantrill has fled. The war is lost, and he and Turner plan to go into Union-held Newport for a drink. It’s clearly a suicide mission. Jake and Holt draw guns on Turner and Pitt. Turner and Pitt back down and ride away. In the last scene it’s dawn. Jake and Holt say goodbye, having made friends despite all their differences. Music swells as Holt rides into the sunrise.

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Mychael Danna, who would later win an Oscar for his Life of Pi (2012) soundtrack, composed the film score, to which Jewel contributed a track off her album Spirit (1998). The film opened in September 1999 in limited release and never did better than thirty-seventh at the box office. The film made just over $64,000 dollars in its first week of release. RWTD’s revenues dropped each week and in the end grossed only $635,096. Considering the movie cost $38 million to make, RWTD was a gigantic box office disaster. Film historians point out that Universal made little or no effort to promote the film after it did poorly in test screening (which is why Ang Lee doesn’t allow test screening for his films anymore). Others thought the problem might be that Americans, spoiled by instant everything, don’t have the patience to sit through a leisurely movie (Dilley 2015). These criticisms suggest that the film’s weak box office showing was the fault of the studio and audiences. Critics had mixed feelings about the film. Washington Post critic Stephen Hunter enjoyed the film immensely, while Roger Ebert thought it was long and slow. Nearly everyone agreed that RWTD was well acted and beautifully filmed. Critics took issue with the film’s pacing, which was slow and meditative between brief bouts of violence, the archaic dialogue rhythms and word choices, and the movie’s failure to pay off any of the violence. Audiences didn’t care much for the movie either, though it remains popular with a certain kind of Civil War buff. RWTD has a lot of problems. Its characters are engaged in ideologically and morally repulsive behavior. Schamus called the Kansas-Missouri border war “a weird liminal zone” because Missouri was a slave state that did not secede from the United States. Schamus also claimed, “Missourians really felt [the war] was an invasion from the north” when almost four times more Missourians served in the Union army than in the Confederate army (Brand 1999). That Missouri was largely Union should be unsurprising—only 9 percent of the state’s population was enslaved, so commitment to slavery was less than zealous. Schamus exposed his romantic ideas about men who were essentially terrorists when he called the Bushwhackers “the rock and rollers of the Civil War” (Astor 2016). This romantic and unrealistic notion of Bushwhackers infects the entire film.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND The roots of the Kansas-Missouri border war can be found in the conflict that arose in Kansas in the seven years before the Civil War, known as “Bleeding Kansas.” In 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act created the two territories and solved the “slavery problem” with the addition of a popular sovereignty clause. While the notion that Kansas settlers would vote on whether they wanted slavery or not sounded like a sensible solution to the



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nation’s increasingly anxious conversation about slavery, it inadvertently caused a kind of war between antislavery and proslavery settlers. Territorial elections were fraught with violence and corruption. By mid-1856, Kansas was a war zone. In May, proslavery Missourians sacked Lawrence, Kansas, a Free State town settled by abolitionists. In retaliation, abolitionist John Brown (1800–1859) and his men roamed the country attacking and sometimes killing proslavery men amid almost continual violence by both sides against the other (Etcheson 2004). In 1858, Missouri “Border Ruffians” killed five Free State men in the Marais des Cygnes massacre, after which U.S. Marshalls nearly captured Brown in the Battle of the Spurs (January 31, 1859). An uneasy peace followed, though violence on the Kansas-Missouri border never entirely ended. By the time the Civil War began in April 1861, both Kansas and Missouri were largely settled by antislavery people, though Missouri was a slave state with a small but active population of proslavery, pro-Confederate people. Lawrence, situated not far from the Missouri border, remained a target for proslavery Missouri guerillas, first called “Border Ruffians.” Most of these men were too poor to own slaves, but they disliked abolitionists and black Americans in equal measure. Once the war began, Border Ruffians organized themselves into “irregular” militias. These pseudo-military groups were proConfederate but not part of the official Confederate military structure. Their fondness for surprise raids against pro-Union Missourians and Kansans led to a name change: “Bushwhackers.” Free State paramilitary groups fell under the moniker “Jayhawkers” or “Red Legs.” These men tended to be more antislavery than abolitionist, objecting less to slavery as an economic institution that gave unfair advantage to rich men. Jayhawkers could be as racist as Bushwhackers, particularly those who wanted no free blacks in either Kansas or Missouri. While some Jayhawkers were as unofficial and guerilla as Bushwhackers, the Seventh Kansas Volunteer Cavalry was made up of Jayhawkers, and the term was used to describe any regiment made up primarily of Kansas men. Preeminent Jayhawker James Lane, who moved to Kansas in 1855, founded “The Kansas Brigade,” sometimes known as “The Free State Army,” composed of the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Kansas Volunteer regiments. Lane’s brigade operated within the U.S. Army, unlike Bushwhackers, but the brigade’s raids into Missouri were as violent to civilians as any guerilla operation (Benedict 2009). The presence of two opposing paramilitary guerilla forces created an unofficial border war along the Kansas-Missouri border during the Civil War years. Much of this war appears to have been violence for the sake of profit, disguised as partisan fighting for a larger cause. Both sides looted, burned, raped, and murdered people affiliated with the other side, and by 1864, neither the Bushwhackers nor the Jayhawkers were making much effort to distinguish their targets (Earl and Burke 2013). By the time the war ended,

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Bushwhackers like William Quantrill (1837–1865) and William “Bloody Bill” Anderson (1840–1864) and the men who rode with them were no better than domestic terrorists. Anderson came from a pro-Southern Kansas family and had a history as lawless and violent as Quantrill’s. Anderson had his own band of men, loyal only to him, and they alternated between riding with Quantrill’s Raiders and riding independently, particularly after the Lawrence massacre. Other notable Bushwhackers include Frank and Jesse James and Cole Younger, leader of the outlaw James-Younger gang. The postwar legacy of the romantic outlaw that sprung up around these men has disguised their very real criminal atrocities (Beilein 2016; Wood 2003; Goodrich 1998). William Quantrill, the most famous Bushwhacker, got his start as a guerilla outlaw well before the Civil War began. The son of poor farmers, Quantrill moved to Kansas in early 1857 but soon after fell out with his traveling partners and began robbing homes and farms. In 1858, he moved to Tuscarora Lake and continued his thieving ways until the community banished him. After a brief stint as a teamster for the U.S. Army, Quantrill joined a group of Border Ruffians before moving to Lawrence in 1860. There Quantrill taught school and flirted with the Free State cause before rejoining the Bushwhackers. A year later, Quantrill traveled to Texas and joined the First Cherokee Regiment of the Confederate army. There he learned military tactics before deserting and returning to Missouri. Soon after he formed “Quantrill’s Raiders,” the Bushwhacker group that would hold sway over the unofficial border war for the rest of the war (Leslie 1996; Castel 1999). Quantrill’s Raiders gained fame and notoriety for their 1863 attack on Lawrence, an act of such brutality that it is often referred to as the Lawrence massacre. Quantrill and his Raiders justified the attack on Lawrence in both general and specific terms. Jayhawkers used the town as a headquarters, riding out from it to attack proslavery Missourians. From the Bushwhacker perspective, Jayhawkers were the real criminals. Kansas’s first governor and passionate Free State advocate, Charles Robinson (1818–1894), contended that Jayhawkers had engaged in “more terrible outrages” than Quantrill ever had (“Governor Robinson’s Speech” 1892). Robinson may have been striking back at his political rival James Lane with his comments, but nonetheless Bushwhackers had good reason to believe that Lawrence was an antislavery Union-sympathetic town. Quantrill considered the Lawrence massacre retaliation for the “sack of Osceola.” In September 1861, James Lane led 1,200 men to repulse the Missouri State Guard, a pro-Confederate, but unofficial, military regiment. The campaign culminated on September 23, when Lane’s force drove the Missourians out of Osceola, after which the Jayhawkers looted and burned all but three of the town’s buildings, freed two hundred slaves, and executed nine townspeople for treason (Petersen 2003). Quantrill also claimed the Lawrence attack was retribution for the women killed in a Kansas City jail collapse, though evidence shows



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the attack on Lawrence was planned well before those women died. More likely, Quantrill used the outrage generated by the event to consolidate support for his plan to attack a civilian target. And there was plenty of outrage. In April, Union general Thomas Ewing Jr. (1829–1896), an enthusiastic antislavery man, issued General Order No. 10, ordering the arrest of any civilian giving aid to the Bushwhackers. Ewing then ordered the arrest of hundreds of women and held them without bail. Some of the women were caught with guns, ammunition, or large amounts of cash intended for Bushwhackers, while others were held for clothing or feeding the guerillas. So many women and girls were arrested that they had to be housed in makeshift jails in Kansas City while they awaited transport and trial in St. Louis, Missouri. One such building was a three-story house. In an effort to make more space, Union soldiers removed some supports from the house’s foundation. Cracks began to appear in walls soon after, and on August 13, 1863, the house collapsed. Four female prisoners were killed, while others were injured. One of “Bloody Bill” Anderson’s sisters died in the collapse, and another, who’d been chained to a bed at the time, suffered two broken legs. The story of the jail collapse inflamed pro-Confederate sympathizers, who saw General Order No. 10 as an example of unreasonable Union oppression and the collapse as a breach of honorable conduct toward women (Harris 1995; Wood 2016). When Quantrill’s Raiders rode down on Lawrence eight days later, many of them felt they were avenging those four dead women. At dawn on August 21, 1864, Quantrill’s Raiders and several hundred Bushwhackers he’d organized to join him rode into Lawrence. S. S. Snyder, a pastor and farmer, was the first person killed when he was shot milking his cow. The Raiders first attacked the Eldridge House, a five-story brick hotel in the center of town. Quantrill’s men took control of the building and used it as headquarters for the next four hours before setting the hotel afire. The Bushwhackers systematically pillaged and burned all but two of the town’s businesses and many homes after first removing and killing men and boys. Raiders scrupulously avoided killing women and girls. Nonetheless, the raid was a massacre, not a battle. The Union soldiers assigned to protect Lawrence had been ordered back to Fort Leavenworth, and the town militia was unable to assemble in the face of the Raiders’ surprise attack. Citizens were nonmilitary personnel, most of them were unarmed, and many were tortured before they were killed. Between 160 and 190 men and boys were killed, the youngest being twelve- or fourteen-year-old Bobbie Martin. Quantrill was reported to have said, “Kill every man big enough to carry a gun” (Schultz 1997). Twenty percent of the town’s population lay dead as the Raiders headed out of town that day, encumbered by wagons loaded with looted goods. Quantrill split up his men after the raid, figuring a large column of wagons and horses heading out of Kansas would attract the Union army’s attention.

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Four days after the massacre, General Ewing issued General Order No. 11 (1863), ordering the evacuation of the four Missouri counties from which Quantrill and the Bushwhackers drew most of their support. In addition to evacuation, Ewing’s troops were authorized to seize abandoned crops and farm animals. The Union army’s intention was to quell the border insurgency and the violence that came with it by depriving the guerrillas of their support systems. The order focused on rural populations, sparing the people who lived in the area’s largest towns, and people living west of the Blue River were also exempted from the order. Everyone else had to go, though persons who could prove they were loyal to the Union were allowed to temporarily settle near Union military installations. General Ewing was also responding to James Lane’s threats to march Jayhawker troops into western Missouri and lay waste to the region and kill its inhabitants. The Eleventh Kansas Infantry rode to intercept Lane’s troops, who were forced to stand down, saving Missourians from a Lawrence-style massacre. In the end, Ewing’s regular army did as much damage as Lane’s men might have. Ewing gave orders that farms were not to be looted and civilians not injured, but controlling the Union soldiers, spread over four remote counties, proved impossible. To make matters worse, Quantrill’s Raiders and independent Bushwhackers moved into the depopulated areas and occupied houses, looted farms, and generally decimated the area’s food and valuables (Beilein 2016). In short, Ewing’s strategy proved disastrous, and in January 1864, he allowed any Missourians who would take an oath of allegiance to return to their homes and farms, but so many farms had been burned by both sides that many people had nothing to return to. In the fall of 1863, having cleared out the evacuated Missouri counties of their goods, Quantrill and Anderson took 450 men to Texas for winter. In March 1864, Confederate general Sterling Price (1809–1867) invited Quantrill’s Raiders to join the regular army. They returned to Missouri and soon after were raiding, raping, looting, scalping, and killing again. On September 27, 1864, Anderson led the now infamous “raid on Centralia” or “Centralia massacre.” Anderson and his men looted the town and stopped and robbed a train. Passengers were divided into civilians and military personnel, and twenty-three men were executed. Anderson was killed by Union soldiers a month later, and his guerillas splintered into small outlaw bands soon after. Quantrill managed to stay alive until a month after the end of the Civil War, when he was shot by Union forces.

DEPICTION AND CULTURAL CONTEXT Critics have noted that RWTD is a movie that could only be made by Ang Lee, and not just because it balances action and drama or because the cinematography is lyrically beautiful. Lee came to the United States from



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Taiwan in 1979 to study at University of Illinois. Even before Lee immigrated to the United States, he was an outsider. His family is waishengren, or Taiwanese people who moved from Mainland China to Taiwan after World War II (1939–1945). Lee’s father fled Mainland China after communists executed his entire family. Lee’s mother was also orphaned in the postwar purge. Consequently, and like many immigrants, Lee considers himself neither fully Chinese nor fully American. When he read Woe to Live On, he identified with the pro-Confederate Bushwhackers for their attempts to push back against the unstoppable tide of Yankee culture. As Lee said, “Yankees won not only territory, but in a sense, a victory for a whole way of life and thinking. The Yankee invasion was not just surface meaning—Yankees continue to win militarily and economically—but also an internal meaning” (Mahon 2013). Lee noted that while he embraces the ideologies of equality that came to govern the nation, it’s the “unstoppable tide” of it that he finds unsettling (Mahon 2013). There’s a scene in RWTD that echoes Lee’s sentiment when Mr. Evans talks to Jake and Jack about the people in Lawrence and their schoolhouse. Evans says, “That is why they will win—because they believe that everyone should live and think just like them. And we shall lose because we don’t care one way or the other about how they live or think, we just worry about ourselves.” Leaving aside the questions about the veracity of this statement, Lee and Schamus explore notions of “outsider” status. Lee, who has never applied for American citizenship, and Schamus, an Ozark writer, constructed a movie that deeply resonates with people who also view themselves as outsiders, or people left behind by a nation with rapidly shifting cultural values. The film’s characters are by definition outsiders. They’re anti-Union in a Union state and guerillas fighting outside the legal confines of the Confederate army. Lee’s and Schamus’s eagerness to tell an outsider story led to a variety of historical errors. The film’s central event, the Lawrence massacre, has a fraught narrative history. Bushwhackers and those sympathetic to them told the story as a justifiable revenge for pro-Union outrages like the Kansas City jail collapse, while pro-Union historians (professional and amateur alike) have framed the massacre as a war atrocity. Even the name of the event is contested. While modern histories have largely settled on “the Lawrence massacre,” some sources call it the “raid on Lawrence,” leaving off the linguistically fraught “massacre.” In the script, visual storytelling, and music score, RWTD attempts to straddle the argument, but the film’s sympathetic portrayal of the men who instigated the attack puts it firmly and awkwardly in the “civilian massacres are justifiable” camp. Moreover, the film avoids any discussion of how shocked both Northerners and Southerners were by the Lawrence attack. Newspapers of the day carried accounts that emphasized the unarmed populace and the fact that men and boys were murdered while women watched. Even Missourians

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were shocked, or at least some of them. Missouri abolitionist George Miller described the attack as “the most infamous event of the uncivil war” (Miller 2015). The controversy between the two states and their competing ideologies about what happened to Lawrence did not fade away in the decades after the war. Missourian and thirty-third U.S. president Harry S. Truman (1884–1972) often told stories about how the Kansas Jayhawkers stole the family silver and burned the barns, though he was born twenty years after the Civil War. On the anniversary of the massacre, both sides take to Twitter to tout their competing points of view, and there are T-shirts available that say “Kansas: Keeping America Safe from Missouri Since 1854” and “William Quantrill Is My Homeboy.” Historians continue to take sides as well. Missouri historian Tom Rafiner says, “The fact that Lawrence was attacked isn’t surprising. It was in retaliation for what Lane did in Missouri” (Rafiner 2013). Meanwhile Kansas historian Thomas Goodrich argues that the Lawrence attack’s “startling savagery” marked it as outside the boundaries of acceptable warfare (quoted in Tanner 2013). “Nothing even comes close to it. It’s the story of how the state’s second largest city was wiped off the earth” (Tanner 2013). The film also makes violence against women, particularly rape, invisible. While modern fans of the Bushwhackers and Quantrill like to claim that Southern men never perpetrated any violence against women, there are several reports of rape amid the looting and killing in Lawrence. This ought not surprise anyone considering that the confluence of violence, masculinity, and conquest make rape an almost foregone conclusion. During his lifetime, Bloody Bill Anderson was commonly acknowledged as a rapist, and by 1864, he was openly shooting women, though his post-death transformation into a romantic cavalier/outlaw erased many of his most repulsive deeds (Wood 2003). The film’s most significant error of omission is its failure to accurately address the calamity that occurred in Missouri after Quantrill’s Raiders attacked Lawrence. Four days after the massacre, and with President Lincoln’s support, General Ewing issued Order No. 11, ordering the full evacuation of the rural population from Bates, Cass, Jackson, and Vernon counties in western Missouri. The order excluded people living in Independence, Harrisonville, Pleasant Hill, and Hickman Mills on the principle that “city” people weren’t the ones harboring enemies of the Union, in part because these towns were near Union military outposts. Ewing also allowed people living west of the Blue River to stay in their homes. Everyone else was supposed to leave the area, regardless of their professed sympathies, in part because Ewing also hoped to suppress the pro-Union Jayhawker guerillas. Persons who could prove their allegiance to the Union could move to a Missouri community near a military installation, but everyone else had to leave the region.



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However well intentioned, General Order No. 11 proved an unmitigated disaster. The empty counties provided Bushwhackers with easy pickings as they fled Union forces. Bushwhackers, Jayhawkers, and even Ewing’s army killed farm animals, looted food stores, and burned farms, even though many of the farmers were pro-Union. The four counties were devastated to such an extent that it took populations decades to recover. Recognizing the unintended consequences of his order, Ewing issued General Order No. 20 after only three months, allowing Union loyalists to return to their farms, but by then the damage had been done (Leslie 1996). While proslavery Missourians blamed Ewing and the Union army for the disaster, many others pointed out that it had been the actions of Quantrill’s Raiders in Lawrence that had brought the whirlwind to western Missouri. And while the people of Missouri suffered, Quantrill was nowhere to be found. He’d gone south to Texas for the winter, leaving the people he said he was protecting to the not-so-tender mercies of the Union army. Of course, Schamus and Lee have to ignore some of the harsher realities of Bushwhacker history to make the film’s larger claim: that war is barbaric and that good men caught in the barbarism do their best to act honorably. There’s nothing new in this thematic approach to the Civil War. Immediately after the war, the nation was faced with a considerable problem of healing a fractured nation that had spent four bloody years killing fellow citizens. Both sides took some common approaches to the “reconciliation problem.” Chief among them was the claim that all the soldiers, from the lowliest enlisted man to the generals, had honorable intentions and were sincere in their vision for the nation. To accomplish this revision, reconciliation ideology had to erase slavery as the root cause of the Civil War to pretend the South had been fighting for something other than the right to keep human beings in legal bondage. RWTD does exactly that, and not only in portraying Bushwhackers as honorable men with a legitimate point of view. The film essentially ignores slavery. For example, in the opening scenes where Jake arrives at the Chiles plantation for a wedding, the viewer sees slaves in the background setting up for the post-wedding festivities. The wedding is shot as a festive occasion, featuring happy people in a bucolic setting, while black bodies move among them silently doing the work. The implication isn’t very subtle: slaves were happy to serve, and proslavery ideology plays no part in the border war. Instead, the men the film follows are engaged in the honorable and heroic endeavor of protecting their families and way of life from nefarious invaders. The problem with the “nefarious invaders” position is twofold. First, the Union army was also the United States Army and Missouri a part of the United States. However one feels about the Confederacy and the rightness or wrongness of its cause, Confederates engaged in a massive act of treason

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HOW (AND WHY) PROSLAVERY TERRORISTS BECAME WESTERN HEROES Several of the Younger brothers and both James brothers rode with William Quantrill during the war, looting and killing their way through western Missouri and eastern Kansas. In the twelve years after the war, the James-Younger gang continued looting and murdering citizens for fun and profit. They also robbed banks, stagecoaches, and trains, becoming infamous for their reckless brutality. The gang’s reign of terror ended in 1876 when two gang members were killed in a Minnesota bank robbery and the other six were injured. Jesse and Frank James continued their criminal career until Robert Ford shot Jesse in 1882. Frank James lived on to see his brother’s memory shift from murdering criminal to a Robin Hood–like folk hero. In the 1880s, dime novels built the “James myth” by appealing to pro-Confederate white supremacist readers. Jesse James and other Civil War guerillas were portrayed as men who robbed from the rich and gave to the poor, defended small farmers from big railroad companies, and acted in chivalric ways to the ladies. None of it was true, but the myth of the outlaw gunslinger became the staple of western novels and then western movies. Historian Mathew Hulbert asks, “Why do Americans seem more comfortable with ex-bushwhackers, cowboys and gunslingers than as participants in a war that saved the Union and emancipated millions of African American slaves” (Hulbert 2016). Part of the answer lies in the way Americans decided to remember the Civil War. David Blight’s work on Civil War memory suggests that in the years immediately after the war, memory could be divided into three types: the white supremacists; the reconciliationists, who wanted to forget disunion in favor of reunion; and the emancipationists, who remembered the war as racial progress (Blight 2009). By the 1880s, the reconciliationists joined with the white supremacists, creating a national narrative of the war that required forgetting the war had been about half the country’s desire to preserve slavery. Dime novels provided Americans with an outlet for the uncomfortable historical reality by transforming men no better than domestic terrorists into mythic western heroes whose narrative power remains to the present day.

against the nation when they seceded and made war on the United States. Portraying the Union army as an invading force in any state is suspect, but doing do so for Missouri, which did not secede, is doubly specious. Second, unlike Maryland, which was kept in the Union by force, Missouri was a willing participant in the Union cause. Slavery was legal in the state, but like most border states, Missouri had comparatively few slaves. About 115,000 of the state’s total population was enslaved, or 9.7 percent. Compared to Alabama (45 percent), Georgia (44 percent), or Mississippi (55 percent), Missouri had relatively little economic or ideological capital wrapped up in the nation’s “peculiar institution” (1860 Census). Many of the Union army’s top generals came from Missouri, including Francis Preston Blair Jr.



