Why We Can't Have a Civil War Film That Tells the Truth

(Source: Brittanica)

In his latest column in The New York Times, Jamelle Bouie asks why Hollywood has trouble depicting the Civil War as a triumph of Union and emancipation.

Other than Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln,” which is a political drama more than anything else, we haven’t had a big Civil War picture in a long time and we probably won’t; the subject is too niche in an era where Hollywood is loath to take a risk on anything isn’t based on an existing popular property. But if anyone is thinking about writing a Civil War film, I would hope that he or she would write one with an unabashedly pro-Union perspective — a film that foregrounds slavery and takes a skeptical view of Confederate mythmaking.

The war that began as a fight to restore the Union and ended as a crusade against human bondage stands as one of the finest moments in our nation’s history. It deserves a Hollywood epic that tries, as much as possible, to tell the truth.

I am sympathetic to Bouie’s concerns. We’ve witnessed a clear shift, over the past few decades, in popular memory away from the Lost Cause and its celebration of all things Confederate. New monuments are going up to acknowledge the military service of African Americans and the abolition of slavery. Bookstores are now filled with popular and academic titles that offer a much richer history of the Civil War era.

But even with all that said, we haven’t seen and Bouie is probably right that we likely will not see a Hollywood epic that captures these themes in the way that Gone With the Wind once did for the Lost Cause. Glory came closest, but it is now over 30 years old and its story was narrowly focused on one white colonel and one regiment of Black soldiers.

Margaret Mitchell’s story of one white slaveholding family’s struggle that spanned the Civil War and Reconstruction worked well on the big screen, in large part, because it embraced elements of tragedy and a clear demarcation between good and evil. White southerners, along with their “loyal” slaves defended a peaceful civilization against marauding Yankee soldiers. After the war the struggle continued, this time in a struggle against scheming “scalawags” and “carpetbaggers.”

That Lost Cause narrative appealed to a wide swath of the white viewing public when it premiered in 1939. We are unlikely ever to see such a sweeping epic on the big screen.

How would a “pro-Union perspective” even be portrayed in a Hollywood film? Does the concept of Union, as it was understood in mid-nineteenth century America, even resonate for Americans in 2024? I have my doubts.

Even more problematic for Hollywood would be a truthful accounting of how the vast majority of the loyal white citizenry of the United States understood race and slavery. Most white Americans had little interest in the lives of the enslaved and they certainly did not volunteer or serve in the United States army to abolish slavery. Many, however, did come to believe that the war could be concluded and the Union saved sooner if slavery was abolished, but that hardly translated into any interest in racial equality.

In the end, the “truth” of any Civil War movie, that captures what Union meant for most white Americans, must deal with the fact that African Americans were largely absent from their understanding of the future of the United States.

I suspect that the vast majority of white Americans would have been perfectly content had the war ended before the end of 1862 with slavery still intact and Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation still unsigned.

But you might insist, in response, that the war did continue and that emancipation became a critical wartime goal. As a result, Union armies became liberating armies. Perhaps a movie or mini-series that follows a small group of Gen. William T. Sherman’s men as they cross Georgia on their famous “March to the Sea.”

It would certainly undercut the depiction of Sherman and his men in Gone With the Wind.

Hundreds of enslaved people risked their lives for freedom as they marched along with the army toward the coast, but such a movie would also have to account for the hundreds of enslaved men, women, and children who drowned in Ebeneezer Creek after the Union army removed pontoon bridges that left them abandoned and exposed to advancing Confederate cavalry.

Are moviegoers willing to immerse themselves in such a story? I don’t know.

History is complicated and truth is messy.

The larger problem for a Hollywood movie, along the lines envisioned by Bouie, is that Americans seem increasingly to believe that the Civil War failed to accomplish anything signficant.

[One of the reasons that Glory works so well is that the movie ends with the assault on Fort Wagner in the summer of 1863.]

Slavery may have been abolished and 4 million people freed, but, we are told, nothing fundamentally changed. We are told that the Civil War never really ended or that we are still living in Reconstruction. Historical change itself appears not to exist as a concept.

This is unfortunate as such a perspective has little to do with history and everything to do with reinforcing our own doubts and concerns about the present and future.

As much as I would love to see Bouie’s Civil War movie made, I am not going to hold my breadth.