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(1821–1875), who’d once run an antislavery newspaper and campaigned for Abraham Lincoln. Of the Missouri men who fought in the war, 110,000 of them served in the Union army and about 30,000 in the Confederate army. This is not to say that Missouri was not contested territory, but the state was considerably more pro-Union than not. The Confederate army won two key victories in Missouri in the summer of 1861 at the Battle of Wilson’s Creek and the Siege of Lexington, but by early 1862, General John C. Fremont (1813–1890) imposed martial law in Missouri and largely ended the Confederate army’s viability in the state. Fremont also ordered the state’s slaves freed, but President Lincoln, rightly fearing a resumption of proslavery agitation in Missouri, allowed the state’s governor to rescind the order (Geiger 2010). While the film makes several ideological and historical errors, it does get much of the period’s details correct. Civil War enthusiasts point out the film’s accuracy with regards to both costume and firearms. Bushwhackers, being by definition outside the normative military, would not have worn uniforms, and the men would have dressed as befitted their individual class locations and personal styles. On the other hand, the men are sometimes too perfectly coifed and not nearly as grubby as men who’d been living rough for months at a time would have been. While many critics and viewers alike took exception to language Schamus used in the script, there’s good historical evidence that nineteenth-century speech patterns were more formal than contemporary English usage (Dilley 2015). Take this exchange for example: Pitt says, “Why you little Dutch son of a b****. You do what I tell you or I will kill you.” Jake pulls his gun and aims it a few inches from Pitt’s face and says, “And when do you figure to do this mean thing to me, Mackeson? Is this very moment convenient for you? It is for me.” This bit of dialogue also illustrates the very real anti-German sentiment that permeated the first half of the nineteenth century. Characters in RWTD call Jake “Dutchy,” in reference to his German roots, and they don’t mean it in a nice way. German Americans were particularly despised among Confederates because, like Jake’s father, they were generally antislavery and proUnion (Levine 1992). Firearms experts enjoyed the way the film got the guns right. Civil War rifles were single shot weapons and shotguns double shot, which was fine for soldiers firing from fixed positions with time to reload. Guerilla forces, fighting from horseback and house to house, found long guns impractical. Handguns reigned supreme in the Missouri guerrilla battles, particularly the Colt 1851 revolver (sometimes called the navy revolving pistol). Favored by outlaws, gunslingers, and Texas Rangers alike, the Colt carried six rounds and could be carried close to the body in a specially made holster (Herring 2008). Ang Lee took particular care to get the details right and did so by relying on Civil War reenactors, many of whom are nearly obsessively detail oriented.

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Schamus’s script and Lee’s direction combine to capture the morally complicated nature of the border war. With no fixed front, largely irregular guerilla combatants, and a civilian population with mixed sympathies, the Kansas-Missouri conflict by its nature blurred distinctions between military and civilian targets. As historian Michael Fellman said of the Bushwhackers, “Most lost their ability to discriminate between guerilla and civilian targets” and so spiraled into revenge attacks that had no end as violence and death became normalized (Fellman 1989). For example, in two scenes Jake’s fellow Bushwhackers gamble with human scalps, doing so with a horrifying nonchalance. Accounts vary about scalping among the Bushwhackers. One story holds that they only began the practice after a Lenape Indian working for the Union army scalped one of Quantrill’s dead Raiders, but other sources suggest the practice began simply because “Bloody Bill” Anderson was just that brutal. Anderson and his men, who sometimes rode with Quantrill and sometimes not, also enjoyed cutting the ears off dead civilians and soldiers alike and sometimes decapitated people. There’s also some argument about whether Bushwhackers took up scalping before or after the Lawrence massacre, but given the movement pretty much fell apart after Lawrence, it’s likely it was before (Etcheson 2004). Though Lee and Schamus’s film doesn’t explore the range of mutilation practiced by Bushwhackers, the scene with the scalps does suggest a nuanced, liminal space where “heroes” transform, if only for a scene, into monsters. Some movie viewers and critics objected to the middle portion of the film where the central characters retire from the field of battle for the winter. It’s true that the long section where the men are living in a makeshift dugout shelter slows the movie’s action down, but the central facts of the story are historically accurate. During the winter of 1862–1863, the Bushwhackers did divide into groups of four and hide out until spring. And, as the movie suggests, the movement did collapse in the wake of the Lawrence massacre, though most of the Bushwhackers rode south to Texas rather than taking wagons west with pretty widows. In fact, it is in the film’s last scene that the viewer can best see Ang Lee’s predilection for ambiguous endings. While Sue Lee and her baby sleep in the wagon, Holt and Jake say goodbye, Jake having traveled from racist disdain for Holt to a friendly respect. As the music swells, Holt rides off into the sunrise, which is surely emblematic of a new kind of future for that character. But it is unclear what kind of future an exslave could have in the last year of the war, riding toward Texas, the same state where the most violent Bushwhackers had taken refuge. Generally, it is difficult to believe that life will be fine for Holt after the war, not with what is known of Reconstruction and the era’s segregation. In this ambiguity, Lee mirrors the ending for one of his greatest films, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, where the heroine hurls herself off a bridge. The film fades to black with her flying through the air, leaving the viewer with no clear answers



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about her fate. Much the same is true of all the characters in RWTD, but none more so than Holt. The stickiest mire RWTD throws itself into isn’t the film’s near fatal fondness for violent paramilitary, proslavery terrorists but the way the film opened the door for the neo-Confederate desire to believe in that most cherished of myths: the black Confederate. Which is not to say Ang Lee or James Schamus endorse this myth, for surely they do not. When Jake assumes Holt is sad about George Clyde’s death, for example, Holt sets him straight: “No, what I felt was free,” Holt says. Jake responds, “I thought that’s what George gave you when he bought you out.” Holt says, “That wasn’t really his to give, now was it? George Clyde, I believe I loved him, but being that man’s friend was no different than being his n*****. And Roedel, I ain’t never again gonna’ be nobody’s n*****.” The film makes it clear that Holt isn’t riding with the Bushwhackers because he believes in their cause. He’s with them because he felt a sense of responsibility to the man who bought his freedom and so followed him into the Bushwhackers. And at least one black man did ride with Quantrill. John Noland (1844–1908) was either a fugitive slave whose owners were killed by Jayhawkers or a free black man whose family had been harassed by Jayhawkers (stories vary). He was so trusted by his fellow Bushwhackers that he often scouted and hunted alone, and it was Noland who surveyed Lawrence before the Raiders’ attack. So it’s not that RWTD gets the Holt character wrong (though it is as misleading as making German American Jake pro-Confederate) but that some movie viewers used the film to bolster their arguments for the existence of black Confederates. It turns out the argument about whether or not they existed and, if so, in what numbers, is central to the argument about Civil War causation. Neo-Confederates can argue that the war wasn’t about slavery and that slavery wasn’t all that bad if they can argue that black men, even slave men, fought with the Confederacy. As historian Bruce Levine has argued, “The idea of faithful slaves in the Old South has been one of the most tenacious myths in American history. Slaves’ fidelity to their masters’ cause—a falsehood constructed to support claims that the war was not about slavery—has long formed one of the staple arguments in the Lost Cause ideology” (Levine 2007). Though the idea of black Confederates may seem ridiculous to many people, there is a minority of Civil War “enthusiasts” who believe that not one or two but thousands of black men willingly joined the Confederate cause. The argument contends that these freedmen and slaves fought to preserve both Southern culture and homeland. If it were just a small fringe who believed in black Confederates it would be one thing, but the debate has been supported by neo-Confederate authors writing faux-scholarly books that get promoted on major news networks. The myth of the black Confederate also supports politically conservative

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claims to color-blindness. As historian David Blight points out, “Who needs real history when you can control public language and political debate” (Blight 2009). The problem is the “real history” is clear on this matter—the vast majority of slaves not only didn’t support the Confederacy but also actively worked against it in both passive and active ways. And what few black men did end up in the Confederate army did so for reasons that had nothing to do with an imagined support of slavery. The behavior of slaves as the Union army invaded the region in which they lived is a prime example that discredits the black Confederate myth. Slaves dropped their workload and made a beeline for the Union army. Fugitive slaves flooded Union-held border areas like the South Carolina Sea Islands and even Washington, D.C. When the Union army took control of Fort Monroe in Virginia in early 1861, slaves took refuge there in such numbers that General Benjamin F. Butler instigated the “contraband of war” policy that would lead to the Emancipation Proclamation and the enlistment of black men in the Union army. Slaves didn’t wait for the Emancipation Proclamation or the end of the war. In some areas as many as 70 percent of slaves freed themselves (Morgan 1992). Nearly 180,000 black men served in the Union army, swelling the enlisted ranks by 10 percent, and thousands more (many of them women) served in noncombat support, as laborers, nurses, scouts, and more, and the majority were slaves who’d freed themselves by fleeing the Confederacy. Those black men and women who served the Confederacy in similar support functions were, of course, slaves. Southern slave women and men built many of the Confederacy’s fortifications, railroads, and more. Their labor should not be conflated with support for slavery because as slaves, by definition, they had no choice in their labor. The Confederacy did contemplate enrolling black men into the Confederate army, but not until the cause was clearly lost. General Patrick Cleburne first suggested the idea in December 1863, after several serious Confederate battle defeats. Cleburne wrote a memo to the officers of the Army of Tennessee in which he said the Confederacy had to choose between losing the war and losing slavery. Cleburne thought only by arming slaves, after promising them their freedom in return for their enlistment, could the South hope to win the war. When the memo made it to President Jefferson Davis and his advisers, they rejected it out of hand. The Confederate government revisited the idea after Atlanta fell to General Sherman’s army in September 1864. In November, President Davis was desperate enough to consider arming black men but worried about the insult to white soldiers. The idea of ending slavery for some or all slaves, even if they fought for the Confederacy first, caused a wave of white protest. White Southerners not only objected to abandoning slavery on economic grounds but also argued that armed slaves would endanger Southern whites (which it surely would have). The fervency of this outcry gives lie to the notion that Confederates



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weren’t fighting to keep black people in bondage. When the Confederate government finally did agree to support black enlistment, it did so in a manner that attempted to continue controlling black men who enlisted and save slavery for those who did not enlist. Facing massive desertion among the ranks, the Confederate Congress authorized black soldiers in March 1865 by a 40–37 margin in the House and 9–8 margin in the Senate. The law allowed black men to volunteer for the army in exchange for probable (but not guaranteed) freedom at the end of the war. The war ended before any black Confederates made it out of training, and in fact only Virginia managed to muster any men into a training company, and then only two hundred slave men volunteered (Levine 2007). It’s probable that if the Confederacy’s collapse and freedom for all hadn’t been so obviously imminent, more slave men would have volunteered, but then again, if the Confederacy hadn’t been so near defeat they wouldn’t have considered black enlistment in the first place. And for good reason. In 1860, there were four million slaves in the United States, most of whom ended up in the eleven seceded states. It was second only to Russian serfdom as the largest population of unfree people in the world. The financial benefit of that many unwaged workers literally can’t be counted. Southerners didn’t embrace slavery just because they believed in black inferiority but also because it benefited them to do so. Slavery was the defining characteristic of the Confederacy. Fundamentally, the historically inaccurate black Confederate trope is the flip side of the white savior trope. Both serve white supremacy, one by arguing that blacks liked slavery enough to help maintain it and the other by positing that blacks need white people’s help to achieve anything of note. The black Confederate trope underwrites Lost Cause ideology with its very insistence on happy slaves and white folks not all that committed to slavery (Coates 2010). It’s a fantasy on the par with Arthurian legend and Disney’s Pocahontas (1995), and these fantasies are durable because they tell a story people want to hear. Indeed, white savior movies have been and remain especially popular among movie audiences. The 2019 Best Picture Academy Award–winning film Green Book has been criticized as a white savior film, and many Americans continue to believe in the black Confederate myth. Neither of these facts should be surprising in a nation where issues of race remain so contentious. The Civil War may have officially ended in 1865, but it’s still being fought in American politics, history books, movies, and elsewhere. Professional historians have trouble combatting the black Confederate myth and others like it. Books written by more dubious sources perpetuate such myths and are detrimental to many Americans’ understanding of U.S. history. In a collection of essays edited by Eric Foner, David Blight calls the “white supremacist, neo-Confederate, anti-statistic” histories “largely ersatz scholarship” (quoted in Foner 2008). Yet, these books get a lot of

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attention on right-wing news outlets. Worse, they appear at book sellers alongside more orthodox histories written by scholars who’ve devoted their life’s work to analyzing facts that contradict the neo-Confederate reading of history. Blight points out, “It is easy to laugh away such slippery, ahistorical versions of the past . . . but incredulity is hardly enough against the realization that millions of Americans either believe this story or are blissful in their ignorance” (quoted in Foner 2008).

CONCLUSION Lee and Schamus may have intended to make a film that didn’t take sides, but instead they made a film that is uncomfortably sympathetic to people willing to wage a war of terror upon civilians in defense of slavery. Because, let’s be clear, Bushwhackers weren’t Confederate soldiers constrained by the rules of military engagement and government approval. They were guerillas who raped, murdered, looted, and burned their way through the Kansas and Missouri countryside with little or no regard for the political leanings of their victims. By any modern standard they were terrorists, and there’s nothing romantic or heroic about that. Schamus and Lee’s film didn’t embrace black Confederates so much as black Confederate proponents embraced the film because it validated their ahistorical ideas. Time and again, all over the dark corners of the Internet, neo-­ Confederates tout RWTD as cinematic proof that black men were happy to fight for “The Cause.” This misuse of the film is in no way the filmmakers’ fault, but how a film is received is at least as important as how a film was intended. For an enthusiastic minority, RWTD is revelatory and entirely delightful, but for most viewers, the film is an exercise in ideological discomfort.

FURTHER READING Astor, Aaron. 2016. Rebels on the Border: Civil War, Emancipation, and the Reconstruction of Kentucky and Missouri. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Beilein, Joseph. 2016. Bushwhackers: Guerilla Warfare, Manhood and the Household in Civil War Missouri. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press. Benedict, Bryce. 2009. Jayhawkers: The Civil War Brigade of James H. Lane. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Blight, David. 2009. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Boyle, William. 2017. “On the Genius of Daniel Woodrell.” LitHub, March 3, 2017. ­https://​­lithub​.­com​/­on​-­the​-­genius​-­of​-­daniel​-­woodrell​-­the​-­battle​-­hardened​-­bard​ -­of​-­meth​-­country​/.



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Brand, Ulrika. 1999. “James Schamus Illuminates Little-Known Chapter in History with Ride with the Devil.” Columbia University News, November 24, 1999. ­http://​­www​.­columbia​.­edu​/­cu​/­pr​/­old99​/­11​/­jamesSchamus​.­html. Castel, Albert. 1999. William Clarke Quantrill His Life and Times. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Coates, Ta-Nehisi. 2010. “Again with the Black Confederates.” Atlantic, January 2010. ­https://​­www​.­theatlantic​.­com​/­entertainment​/­archive​/­2010​/­01​/­again​-­with​ -­the​-­black​-­confederates​/­33792​/. Dilley, Whitney Crothers. 2015. The Cinema of Ang Lee: The Other Side of the Screen. New York: Columbia University Press. Earl, Jonathon, and Diane Mutti Burke, eds. 2013. Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Missouri: The Long Civil War on the Border. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Etcheson, Nicole. 2004. Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Fellman, Michael. 1989. Inside War: The Guerilla Conflict in Missouri during the American Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press. Foner, Eric, ed. 2008. Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World. New York: W. W. Norton. Geiger, Mark W. 2010. Financial Fraud and Guerrilla Violence in Missouri’s Civil War, 1861–1865. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Goodrich, Thomas. 1998. Bloody Bill Anderson: The Short, Savage Life of a Civil War Guerilla. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole. Harris, Charles F. 1995. “Catalyst for Terror: The Collapse of the Women’s Prison in Kansas City.” Missouri Historical Review 89, no. 3 (April): 290–306. Hassenger, Jesse. 2016. “Ang Lee Fought an Unconventional Civil War with This 1999 Flop.” A. V. Club, June 21, 2016. ­https://​­film​.­avclub​.­com​/­ang​-­lee​-­fought​ -­an​-­unconventional​-­civil​-­war​-­battle​-­with​-­1798248539. Herring, Hal. 2008. Famous Firearms of the Old West: From Wild Bill Hickok’s Colt Revolvers to Geronimo’s Winchester, Twelve Guns That Shaped Our History. New York: Globe Pequot. Hulbert, Mathew. 2016. The Ghosts of Guerrilla Memory: How Civil War Bushwhackers Became Gunslingers in the American West. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Leslie, Edward E. 1996. The Devil Knows How to Ride. New York: Random House. Levine, Bruce. 1992. The Spirit of 1848: German Immigrants, Labor Conflict and the Coming of the Civil War. Urbana–Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Levine, Bruce. 2007. Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves during the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press. Mahon, James Edwin. 2013. “All’s Fair in Love and War? Machiavelli and Ang Lee’s Ride with the Devil.” In The Philosophy of Ang Lee, edited by Robert Arp and Adam Barkman. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press. Miller, George. 2015. Missouri’s Memorable Decade, 1860–1870. Oxford: Andesite. Morgan, Lynda. 1992. Emancipation in Virginia’s Tobacco Belt, 1850–1870. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Petersen, Paul R. 2003. Quantrill of Missouri: The Making of a Guerrilla Warrior— The Man, the Myth, the Soldier. Nashville, TN: Cumberland House Publishing. Rafiner, Tom. 2013. Cinders and Silence. Harrisonville, MO: Burnt District Press.

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Schultz, Duane. 1997. Quantrill’s War: The Life and Times of William Clarke Quantrill, 1837–1865. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Tanner, Beccy. 2013. “150 Years Later, Quantrill’s Raid on Lawrence Stirs Deep Emotions.” Wichita Eagle, August 17, 2013. ­https://​­www​.­kansas​.­com​/­news​ /­local​/­news​-­columns​-­blogs​/­the​-­story​-­of​-­kansas​/­article1121021​.­html. U.S. Census. 1860 Census: Population of the United States. ­https://​­www​.­census​.­gov​ /­library​/­publications​/­1864​/­dec​/­1860a​.­html. Wood, Larry. 2003. The Civil War Story of Bloody Bill Anderson. Fort Worth, TX: Eakin. Wood, Larry. 2016. Bushwhacker Belles: The Sisters, Wives and Girlfriends of the Missouri Guerillas. Gretna, LA: Pelican.

Chapter 8

Gangs of New York (2002) Gangs of New York is known as one of the few looks at the war from the Union perspective, though in truth it uses the draft riots of 1863 as merely a backdrop to an oft-told tale of gang warfare. Gangs took its inspiration from journalist Herbert Asbury’s The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld (1929). In his 2008 foreword to the book, Russell Shorto, himself a journalist but also a historian best known for The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan, and the Founding Colony that Shaped America, called the area of Five Points “a world to explore as legendary and rich as J. R. R. Tolkein’s Middle Earth” (Asbury 2008). The screenwriters, Jay Cocks, Steven Zaillian, and Kenneth Lonergan, did their best to duplicate that thought as they created their characters, and director Martin Scorsese did the same with his casting, which includes Leonardo DiCaprio, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Cameron Diaz. Shorto ends his foreword by reminding the reader that not being a historian, Asbury relied only on first-person interviews with elderly men whose memories of the events of their far-off youth could be faulty, on purpose or not. With no paper trail to double-check their stories, they make grand characters for screenwriters to fictionalize even further. Yet the filmmakers used this fictional text as the basis for as historically accurate a story as they could tell, right down to having lead actor Daniel Day-Lewis listen to recordings of Walt Whitman’s voice in order to capture the proper accent for the period. When placed in nomination for an Academy Award, the production company even listed Gangs as an original screenplay, a move Cocks defended by saying, “This is a world we conjured out of whole cloth, out of a whole lot of unassimilated historical research” (Turner 2003). He based his opinion on the fact that the book served merely as an introduction to the history of

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the draft riots and claimed the screenwriters only borrowed some entertaining gang and individual character names, and the title, from Asbury’s work. The rest of the story came from researching many, many other books about the period and about the specific events of the draft riots and the corruption of Tammany Hall. To illustrate the idea that Gangs takes a true look at that history, the film opens with a view of what appears to be an almost medieval landscape due to all the poverty and loose animals roaming the unpaved streets of Five Points. The film introduces Amsterdam (Leonardo DiCaprio) as a young boy who watches his father, Priest Vallon (Liam Neeson), murdered by Bill the Butcher (Daniel Day-Lewis). Hell-Cat Maggie (Cara Seymour) joins the fight with iron talons as her weapon of choice to establish that the film will have at least one female viewpoint into this impoverished world, but she rarely shows up again until it’s time to become a victim of the violence. Bill tells his followers to give Amsterdam to the law so that he will receive a good education in what passed for the juvenile detention of the day. Fifteen years later, Amsterdam exits a prison two hours north of New York City. Arriving in the city alongside a wave of Irish immigrants, he is taken for one himself. On the docks, he sees corruption of all kinds. Nativists, who want America for Americans, threaten the new arrivals while representatives of Tammany Hall offer hot soup in exchange for future votes. Together with a childhood friend, Johnny (Henry Thomas), and a new acquaintance, African American Jimmy Spoils (Lawrence Gilliard Jr.), Amsterdam begins his quest for revenge against Bill. When newspapers announce the Emancipation Proclamation, controversy rises between those for it and those against. Bill meets with William “Boss” Tweed (Jim Broadbent) to complain and finds Tweed asking that they work together for the betterment of the city and of Tweed’s political base. Later that evening, two rival private fire brigades arrive at the scene of an apartment fire and end up in a fight over who has the right to rescue the place. Amsterdam and Johnny race in to salvage property as Bill arrives with his own private fire brigade. Amsterdam saves Johnny from being trapped, and Johnny invites him to join his gang, ruled by Shang (Stephen Graham). Soon Amsterdam and Johnny bump into Jenny Everdeane (Cameron Diaz), who engages them in conversation long enough to pickpocket Johnny’s watch, but he lets her do it because she leaves behind cute notes such as “Beware of Strangers.” Later Amsterdam learns that Bill and his gang celebrate the killing of his father every year. Back on the street, they find recruiters talking immigrants into joining the Union army for the reliable access to food while others grumble about how wealthy men could buy their way out of the draft for $300. Amsterdam encounters Jenny again, and she pickpockets his father’s medal. He follows her onto a horse-driven public coach and into the uptown neighborhood where she works as a maid. Amid all this, Amsterdam learns ways to make money and survive on the streets, including selling the corpses of men killed in criminal activity



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to local medical students. One day Bill encounters a group of rich citizens touring the slums looking to support a charity. They include Horace Greeley, publisher of the Tribune, and the Schermerhorn family, who fall for local cop Happy Jack’s (John C. Reilly) story that he is beloved by his constituents and that Bill is an upstanding local leader. Bill takes Amsterdam under his wing, and Johnny questions Amsterdam’s motives. With a production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as the backdrop, tensions rise over the idea of supporting the Union army in freeing enslaved people who will come to the city and take work away from the nativists—and the newly arrived Irish. Amsterdam uses an assassin’s attack on Bill during the play to save Bill’s life and ingratiate him into Bill’s gang, with the plan to use his new position to execute his own assassination attempt later. However, one of Bill’s main thugs, Walter “Monk” McGinn (Brendan Gleeson), recognizes Amsterdam as Priest Vallon’s son and threatens to expose him. Meanwhile, Amsterdam reveals his real identity to Jenny, who has to admit she is loyal to Bill for having saved her from a life of prostitution. Before the audience can wonder who will betray Amsterdam first, Johnny tells Bill the truth. P. T. Barnum (Roger Ashton-Griffiths) appears not only as the spectacle provider he is known to be but also as a purveyor of purchasable women and children. Then he acts as ringmaster to a performance by Bill the Butcher where Bill reveals Amsterdam’s true identity to the crowd while demonstrating his prowess with the tools of the butcher trade. He releases Amsterdam, saying, “He hasn’t earned a death at my hands,” only a branding by holding a burning knife against Amsterdam’s cheek. Jenny saves Amsterdam by hiring a doctor to work on his wounds and declares they should leave for San Francisco, but Amsterdam is bent on revenge. Despite Jenny’s plan, Amsterdam gathers other disenfranchised Irishmen around him and gives his own version of a St. Crispin’s Day speech when he says, “There’s more of us coming off these ships every day. Fifteen thousand Irish a week. Get all of us together we ain’t got a gang. We got an army.” The one who he won’t let join his new crew is Johnny, who is told to leave Five Points and never be seen again. Before he can go, Bill’s men bring him to their leader, who explains that you can never trust a man who turned on a friend. Amsterdam later finds Johnny, not yet dead, pierced on a spiked fence, begging to be killed for mercy. Jenny hands Amsterdam her pistol, and the scene ends with the sound of the shot. Tweed now comes to Amsterdam to form an alliance against Bill and his natives because Amsterdam has more followers. In turn, Amsterdam insists that Tweed support some Irish candidates and then he will promise to consolidate the Irish vote. Tweed agrees and Amsterdam proposes Monk for sheriff, who wins the election. However, Bill retaliates by killing Monk, which leads to an all-out gang war on the very morning of the day the draft riots also break out. Across town, at the home of the rich Schermerhorn family, Tweed attends a party with Horace Greeley and the mayor while in

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his underground chamber Amsterdam prepares for the war. There is a quick standoff as some of his followers refuse to fight with an African American and Amsterdam asks Jimmy to stand down. Then Jenny comes to say she has booked passage on a boat to California. Amsterdam asks her to wait a day and he will join her, but she says, “You’ll be dead by then.” As the riot grows, mobs raid the Schermerhorn home, angry about the $300 payoff, and elsewhere in the city mobs are going after African Americans, blaming them for the war. All around town the police force is overwhelmed, the military men sent to help are overwhelmed, and a mob mugs Jenny while she heads to the dock for her boat. In the fight scene that finishes the film, Amsterdam’s gang squares off with Bill’s gang while ships in the harbor rain cannon balls down around them. When Bill takes a knife to the gut, he tells Amsterdam, “Thank God I die a true American.” But the wound is not fatal until Amsterdam takes his own knife, the knife that killed his father, and drives it into Bill’s chest. In the aftermath of the riots, hundreds of bodies are tossed into a common pit grave created out of the ruins of the local mission with Tweed commenting that he will need more soup at the docks tomorrow to greet the arriving Irish immigrants because “we’re burying a lot of votes down here tonight.” The film ends with Amsterdam visiting his father’s grave and seeing that Bill’s tombstone sits beside it. Filming in Rome and New York proved expensive. The budget rounded out to $100 million, but the gamble proved worth the risk as Gangs grossed $193 million worldwide after its release on December 20, 2002. Gangs also scored critical success, with overall positive opinions of the script, directing, detail in both the production design and the period costume design, and praise for Day-Lewis’s performance. The New York Times reviewer A. O. Scott noted, “Though this is Lower Manhattan in 1846, it might as well be the Middle Ages or the time of Gilgamesh: these warlike rituals have an archaic, archetypal feeling” (Gilfoyle 2017). Meanwhile, Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert declared Gangs “a classic that traces the birth of America, not in civilized boardrooms where the principles of democracy are debated and pondered upon; but through bloody street brawls and hate crimes . . . A civilisation that was born out of savagery! Scorsese rips up the postcards of American history and reassembles them into a violent, blood-soaked story of a bare-knuckled past” (Ebert 2002). In The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw wrote, “1846 New York is reimagined as a hyperreal wild west of the east, where the rule of law is patchy at best, peopled with brawling villains in bizarre, dreamlike top hats. Scorsese said he wanted the movie to be like a western set on Mars. It’s actually like a Kubrick shocker set in a Henry James or Edith Wharton adaptation” (Bradshaw 2003). As with any film, Gangs did not find favor with all the reviewers. Writing for The Hollywood Reporter, Kirk Honeycutt said, “Here is a movie from



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arguably America’s most brilliant filmmaker, yet one so dark and disturbing you might label it a ‘feel-bad’ movie. It’s a gangster film, one of cinema’s more durable genres, yet mired in arcane history and forgotten political movements” (Honeycutt 2017). Honeycutt may have been closer to the truth. Despite the majority of effusive reactions, while Gangs earned ten Oscar nominations, the film lost them all, making it one of the few films nominated widely that won nothing in the end.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND Before gangs gained power in the Five Points area, the people who held sway were tradesmen and, of all things, volunteer fire fighters who provided protection to the less-powerful locals. Eventually, power fluctuations, economic concerns, and differences in general political ideology caused rivalries to develop. Their differences largely came from creating ethnic enclaves among the various immigrant groups (Irish, Italians, Germans) with those claiming to have been born American joining with the nativists, who shared a fear of being overrun by immigrants and by extension a fear of soon-to-be-freed African Americans. A streak of anti-abolitionism ran through them as well. The character of the area had changed greatly from when the Dutch founded New Amsterdam in 1625. Their reputation for providing a safe haven for many varied ethnic groups had traveled with them from Europe to the New World and survived for a while after they ceded the land to England. As the largest port for the landing of new peoples, the area filled up with wave after wave of refugees and hopeful newcomers, some of whom succeeded beyond their wildest dreams and many, many more who struggled day to day across generations. Not all turned to crime, but the area of Five Points became a meeting ground for those who did. Those who turned to politics, and made a show of helping the poor, congregated under the protection of the famed Boss Tweed (1823–1878) (whose given name was William Magear Tweed), but they allied with the gangs, using them as their men on the street, urging (or threatening) people to vote for politicians of Tweed’s choosing. This run of powerful gangs existed largely until the economy grew, as did the power of police. Some credit the reform administration of Mayor John Purroy Mitchel (1879–1918), who served from 1914 to 1917, with the final crushing of the gangs. Known as the Boy Mayor of New York because he was the second-youngest person elected mayor, Mitchel earned the support of the anti-Tammany crowd and immediately allowed his police commissioners and courts to arrest, convict, and imprison over three hundred remaining gang members. While later criminal groups might have attempted to revive the old ways, they never reached the numbers (in the thousands) of

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men involved in the era of Five Points (1840s–1860s). Mitchel lost his next election, joined the Army Air Service in World War I, and died when he fell out of his plane during a nosedive (Winn 2014). Until then, Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall had the run of the area. Tammany Hall stands for what began as the Society of St. Tammany, a New York City political organization founded in 1786 and known for helping immigrants, most notably the Irish, rise in American politics. As the thirdlargest landowner in New York City, Tweed had been named to many boards of directors, covering everything from the Erie Railroad to the Brooklyn Bridge. Such popularity gained him a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives (1853–1855), which he parlayed into an even more powerful position on the New York County Board of Supervisors. From there he controlled employment through providing city services to those who would vote as he told them to vote. In 1871, long after the events in the film, Tweed’s corruption became clear. As a member of the Brooklyn Bridge board of directors, he advised the contractor to pay a $60,000 bribe so that the New York aldermen would approve the proposal. For his efforts, Tweed received private stock in the Bridge Company (Golway 2014). Soon, though, county auditors found the many financial discrepancies in Tweed’s dealings around the city. In 1871, a parade of Irish Protestants erupted into a riot, with Tweed’s approval, during which they targeted Catholic citizens; more than sixty people died in the incident. Though arrested and out on bail for his mishandling of city monies, much of which found its way into his private accounts, Tweed gained reelection. After two trials—one a mistrial when the jury failed to decide and the second resulting in convictions on over two hundred counts—Tweed ended up in the Ludlow Street jail, but during a court-approved home visit he escaped to Spain, where federal officials rearrested him and returned him to prison in New York. Tweed died of pneumonia in prison on April 12, 1878 (Golway 2014). Tammany Hall secured its power in the 1840s through an acceptance of the newly arriving immigrants, which angered nativists, whose political philosophy focused on promoting the interests of native inhabitants to the detriment of immigrants. Nativism became a movement in the United States about fifteen years before the Civil War during the influx of Irish immigrants, most of whom were Catholics and therefore called papists for their loyalty to the Pope. Most American citizens at the time had largely descended from Protestant English stock and feared the two philosophies could not survive well together. While in the western part of the country this nativism manifested itself as an anti-Asian attitude, in the major cities of the East, and certainly in New York City, the focus remained on the Irish. Parties such as the Know-Nothings, who gained their nickname because members asked about their affiliation were told to answer, “I know nothing,” held distinctly anti-Catholic and anti-immigration beliefs. Eventually,



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they became the American Party six years before the Civil War. They were instrumental in many anti-Catholic riots that broke out in cities such as Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Louisville, Kentucky. In New York City, the nativists deplored the fact that 3.7 million immigrants arrived between 1820 and 1860. Nativists worked both illegally through acts of violence and legally through supporting legislation to lengthen the time it took to qualify for citizenship, or vote, and tried to pass laws protecting Americans from immigrants seeking similar employment. Their influence stretched as far as the federal government. Though they never put forth a winning candidate for president, finally, in the 1920s, a quota system came into existence that limited the number of newcomers based on country of origin. The quota lasted until President Lyndon Johnson championed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (Knobel 1996). Nativists in New York City showed particular disdain for being conscripted into the army to fight a war that would free yet another minority group they feared would force them out of their jobs. Likewise, while some newly arrived impoverished immigrants appreciated the military’s promise of regular meals, others resented the fact that rich men could buy their way out of the draft for a fee of $300. This number further insulted white ­working-class men who knew enslaved people in the South sold for three or more times that fee, so they felt it denigrated their own worth. The Enrollment Act, or Civil War Military Draft Act, had gone into effect on March 3, 1863, requiring all male citizens between the ages of twenty and thirty-five and all unmarried men between thirty-five and forty-five to serve in the military. Resentment against the draft built as the summer heat and news of the great losses of the Battle of Gettysburg came through in early July. In New York City, the draft began on Saturday, July 11, 1863, and things remained calm all that day and all day Sunday. City leaders had thought that having the Sunday between as both a break in the lottery and a day off work would keep things calm, but instead Sunday became a day of organizing by angry groups around the city. The local police spent the day planning as well, strategizing about how to protect the local armories, city buildings, and the homes of the rich, still believing they could keep any mob that might congregate in check. They were wrong. These draft riots became the second-largest insurrection in U.S. history, with the Civil War being the first. On Monday, July 13, despite the police presence, a crowd gathered at the draft office on Third Avenue and Forty-Seventh Street as it opened at 10:00 a.m. and battered their way inside. Led by a volunteer fire company, they quickly moved to the next act, burning the building to the ground and fighting any city fire department that came to the scene to put down the fire. In fact, the mob killed several horses that pulled vehicles arriving to assist with the fire, and when they recognized police superintendent John Kennedy in the crowd observing, they attacked and stabbed him over seventy times. He survived but spent the rest of the riots in a hospital.

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As they moved through town, the rioters started fires at hotels, other draft offices, and over fifty buildings, including the mayor’s mansion on Fifth Avenue. To keep the police from knowing their movements, they cut telegraph lines as they traveled. When they attempted to attack the local news­ paper offices of the New York Times, they found the editors had positioned Gatling guns from the local armory in the windows to repel any rioters. At the New York Tribune, an abolitionist-leaning newspaper edited by Horace Greeley, over a hundred police officers held off the mob so the staff could exit out the back. Soon the mob turned from its ostensibly political motivations and became an anti-black free for all, culminating in the sacking (for its food stores) and burning of the Colored Orphan Asylum. In this case, the police stationed in the area proved able to hold the mob back long enough for the over two hundred children to escape before the looters took control. Still, as the rioting moved through the African American areas of town, they killed over 120 local citizens and destroyed many, many black-owned homes and businesses in the district. Of particular scorn were any interracial families; businesses catering to the “mixed” trade, such as brothels where white women serviced black men; or men working in what had recently been whites-only occupations, such as dockworkers, resulting in random lynchings across the city. One of the African Americans lynched during the riot was the sevenyear-old nephew of a black soldier in the famed Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Infantry Regiment who would die of wounds received at the Battle of Fort Wagner, a battle depicted in the film Glory (McPherson 2001). This was all on the first day of the riots. Though it rained that evening, which helped with the fires, the weather did not cool down the tempers of the rioters. They began Tuesday by attacking known abolitionists. By now, the local city administrators understood the police force to be woefully insufficient to end this chaos, so they called in military men from local forts, students from West Point, and soldiers fresh from the Battle of Gettysburg. Over the next two days, politicians worked to suspend the draft, which quelled some of the participants as that was their end goal. However, those who had moved this into a race riot still threatened violence in a gathering near Gramercy Park on Thursday night. Here the many military men now on-site finally routed the mob and the New York City draft riot ended.

DEPICTION AND CULTURAL CONTEXT New York Times reviewer A. O. Scott wrote, “With this project, Mr. Scorsese has made his passionate ethnographic sensibility the vehicle of an especially grand ambition. He wants not only to reconstruct the details of life in a distant era but to construct, from the ground up, a narrative



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of historical change, to explain how we—New Yorkers, Americans, modern folk who disdain hand-to-hand bloodletting and overt displays of ­corruption—got from there to here, how the ancient laws gave way to modern ones” (Scott 2002). Scott felt that American filmmakers rarely went that route, avoiding the triumph of Manifest Destiny, moral progress, and enlightenment, and he found Gangs to be “a blood-soaked revenger’s tale, in which the modern world arrives in the form of a line of soldiers firing into a crowd” (Scott 2002). The question becomes whether the film’s grand historical ambition came to fruition or whether it drowned under the spectacle of cinematic special-effects violence. The trailer certainly featured the violence of the gang rivalry more than the dedication to history, making the film seem more a blend of West Side Story and The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. It clearly focused on how witnessing that level of violence affected the boy who grew up to be Amsterdam. The filmmakers laid a Shakespearean theme of revenge from the very start by Amsterdam’s line “With this knife that struck him down, let me put to rest my father’s ghost.” Yet, the level of violence in the finished film is clearly exaggerated as there were very few such gang battles in the actual history of Five Points. Even though Five Points was poor, it was not that violent, and murder was much rarer. Fists were the weapon of access for most fights, which often took place among small sets of individuals in or around local bars. At this time there was hardly a murder a month in all of New York. The rise of the Mafia and Prohibition led to the dramatic increase in violence that the city became famous for in following years (Conway, McCormack, and Thomas 2003). But to watch the film, one imagines swords and pistols and axes as easily available elements. Judging the truth of the history portrayed on screen begins by judging the truth of the history portrayed in the original source material. While Asbury’s book is shelved with nonfiction and purports to be a history of the gangs of New York, the subtitle admits it is “An Informal History of the Underworld.” On top of that, unlike other films adapted from books, which work hard to remain loyal to the text, when Scorsese thought about making Gangs he admitted being more interested in being loyal to the town than its residents. He wanted to show his audience the city of New York’s intricate relationship to American history, to illustrate that the city and its debates about immigrants were crucial to the founding of the country. He felt democracy required acceptance of multiculturalism and wanted to impart that idea to his fans. Scorsese described the film as “historically accurate to the nature of anarchy and chaos” (Various 2002). But films are about people, not places, and in his review Ebert noted that “the canvas is filled with many other colorful characters, including . . . P. T. Barnum (Roger Ashton-Griffiths), whose museum of curiosities scarcely rivals the daily displays on the streets” (Ebert 2002). Horace Greeley, publisher of the Tribune, and the Schermerhorn family are among the other

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prominent historical figures who appear. The historical accuracy of the characters’ names used throughout the film varies beginning with the real man who carried the Bill the Butcher name, William Poole. He was murdered in 1855, so he did not live long enough to experience either the draft riots or the Civil War. On the other hand, the writers put their research to good use by using his reported last words in the film, allowing Daniel Day-Lewis the line, “If I die, I die a true American” (Gorn 1987). Poole had been the head of the Bowery Boys gang, an enforcer for the nativist organization the Know-Nothing Party, and virulently anti-Catholic. His death came at the hands of Irishman John Morrissey (1831–1878), who worked supporting Tammany Hall. The men argued over gambling debts related to a boxing match, and eventually Morrissey and two other friends shot Poole outside a saloon. He died ten days later from complications (Gorn 1987). More public figures, such as Tweed, Barnum, and Greeley, do better, though not much, as all are shown dealing with the underbelly of crime and corruption as a normal part of their daily lives, to varying degrees. In his review Ebert noted that “Tammany Hall buys and sells votes, ethnic groups are delivered by their leaders, and when the wrong man is elected sheriff he does not serve for long” (Ebert 2002). The film depicts Tweed as the most corrupt, which comes with enough historical backing to be a fair portrait, whereas the film misuses Barnum and his story in several ways. The film places Barnum in the center of not merely a circus ring but a human trafficking circle, which is not something the real-life Barnum ever stood accused of doing. Also, his five-story museum did not burn during the draft riots but, rather, two years later on July 13, 1865, due to unknown causes. Thanks to the quick action by local firemen, no humans died in that actual fire, but many animals perished, including two whales, which boiled alive in their tanks. While other animals escaped, rumors of a lion racing through the city streets, mirrored in the film by an elephant running wild, seems to be the invention of local newspapermen. Stories varied from seeing a lion, to seeing a tiger, to one of the volunteer firefighters who claimed he took an axe to a runaway animal to keep everyone safe (Thompson 2015). What is true is that Barnum rebuilt and repopulated the museum but lost it to fire again in 1868. Horace Greeley’s intense abolitionism gets short shrift in the film, which focuses more on making him a man kowtowing to the rich society families. In truth, he had been pressing President Abraham Lincoln, through articles and editorials in his newspaper, to speed up the act of emancipation. To that end, he had written a letter to the president, “Prayer of Twenty Millions,” and published it in the paper on August 19, 1862. Also in the paper, Greeley supported the conscription, which did make him and the Tribune building a target for the draft riot mob. It is not commonly known whether he socialized with or assisted the Schermerhorn family in choosing where to place their charitable donations, but the family did exist. Caroline Webster “Lina”



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Schermerhorn came from the Dutch aristocracy, a descendant of the city’s original settlers, and married William Backhouse Astor Jr., a descendant of the Livingston family, in 1853. By 1863, she had given birth to four of her five children. The last, John Jacob Astor, would be born in 1864 and die on the Titanic in 1912. There is no record of rioters looting the Schermerhorn home during the riots as is depicted in the film. As to the female characters who appear more prominently in the film, Hell-Cat Maggie, who bites off her victims’ ears, was a composite of the real woman who did just that and a few other historical female criminals of the area (Burrows and Wallace 2000). The pickpocket (and love interest) Jenny Everdeane is completely fictional, though poor women were often arrested on petty theft charges in urban areas while rich women were given psychological care for the invented mental disease of shoplifting (Abelson 1992). Whether based on real people or not, some actors went to great pains to sound real to the era. “The film’s voice coach, Tim Monich, resisted using a generic Irish brogue and instead focused on distinctive dialects of Ireland and Great Britain” (Bordewich 2002). Since Amsterdam had been born in Ireland but raised in the United States, his accent was designed as a blend of accents, which is true of immigrant children to this day. For the Bill the Butcher accent of the native born, Monich studied old poems, ballads, newspaper articles, and the Rogue’s Lexicon, a book of underworld idioms compiled by New York’s police commissioner so that his men would be able to tell what criminals were talking about. “An important piece was an 1892 wax cylinder recording of Walt Whitman reciting four lines of a poem in which he pronounced the word ‘Earth’ as ‘Uth,’ and the ‘a’ of ‘an’ nasal and flat, like ‘ayan’” (Bordewich 2002). Another broader overall inaccuracy is that there are many Chinese immigrants shown in the movie. This is an anachronism because there was no real Chinese presence in New York until the 1870s and 1880s. During the Civil War, there were only a few hundred people of Chinese origin in the entire city. Chinese migrants in the United States primarily crossed the Pacific Ocean and therefore arrived in California first. They found work in the gold mines and later building the Western branch of the Transcontinental Railroad (Conway, McCormack, and Thomas 2003). Finally, the city did deal with a cholera epidemic but not in 1863. One happened in 1832, and another after the war, in 1866. “So there are quibbles and quarrels galore to be had with Gangs of New York. But this is a flawed masterpiece we’re talking about. Objecting to its faults is like complaining about misaligned spangles on the costume of a strongman who’s juggling a dozen buses” (Bradshaw 2003). The danger of fearing immigration—and fearing immigrants—rather than embracing them as a theme arrives early in the film. As a filmmaker, Scorsese often finds himself drawn to stories of immigrants and assimilation. “The reality is this country is built by the ingenuity and the power and

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the extraordinary contributions of the immigrants. And so there’s always been a resistance of fear and ignorance of the groups that have come to America until people began to understand, begin to know the need” (Ribera 2017). Though the film had been in production before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the year it premiered coincided with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, which realigned all immigration agencies under this new department. In the following ten years, spending on border security and deportations increased exponentially. Immigration had cycled in and out of U.S. politics ranging from the earliest days of the Alien and Sedition Acts to President Ronald Reagan’s Amnesty Act to Homeland Security. What effect this film had on people’s opinions is difficult to track, but, fearing issues, Miramax delayed the release of the film from December 2001 to December 2002. Publicists in the company felt it was too soon after the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, for a violent movie set in New York that depicts the New York Police Department (NYPD) in a bad light. Other reports say the film was behind schedule and couldn’t be released in its original theatrical slot. Scorsese is famous for lengthy films, and this one required the overtime services of editor Thelma Schoonmaker more than any previous film Scorsese had made. Working side by side with Scorsese, she produced eighteen various versions screened for test audiences. The cut they eventually chose ran two hours and forty-seven minutes. Scorsese discusses this process in the DVD commentary, saying, “There’s not one version that I would say, ‘That’s my original version.’ This was all a series of changes and rewrites and restructuring, until finally it comes down to the movie you see in the theater” (Ribera 2017). When the movie was released, it ended with a time-lapse of the New York City skyline from the 1860s to then present-day New York, which when originally designed had included the Twin Towers. The filmmakers decided to keep that visual on the film in tribute to the city and its inhabitants.

FURTHER READING Abelson, Elaine S. 1992. When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Anbinder, Tyler. 2002. Five Points: The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum. New York: Plume. Asbury, Herbert. 2008. The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld. New York: Knopf. Bordewich, Fergus M. 2002. “Manhattan Mayhem.” Smithsonian Magazine, December 2002. ­https://​­www​.­smithsonianmag​.­com​/­arts​-­culture​/­manhattan​-­mayhem​ -­72604720​/. Retrieved July 15, 2010.



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Bradshaw, Peter. 2003. “Gangs of New York.” Guardian, January 9, 2003. ­https://​ ­www​.­theguardian​.­com​/­culture​/­2003​/­jan​/­10​/­artsfeatures2. Burrows, Edwin G., and Mike Wallace. 2000. Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. New York: Oxford University P ­ ress​.­ Conway, K., M. McCormack, and C. Thomas. 2003. “Gangs of New York.” Social Education 67 (6): 313–17. Cook, Adrian. 2014. The Armies of the Streets: The New York City Draft Riots of 1863. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Ebert, Roger. 2002. “Gangs of New York.” ­https://​­www​.­rogerebert​.­com​/­reviews​ /­gangs​-­of​-­new​-­york​-­2002. Geraghty, Christine. 2008. Now a Major Motion Picture: Film Adaptations of Literature and Drama. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Gilfoyle, Timothy J. 2017. “Scorsese’s Gangs of New York: Why Myth Matters.” Scraps from the Lot. ­https://​­scrapsfromtheloft​.­com​/­2017​/­03​/­09​/­scorseses​-­gangs​ -­new​-­york​-­myth​-­matters​/. Golway, Terry. 2014. Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics. New York: Liveright. Gorn, Elliot J. 1987. “Good-Bye Boys, I Die a True American: Homicide, Nativism, and Working-Class Culture in Antebellum New York City.” Journal of American History 74 (September 2): 399–410. Hansen, Liane. 2007. “Scorsese on the Immigrant Experience on Film.” National Public Radio, June 10, 2007. Accessed July 3, 2019. ­https://​­www​.­npr​.­org​ /­templates​/­transcript​/­transcript​.­php​?­storyId​=​­10919643. Honeycutt, Kirk. 2017. “‘Gangs of New York’: THR’s 2002 Review.” Hollywood Reporter, December 20, 2017 (originally published in 2002). h ­ ttps://​ ­w ww​.­h ollywoodreporter​.­c om​ /­r eview​ /­g angs​ -­n ew​ -­y ork​ -­r eview​ -­2 002​ -­m ovie ​-­1069314. Knobel, Dale. 1996. America for the Americans: The Nativist Movement in the United States. New York: Twayne. LV Criminal Defense. 2019. New York, New York Crime Statistics 1860–1920. ­https://​­www​.­lvcriminaldefense​.­com​/­ny​-­1860​-­1920​/. McPherson, James M. 2001. Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction. New York: McGraw-Hill Education. Ribera, Robert. 2017. Martin Scorsese: Interviews, Revised and Updated. Conversations with Filmmakers Series. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Sante, Luc. 2003. Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Scott, A. O. 2002. “To Feel a City Seethe as Modernity Is Born.” New York Times, December 20, 2002. Thompson, Helen. 2015. “150 Years Ago, a Fire in P.T. Barnum’s Museum Boiled Two Whales Alive.” Smithsonian Magazine, July 20, 2015. ­https://​­www​.­smithsonianmag​ .­com​/­smart​-­news​/­pt​-­barnums​-­bizarre​-­museum​-­burned​-­ground​-­1865​-­180955955​/. Turner, Julia. 2003. “Why Is Gangs of New York Nominated for the Best Original Screenplay Oscar?” Slate, February 12, 2003. ­https://​­slate​.­com​/­news​-­and​ -­politics​/­2003​/­02​/­is​-­gangs​-­of​-­new​-­york​-­an​-­original​-­screenplay​.­html. Various. 2002. Gangs of New York: Making the Movie. New York: Miramax. Winn, Christopher. 2014. I Never Knew That about New York. New York: Plume.

Chapter 9

Lincoln (2012) Written by Tony Kushner and directed by Steven Spielberg, Lincoln depicts the last four months of the Abraham Lincoln presidency and the effort to pass a Constitutional amendment ending American slavery. When Spielberg signed a deal to direct a Lincoln movie, he joined a long and crowded filmmaking tradition. There are over two hundred movies, documentaries, and television shows (including miniseries) featuring the sixteenth president. Admittedly, the number of Lincoln films is relatively modest compared to Lincoln books, but that’s because at nearly fifteen thousand, there are more books about Lincoln than any other person in history, with the possible exception of Jesus. Lincoln wasn’t always popular. His presidency was contentious even in the North, as the contested 1864 presidential election suggests, and most white Southerners reviled him. David H. Donald, one of Lincoln’s many biographers, contends that the sixteenth president did not take on heroic, even mythological, status until the early twentieth century (Donald 1969). Coincidentally, this was about the same time silent films made their appearance on the American stage. Birth of a Nation (1915) signaled a trend toward national reconciliation that would shape a flood of films in the 1920s, and that trend included historically inaccurate portrayals of the sixteenth president. Thirteen years and multiple postponements lie between Spielberg’s first discussions about a Lincoln film and the finished product, suggesting how difficult it was to craft a film that would meet twenty-firstcentury cultural needs. And in the end the real purpose of the Lincoln film was not to offer up a historically accurate accounting of the president but to craft a Lincoln that twenty-first-century moviegoers would pay to watch.

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LINCOLN GOES TO THE MOVIES President Lincoln didn’t become an American icon until the early twentieth century. Coincidentally, this was about the same time silent films made their appearance, signaling a long history of movie-made Lincolns who bore little or no resemblance to the historical man. Some of the earliest Lincoln films, including The Reprieve (1908), Abraham Lincoln’s Clemency (1910), and The Sleeping Sentinel (1910), built on the myth of Lincoln the merciful. In all these films, the president pardons a young soldier about to be executed for some breach of discipline. In Lieutenant Grey of the Confederacy (1911) Lincoln pardons a Confederate spy, and in the 1913 Toll of War he pardons a Southern girl spy. Lincoln pardons another Southern spy in Birth of a Nation (1915), cementing that decade’s version of Lincoln as humane and merciful. In these films, emancipation and black civil rights are seen as either unimportant or actively dangerous to white Americans, particularly as they undertake the difficult job of healing the wounds of a civil war. Without a doubt, Birth of a Nation is the best known of these films, and it portrayed Lincoln as a racist who preferred white Confederates to African Americans. The first full-length Lincoln film, The Dramatic Life of Abraham Lincoln, appeared in 1924 and began a film tradition of treating Mary Todd Lincoln as an overbearing harpy. The same year John Ford’s The Iron House emphasized Lincoln’s status as a westerner. The film was a huge box office success, signaling that Lincoln’s transformation into America’s favorite “man of the people” was well under way. Great Depression–era Lincoln films reprised the silent era’s obsession with the merciful Lincoln, including The Littlest Rebel (1935), where Shirley Temple gets Lincoln to pardon her Confederate father. As the decade ground on, audiences increasingly gravitated toward a Lincoln who expressed values of self-reliance, hard work, and strength in the face of adversity. Both John Ford’s The Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) and Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940) captured America’s desire for such a Lincoln. There are also a number of parody or satirical Lincoln films, including that perennial favorite of historians, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989). In that film, Lincoln delivers a Spark Notes version of his Gettysburg Address, ending with the not-so-immortal lines, “Let’s be excellent to each other. And party on, dudes.” Perhaps the ultimate example of plasticity of the celluloid Lincoln can be found in Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies, both of which came out the same year as Spielberg’s Lincoln.

In 2001, DreamWorks announced they had signed a deal for the film and signed John Logan to write the script. Logan, who’d written Gladiator the previous year and would go on to write the scripts for The Last Samurai (2003), The Aviator (2004), Sweeney Todd (2007), and more, created a script that focused on the relationship between Frederick Douglass and Lincoln. Spielberg rejected that script and hired Paul Webb to rewrite. Webb’s script covered the entirety of Lincoln’s presidency. Then Liam Neeson, Spielberg’s first choice to play Lincoln, dropped out of the project and Pulitzer



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Prize–winning playwright Tony Kushner took over from Webb. Kushner’s first script came in at five hundred pages, so he narrowed the movie’s focus from the last four months of Lincoln’s life to the last two months. A year after the film’s intended release date and well behind schedule, Daniel DayLewis agreed to play Lincoln. Spielberg assembled an all-star cast, including Sally Field, David Strathairn, Tommy Lee Jones, Hal Holbrook (who played Lincoln in 1974), and James Spader. The godfather of American movie scores, John Williams, composed and conducted the soundtrack with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Chicago Symphony Chorus. The film opens with a flashback of the Battle of Jenkins Ferry, April 30, 1864, before shifting to a scene where two black soldiers speak with a seated man the camera reveals to be Abraham Lincoln. The movie shifts to January 9, 1865, where the viewer is introduced to the president’s home life and a variety of conversations that suggest how heavily slavery weighs on Lincoln’s mind. Lincoln makes a deal with Francis Preston Blair (Hal Holbrook) to bring a discussion of an abolition amendment to the House floor in return for peace talks with Confederate leadership. The movie briefly leaves Lincoln to focus on Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones), chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and a known abolitionist. Meanwhile Secretary William H. Seward (David Strathairn) meets with lobbyists Robert Latham (John Hawks), Richard Schell (Tim Nelson), and W. N. Bilbo (James Spader) to discuss strategy. A near montage of short scenes at the movie’s midpoint shows the lobbyists Latham, Schell, and Bilbo offering congressmen jobs and money to vote for the amendment. After a series of political machinations and Lincoln family difficulties, the film shifts to the War Department telegraph office, where Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton (Bruce McGill), Secretary of War Gideon Welles (Grainger Hines), President Lincoln, and a telegraph operator wait for news regarding the battle for Wilmington. Scenes in the House chambers suggest congressmen have heard rumors of the peace talks and are losing their will to vote to abolish slavery. The amendment seems doomed. General Ulysses Grant (Jared Harris) meets with Confederate officials, including Alexander Stevens (Jackie E. Haley), the rebel vice president. Grant is unsympathetic to their desire to keep slavery but sends Lincoln a telegram urging him to meet with the Confederates to discuss peace terms. Late in the night, Lincoln ponders his options and decides he will meet with Confederates at Hampton Road, Virginia. At last the day of the vote comes. The House roll call commences and the Thirteenth Amendment passes. As celebrations erupt in the gallery and on the House floor, Stevens approaches the speaker and asks for the final bill. Stevens takes the bill home and presents it to his black housekeeper. At Fort Monroe, Hampton Roads, Virginia, Lincoln and Seward meet with the Confederate envoys aboard the River Queen. Lincoln firmly refuses to meet their demands for concessions on slavery. The next scene shows

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Lincoln riding through a battlefield, surrounded by dead soldiers and horses. Lincoln meets with Grant to discuss terms for Confederate surrender, which precedes General Lee’s (Christopher Boyer) surrender at Appomattox Court House. That evening Lincoln discusses a measure to allow black voting with Ashley and the Speaker of the House. The men then watch as Lincoln walks down the hall on his way to the carriage that will take him to the theater. The next scene opens in a theater. A man stops the performance to announce the president has been shot. The crowd erupts as the president’s son, who was in the audience, is rushed from the building. In the movie’s penultimate scene, the dying president lies in a bed surrounded by cabinet officials and family. A doctor pronounces Lincoln dead, and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton utters his famous line, “Now he belongs to the ages.” The film closes with a flashback to Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address as he reads the immortal lines about binding up the nation’s wounds. Lincoln premiered in October 2012 and eventually made over $275 million. The film’s success came as a pleasant surprise to Paramount Pictures executives, who’d objected to Spielberg’s $65 million budget. Spielberg’s previous historical film, Amistad (1997), proved a critical success but a box office disaster. After Lincoln’s release, academic historians went into high gear, criticizing the film for a number of historical inaccuracies, but the American moviegoing population didn’t care. Teachers asked Spielberg for an affordable DVD version of the film they could show in classrooms. Disney Educational Productions responded by donating thirty-seven thousand copies of the film to secondary schools, along with a teaching guide titled Stand Tall: Live Like Lincoln. The film garnered numerous awards, including twelve Academy Award nominations. Critics and audiences alike singled out Day-Lewis’s restrained and thoughtful Lincoln as particularly notable, winning the Best Actor award from the Academy Awards, the British Academy Film Awards, Critics Choice Awards, Golden Globe Awards, and many, many more. Sally Field and Tommy Lee Jones both received a number of nominations and awards, as did John Williams, Kushner, and Spielberg. The film made dozens of critics’ Top Ten lists for the year and earned the top spot on four of those lists.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT Slavery caused the American Civil War. All causation theories that argue otherwise either disguise slavery, like the “states’ rights” argument, or make the racist argument that slavery wasn’t an issue because it wasn’t that bad. This is not to say that the men and women who fought in or supported one side of the war or the other did so primarily because they were for or against slavery, but there is a line of demarcation between war causation and



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personal motivations. As slavery grew in the United States, from less than a quarter million slaves in 1800 to nearly four million in 1860, so too did the sectional argument about the nation’s “peculiar institution.” As Southern states’ slave numbers expanded, ideological commitment to Southern slavery hardened, culminating in the secession of eleven slaveholding states from the Union and their formation of the Confederate States of America. At the same time, abolitionists’ movement to end American slavery gained traction across the nation, particularly but not only in Northern states. At the nation’s birth, slavery was written into a myriad of state and federal laws. The U.S. Constitution avoided specific mentions of slavery but did functionally endorse it with the Three-Fifths Compromise, which allowed representation to be measured by accounting for all of a state’s free persons and three-fifths of a state’s unfree persons. Additionally, Article IV of the Constitution established a Fugitive Slave Law, making it illegal for slaves to free themselves by escaping to a state that had abolished slavery. A series of laws and federal congressional acts in the decades before the Civil War hardened the legal basis for slavery, culminating in the U.S. Supreme Court decision Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), establishing slaves as property, not persons, under the law. In the decades before the Civil War, abolitionists took a state-by-state approach to ending slavery. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, they had success with Northern states, in great part because slavery served a decreasingly important economic purpose in states north of the MasonDixon Line. In 1780, Pennsylvania became the first state to abolish slavery. That same year Massachusetts enacted a state constitution that declared all men equal, but it took three court cases in 1781 and 1783 to abolish slavery. Other Northern states followed suit, most of them taking a “gradual emancipation” approach. New York, for example, passed a 1799 law that transformed slaves into indentured servants, and in 1817 passed another law that freed slaves born before 1799 and ended indentures in 1827. Border states in the upper South tended to have high percentages of free blacks (as many as 91 percent in Delaware in 1860) but nonetheless maintained slavery as a legal institution (McCarthy and Stauffer 2006). By the time the Civil War began in 1861, Americans could be divided into three camps with regards to slavery. Proslavery forces used racist ideology to argue for slavery as an economic and moral institution. Abolitionists objected to slavery on moral, religious, and human rights grounds and contended that slavery should be abolished immediately and unconditionally. Antislavery persons, on the other hand, objected to slavery as interfering with the rights of free white workers and creating an unfair economic advantage for slave owners that would lead (or already had led) to a national slaveocracy. As the war entered its second year, it became increasingly clear to Northern Americans that the war’s end must include the end of slavery if for

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no other reason than the Confederacy’s collapse would be guaranteed by the noncooperation of its four million slaves. The 1861 Confiscation Act allowed the federal government to confiscate rebel property, including slaves. In Missouri, General John Fremont declared martial law and declared all slaves in the state free. Lincoln objected to Freemont’s unauthorized emancipation and removed him, but the precedent had been set. In May 1862, General David Hunter proclaimed all slaves in Union-held areas of South Carolina, Florida, and Georgia free. Again, Lincoln revoked the order. Though much has been made of Lincoln’s caution, four border states (Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri) with slavery had stayed in the Union. Their defection to the Confederacy would have made a Union victory nearly impossible (McPherson 2007). The public support for Hunter’s emancipation efforts led Congress to pass a Second Confiscation Act in July 1862. This act freed slaves who crossed Union lines. The resultant flood of slaves to Union army camps suggested the power of freedom to destabilize slave owners and the Confederacy. Lincoln almost immediately proposed a draft version of the Emancipation Proclamation to his cabinet, though he continued to worry about the four slaveholding border states. The Union army’s strategic victory at Antietam in September 1862 gave Lincoln the impetus to issue his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. He warned the Confederacy they had until January 1, 1863, to return to the Union or lose their slaves by official proclamation. Lincoln also called for the enrollment of black men into the Union army and navy. This provision helped signal Lincoln’s intention to end slavery. As Eric Foner explains, “By making the army an agent of emancipation and wedding the goals of Union and abolition [the Emancipation Proclamation] ensured that northern victory would produce a social transformation in the South and a redefinition of the place of blacks in American life” (Foner 2010). The Emancipation Proclamation made the efficacy of promised freedom clear. Though Lincoln’s January 1, 1863, proclamation technically freed relatively few slaves, in declaring the slaves held by states in insurrection free, it signaled the war was henceforth about ending slavery. Thus Lincoln linked emancipation with saving the Union and ending the war and in that way sold the idea to the many Northerners who were neither abolitionists nor antislavery adherents. Slaves rebelled in increasing numbers after the proclamation. By war’s end, over ten thousand slaves had escaped to the Union army. Over a hundred contraband camps existed in places that had once been worked by slaves, most famously the Freedmen’s Colony of Roanoke Island, North Carolina, where 3,500 ex-slaves built a self-sufficient community. Thousands more freedmen joined regiments of the U.S. Colored Troops. By 1865, there were 175 black regiments in the U.S. Army, or about 10 percent of the army’s total enlistment. And of the 186,000 black soldiers who served in the



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war, 134,000 of them had escaped from slave states. Lincoln credited black soldiers for turning the tide of war. Sensing an opportunity, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony formed the Women’s Loyal National League (sometimes called the Women’s National Loyal League) in May 1863 with the purpose of supporting an amendment to abolish slavery. Stanton and Anthony enlisted the considerable organizational assistance of members of the women’s suffrage movement. Many of the men and women who worked for women’s suffrage were also connected with abolitionist organizations, making the organization a perfect match of interests. They published “An Appeal to the Women of the Public” and called a convention. At the convention they called for equal civil rights for all men and women, including citizens of “African descent.” The league organized a petition drive to demand Congress consider an amendment to the Constitution abolishing slavery. When they’d collected one hundred thousand signatures, Senator Charles Sumner delivered the petition to the Senate. The league eventually gathered over four hundred thousand signatures, providing significant impetus for congressmen to support the amendment (Venet 1991). Based on the impetus created by the flood of slaves fleeing to the Union and the Loyal League’s petition drive, Congressman James Ashley of Ohio introduced a bill for the Thirteenth Amendment on December 14, 1863. On January 11, 1864, Senator John Henderson introduced a joint resolution for the amendment. Sumner and Representative Thaddeus Stevens, both prominent foes of proslavery forces, worked on wording for the bill, and on February 10, 1864, the Senate Judiciary Committee unveiled the bill’s final wording. The Senate passed the amendment in April 1864, but the June House vote split on party lines and failed to pass (Dudden 2011). The election of 1864 created new opportunities for the bill, backed by the seemingly endless tide of escaping slaves and the increasingly important role of black soldiers in the Union army. Lincoln endorsed the Thirteenth Amendment as part of his platform in the run-up to the November election. After his reelection, he took a central role in promoting the amendment’s passage in the House of Representatives. On January 31, the House voted again, and this time the Thirteenth Amendment passed by a two-vote margin. Having passed the House and Senate, the amendment abolishing slavery had to be ratified by three-fourths of the states to become law. A month after its passage in the House, eighteen states had ratified the amendment, including Virginia and Louisiana, both former Confederate states. Lincoln and others had long contended that the seceded states were still states because their secession had been illegal. This argument required rebel states to also ratify the amendment after the war ended in April 1865. Congress made ratification a requirement for readmission to the Union. When Georgia ratified

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the amendment in December 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment became law and legal slavery ceased in the United States of America.

DEPICTION AND CULTURAL CONTEXT While Spielberg and Kushner’s Lincoln is a far, far better film than most Lincoln films, these films have historically set the accuracy bar pretty low. Lincoln’s biggest flaw is its omission of blacks and women. The portrayal of White House servants Elizabeth Keckley (Gloria Reuben) and William Slade (Stephen McKinley Henderson) as passive characters, straight out of Hollywood’s 1930s central casting, suggests the film’s larger problem in small scale. In the film, Keckley does little but act as Mary Todd Lincoln’s companion, but for one scene where Lincoln asks her what slaves will do after freedom. She tells him slaves don’t ask what comes next. They say, “Freedom first.” While this scene appears to give her some kind of active agency, the Keckley character is asked to speak for all of “her people” and so loses her individuality. Moreover, while Keckley was indeed Mary Lincoln’s seamstress, she had a vibrant life outside the White House. In 1862, she and the ladies of the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church organized the Ladies Contraband Relief Association to raise money and donations of clothing and food to help the fugitive slaves who’d fled to the Union capital. Mary Lincoln donated $200 to the organization, an act that underscores her Unionist sympathies. During the war, Keckley also ran her own dressmaking shop, where she employed upward of twenty black women. Keckley used the shop to teach black women a marketable skill, having learned firsthand how freedom required black women to support themselves (Grant 2016). And yet Spielberg and Kushner’s Lincoln portrays this activist woman as a passive servant who watched history being made rather than make it herself. William Slade gets no better treatment, and in fact the character comes perilously close to the “Sambo” or “Uncle Tom” stereotype so often seen in early American films and books. In reality Slade was an elder at the same Presbyterian church attended by Keckley and a leader in that church’s efforts to help fugitive slaves and poor freed persons. He was also a founding member of the Columbian Harmony Society, a benevolent association that helped poor blacks arrange affordable burials. During the war, Slade served as the president of the Convention of the Social, Civil and Statistical Association, an organization that collected data to make a case for black citizenship and voting rights (Sweet 2013). The film Slade is likeable, but his main job seems to be making sure the president wears his gloves. Frederick Douglass is also one of the film’s critical missing black characters. The oversight is particularly odd given both the film’s focus on black emancipation and the fact that the first draft of the script focused on



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Douglass and Lincoln’s friendship. The two men met in mid-1863, a good eighteen months before the events portrayed in Lincoln. In both meetings and letters, Douglass pressured Lincoln to end slavery, give black Americans citizenship, and allow the vote for all citizens (Blight 1991). Douglass encouraged his sons to join the army (unlike Lincoln), believing the existence of black soldiers would hasten the end of slavery, a belief that turned out to be true. In 1864 he wrote, “Henceforth let the war cry be down with treason, down with slavery, the cause of treason” (McPherson 1965). Lincoln wholly omitted the man who pushed Lincoln to end slavery. The movie’s lack of active black characters extends to missing representations of the black Americans who, by their efforts, made the Thirteenth Amendment a near foregone conclusion. The hundreds of thousands of slaves who fled to the Union army after the Second Confiscation Act signaled to Northern voters and politicians that slaves would not tolerate their enslavement any longer. Fugitive or contraband slaves not only created a public relations problem for anti-emancipation Northerners but also actively resisted slavery by depriving their masters and the Confederate government of their labor. The 134,000 fugitive men who joined the Union army or navy, and the uncounted (literally) fugitive slave women who followed the armies to cook, nurse, and spy, tipped the balance of victory toward the Union. As historian Kate Masur points out, “Mr. Spielberg’s Lincoln helps perpetuate the notion that African Americans have offered little of substance to their own liberation . . . it reinforces, even if inadvertently, the outdated assumption that white men are the primary movers of history and the main source of social progress” (Masur 2012). The unimportance of African Americans to American history is a story of such repetitive power it has become perceived truth, however historically inaccurate; Kushner and Spielberg perpetuated that inaccuracy. Much the same could be said for the missing women in the movie. As Masur points out, Lincoln underwrites the notion that white men are the primary movers in American history. Nothing could be further from the truth. The abolitionist movement, which existed decades before white Congressmen decided to take up the cause of the Thirteenth Amendment, was rife with female activists. It was from that tradition that Stanton and Anthony founded the Women’s Loyal National League. The league’s petition drive (along with the activities of free blacks and fugitive slaves) pushed President Lincoln and the U.S. Congress to seriously consider the amendment (Zaeske 2003). Rather than have one or two strong, pro-emancipation female characters, the film has passive and patient Elizabeth Keckley and hectoring, crying Mary Todd Lincoln. Both characters are stereotypes that ignore the historical reality of women’s contribution to the abolition of slavery. Lincoln’s errors of commission are picayune compared to its errors of omission. In the movie’s first real scene, for example, two black soldiers engage in a lively discussion of war aims with the president. While it is

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true Lincoln had a reputation for approachability, no soldier would have argued with him or taken him to task for his racial politics. As the three men speak, two white soldiers approach the president and recite the Gettysburg Address. While this makes for stirring cinema, the Gettysburg Address didn’t gain any kind of fame until well after the Civil War. It seems unlikely two soldiers would have memorized it (Wills 2006). The movie suggests Secretary of State Seward only grudgingly came to see the Thirteenth Amendment as a good idea, but however much Seward was a wily politician, he had better antislavery credentials than Abraham Lincoln. One of the reasons Lincoln won the Republican Party’s nomination in 1860 was that his main rivals, Seward and Salmon P. Chase, were seen as too antislavery. While Lincoln adhered to the Constitutional argument (which contended slavery was legal because the Constitution implicitly endorsed the institution), Seward held to the “higher law” standard. In this he joined abolitionists from William Lloyd Garrison to Douglass in arguing that a higher law than the Constitution demanded the end to slavery (McCarthy and Staufer 2006). Also, as Lincoln’s primary political adviser, it would have been Seward who met with the three lobbyists, not Lincoln. While the amendment vote did pass by two votes, the film shows two Connecticut congressmen voting no. In a public letter to Steven Spielberg, Connecticut Democratic congressman Joe Courtney objected to the film’s portrayal of his home state as not entirely behind the abolition of slavery, pointing out that all four of the state’s representatives voted for the amendment. Screenwriter Tony Kushner responded with his own public letter. He defended the film’s voting choices by saying, “I also made up dialogue and imagined encounters and invented characters” (McConnell and Todd 2013). Kushner’s point that he wasn’t making a documentary is a fair one, but it’s hard to see how getting the vote wrong helped the film’s story line. Speaking of the film’s portrayal of the House of Representatives, nineteenth-century political debates were not quite as boisterous as Spielberg and Kushner depicted. Representatives were not allowed to address each other but instead had to direct their remarks to the Speaker of the House. The Speaker would have disciplined anyone who broke that rule of order. Thaddeus Stevens was well known for his caustic wit, but he would not have called Fernando Wood a “fatuous nincompoop” in public. Lincoln’s surrender scene at Appomattox Court House gets a few details wrong. First, because the McLean House was not available for filming, Spielberg used a building that makes it appear as if the surrender happened in the countryside rather than in the center of a small town. The film also shows General Grant in dress uniform. In fact, Grant rarely wore his dress uniform and was not doing so for the surrender. He’d been out in the field, near where his cavalry and infantry had blocked Lee’s army, when he received a letter from Lee requesting a meeting to discuss surrender. Grant wrote Lee back in the affirmative but left it to Lee to find a suitable meeting place. So



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Lee rode to Appomattox Court House, met Wilmer McLean, and arranged to use his house. Grant arrived after Lee, wearing the mud-spattered field uniform he’d been wearing all week (Simpson 2000). Lastly, the movie is most assuredly not based on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book Team of Rivals (2005) as nearly every discussion of Lincoln claims. Goodwin’s book is over eight hundred pages long and less than ten of those pages deal with the Thirteenth Amendment. One can only assume Spielberg and others hoped to lend the film a patina of historical accuracy by claiming it leaned on Goodwin’s currency as one of the nation’s most famous American historians. The scheme seems to have worked. Certainly Lincoln did considerably better at the box office than Spielberg’s other historical films. Some critics and historians have complained about the film’s switching the theaters, from Ford’s Theater to Grover’s Theater. The Lincolns’ youngest son, Tad, did attend Aladdin at Grover’s Theater the night his father was killed. Corporal James Tanner, the Union soldier who accompanied Tad that night, later described the evening. Apparently a man came in the theater’s entrance door yelling that the president had been shot, but audience members agreed it was a ruse perpetrated by pickpockets who wished to take advantage of a fleeing crowd. Moments later the theater manager came on stage to announce the news was true. Tanner took Tad back to the White House and handed him over to the doorkeeper, Thomas Pendel, who watched over the crying boy until he fell asleep (Bogar 2013). By telling the Grover’s Theater story rather than the Ford’s Theater story, Kushner and Spielberg turn off a well-traveled road. Lincoln gets a number of other details right. As the film portrays, Abraham Lincoln worried that after the war the courts would overturn the Emancipation Proclamation. Without a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery, he feared the nation would return to the prewar status quo. By the war’s end, Lincoln had no wish to reunite the nation with slavery intact, nor did the vast majority of Northern voters. The historical Lincoln takes a lot of heat for being either too tolerant of slavery or too fond of abolition. People tend to conflate Lincoln the man with Lincoln the politician and president. The man took his job as president seriously. He believed he should represent all Americans, not just the ones who voted for him. His job was, among other things, to uphold federal laws and the United States Constitution, and the law said slavery was legal. Also, by the time Lincoln assumed the presidency, seven states had seceded. His presidential directive was the maintenance of the union, not the elimination of slavery. After Lincoln’s 1864 reelection and three years of war, his job had changed. Unlike in the early months of his administration and the war, Lincoln’s desire to abolish slavery was backed by the wishes of a majority of Northern citizens as well as the escalating refusal of slaves to stay enslaved. Spielberg and Kushner’s Lincoln accurately represents the president’s desire to force emancipation to a vote in the House of Representatives.

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The film also highlights the president’s very real disinclination to sign orders of execution for soldiers. More than five hundred soldiers were executed during the Civil War, most of them for desertion. According to the War Department’s General Orders (issued from 1861 to 1863) men convicted of desertion were to be shot, though commanding officers could choose to brand deserters with a D, forfeit their pay, or dismiss them from military service (an ironic punishment for a deserter). Lincoln heartily disapproved of military executions, saying, “You can’t order people shot by the dozens or twenties. People won’t stand for it” (Foner 2010). On another occasion he pardoned a soldier on the principle that the nation would be better off if the man were fighting, not dead. The president called desertion cases “leg cases” and reasoned that “if Almighty God gives a man a cowardly pair of legs how can he help their running away with him” (Foner 2008). Lincoln pardoned soldiers singly and sometimes in batches and once worried that he hadn’t used his pardon power as often as he should have. Viewers, critics, and historians all seem to enjoy the fact that the film is cast, costumed, and made up so that most of the characters look much like the historical persons they’re playing. Daniel Day-Lewis’s portrayal of Lincoln garnered the most attention, though some critics and viewers took issue with Day-Lewis’s higher-pitched voice. The problem with this criticism is that people believe they know what Lincoln sounded like based on film and television portrayals of Lincoln, most of which are firmly based in the Disney Hall of Presidents animatronic, basso-profundo presidential voice. A journalist writing in 1860 reported Lincoln’s voice as “a thin tenor, or rather falsetto.” The same year the New York Herald said he had “a frequent tendency to dwindle into a shrill and unpleasant sound” (Krowl 2018). On the upside, Lincoln’s tenor carried out over crowds better than a more bass voice, making him easier to hear than many politicians in the days before microphones.

THE PRESIDENT’S HAT There are few items of clothing more iconic than Abraham Lincoln’s top hat. The president wore the same silk hat from his inauguration to his assassination. That hat is now on display at the Smithsonian. In the film, Lincoln gives a short flag-raising speech after first pulling his notes out of his top hat. Some sources say Lincoln didn’t keep papers in his hat, but others say he did. The historians at Lincoln’s Cottage, now a national monument, say the president was a “frightfully messy person” who used his hat to keep track of important papers. The hat became nationally significant in April 1865. While on tour in the fallen Confederate capitol of Richmond, an aged black man approached Lincoln, removed his hat, and bowed. The president responded by removing his own hat and bowing in return, breaking racial notions of custom and caste.



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The film contains several tender moments between the president and his son Tad and harsher or at least awkward moments with son Robert. Robert was the oldest of the Lincolns’ four children, and his birth order meant he was raised with rather more discipline than Tad. Also, after Willie’s death, neither Lincoln parent was inclined to discipline Tad, who as a result had the run of the White House. Lincoln’s own father, Thomas, was strict and violent with his son, and Abraham made a decision to not be that way with his children. Years after her husband’s death, Mary Lincoln said her husband was “very, very indulgent to his children,” because he wanted them “unrestrained by parental tyranny” (Donald 1969). As Lincoln portrays, Robert was less lighthearted than Tad. For example, when the Lincolns hosted a reception for Tom Thumb, a famous little person, Robert refused to attend on the principle that circus acts were beneath his dignity. He did want very much to quit college and go to war. Mary Lincoln, who thought she’d lost quite enough children to death, was particularly insistent that her eldest stay out of danger. In February 1865, shortly after the Thirteenth Amendment passed the House, Robert got his wish when he was commissioned a captain and assigned to Ulysses S. Grant’s staff (Goff 1968). The story the film Lincoln tells the War Department telegraph operators one night about Melissa Goings is true and one Lincoln took great delight in telling. The Ethan Allen story is probably not true, but the president did like to tell it. The president had a cache of vulgar stories, and he often told them while hanging out at the War Department, much to the frustration of his proper secretary of war Edwin M. Stanton The film also captures the president’s troubled sleep and recurring dreams, which Lincoln believed were prophetic. He took these dreams seriously and often told these dreams to the people around him. Lincoln’s dreams fell into four categories: visitations from the dead, worries about his sons’ safety, prophesies of battle victory, and visions of his own death (Oates 1994). And the last category may be fiction. Ward Hill Lamon, who was one of Lincoln’s oldest friends, said Lincoln described a dream of his own funeral ten days before the assassination. It’s a great spooky story and one much repeated, but there’s no evidence Lamon ever told the story until nearly twenty years after Lincoln’s death. Lamon’s story is even more suspect because he says Lincoln told the dream to both himself and Mary, but Mary Lincoln never once mentioned any such prophetic dream. On the other hand, White House guard William Henry Crook claimed the president told him about just such a dream the night before the assassination. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles reported similar conversations with the president. Lincoln largely gets the Hampton Roads Peace Conference correct, though it overemphasizes its importance to the passage of Thirteenth Amendment. Black soldiers did not meet the Confederate envoys on their way to Hampton Roads, Virginia. It would have been a diplomatic insult to the proslavery Confederates and thus counter to Lincoln and Seward’s aims. Nonetheless,

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Spielberg’s placement of black men in uniform in that scene reminds viewers that the war was about ending a system of human bondage that would have put those men in chains. The film does suggest time and again that the fate of the Thirteenth Amendment lay in what happened in the peace talks, which simply wasn’t true. Nor was the Hampton Roads Peace Conference anywhere near as significant as the movie would suggest. One can hardly read a review of Lincoln without seeing mention of the film being based on Goodwin’s Team of Rivals. This inaccurate claim speaks to the kind of movie Spielberg and Kushner wanted to make. The film premiered a month before the 2012 presidential election and after President Barack Obama had named Team of Rivals one of the books he’d want on a desert island. In 2009, Obama would also put together his first-term cabinet in a manner that emulated Lincoln’s so-called team of rivals. Lincoln’s opponents for the 1860 nomination included Edward Bates, Salmon P. Chase, and William Seward, all of whom ended up key players in the first iteration of Lincoln’s cabinet. Likewise, in Obama’s first term, he made his Democratic primary opponent Hilary Clinton his secretary of state and Joe Biden his vice president. Of course, as many political pundits and historians have pointed out, the other similarity between the Lincoln and Obama cabinets was that they weren’t really all that full of rivals (Green 2013). By the beginning of Lincoln’s second term, his cabinet had seen significant turnover. Only Secretary of the Navy Welles and Secretary of State Seward remained, while men more friendly to Lincoln had replaced the others. Lincoln could afford to let his “frenemy” cabinet dwindle after his second election, knowing he wouldn’t be running again and didn’t need the cross-party support anymore. Much the same could be said of Obama, whose second round of cabinet appointments in 2013 included new secretaries of state, treasury, and defense. There can be little doubt that both Goodwin and Spielberg were cashing in on Lincoln’s marketability. He’s never been more popular, or more contested. His image appears in advertisements for consumer goods from antidepressant medications to pickup trucks. The “Lincoln Enigma” can be found even in sculpture. In the Mount Rushmore colossus, Lincoln (along with George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Teddy Roosevelt) is literally larger than life. At 450 feet, Lincoln’s head is not only the largest of the four carved into the mountain but the largest American sculpture. Daniel French’s seated Lincoln at the Washington Lincoln Memorial is likewise larger than life, though this Lincoln is less colossus and more the stern but loving “Father Abraham.” There’s a statue of Lincoln in Fort Wayne, Indiana, that memorializes Lincoln the dog-loving boy, and one in Ewa Beach, Oahu, Hawaii, that portrays a muscular and rugged woodsman Lincoln. There are several busts of Lincoln as “Man of Sorrows,” including the one that traditionally stands on a side table in the Oval Office, and the town of



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Gettysburg has a statue of Lincoln, hat raised, giving a modern tourist directions (Boritt 1996). And there are many more. The mythic Lincoln began to take form only days after John Wilkes Booth murdered the president as the assassinated president’s funeral train rolled across the country. In Washington, D.C., more than ten thousand people turned out to watch the elaborately decorated steam engine, with Lincoln’s portrait affixed above the engine’s cattle guard, as its nine cars began its 1,655-mile trip to Springfield, Illinois. In each city through which the train passed, an honor guard removed Lincoln’s casket from the train and paraded it through town while thousands looked on and wept. No one knows how many people came out to see Lincoln’s final trip, but most estimates put the numbers northward of a million. The president’s tragic death erased the controversy that surrounded him in life, at least in the Northern states. Preachers and poets alike celebrated the dead president both as a “common man” and as a saintly figure, larger and wiser than mere mortals. Lincoln replaced George Washington as the nation’s father that year of his death, and it’s a role he’s largely held ever since. Father Lincoln is just one iteration of the mythic Lincoln. There’s also Lincoln the Savior of the Union, Lincoln the Honest Self-Made Man, Lincoln the Frontiersman, Lincoln as the Man of the People, and Lincoln the Great Emancipator. Kushner and Spielberg wholeheartedly adopted this last mythic persona for their film (Boritt 1996). Lincoln is, as historian David Blight puts it, “infinitely malleable” (Foner 2008). His words and his images appear ad infinitum, some of them real and some imaginary. Most famously, Ronald Reagan quoted Lincoln to a wildly cheering crowd at the 1992 Republican National Convention, only it turned out Lincoln had not said any of the things Reagan quoted. The fact that Reagan made up his quotes mattered not one whit to his political party, who used the moment to stake a claim to the historical Lincoln as one of their own. In so doing, the Republican Party took a brief stab at marketing itself as the party of civil rights. In 2005, for example, the party’s official calendar used pictures of Lincoln and notable African Americans to claim civil rights achievements as their own, despite overwhelming evidence that the postReconstruction Republican Party has consistently resisted the expansion of civil rights. George W. Bush made another pitch for Republicans as the fountainhead of civil rights in a 2006 speech to the NAACP. He told his audience that his was still the party of Lincoln and that they ought not give over their allegiance to the Democratic Party. However, the speech came on the heels of Bush’s infamous mishandling of Hurricane Katrina, and black Americans were in no mood to be blamed for abandoning Republicans (Blight 2002). This process of claiming Lincoln for one side or another isn’t new. In 1947, historian David H. Donald wrote a now famous essay titled “Getting Right with Lincoln” in which he demonstrated how politicians of any party, at any time, could claim Lincoln as their own. Even white supremacist neoConfederates have a use for Lincoln, either soft-selling his commitment to

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ending slavery or by vilifying him as a stand-in for all the things they hate about twenty-first-century America, from big business to cultural diversity. Richard Nixon kept a bust of Lincoln in his office, but so too did Bill Clinton, though Clinton’s Lincoln bust stood next to a bust of Franklin D. Roosevelt. These days it’s de rigueur for presidents to have a Lincoln bust in the Oval Office. President Obama did, but so too does President Donald Trump, though the latter surrounds his with not one American flag, as is traditional, but three. President Trump doesn’t just identify his party with Lincoln but has favorably compared himself to the sixteenth president, declaring himself more popular than Lincoln despite the fact that there was no popularity polling in the 1860s. Trump has also claimed that Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was “excoriated” by the press, much like the press’s reaction to his own speeches. It’s not true, but the Trump base loves the comparisons. Lincoln’s immense plasticity worked well for Spielberg and Kushner’s Lincoln. The movie appeals to the view of Lincoln as an American saint, and it’s a view moviegoers find appealing. However, in reaching for a mass audience, Lincoln falls into the “white savior” abyss. Though the white savior can be a real person who acts to help nonwhite persons, the label also describes a fiction trope that appears in novels, movies, and television programs. The cinematic version of the trope often portrays the white savior as messianic, saving not individual persons of color but entire groups of nonwhite people (Vera and Gordon 2003). Social critic Teju Cole contends that the trope exists to satisfy the emotional needs of whites, who want to feel good about their white privilege (Cole 2012). White moviegoers could leave the theater after seeing Lincoln feeling emotionally satisfied by a story of white male political heroism when in reality the sixteenth president did not singlehandedly bring about the end of slavery. To tell that story, Spielberg and Kushner had to ignore the masses of people who worked for decades to end American slavery, and in that omission the film contracts a near fatal case of white savior complex. That may be what so many Americans and film critics liked about the film. Films like Lincoln appease white guilt about racism while reinforcing America’s racial hierarchies. A nation that confuses white savior films with historical documentaries can remain ignorant of the ongoing racial divides in the nation, or better yet, blame those divides on persons of color who point them out. A steady diet of Hollywood films reinforces the problem. Three of the most recent films in this volume fall into the white savior category: Glory, Ride with the Devil, and Free State of Jones. Hollywood makes them, Americans go see them, and many of them win awards. Non–Civil War films like The Blind Side (2009), Lala Land (2016), Freedom Writers (2007), and The Help (2011) received a mountain of critical attention in spite of the fact that each is an egregious example of a white savior film. Lincoln also falls into the “great man” trap. This is a brand of history and filmmaking that imagines all history can be boiled down to biographies of



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great men doing great things. Great man theory can be traced to Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who in the 1840s postulated that everything important in history was the result of the action of a great man. Great man theory explicitly ignores women as significant historical actors and implicitly posits that greatness lies with Western or white men (Carlyle 2013). Cynical Civil War historians call this the “gods and generals” approach, so named after the 1996 book Gods and Generals by Jeffrey Shaara and the 2003 film adaptation by the same name. Great man theory is not just racist and sexist; it ignores the great masses of people who also direct history—for example, the masses of fugitive slaves who made it clear to Lincoln and others that they would not be enslaved any longer. The problem isn’t just that Lincoln is a white savior and great man film but that the filmmaker and screenwriter had to purposefully ignore wide swaths of history to do it. Kushner might have written a screenplay that mentioned the tide of fugitive slaves or been more specific about the effect black soldiers had on Northern voters’ opinions of slavery. It might also have allowed a token appearance by Frederick Douglass or even William Lloyd Garrison to suggest the decades-long struggle against slavery. And someone could have mentioned the women who petitioned to bring the amendment before the House. Spielberg might have used his not-­insignificant Hollywood power to make a film that portrayed Lincoln as a man acting not just from his own sense of goodness and right but in response to the pressures brought to bear by recalcitrant slaves, black soldiers, and female social justice warriors. It would have still been a Lincoln film but one that also allowed for a great number of people who deserve a little more credit for their very real heroism. In so doing, it might have been the first great Lincoln film and a film more in keeping with the promise of racial equality it promoted. The best historical films achieve a balance between good storytelling (art) and historical accuracy (fact). In that sense, Lincoln is an entertaining but ultimately disappointing Civil War film.

FURTHER READING Blight, David. 1991. Frederick Douglass’ Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Blight, David W. 2002. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bogar, Thomas. 2013. Backstage at the Lincoln Assassination: The Untold Story of the Actors and Stagehands at Ford’s Theater. Washington, DC: Regnery History Publishing. Boritt, Gabor S. 1996. The Historian’s Lincoln: Pseudohistory, Psychohistory and History. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Carlyle, Thomas. 2013. On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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Cole, Teju. 2012. “The White-Savior Industrial Complex.” Atlantic, March 21, 2012. ­https://​­www​.­theatlantic​.­com​/­international​/­archive​/­2012​/­03​/­the​-­white​-­savior​ -­industrial​-­complex​/­254843​/. Donald, David H. 1969. Lincoln Reconsidered: Essays on the Civil War Era. New York: Knopf. Dudden, Faye. 2011. Fighting Chance: The Struggle over Woman Suffrage and Black Suffrage in Reconstruction America. New York: Oxford University Press. Foner, Eric, ed. 2008. Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World. New York: W. W. Norton. Foner, Eric. 2010. The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. New York: W. W. Norton. Goff, John S. 1968. Robert Todd Lincoln: A Man in His Own Right. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Grant, Jordan. 2016. “Elizabeth Keckley: Businesswoman and Philanthropist.” Oh, Say Can You See? A Journal of the National Museum of American History, March 22, 2016. ­https://​­americanhistory​.­si​.­edu​/­blog​/­elizabeth​-­keckley​-­business woman​-­and​-­philanthropist. Green, Michael S. 2013. “Lincoln and Obama’s Teams of Non-Rivals.” Origins: Current Events, in Historical Perspective, January 22, 2013. ­http://​­origins​.­osu​.­edu​ /­history​-­news​/­lincoln​-­s​-­and​-­obama​-­s​-­teams​-­non​-­rivals. Krowl, Michelle. 2018. “Hearing Abraham Lincoln’s Voice.” Library of Congress, ­January 3, 2018. ­https://​­blogs​.­loc​.­gov​/­loc​/­2018​/­01​/­hearing​-­abraham​-­lincolns​-­voice​/. Masur, Kate. 2012. “In Spielberg’s Lincoln, Passive Black Characters.” New York Times, November 12, 2012. ­https://​­www​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2012​/­11​/­13​/­opinion​/­in​ -­spielbergs​-­lincoln​-­passive​-­black​-­characters​.­html. McCarthy, Timothy Patrick, and John Stauffer. 2006. Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism. New York: The Free Press. McConnell, Dugald, and Brian Todd. 2013. “Congressman Says ‘Lincoln’ Depicts Connecticut Vote Erroneously.” CNN, February 8, 2013. ­https://​­www​.­cnn​.­com​ /­2013​/­02​/­07​/­showbiz​/­lincoln​-­error​/­index​.­html. McPherson, James M. 1965. The Negro’s Civil War: How American Negroes Felt and Acted during the War for Union. New York: Pantheon. McPherson, James M. 2007 [1988]. Battle Cry Freedom: The Civil War Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Oates, Stephen B. 1994. With Malice toward None: A Life of Abraham Lincoln. New York: Harper. Simpson, Brooks. 2000. Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph over Adversity, 1822–1865. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Sweet, Natalie. 2013. “A Representative of ‘Our People’: William Slade, Leader in the African American Community and Usher to Abraham Lincoln.” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 34 (2): 21–41. Venet, Wendy Hammand. 1991. Neither Ballots nor Bullets: Women Abolitionists and the Civil War. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Vera, Hernan, and Andrew M. Gordon. 2003. Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Wills, Garry. 2006. Lincoln at Gettysburg. New York: Simon & Schuster. Zaeske, Susan. 2003. Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery and Women’s Political Identity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Chapter 10

Free State of Jones (2016) As the twenty-first century began to mature, so too did Americans’ ideas about who qualified as heroes of the Civil War. While conflicts over taking down statues of old Confederate generals roiled southern cities, artists around the country started making art that glorified the anti-Confederates, and films were no different. This climate bred Free State of Jones, the story of a Confederate army deserter who organizes his own interracial militia of formerly enslaved people and lower-income farmers, all dedicated to ending the war, though for differing reasons. While based on the story of Newton Knight, a real medic from Mississippi, the story and screenplay were written by Leonard Hartman with Gary Ross, who also directed. A much more highly fictionalized version of the story had been told once before on film, in 1948’s Tap Roots, adapted by Alan Le May from a novel by James Street and starring Van Heflin and Susan Hayward. Casting Matthew McConaughey as Knight must have seemed natural as he had already played abolitionist Roger Sherman Baldwin in Amistad (1997). As a lawyer, Baldwin chose to represent the kidnapped Africans who had landed in the free North rather than the slave South. Free State opens on a black screen with “Based on Actual Events Jones County, Mississippi 1862–1876” superimposed and fades up on a group of badly battered Confederates marching to the crest of a hill. There they see miles of men in blue over the edge and watch as their commander and comrades have their brains blown out by cannon fire. Men fall. Other men pick up the flags they drop. They fall. Other men follow. Medics drag bodies across the field, passing men who will never leave the spot where they fell.

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Newton Knight (McConaughey), a medic, drags a wounded man toward the hospital tent. Knowing that if doctors think a soldier is an officer they treat him faster, Knight borrows the insignia off a dead man’s coat. No one notices as they are too busy mopping up the blood. In camp later, the men discuss the new conscription act, which says that eldest sons of plantations owning twenty slaves “get to go home.” Fellow soldiers question why Knight is a nurse, not a fighter. He reminds them that if they get shot tomorrow, “you won’t want to go looking for an artillery officer” and questions why the rest are fighting. One says, “I ain’t fighting for cotton, I’m fighting for honor.” Knight meets his nephew, Daniel (Jacob Lofland), who informs him the army supply officers came to their farm, took most of their hogs, all the cotton, and him, telling him he had been conscripted. In the trenches the very next day, Daniel takes a shot in the belly and Newt decides to take his body home “where he belongs.” When told Daniel died with honor, Newt’s response is that “he just died.” At home in Jones County, Daniel’s mother, Annie (Jessica Collins), tells Knight the story of how the army men took all they had for the war effort. In his own home, he spends time with his wife, Serena (Keri Russell), and baby, who needs a doctor as well. Knowing he can’t go into town or he’ll be found away without leave, he heads to a local saloon in search of a doctor. There are no doctors left in town, but the saloon owner, Aunt Sally (Jill Jane Clements), knows of a “house negro” on a nearby plantation who is good with medicinal things. Rachel (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) arrives with a pass allowing her to travel and saves Newt’s child. Then the film uses her introduction to transition to eighty-five years in the future. Knight’s great grandson Davis is on trial for marrying a white woman, which is the crime of miscegenation in 1948, because as a descendant of Knight he is reported to have one-tenth African blood. Back in the past, Knight learns the conscriptors are coming back to take the rest of Annie’s hogs. He teaches her three young daughters to shoot rifles to hold them off because as a deserter he has to run from the slave patrol dogs. Serena is angry that he’s always fighting for others and now no one will be left to fight for her. When she sees several Confederate scouts casing her home looking for Newt, she begins packing. In the modern-day story line, a prosecuting attorney tells the jury that Serena left Newt, yet he had more children, who therefore must have been the children of himself and an enslaved woman. On the run, Knight is bitten by a dog but makes it to the saloon, where Aunt Sally patches him up and sends him into the swamps where the runaways live. There he meets Rachel again along with a runaway, Moses (Mahershala Ali), who wears a contraption around his neck that was placed for punishment. Rachel learns to read by watching the teacher of her owner, James Eakin’s children. She steals a knife she brings to Newt in the woods, and she



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has been bringing small tools and stolen food from the big house to the men all along. Having been a blacksmith, Newt offers to take the collar off Moses. By July 1863, Knight is helping old friends escape conscription by bringing them to the swamp, which has become an interracial collection of men and women. As a group calling themselves “the freemen of Jones County,” they attack the local conscription men and steal their provisions. Younger men arrive in camp and treat Knight like the commanders they left behind in the Confederate army. Other women have now joined their community, and on Sundays Newt holds religious meetings, using scripture to explain their right to not give away all they sow. Back at camp, mixing people of both races begins to cause tension. The Confederate colonel approaches Aunt Sally to send a message to Knight offering a full pardon to anyone who surrenders. Knight says no, so the Confederates begin burning the farms of the men who followed him. Some men decide to take the offer, but they are met by the local Confederates who instead of pardoning them, hang them, including the youngest boys. The women of the town cut their men down, and the Confederates monitor the funeral, expecting Knight to come pay his respects. Instead the women ambush the Confederates with rifles hidden in their long black mourning dresses, backed up by Knight and his army. The Confederate colonel is wounded in the foot and takes refuge in the church behind the graveyard. Knight follows, shoots, and hangs the colonel by his own belt in a fitting punishment for hanging the young boys. Knight asks Union general William Tecumseh Sherman for backup and supplies but is denied, which lowers morale. Confederates headquartered in Alabama strategize how to overtake Knight’s men, who hold all of Jones, Jasper, and half of Smith counties and have 250 men. Colonel Lowry marches with 1,000 men to fight against them. Knight claims the land belongs to them and names it the Free State of Jones. Principles of their country include “No man ought to stay poor so another can get rich,” “What you put in the ground is yours,” and “Every man is a man.” When the surrender is announced in April 1865, the Reconstruction amendments are written and ratified. Moses is reunited with his family and begins farming his own land, promised to the newly freed by Sherman. Then Andrew Johnson reverses Sherman’s promise and the runaways are told that Confederates who take the oath can have their land returned to them. James Eakins does so, and his family returns to their plantation. Rachel becomes a teacher at the local Freedmen’s School. Serena and Newt’s son return. Serena has nowhere to go, so Rachel welcomes her into their home. Back in the present, the prosecutor proves that Serena came home and must therefore be Davis’s legal ancestor. Still being the legal wife of Newt, she qualifies as the mother of his later children. Back in the past, the Eakins family takes Moses’s son for debt. Knight is arrested for taking Moses’s son away from his “apprenticeship” according

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to the new laws. Soon, martial law is declared and Union army men are sent in to protect African Americans under military Reconstruction. Former slaves join the Union League to protest the new laws and share information such as the Fifteenth Amendment, allowing the men among them to vote. But this, inevitably, leads to the riding of the KKK, who burn black churches in their own illegal protest. Knight wants more white men to join the Union League, but his friend Ward insists they won’t because their war is over. Rachel gives birth to a child who she declares to be a “brand-new thing,” being neither black nor white, and Newt places the baby’s name in their bible, listing Rachel as the mother. This becomes a piece of evidence in the modern-day trial as proof that Davis carries black blood. In the early 1870s, Moses walks through the fields registering men to vote, but on the way home he is lynched. On Election Day, two months later, Knight and Jasper stand to protect the men who want to vote. Only 22 are willing to take the risk. Despite all 24 of them voting one way, the official count only shows 2 of their votes versus 419 for the other party. Soon, the federal government pulls troops out, leaving the KKK to go on a murder spree before the election of 1876. In response, Rachel asks Knight to move north, where their son can go to school, but Knight does not want to leave a home he fought so hard to protect. Film reviewers recognized the value of finally depicting both the visually powerful carnage of the Civil War and the less exciting aftermath, known as Reconstruction. Yet many also felt that the desire to tell the whole story dragged the film down. Wendy Ide of The Guardian wrote that in Free State, “A fascinating and genuinely important period in American history is underserved here by an inelegant structure and unwieldy running time” and went on to say, “There’s a languid quality to much of the film, which flows slower than the waters in the bayou where Knight and his army hide out” (Ide 2016). Likewise, Jordan Hoffman wrote, “Put bluntly, there’s just too much plot in Free State of Jones. There’s more than one moment in which McConaughey has a heart-to-heart with a comrade that seems really important but I swear it’s the first time the other character has appeared on screen. There’s got to be a version of this movie floating around that’s four hours long” (Hoffman 2016). Finally, famed reviewer Roger Ebert summarized Free State like this: “As inherently astonishing and powerful as this littleknown episode is, it has not been well-served by Ross’ lumpy, ill-conceived script, which ends up wasting Matthew McConaughey’s terrific lead performance and other strong acting contributions” (Ebert 2016).

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND Like the Civil War, people’s perceptions of the story of Newton Knight change based on where the story is told. In the North, he is largely seen as a



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hero, and in the South, still in the twenty-first century, over 150 years after the war ended, Knight is known as “a traitor and a reprobate” by some, and worse, “He is actually a thief, murderer, adulterer and a deserter” (Grant 2019), though that last quote comes from the website of the local chapter of the Sons of the Confederate Veterans in Jones County. Knight was a Southern farmer before the Civil War, a Confederate soldier during the early part of the war, a deserter later in the war, and a deputy U.S. Marshal in Mississippi after the war, during Reconstruction. He was legally married to Serena Turner in 1858 but later left 160 acres of land to his second wife, a free black woman named Rachel, making her one of the few African American women to own land in the South (Stauffer and Jenkins 2009). Knight never owned slaves (though his ancestors did), he loved and respected his mixed-race children, and he was fine with his children marrying people of other races. Regarding his military service, Knight joined the Confederate army’s Eighth Mississippi Infantry Regiment in July 1861, and in May 1862 switched to Company F of the Seventh Mississippi Infantry Battalion because it included more local men (Bynum 2003). In the summer of 1862, Knight became one of the Confederacy’s many deserters, likely in response to various new events including the news that Confederate army supply units had taken all the horses from his farm for military service, local families reported being left without food for the coming winter, and the announcement of the Twenty Negro Law that allowed rich men to avoid military service entirely. Whatever his full reasoning, Knight deserted in early 1863 and was captured and jailed. What angered him more was the burning of his farm by the authorities in order to send a message to others considering desertion (Stauffer and Jenkins 2009). While hiding out in the local Leaf River swamp, Knight encountered many more deserters along with a contingent of runaway slaves. One of the things that forced Knight into the swamp was the rumor that he had shot and killed Major Amos McLemore, who had been sent to Jones County to recapture deserters as the Confederate army needed manpower more and more as the war continued (Bynum 1999). Nicknaming themselves either Knight Company or Jones County Scouts (accounts by historians vary), the men he gathered around himself, many local relatives and friends, began skirmishing with Confederate quartermaster companies sent to gather supplies. Knight Company kept the soldiers from taking supplies from some farms or caught up with them after they had done so, collected the food at gunpoint, and redistributed it to families in need, giving the group a bit of a Robin Hood reputation. The group utilized a number of different hideouts with various names meant to throw off anyone following them. Sal Batree gained its name because Newt named his shotgun Sal, and Batree is “Battery” in the local dialect (Grant 2019). Eventually, Knight Company claimed the capture of the city of Ellisville. Historians still disagree on whether what Knight and

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his followers did amounted to seceding from the Confederacy. Rather, the men later claimed their area, Jones County, had never actually chosen to leave the Union. Confederate authorities tracked the men in the swamps and captured and executed ten of them as a message to the rest (Bynum 1999). As the war neared its obvious end, Knight sent word to nearby Union troops that he and his men hoped to join them but was denied. After the war, however, the Union army hired Knight to distribute rations to families whose farms had been stripped of their harvests. He also made it his business to free several children still being held in slavery by owners who simply did not announce the news of the surrender and the Reconstruction amendments (Kelly 2009). In fact, Reconstruction helped Knight. He earned the position of a local U.S. Marshall, rebuilt his farm, and became colonel of an otherwise all-black Union regiment composed to defend residents against the rise of the KKK and other domestic terrorist organizations bent on keeping African Americans from utilizing the rights now granted to them. This position lasted from 1875 to 1877, the year Reconstruction is considered to have ended. Before Reconstruction ended, laws allowed interracial marriage, so Knight separated from Serena and Rachel became his common-law wife, though Serena and her children remained on his property in a separate house. At the same time, their son married a daughter of Rachel’s from an earlier relationship, and their daughter married Rachel’s son, creating confusion for genealogists in the future. Together the couple had five more children before she died in 1889. When he died some thirty-three years later, he broke a Mississippi law that barred burying whites and blacks in the same cemetery when he was buried next to Rachel (Kelly 2009). In 2016, as the film premiered, chapters of the Sons of the Confederacy still existed in Mississippi, and John Cox, a member, when interviewed about Knight’s legacy, proudly stated, “Some people are far too enamored of the idea that he was Martin Luther King Jr., and these are the same people who believe the War Between the States was about slavery, when nothing could be further from the truth” (Grant 2019). Yet it is on the record that Andrew Stephens, vice president of the Confederate States, said of the Confederacy: “Its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—submission to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition” (Kendi 2017). Likewise, John Mosby, a Confederate raider, always stood by the idea that “the South went to war on account of slavery.” Knowing that South Carolina cited defense of slavery in its secession, Mosby said, “South Carolina ought to know what was the cause of her seceding” (“Confronting Slavery and Revealing the ‘Lost Cause,’” n.d.). Historians quibble about the beginning of the Reconstruction era, choosing between the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation and the beginning of the Port Royal Experiment in 1863 or the final end of the war in



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1865. Because the Emancipation Proclamation only freed the enslaved people in areas the Union army had retaken, it is not considered by all to be the true beginning of the era. They do agree that Reconstruction flourished under President Ulysses S. Grant’s two terms but floundered and ended, too early to cement real change, in 1877 due to the election of Rutherford B. Hayes as president. During Reconstruction, Congress proposed and adapted the three Reconstruction amendments: the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth. The Thirteenth Amendment essentially forbid slavery except as a punishment for crime; the Fourteenth Amendment granted citizenship to all persons born in the United States, including former slaves, and guaranteed all citizens equal protection of the laws. This turned out not to be definitive enough, as women born in the country did not yet have the right to vote, so this amendment did not mean that formerly enslaved men had earned that right. For that Grant saw the need for a Fifteenth Amendment, which promised that the right to vote could not be denied on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. The army stationed troops in Southern cities to enforce these new rights, and when they retracted those troops in 1877, most new advancements halted until the civil rights movement of the 1960s. While the troops held authority, many African American men began to vote such that African American men earned positions in state and federal offices from sheriffs to senators. Hiram Rhodes Revels became the first African American senator, representing Mississippi, where Blanche Bruce also served. As noted earlier, such success frightened many former Confederates. Once the government recalled Union troops in 1877, the formerly enslaved were disenfranchised both politically and economically, through sharecropping and legal segregation, which began in the form of Jim Crow laws passed state by state. Few African Americans protested these new laws as unconstitutional due to the activities of the domestic terrorist group known as the KKK. Wearing white hoods and robes for disguises, they began the devastating practice of lynching African American men, women, and often children to scare them away from exercising their constitutional rights. Finally, the reality of interracial marriage before, during, and after the Civil War is that it did exist. Many Southern states repealed anti-­miscegenation laws during Reconstruction, leaving a window for mixed-race marriages, but quickly reinstated them when Reconstruction ended. This came in Mississippi in 1865 with the first ban on marriage between whites and blacks under the Black Codes. In 1890, their state Congress wrote the ban into Mississippi Constitution, and it read: “The marriage of a white person with a negro or mulatto, or person who shall have one eighth or more of negro blood, shall be unlawful and void.” In the 1900s, these laws began to include Chinese Americans and other nonwhites. Due to the prevalence of rape among owners and enslaved women before slavery ended, there were many instances of spouses with black heritage such as the Davis Knight case in 1948.

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Davis Knight was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison for breaking the state codes. The state of Mississippi offered to drop the charges if he annulled the marriage and left Mississippi, but he refused the offer and accepted the sentence. Then the Mississippi Supreme Court overturned the conviction to avoid a federal challenge to their racial codes.

DEPICTION AND CULTURAL CONTEXT As Gary Ross notes on the website he created to explain all the creative choices he made when writing the screenplay (which also footnotes all the research he undertook to write the script, including scans of primary documents), “Some things need to be invented in a movie, but most things in Jones were not. I think it’s only right that you be able to tell which was which” (Grant 2019). Due to his diligence, much of what appears in the film is as true as it can be, being built around primary documents from Knight’s life and the lives of other Unionist Southerners of the era. Further proof of Ross’s interest in and devotion to historical accuracy came from the explanation he gave on the film’s website: “Academic history is often overwhelmed by popular history. Les Mis actually becomes the French Revolution, Homeland is somehow the ‘real’ war on terror, and Lincoln is inevitably remembered as he was in Lincoln.” Ross’s interest in Knight’s story had been piqued when a development executive gave him a treatment on Knight and the Free State of Jones. Two years of research followed with top experts in Reconstruction, including John Stauffer at Harvard and Eric Foner of Columbia. Foner, who had written Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877, served as Ross’s historical consultant by suggesting many other worthwhile texts until Ross admitted, “It was such a heady experience to learn for learning’s sake, for the first time, rather than to generate a screenplay. I’m still reading history books all the time. I tell people this movie is my academic midlife crisis” (Grant 2019). With that as his marching orders, Ross used his website to explain which parts were true and which were invented for the purpose of supporting the narrative. Even then, Ross strove to ensure those points were based on historical truths. For instance, the character of Daniel is fictional, designed to put a face to the philosophical reasons Knight frequently gave for deserting: the class division inherent in conscription and the human waste created by war, which takes even children and turns them into cannon fodder. Daniel also provides Ross the chance to illustrate how American ideas about what constituted a “good death” changed due to the experience of this war. Many rich men who died had families that could afford to send for their bodies to be buried back home in family graveyards. Most poor men ended up in group trenches on the sidelines of battlefields with the lucky ones removed in the years after the war and placed in battlefield cemeteries created by



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government commissions largely staffed and led by women and free black men (Faust 2008). Therefore, Knight is behaving as a man who felt the only way his nephew could rest easily in the hereafter was if his body was brought back home and buried on his family’s land. The scene of Knight teaching his female relatives, including the youngest daughters, to shoot is half true and half invention for drama’s sake. The truth of it is that most women were taught to shoot at a young age as a skill necessary for survival. Pioneers and farmers lived on lands surrounded by the natural predators of their areas—from wolves to bears depending on location (Knight 1951). As to female support for the Free State of Jones, men interviewed after the war all consistently mentioned the way women, local sympathizers, and those enslaved most notably Rachel, brought food and weapons into the various swamp hideouts to help them survive (Grant 2019). Ross began his quest to prove the historical accuracy of his film to future audiences in the trailer, which opens on a phrase that goes beyond the typical “Based on a True Story.” For Free State, Ross added the adjective “incredible,” as in “Based on the Incredible True Story.” Then the trailer gives away the plot point that young Daniel will die in order to highlight the antiConfederate comment in this exchange: Will: “He died with honor.” Knight: “No, Will, he just died.” Next the trailer cuts to seeing the Eakins family in their luxury as Knight tells his swamp companions, “We’re all dying so they can stay rich,” cementing the secondary theme of classism. Definitions of Knight as “a Confederate soldier who became an outlaw” and “an outlaw who became a leader” and “a leader who inspired rebellion” aim to place Knight in a category Americans tend to find fascinating. Bonnie and Clyde were outlaws. Jesse James was an outlaw. Josey Wales was an outlaw. Though, perhaps “outlaw” is a proper adjective as Knight is as divisive as those other outlaws—both a hero to pro-Unionists and a murdering traitor to the pro-Confederates. Then the trailer shows Knight handing out stolen rifles to his followers while proclaiming, “No man ought to tell another man what he’s got to live for, or what he’s got to die for.” Focusing on the visual excitement of the rebellious adventures (blowing up trains, burning down barns full of hay), only in the last sentence does the trailer insinuate the story will include Reconstruction when Knight says, “There’s still plenty left to fight for.” Despite new attitudes toward the Civil War, in the deeply divided South, this new focus on destroying the Lost Cause version of Confederate history did not sell well. According to Jones County historian Wyatt Moulds, “In the Lost Cause mythology, the South was united, and secession had nothing to do with slavery. What happened in Jones County puts the lie to that, so the Lost Causers have to paint Newt as a common outlaw, and above all else, deny all traces of Unionism. With the movie coming out, they’re at it harder than ever” (Grant 2019). That attitude likely comes from the fact that Free State finally makes the Confederate army the historical villains

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they deserve to be. Perhaps that stunted sales in the South, but the portrait painted of Reconstruction covers all the bases in an honest manner. Among African American viewers, there might have been a fear that a Civil War film would once again involve watching respected actors portraying stereotypical groveling or that they would be subjected to the use of the n-word, even though Newt’s preaching insists that no man is an n-word because no man can own a child of God. An example of research Ross did not delve into as deeply comes from the line after Rachel gives birth to a child who she declares to be a “brand-new thing,” being neither black nor white. This is disingenuous since mixed-race children existed throughout the South before the Civil War due to owners treating slaves as concubines. Mixed-race peoples made up most of the enslaved people assigned to working in the plantation homes as maids, cooks, valets, and the like for a variety of reasons (Toplin 1979). American history has begun to tell the stories of people like Sally Hemmings, maid and half-sister to Martha Jefferson since Hemmings was the child of Martha’s father and an enslaved woman on his plantation. In 2019, Jefferson’s home, Monticello, began renovating the room where Hemmings lived and planned to add her story more prominently into their home tours. Likewise, Southern diarist Mary Chesnut wrote snidely of the many, many visits to other plantation homes where the likeness and lightness of the house servants was obvious to all but the plantation mistress herself (Chesnut 1905). Next is the question about the existence of Unionists in the Confederate states. After the war, many a plantation owner took the oath of allegiance to the United States in order to reclaim their property and, further, to earn federal monies for rebuilding what had been destroyed by Union troops. Did that mean they had been Unionists from the beginning of the conflict? Statistics for Southerners enlisting in the Union army vary based on method for collecting, but most academics agree a hundred thousand is a fair estimate because every state in the Confederacy had at least a battalion of men enlist for the Union, with Tennessee sending the most men (Current 1992). Clearly, like Knight, many men stayed loyal to the Union, with notables including Francis Pierpont, Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs, and Andrew Johnson. A Virginian against his state’s secession, Pierpont supported the creation of West Virginia. Upon achieving statehood, the citizens elected him governor. Meigs, a Georgian, did not leave his post in the Union army upon secession and later, in anger at his most famous colleague, Robert E. Lee’s, treason, Meigs chose Lee’s former home at Arlington for a national cemetery. Finally, Tennessee senator Andrew Johnson was the only sitting senator from a Confederate state who did not resign when his state seceded. Lincoln then appointed him military governor of Tennessee when the Union army retook the state and chose Johnson for a running mate to send the message of national unity as the war ended. Upon Lincoln’s assassination, Johnson became president.



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In real life, Knight’s right-hand man, Jasper Collins (portrayed in the film by Christopher Berry), came from a large family of staunch Mississippi Unionists. He later named his son Ulysses Sherman Collins, after his two favorite Union generals, Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman. Jasper Collins did echo many non-slaveholders across the South when he said of the Twenty Negro Law, “This law . . . makes it a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight” (Grant 2019). Finally, any film analysis post the Green Book controversy of 2018 requires a discussion on whether or not telling the tale of the Free State of Jones from the perspective of the white male character, this time Newton Knight, once again falls into the white savior trope. Calling it a “clumsy historical drama,” Wendy Ide of The Guardian wrote: “It also offers further evidence that Hollywood is happiest tackling racial politics when there is a white man at the heart of the story” (Ide 2016). Yet, from a dramatic standpoint, Knight is the character who undergoes the most change, from joining the Confederate army to rebelling against it, and dramas are generally centered on the character who undergoes the most change. Instead of a savior, Knight is an example of a newer phrase in the othering vocabulary—he is a white ally. A savior by definition is a person who rescues others, often others in communities marked as underprivileged, for instance Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds, Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves, or Hilary Swank in Freedom Writers. An ally is a person associated with another or others for a common cause, or a supporter rather than a savior. Allies seek to understand struggles and add their voice to the dialogue, not dominate it. Knight does not save the runaways and the deserters alone. He assists them on a path they have already undertaken, and he continues that support long after his original goal, that of ending the carnage of war, is over. This makes Knight an ally. Despite ten years of this in-depth research and writing, studios still balked at financing the film. “This was before Lincoln and 12 Years a Slave, and it was very hard to get this sort of a drama made. So I went and did Hunger Games, but always keeping an eye on this” (Grant 2019). Then Lincoln came out in 2012, earning ten Academy Award nominations and two wins (for Best Actor and Best Production Design) and 12 Years a Slave came out in 2013, winning the Academy Award for Best Film. Each film helped open the door for other films willing to be honest about the viciousness and cruelty of slavery, and Ross gained the green light to begin filming. FURTHER READING Blight, David W. 2001. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, MA: Belknap of Harvard University Press. Bynum, Victoria E. 1999. “Telling and Retelling the Legend of the ‘Free State of Jones.’” In Guerillas, Unionists, and Violence on the Confederate Home Front, edited by Daniel Sutherland. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press.

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Bynum, Victoria E. 2003. The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Chesnut, Mary Boykin. 1905. A Diary from Dixie. New York: D. Appleton. “Confronting Slavery and Revealing the ‘Lost Cause.’” n.d. National Park Service. ­https://​­www​.­nps​.­gov​/­resources​/­story​.­htm​%­3Fid​%­3D217. Current, Richard Nelson. 1992. Lincoln’s Loyalists: Union Soldiers from the Confederacy. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press. Deed of Sale from Newton Knight to Rachel Knight. December 12, 1876 (filed December 23rd, 1876), Jasper County, Mississippi, Deed Book No. 19, p. 223, Chancery Clerk’s Office, Paulding, Mississippi. (Copy of Deed in Herman Welborn Collection.) Ebert, Roger. 2016. “Free State of Jones” Review. ­https://​­www​.­rogerebert​.­com​/­reviews​ /­free​-­state​-­of​-­jones​-­2016. Faust, Drew Gilpin. 2008. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. New York: ­Knopf​.­ Grant, Richard. 2019. “The True Story of the ‘Free State of Jones.’” Smithsonian. ­https://​­www​.­smithsonianmag​.­com​/­history​/­true​-­story​-­free​-­state​-jones-180958111/. Hoffman, Jordan. 2016. “The Free State of Jones Review—A Southern Schindler’s List.” Guardian, June 23, 2016. ­https://​­www​.­theguardian​.­com​/­film​/­2016​/­jun​/­23​ /­free​-­state​-­jones​-­review​-­matthew​-­mcconaughey​-­newton​-­knight. Ide, Wendy. 2016. “Free State of Jones Review—Clumsy Historical Drama.” Guardian, October 2, 2016. ­https://​­www​.­theguardian​.­com​/­film​/­2016​/­oct​/­02​/­free​-­state​ -­of​-­jones​-­review​-­historical​-­drama​-­matthew​-­mcconaughey. Kelly, James R., Jr. 2009. “Newton Knight and the Legend of the Free State of Jones Archived 2010-06-09 at the Wayback Machine.” Mississippi History Now. ­http://​­mshistorynow​.­mdah​.­state​.­ms​.­us​/­articles​/­309​/­newton​-­knight​-­and​-­the​ -­legend​-­of​-­the​-­free​-­state​-­of​-­jones. Kendi, Ibram X. 2017. “What Would Jefferson Say about White Supremacists Descending upon His University?” Washington Post, August 13, 2017. ­https://​ ­www​.­washingtonpost​.­com​/­news​/­made​-­by​-­history​/­wp​/­2017​/­08​/­13​/­what​-­would​ -­jefferson​-­say​-­about​-­white​-­supremacists​-­descending​-­upon​-­his​-­university​/?­utm​ _term​=​.­0cff626f368a. Knight, Ethel. 1951. The Echo of the Black Horn. Binghamton, NY: Maple-Vail. “Miscegenation Law: Mississippi and the Nation.” ­https://​­www​.­mdah​.­ms​.­gov​/­new​ /­wp​-­content​/­uploads​/­2014​/­08​/­Miscegenation​-­Law​.­pdf. Mississippi Constitution, Article 14 Sec. 263, 1890. Stauffer, John, and Sally Jenkins. 2009. The State of Jones. New York: Doubleday. Toplin, Robert Brent. 1979. “Between Black and White: Attitudes toward Southern Mulattoes, 1830–1861.” Journal of Southern History 45 (2): 185–200.

Bibliography Abbott, Karen. 2015. Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War. New York: Harper Perennial. Adams, Virginia Matzke, ed. 1991. On the Altar of Freedom: A Black Soldier’s Civil War Letters from the Front. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Adler, Renata. 1968. “The Screen: Zane Grey Meets Marquis de Sade.” New York Times, January 25, 1968. ­https://​­www​.­nytimes​.­com​/­1968​/­01​/­25​/­archives​/­the​ -­screen​-­zane​-­grey​-­meets​-­the​-­marquis​-­de​-­sade​-­the​-­good​-­the​-­bad​-­and​.­html. Alberts, Don E., and Donald S. Frazer. 2000. Battle of Glorieta. College Station: Texas A&M University Press. Astor, Aaron. 2016. Rebels on the Border: Civil War, Emancipation, and the Reconstruction of Kentucky and Missouri. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Barrett, Jenny. 2009. Shooting the Civil War. London: I. B. Tauris. Bartoletti, Susan Campbell. 2014. They Called Themselves the K.K.K.: The Birth of an American Terrorist Group. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Basinger, Jeanine. 1986. The World War Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre. New York: Columbia University Press. Beilein, Joseph. 2016. Bushwhackers: Guerilla Warfare, Manhood and the Household in Civil War Missouri. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press. Benedict, Bryce. 2009. Jayhawkers: The Civil War Brigade of James H. Lane. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Berg, Charles Ramirez. 2002. Latino Images in Film: Stereotypes, Subversions and Resistance. Austin: University of Texas Press. Black, Daniel P. 2016. Dismantling Black Manhood: A Historical and Literary Analysis of the Legacy of Slavery. New York: Routledge. Blackman, Ann. 2005. Wild Rose: Rose O’Neal Greenhow, Civil War Spy. New York: Random House.

170 Bibliography Blanton, Deanne, and Lauren M. Cook. 2002. They Fought Like Demons: Women Soldiers in the American Civil War. New York: Random House. Blight, David W. 1991. Frederick Douglass’ Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Blight, David W. 1995. “The Meaning or the Fight: Frederick Douglass and the Memory of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts.” Massachusetts Review 36, no. 1 (Spring): 141–53. Blight, David W. 2002. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bogar, Thomas. 2013. Backstage at the Lincoln Assassination: The Untold Story of the Actors and Stagehands at Ford’s Theater. Washington, DC: Regnery History. Boritt, Gabor S., ed. 1999. The Gettysburg Nobody Knows. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bourdin, Juliette. 2018. “The West and the Western as Grounds for Reconciliation in the American Civil War.” Revue LISA 16(1): 17–31. Branch, Taylor. 1988. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63. New York: Simon & Schuster. Brand, Ulrika. 1999. “James Schamus Illuminates Little-Known Chapter in History with Ride with the Devil.” Columbia University News, November 24, 1999. ­http://​­www​.­columbia​.­edu​/­cu​/­pr​/­old99​/­11​/­jamesSchamus​.­html. Brode, Douglas, and Shea T. Brode, eds. 2017. The American Civil War on Film and TV: Blue and Gray in Black and White and Color. New York: Lexington. Brody, Richard. 2013. “The Worst Thing about Birth of a Nation Is How Good It Is.” New Yorker, February 2013. Brown, Dee. 1985. The Galvanized Yankees. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Brownlee, Richard. 1958. Gray Ghosts of the Confederacy. Washington, DC: Library of Congress. Burke, Edwin. 1935. The Littlest Rebel. Los Angeles, CA: Twentieth Century Fox. Busey, John W., and David G. Martin. 2005. Regimental Strengths and Losses at Gettysburg. Hightstown, NJ: Longstreet House. Carlyle, Thomas, ed. 2013. On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Carnes, Mark, ed. 1994. Past Imperfect: History According to Movies. Chicago: Lakeview. Castel, Albert, ed. 1999. William Clarke Quantrill His Life and Times. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Catton, Bruce. 1965. The Centennial History of the Civil War. Vol. 3, Never Call Retreat. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Chadwick, Bruce. 2001. The Reel Civil War: Myth Making in American Film. New York: Knopf. Chamerovzow, Louis Alexis, ed. 1855. Slave Life in Georgia: A Narrative of the Life, Sufferings, and Escape of John Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Now in England. London: W. M. Watts, Crown Court. Chernow, Ron. 2017. Grant. New York: Penguin. Chesnut, Mary Boykin. 1905. A Diary from Dixie. New York: D. Appleton. Christensen, Terry. 1987. Reel Politics, American Political Movies from Birth of a Nation to Platoon. New York: Basil Blackwell.

Bibliography 171 Clinton, Catherine. 1982. The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World in the Old South. New York: Pantheon. Cloyd, Benjamin G. 2010. Haunted by Atrocity: Civil War Prisons in American Memory. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Coates, Ta-Nehisi. 2010. “Again with the Black Confederates.” Atlantic, January 2010. ­https://​­www​.­theatlantic​.­com​/­entertainment​/­archive​/­2010​/­01​/­again​-­with​ -­the​-­black​-­confederates​/­33792​/. Cole, Teju. 2012. “The White-Savior Industrial Complex.” Atlantic, March 21, 2012. ­https://​­www​.­theatlantic​.­com​/­international​/­archive​/­2012​/­03​/­the​-­white​-­savior​ -­industrial​-­complex​/­254843​/. Commager, Henry S. 1973. Documents in American History. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Costa, D. L. 2007. “Surviving Andersonville: The Benefits of Social Networks in POW Camps.” American Economic Review 4 (97): 1467–87. Cox, Alex. 2009. 10,000 Ways to Die: A Director’s Take on the Spaghetti Western. Harpenden, UK: Oldcastle. Cox, Karen L. 2003. Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Cripps, Thomas. 1995. “Frederick Douglass: The Absent Presence in Glory.” Massachusetts Review 36, no. 1 (Spring): 154. Cumbow, Robert. 2008. The Films of Sergio Leone. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow. Davis, Robert S. 2006. Ghosts and Shadows of Andersonville: Essays on the Secret Social Histories of America’s Deadliest Prison. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press. Devine, Shauna. 2017. Learning from the Wounded: The Civil War and the Rise of the American Medical School. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Dilley, Whitney Crothers. 2015. The Cinema of Ang Lee: The Other Side of the Screen. New York: Columbia University Press. Donald, David H. 1969. Lincoln Reconsidered: Essays on the Civil War Era. New York: Knopf. Dray, Philip. 2010. Capitol Men: The Epic Story of Reconstruction through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen. Wilmington, MA: Mariner. Drisdelle, R. 2010. Parasites: Tales of Humanity’s Most Unwelcome Guests. Berkeley: University of California Press. Du Bois, W. E. B. 1998. Black Reconstruction in America 1860–1880. New York: Free Press. Dudden, Faye. 2011. Fighting Chance: The Struggle over Woman Suffrage and Black Suffrage in Reconstruction America. New York: Oxford University Press. Duncan, Russell, ed. 1992. Blue-Eyed Child of Fortune: The Civil War Letters of Robert Gould Shaw. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Earl, Jonathon, and Diane Mutti Burke, eds. 2013. Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Missouri: The Long Civil War on the Border. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Edgerton, Douglas R. 2016. Thunder at the Gates: The Black Civil War Regiments That Redeemed America. New York: Basic Books. Emilio, Luis F. 1995. A Brave Black Regiment: The History of the Fifty-Fourth Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, 1963–65. New York: Da Capo.

172 Bibliography Etcheson, Nicole. 2004. Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Faust, Drew Gilpin. 2008. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. New York: Knopf. Fellman, Michael. 1989. Inside War: The Guerilla Conflict in Missouri during the American Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press. Flamini, Roland. 1975. Scarlett, Rhett, and a Cast of Thousands: The Filming of Gone with the Wind. New York: Macmillan. Foner, Eric, ed. 2008. Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World. New York: W. W. Norton. Foner, Eric. 2010. The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. New York: W. W. Norton. Foote, Shelby. 1986. The Civil War: A Narrative. New York: Random House. Franklin, John Hope. 1979. “The Birth of a Nation: Propaganda as History.” Massachusetts Review 20, no. 3 (Autumn): 417–34. Frayling, Christopher. 1981. Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans, from Karl Marx to Sergio Leone. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Frayling, Christopher. 2000. Sergio Leone: Something to Do with Death. London: Faber & Faber. Frazier, Donald. 1995. Blood and Treasure: Confederate Empire in the Southwest. College Station: Texas A&M University Press. Futch, Ovid L. 1968. History of Andersonville Prison. Gainesville: University of Florida Press. Gallagher, Gary W., and Alan T. Nolan, eds. 2000. The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gallagher, Gary W. 2008. Causes Won, Lost, Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know about the Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Geiger, Mark W. 2010. Financial Fraud and Guerrilla Violence in Missouri’s Civil War, 1861–1865. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Gevinson, Alan. 1997. Within Our Gates: Ethnicity in American Feature Films, 1911–1960. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gilfoyle, Timothy J. 2017. “Scorsese’s Gangs of New York: Why Myth Matters.” Scraps from the Lot. ­https://​­scrapsfromtheloft​.­com​/­2017​/­03​/­09​/­scorseses​-­gangs​ -­new​-­york​-­myth​-­matters​/. Goff, John S. 1968. Robert Todd Lincoln: A Man in His Own Right. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Goodrich, Thomas. 1998. Bloody Bill Anderson: The Short, Savage Life of a Civil War Guerilla. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole. Gordon, Linda. 2017. The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition. New York: Liveright. Green, Michael S. 2013. “Lincoln and Obama’s Teams of Non-Rivals.” Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective, January 22, 2013. ­http://​­origins​.­osu​.­edu​ /­history​-­news​/­lincoln​-­s​-­and​-­obama​-­s​-­teams​-­non​-­rivals. Harmon, Henry, ed. 1996. Giving Up the Ghost: Diaries and Recollections of Prisoners. Kearny, NJ: Belle Grove Publishing. Harris, Charles F. 1995. “Catalyst for Terror: The Collapse of the Women’s Prison in Kansas City.” Missouri Historical Review 89, no. 3 (April): 290–306.

Bibliography 173 Haskell, Paul. 2014. “The War in Film: The Depiction of Combat in Glory.” In The Civil War in Popular Culture: Memory and Meaning, edited by Lawrence A. Krieser Jr. and Randal Allred. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Heller, Scott. 1998. “Studying War as a Contest of Words.” Chronicle of Higher Education, March 27, 1998. Hernán, Vera, and Andrew Mark Gordon. 2003. Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness. New York: Rowman & L ­ ittlefield​.­ Horigan, Michael. 2002. Elmira: Death Camp of the North. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole. Horowtiz, Tony. 2002. Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from an Unfinished Civil War. New York: Pantheon. Keller, David. 2015. The Story of Camp Douglas: Chicago’s Forgotten Civil War Prison. Charleston, SC: History Press, Library Editions. Kennedy, V. Lynn. 2010. Born Southern: Childbirth, Motherhood, and Social Networks in the Old South. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University P ­ ress​. ­Konstam, Angus, and Tony Bryan. 2004. Confederate Blockade Runner 1861–65. Oxford: Osprey Publishing. Korda, Michael. 2015. Clouds of Glory: The Life and Legend of Robert E. Lee. New York: Harper Perennial. Lamphier, Peg. 2018. Soldier, Diplomat, Archaeologist: The Bold Life of Louis di Palma Cesnola. Los Angeles, CA: Mentoris. Leckie, William H., and Shirley A. Leckie. 2012. The Buffalo Soldiers: A Narrative of the Black Cavalry in the West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Leslie, Edward E. 1996. The Devil Knows How to Ride. New York: Random House. Levine, Bruce. 1992. The Spirit of 1848: German Immigrants, Labor Conflict and the Coming of the Civil War. Urbana–Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Levine, Bruce. 2005. Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves during the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press. Levine, Bruce. 2007. Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves during the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press. Loewen, James W., ed. 2018. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. New York: The New Press. Lonn, Ella, ed. 2016. Desertion during the Civil War. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith Publishing. MacLean, Maggie. 2011. “Annie Haggerty Shaw: Wife of Union Colonel Robert Gould Shaw.” Civil War Women: Women of the Civil War and Reconstruction Eras (blog). ­https://​­www​.­civilwarwomenblog​.­com​/­annie​-­haggerty​-­shaw​/. Marshall, Kenneth. 2011. Manhood Enslaved: Bondsmen in Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth-Century New Jersey. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. Masich, Andrew E. 2006. The Civil War in Arizona: The Story of the California Volunteers, 1861–65. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Masich, Andrew E. 2017. Civil War in the Southwest Borderlands, 1861–67. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Mateiski, Marilyn, and Nancy L. Street. 2003. War and Film in America: Historical and Critical Essays. New York: McFarland Publishing. McCarthy, Timothy Patrick, and John Stauffer. 2006. Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism. New York: Free Press.

174 Bibliography McDonough, James Lee. 2017. William Tecumseh Sherman: In the Service of My Country: A Life. New York: W. W. Norton. McElya, Micki. 2007. Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press. McMurty, Larry. 1968. In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas. Austin, TX: Encino. McPherson, James. 1965. The Negro’s Civil War: How American Negroes Felt and Acted during the War for Union. New York: Pantheon. McPherson, James. 1990. “The ‘Glory’ Story.” New Republic, January 1990. h ­ ttps://​ ­newrepublic​.­com​/­article​/­91210​/­tnr​-­film​-­classics​-­glory​-­january​-­15​-­1990. McPherson, James. 2000. Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press. McPherson, James, ed. 2007. Battle Cry Freedom: The Civil War Era. New York: Oxford University Press. McPherson, James. 2014. The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionist and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Miller, George, ed. 2015. Missouri’s Memorable Decade, 1860–1870. Oxford: Andesite. Mintz, Steven, Randy Roberts, and David Welky. 2016. Hollywood’s America: Understanding History through Film. New York: Wiley Blackwell. Morgan, Lynda. 1992. Emancipation in Virginia’s Tobacco Belt, 1850–1870. Athens: University of Georgia Press. National Archives. 2017. “Black Soldiers in the Military during the Civil War.” National Archives, September 1, 2017. ­https://​­www​.­archives​.­gov​/­education​ /­lessons​/­blacks​-­civil​-­war. Neely, Mark E. 1999. Southern Rights: Political Prisoners and the Myth of Confederate Constitutionality. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Nolan, Alan T., ed. 2000. The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Oates, Stephen B. 1994. With Malice toward None: A Life of Abraham Lincoln. New York: Harper. O’Connell, Robert L. 2004. Fierce Patriot: The Tangled Lives of William Tecumseh Sherman. New York: Random House. Osterweis, Rollin G., ed. 2003. The Myth of the Lost Cause, 1865–1900. Washington, DC: Regnery History. Parsons, Elaine Frantz. 2015. Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Patterson, Benton Rain. 2012. Ending the Civil War: The Bloody Year from Grant’s Promotion to Lincoln’s Assassination. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Peple, Edward. 1911. The Littlest Rebel. New York: Samuel French. Petersen, Paul R. 2003. Quantrill of Missouri: The Making of a Guerrilla Warrior— The Man, the Myth, the Soldier. Nashville, TN: Cumberland House Publishing. Pike, James Shepherd. 1874. The Prostrate South. New York: D Applebaum. Reynolds, David S. 2006. John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil. New York: Knopf. Rutberg, Becky. 1995. Mary Lincoln’s Dressmaker: Elizabeth Keckley’s Remarkable Rise from Slave to White House Confidante. London: Walker.

Bibliography 175 Salyer, Robert. 2017. The Myth of Virtue: Histories’ Lies of the Civil War. Mineral Point, WI: Little Creek. Schama, Simon. 1988. “Onward and Upward with the Arts: Clio at the Multiplex.” New Yorker, January 19, 1988. ­https://​­www​.­newyorker​.­com​/­magazine​/­1998​/­01​ /­19​/­clio​-­at​-­the​-­multiplex. Schultz, Duane. 1997. Quantrill’s War: The Life and Times of William Clarke Quantrill, 1837–1865. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Schultz, Jane E. 2004. Women at the Front: Hospital Workers in Civil War America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Schwartz, Barry. 2003. Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sherwood, Robert. 1937. Abe Lincoln in Illinois. New York: Dramatists Play Service. Skoch, George. 2007. “Inside Andersonville: An Eyewitness Account of the Civil War’s Most Infamous Prison.” Civil War Times 46, no. 8 (October): 40–7. Simpson, Brooks. 2000. Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph over Adversity, 1822–1865. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Singer, Jane. 2019. The War Criminal’s Son: The Civil War Saga of William A. Winder. Lincoln, NE: Potomac. Stern, Julia A. 2012. “Discovering the African-American Civil War through Mary Chesnut.” Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 45, no. 1 (Spring): 3–10. Sweet, Natalie. 2013. “A Representative of ‘Our People’: William Slade, Leader in the African American Community and Usher to Abraham Lincoln.” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 34 (2): 21–41. Taylor, Marion, and Heather Lehr Wagner. 2004. Harriet Tubman: Antislavery Activist. New York: Chelsea House Publications. Trefousse, Hans. 1997. Thaddeus Stevens: Nineteenth-Century Egalitarian. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Trudeau, Noah Andre. 2003. Gettysburg: A Testing of Courage. New York: HarperCollins. Underwood, John Curtis. 1914. Literature and Insurgency: Ten Studies in Racial Evolution. New York: Mitchell Kennerly. Venet, Wendy Hammand. 1991. Neither Ballots nor Bullets: Women Abolitionists and the Civil War. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Wallace-Sanders, Kimberly. 2008. Mammy: A Century of Race and Southern Memory. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Ward, Geoffrey C., Ken Burns, and Ric Burns. 1994. The Civil War. New York: Vintage Publishing. Wasko, Janet. 1986. “D. W. Griffiths and the Banks: A Case Study in Film Financing.” In The Hollywood Film Industry: A Reader, edited Paul Kerr. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Waugh, Joan. 2009. U. S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Welch, Rosanne. 2004. A Family Affair: Emancipation and Slavery in the Old Natchez District, 1795–1860. Los Angeles: California State University Press. West, Jessamyn. 1940. The Friendly Persuasion. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.

176 Bibliography Whitlock, Flint. 2006. Distant Bugles, Distant Drums: The Union Response to the Confederate Invasion of New Mexico. Boulder: University of Colorado Press. Wills, Brian. 2006. Gone with the Glory: The History of the Civil War in Cinema. New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Wills, Garry. 2006. Lincoln at Gettysburg. New York: Simon & Schuster. Wood, Larry. 2003. The Civil War Story of Bloody Bill Anderson. Fort Worth, TX: Eakin. Wood, Larry. 2016. Bushwhacker Belles: The Sisters, Wives and Girlfriends of the Missouri Guerillas. Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company. Zaeske, Susan. 2003. Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery and Women’s Political Identity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Index Abe Lincoln in Illinois, 140 Abolitionists, 7, 25, 28, 132, 143–144, 148; black soldiers, 66; Lawrence, Kansas, 109; Quaker, 25–26, 28; Shaw, Robert Gould, 61 About Last Night, 52 Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, 140 Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies, 140 Alien and Sedition Acts, 136 American Communist Party, 29 American Party, 131. See also Nativism Amistad, 142 Amnesty Act, 136 Anderson, William (Bloody Bill), 111, 112, 114, 118 Andersonville, 85–102; film summary, 86–87; historical accuracy, 94–102; release and reception, 87–88 Andersonville Prison, 85–94; closed, 93; construction, 91–92; disease and mortality rates, 91; social networks, 91–92 Andersonville Raiders, 86, 92, 98 Andersonville Regulators, 92, 98 Andrew, Governor John, 58 Anthony, Susan B., 145 Antietam, Battle of, 13, 63–64, 75–76, 87

Appomattox Court House, xx, 8, 142, 148–149 Arizona Territory, 39, 40 Asbury, Herbert (Gangs of New York), 125–126, 133 Ashley, James, 145 Aviator, The, 140 Bandido stereotype, 44–46. See also Brownface; Whitewashing Barnum, P. T., 127, 133–134 Belle Island, 91, 96 Berenger, Tom, 72 Bilbo, W. N., 141 Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, 140 Bird Man of Alcatraz, 85 Birdwell, Joshua, 19 Birth of a Nation, reception, xxiv–xxv. See also Griffith, D. W. Black Codes, 9, 11, 163 Black Confederates, 14, 57, 119–122; history, 120–121; mythology, 119– 120; neo-Confederate propaganda, 119, 121; white savior trope, 121 Blair, Francis Preston, 141 Blair, Francis Preston, Jr., 116–117 Blue and Gray, 79 Booth, John Wilkes, xx, 7, 153

178 Index Border Ruffians, 109–110. See also Border War Border war, xx, 108–110, 115, 118; General Order 11, 112; Kansas, 108–109; Lawrence Massacre, 109–112; Missouri, 109–112; outlaws, 110; Quantrill, William, 110–111; violence, 109–110, 112; women’s jail collapse, 111 Born Southern, 12 Bounty Jumpers, 98–99 Boyer, Christopher, 142 Bridge on the River Kwai, The, 29 Broderick, Matthew, 52–53, 58, 67–68 Brown, John, 7, 109 Brown face, 45 Buffalo Soldiers, 58 Buford, John, 72, 75–76 A Bug’s Life, 35 Bull Run, First Battle of, xix, 88–89 Bushwhackers, 107–113, 115, 118 (see also Border War); Anderson, William (Bloody Bill), 110, 114, 118; Quantrill, William, 110–111, 114– 116, 119 Butler, Benjamin, 55, 89, 120 Camp Douglas, 90 Camp Followers, 79 Camp Sumter. See Andersonville Prison Canby, Edward, 38–40 Capra, Frank, 19–20, 29 Carney, William, 60 Chamberlain, Joshua, 72–73, 76 Chancellorsville, Battle of, 78–79 Chase, Salmon P., 81, 148, 152 Chestnut, James, 13 Chestnut, Mary, 13 Chivalry, 15, 116 Civil War reenactors, 65, 86, 117 Clinging to Mammy, 11 Cocks, Jay, 125 Cold Mountain, 45 Collins, Jaspar, 167 Colored Orphan Asylum, 132 Colossus of Rhodes, 33

Confederate States of America, 8, 24, 56, 75, 100, 143; prison camps, 88, 90, 92, 100, 102; secession, xix; slavery, 142–143 Confederate statues, 16–17, 100, 157 Confiscation Acts, 55–56, 144, 147 Conscription, 134, 158–159, 164 Conscription Bill, 26 Courage under Fire, 52 Courtney, Joe, 148 Crook, William Henry, 151 CSS Virginia (formerly USS Merrimack), xxviii Cukor, George, 2, 5 Cultural appropriation. See Whitewashing Daniels, Jeff, 72 Daughters of the Confederacy, 5, 100 Davis, Jefferson, 9, 75, 120; capture and surrender, 8, 101 Death, Culture of, 63, 77 Desertion, 62, 121, 161; punishment, 54, 150 DeYoung, Cliff, 86 Diaz, Cameron, 125–126 DiCaprio, Leonardo, 125–126 Disease, 13, 90–91, 94, 97 Dixon-Hill Cartel, 89 Douglass, Frederick, 7, 53, 58–59, 146–148, 155; Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Regiment, 58–59 Draft Act of 1863, 26, 131 Dramatic Life of Abraham Lincoln, The, 140 Dred Scott, xviii, 143 Driving Miss Daisy, 55, 67 Duvall, Robert, 72 Early, Jubal A., 79 Eastwood, Clint (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly), 33–34, 36 El Bandido. See Bandido stereotype Elliott, Sam, 72 Elmira Prison, 90, 96 Elwes, Cary, 52

Index 179 Emancipation Proclamation, 56, 66, 120, 144, 149, 163 Ewing, Charles, 112, 114

Gable, Clark (GWTW), 1, 2, 16 Galvanized Yankee, 41–42, 101 Gangs of New York, 125–136; film summary, 126–128; historical Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, 52 accuracy, 129–132; release and Ferroni, Georgio, 42 reception, 128–129 A Few Dollars More, 34, 37 Garrison, William Lloyd, 148, 155 Field, Sally, 141 General Orders 10 and 11, 111, 112, 115 Fields, Freddie, 52 General Order 252, 62, 89 Fifteenth Amendment, xi, 9, 160, 163 Gettysburg, 4, 71–82; film summary, First Manassas. See Bull Run, First 71–72; historical accuracy, 77–82; Battle of release and reception, 71, 74 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 2 Gettysburg, Battle of, 13, 23, 74–77, 91, Five Points, 125–127, 129–130, 133 131–132; casualties, 75–76; Pickett’s Fleming, Victor (Gone with the Wind), Charge, 76–77 1–2 Gettysburg Address, 77, 148 Ford’s Theater, 149 Glorieta Pass, Battle of, 40 Forrest, Nathan B., 10 Glory, 46, 51–68; film summary, 52–54; Fort Monroe, 141 historical accuracy, 58–68; release and Fort Sumter, 8 reception, 55 Fort Wagner/Battery Wagner, 52, 57, Gods and Generals, 71 59–61 (see also Glory); Massachusetts Goings, Melissa, 151 Fifty-Fourth Infantry, attack of, 54, Gone with the Wind (GWTW), 1–17, 57, 63–64, 66 20, 71; film summary, 2–5; historical Fourteenth Amendment, 9, 163 accuracy, 10–17; release, 6–7 Fox, George, 24 Good, the Bad and the Ugly, The, Fox, Margaret Fell, 24–25 33–48; film summary, 36–37; Frankenheimer, John (Andersonville), historical accuracy, 41–48; release and 85–86, 102 reception, 37–38; soundtrack, 35–36, Fredericksburg, Battle of, xx, 78 38, 42; trilogy, 33, 34, 38–41, 42 Freedman’s Colony of Roanoke Island, Good Earth, The, 45 144 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 30 Freeman, Morgan, 53, 60, 67, 68 Grant, Ulysses S., 8, 76, 89, 95–96, 141, Free State of Jones, 46, 157–167; 148–149, 151, 163, 167; Gettysburg, film summary, 158–160; historical 73, 76, 80–81; prisoner exchange, accuracy, 160–164; release and 89–90, 95–97; slavery, 141; surrender reception, 160 of Lee, 148–149 Fremantle, Arthur, 81 Greaser stereotype. See Bandido Fremont, John C., 117, 144 stereotype French Connection, The, 85 Great man history, 154–155 Friendly Persuasion, 19–30; film Great Wall, The, 52 summary, 21–22; historical accuracy, Greeley, Horace, 127, 132–134 23–26; release and reception, 22–23 Greenhow, Rose, 90 Fugitive Slave Act, xviii, 29, 143 Griffith, D. W. (Birth of a Nation), xxi– Fugitive Slaves xviii, 16, 59–60, 61, 62, xxiv, 16 120, 155; Thirteenth Amendment, xiv, Grimaldi, Alberto (The Good, the Bad 146–147; Tubman, Harriet, 59 and the Ugly), 34

180 Index Grover’s Theater, 149 Guerillas. See Bushwhackers Haley, Jackie E., 141 Hampton Roads Peace Conference, 151–152 Harper’s Ferry, Raid on, 7 Harris, Jared, 141 Hayes, Rutherford B., 9, 163 Hayes Code, 43 Hays Office, 5 Hemmings, Sally, 166 Henderson, Stephen M., 146 Hepburn, Katherine, 2 Historical memory, xi, xxi, 64, 100–101, 116 Holbrook, Hall, 141 Hood, John, 8, 73 Horner, Jack, 52, 55 House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), 29–30 Howard, Sidney (GWTW), 1–2 Hunter, David, 56, 144 Hurt, William, 71–72

King, Rodney, 80 Knight, Newton, 157–158, 160–162 Knight, Rachel, 158, 160, 162 Knight, Serena, 158–159, 161–162 Ku Klux Klan (KKK), 4, 9–10, 160, 162–163 Kurosawa, Akira, 35 Kushner, Tony, 139, 146, 148, 154–155

Lane, James, 109–110, 112 Last Days of Pompeii, 33 Last Samurai, The, 52, 140 Latham, Robert, 141 Lawrence Massacre, 110, 113, 118 Lawrence of Arabia, 29 Lee, Ang, 105–106, 112–113, 117–118, 119, 122 Lee, Robert E., 7–8, 24, 71, 76–78, 142, 148–149, 166 Lee, Spike, 67 Legends of the Fall, 52 Leigh, Vivien (GWTW), 1, 2, 16 Leone, Sergio, 33–35, 42–43, 46–48 Libby Prison, 90–91 Lincoln, 45–46; Daniel Day-Lewis Immigrants, 129–130, 135–136 portrayal of, 150; film summary, Immigration and Nationality Act, 131 141–142; historical accuracy, 142– Incrocci, Agenore, 34 146; marketability and mythology, Indiana Home Guard, 23 152–154, 155; omission of blacks In the Land of the Poets, 71 and women, 146–147; release and It Happened One Night, 1 reception, 139–141; Thirteenth Amendment, 148 James Brothers, 116, 165. See Lincoln, Abraham, 3, 7–8, 13, 66, 68, Bushwhackers 74–75, 77, 89–90, 99, 117, 134; Jarre, Kevin (Glory), 51 contraband of war, 55; General Order Jayhawkers, 109–110, 114 252, 62, 89; Lincoln (film), 139–151; Jefferson, Martha, 166 marketability and mythology, Jefferson, Thomas, 152 152–154, 166 Jim Crow. See Segregation Lincoln, Mary Todd, 146, 151 John Ransom’s Andersonville Diary, 85 Lincoln, Robert, 151 Johnson, Andrew, 8–9, 159, 166 Lincoln, Tad, 149, 151 Johnston, Joseph, 8, 77 Little Darlings, 71 Jones, Tommy Lee, 71–72, 141 Little Rock Nine, 29 Jones County, 157–159, 161–162, 165 Longstreet, James, 74, 81 Loring, William, 38–39 Keckley, Elizabeth, 146–147 Lost Cause, 1, 4, 12, 14–16; mythology, Killer Angels, 77–78, 82 80–82, 100, 119, 121; regarding Jones King, Reverend Martin Luther, Jr., 6, 162 County insurrection, 165

Index 181 McPherson, James, 51, 55, 62, 64 Macy, William H., 86 Madison, Dolley, 25 Magnificent Seven, The, 35, 45 Manchurian Candidate, The, 85 Manhood, 65–66 Man with No Name Trilogy (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly), 33, 38 March to the Sea, 5, 8, 14 Margaret, Mitchell, 1–2, 6 Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Infantry Regiment, 51–68 McDaniel, Hattie, 1–2, 6–7, 16 McElroy, John, 86 McMurty, Larry, 48 Meade, George, 75–77 Meigs, Montgomery, 56, 166 Mesilla, Battle of, 39 Midwifery, 11 Militia Ballot Acts, 26 Miscegenation, 158, 163 Montgomery, James, 54, 56, 64, 86 Moonlight and magnolias, x, 51 Morgan, John Hunt, 23–24 Morricone, Ennio, 35–36, 42 Mortality rates, 13–14, 57, 63; at Battle of Gettysburg, 74–76, 90, 96, 164 Morton, Oliver P., 23 Myrick, Susan, 1

Payne, John, 25 Perkins, Anthony, 19 Pettigrew, James Johnston, 77 Pickett, George E., 73 Plantation Mistress, The, 12 Port Royal Experiment, 56, 62, 162 Prison Camps, 88–89 Prisoner Exchange, causing overcrowding at Andersonville, 94–97, 100 Prisoners of war, 62; Andersonville, 93–94; First Battle of Bull Run, 88–89; prison camps, 90; prisoner exchange suspended, 89–90

Old Capitol Prison, 90, 93 Old South. See Lost Cause Once Upon a Time in the West, 38

Saint-Gaudens, Augustus, 51 Salerno, Enrico (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly), 35 Scarpelli, Furio (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly), 34 Schamus, James, 105–106, 108, 118– 119, 122

Quakers (Society of Friends), 19–28 Quantrill, William, 107, 110–112, 114–115, 118

Raiders of the Lost Ark, 44 Rambo: First Blood, Part II, 51 Reagan, Ronald, 30 Reconciliation, 41, 101, 115 Reconstruction, xi, 8–9, 16, 118, 153, 159–164, 166 Reconstruction Amendments, 9, 163 Red Legs. See Jayhawkers Richmond, Virginia, 8, 75, 92, 97, 99–100, 150 Ride with the Devil: “Bleeding Kansas,” National Park Service, 72, 96, 101 108; film summary, 106–107; historical Nativism, 130 accuracy, 108–112; mythology of black Neo-Confederates, 88, 96, 119, 121–122 Confederates, 119–121; Quantrill’s New Mexico Campaign, 35; historical Raiders, 110–112; reception, 108; background, 38–41, 44 source material, 105–106; turning New York City draft riots, 66, 131–132 proslavery men into western heroes, Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia, 115–117, 119; white savior trope, 121 The, 71 Rintels, David, 85–86, 102 Northern Aggression, Myth of, xi, Rio Grande River, 38 96–97, 102 Ross, Gary, 157

Pacifism, 30 Palmito Ranch, Texas, 8 Parent Trap II, 71

182 Index Schell, Richard, 141 Scorsese, Martin, 132–133, 136 Secession, 28, 81, 97, 100, 143, 145, 162, 165–166 Segregation, 9, 12, 163 Selznick, David O., 1, 6 Seven Samurai, 35 Seward, W. H., 141, 148, 152 Shane, 35 Shaw, Annie Haggerty, 59 Shaw, Robert Gould, 51–54, 56, 61, 63 Sheen, Martin (Gettysburg), 72 Sherman, William T., 5, 159, 167; March to the Sea, 8, 14, 57, 64, 92–93; prisoners of war, 95–96 Sibley, Henry, 39–40 Slade, William, 146 Slavery, 7, 41; border states, 116; cause of Civil War, 142–143; escapes, 144–145; myth of black Confederates, 120–121; mythology, 10–11, 115; Thirteenth Amendment, 145–148 Spaghetti westerns, xii, 33, 35, 43 Spielberg, Steven, xiii, 139; directing Lincoln, 141–142, 146, 148, 152, 154–155 Stanton, Edwin M., 26, 56, 141–142 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 145 Steiner, Max (GWTW), 2 Stevens, Alexander, 141 Stevens, Thaddeus, 141, 145, 148 Stoneman, George, 92–93 Stuart, Jeb, 7, 72, 73, 75 Sumner, Charles, 145 Swerling, Jo, 2 Tammany Hall, 130, 134 Texas, 40–41 Thirteenth Amendment, 9, 141, 145– 146, 148–149 Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, 12 Trans-Mississippi West, 41 Trimble, Isaac R., 77 Tubman, Harriet, 57, 59

Turner, Ted, 71–72, 79, 85, 87, 102 Tweed, William (Boss), 127, 130, 134 12 Years a Slave, 167 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 127 Underground Railroad, 25 United States Colored Troops (USCT), xx, 55–56, 60, 144 Van Cleef, Lee (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly), 34–36, 45 Veterans of the Confederate Army, 10 Vicksburg, Battle of, 23 Vicksburg, Siege of, 24, 41 Vietnam War, 42 Volante, Gian (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly), 34 Wallach, Eli (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly), 34, 36, 44, 45 War of 1812, 28 Wayne, John, xii Welles, Gideon, 141, 152 West, Jessamyn, 19–20, 27 Western films, 34, 46, 48 White savior, 46, 66–67, 121, 154–155, 167 White supremacy, 65–66, 116, 121, 153–154 Whitewashing, 45–46 Williams, John, 35, 141–142 Wilson, Michael, 20, 27, 29–30 Winder, John, 92–93 Wirz, Henry, 90, 92–93, 95, 99–101 Wizard of Oz, The, 2 Women, 10–16, 24–26, 46–47, 79–80; violence against, 114, 145, 163, 165 Women’s Loyal National League (also Women’s National Loyal League), 145 Woodrell, Daniel, 105 Yojimbo, 33, 35 Younger Brothers, 116 Zwick, Edward, 52, 63–64

About the Authors PEG A. LAMPHIER, PhD, teaches interdisciplinary humanities at California State Polytechnic University and American Women’s History at Mount San Antonio College. Lamphier wrote Kate Chase and William Sprague: Politics and Gender in a Civil Wary Marriage (2003) and co-edited Spur Up Your Pegasus: Family Letters of Salmon, Kate and Nettie Chase (2009), Women in American History: A Social, Political, and Cultural Encyclopedia and Document Collection (ABC-CLIO, 2016), and Technical Innovation in American History: An Encyclopedia of Science and Technology (ABC-CLIO, 2019). She writes Civil War mystery novels, including The Lincoln Special (2017), The Great Show (2017), Rebel Belles (2018), and Iron Widow (2019). Lamphier also writes historical biographies, The Bold Life of Louis Palma di Cesnola (2018), Little by Little We Won: The Life of Angela Bambace (2019), and What a Woman Can Do: Artemisia Gentileschi (forthcoming), as well as the gaslamp fantasy Violent Delights and Vampires (2018). ROSANNE WELCH, PhD, serves as Executive Director of Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting where she created a set of History of Screenwriting courses (because “History of Film” courses become “History of Directors” courses and thereby “History of Great Men”) and teaches courses in One-Hour Drama. Her television writing credits include Beverly Hills 90210, Picket Fences, ABC NEWS: Nightline, and Touched by an Angel. Welch edited When Women Wrote Hollywood (2018), named runner up for the Susan Koppelman Award honoring the best anthology, multi-authored, or edited book in feminist studies by the Popular Culture Association. She co-edited Women in American History: A Social, Political, and Cultural Encyclopedia and Document Collection (named to both the 2018 Outstanding References Sources List and to the list of Best Historical Materials, by the American Library Association) and wrote Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Popular Culture (2016). Welch serves as Book Reviews editor for Journal of Screenwriting and on the Editorial Board for Written By magazine. In 2019 she was elected to the Executive Committee of the International Screenwriting Research Network for a two year term.  You can find her talk “The Importance of Having a Female Voice in the Room” from the TEDxCPP here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JFNsqKBRnA and other recorded lectures on her YouTube Channel here: https://www.you tube.com/user/DrRosanneWelch