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.
"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." Is it possible you're being a little pessimistic here? The slave-holders tried to destroy the Union. Did that not have a radicalising effect on Unionists, making them abolitionists? I don't claim to know of any evidence for this, just observation that opinions don't always change gradually, but sometimes suddenly in a crisis. Doesn't always last, of course.
Louisa May Alcott's Little Women is very much a Civil War novel, and Greta Gerwig's recent version is the best thing I've seen about the northern home front, and a fine counterpoint to GWTW.
I read E. L. Doctorow's The March within a year of its publication in 2006 just as I was confirming the suspicion I had held for a year or two that I did indeed have a Civil War ancestor. It began in 2001 a month or two after 9-11 when I accompanied my wife to a meeting with nurses in Atlanta, Georgia where she was scheduled to speak. We spent a Sunday afternoon there at Stone Mountain with two Samoan nurses my wife had worked with in Samoa in 1991 and again for a number of months from 1993 to 1996 and beyond. I found myself in the position of having to interpret this monument to these Samoans we had known for about a decade. A year later my wife had a meeting in Geneva, Switzerland and I went along. It was my first trip to Europe. I flew into Amsterdam, spent two nights there, then flew to Geneva where I met up with my wife for the weekend. On Monday morning I got on a train to Munich and enjoyed the last day and a half of Oktoberfest in the first week of November before boarding a train for three nights in Berlin. I took day trips to Schloss Sanssouci in Potsdam and to Spandau and I saw the Brandenburg Gate while the new U.S. Embassy there was officially opened. I had known since early childhood that my father's family were Germans who moved to Wisconsin sometime in the 19th century and that my grandfather had been a minister there and preached in both German and English. He died in 1932 more than twenty years before I was born. His wife, my grandmother, died in 1956 and saw me only once while I was still an infant in 1953. On my trip to Berlin I had no clue where to even begin a search for my German roots. As it happens, living in Manila, it began with a dial-up connection to the internet, using Google to Search my own surname. I found a cemetery transcription of a small church graveyard in Tilden, Wisconsin, not far from Chippewa Falls and about an hour's drive from the Twin Cities. I found a Census Record from 1910 for Chippewa Falls. I also found a Plat Map for a Scott Township in Sheboygan County bordering Lake Michigan and a roster for Company F of the 27th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry with a soldier named Wilhelm Lubach, who enlisted on October 18th, 1864 and died of disease on July 27th, 1865. But what really made me curious was an emigration record from a German genealogy site called the Neumark List. It was Germans mostly from what had been West Germany searching for relatives and ancestors who had lived before 1945 east of the Oder in what had since become Poland. I joined the list and tried to recollect what I could from two years of high school German and another year and a half at the college level. Reunification of Germany was a complex process as most of the five million Germans living east of the Oder who survived WWII were transplanted to what we used to call East Germany. I followed the List for more than a year before I determined that the Kreis Koenigsberg where my ancestors lived when they registered to emigrate in 1855-56 was not the city where Immanuel Kant was born and lived out his entire life. That city has been known as Kaliningrad since the end of WWII. It's a Russian exclave between Poland and Lithuania and Russia's only ice free Baltic port. Kreis Koenigsberg is a county about seventy miles from Berlin. Koenigsberg was a town that was that county's county seat, now known as Chojna. Zehden is a small town in that county on the Oder at the point where the Finow Canal connects to the Oder. You can get in a boat and go all the way to the Kurfurstendamm in downtown Berlin without getting out of the boat. The Port of Berlin is actually the city of Stettin on the Oder about twenty miles from the Baltic. The Poles call it Szczecin. Reading E L Doctorow's The March is quite disorienting until you are three or four chapters in. I learned today that it has been made into a stage play that was performed in Chicago at the Steppenwolf Theatre in 2012, but I think it's still considered an off Broadway production. Half a dozen Doctorow novels have been made into films that received critical acclaim but achieved disappointing results at the box office. The March was written knowing that it would eventually become a movie. It's quite cinematic and photographers documenting Sherman's march to the sea and beyond are among the main characters. The only question is when.
Thanks so much for sharing this story. I am going to make sure that my wife, who is from Germany, also reads it. I would love to see "The March" turned into a Hollywood film.
My vote for a Civil War film is one that focuses on the life of Robert Smalls. Born into slavery in South Carolina, Smalls commandeered a Confederate ship (that he'd been working on) in order to rescue his family and other enslaved people. He turned the ship over to the Union forces and then served in the Navy.
His story highlights (1) how Confederate forces relied on enslaved labor, (2) the resistance in the Union Army to the service of Black soldiers, (3) the unique journey that four million enslaved people experienced on the path to freedom, and (4) the active role enslaved people played in their emancipation.
An internet search shows some productions in development. I hope they make it to the big screen.
I agree. His life would make for a wonderful feature film. I have also heard of a production in the works, but I can't say where it is in terms of development. Let's keep our fingers crossed. Thanks for the comment.
I've never seen the American TV film Andersonville dir John Frankenheimer, although I've read the unrelated novel of the same name by MacKinlay Kantor, but I imagine it would do something to counter the "noble Confederates" myth.
Andersonville: The Last Depot by William Marvel is the best account I've read of all that transpired at Andersonville. Henry Wirz wasn't as monstrous as the made for TV movie makes him out to be. He was a German who had the misfortune to enter the U.S. through the Port of New Orleans and to sign on with the Confederacy. His skills were such as could have been useful in the North where the overwhelming majority of Germans served. His trial and hanging on the spot that now houses the United States Supreme Court might have gone differently if German-American veterans had spoken up on his behalf for a little leniency in view of the circumstances under which he worked. The brother of my mother's great grandfather died at Andersonville in April 1864, two months after the camp opened. Abraham Steele was among the first five hundred of the more than 10,000 prisoners who died there. Sherman's march could have intervened and didn't. My relative was one of eight soldiers from the 80th Ohio captured at Tunnel Hill in the Battle of Chattanooga. Five of the eight survived Andersonville. Two were shipped north on the overloaded Sultana when it exploded on the Mississippi. One drowned. The other made it to shore. My Civil War ancestor's unit, the 27th Wisconsin, lost roughly one quarter of its manpower to disease, ten times its losses to combat and those were not unusual casualty figures.
Such a movie will have to be an active intentional collaboration between the primary sources left behind by Civil War era authors & the modern artists who interpret them.
Thanks for the response. I always think it's important to remind people that movies are not works of historical interpretation. We shouldn't expect them to be accurate to the degree that we expect historians to be.
Absolutely -- Historians should be involved, clearly -- But artistic interpretation is a different mindset.
Maybe "The Civil War" is too big a set of stories & ideas for any one movie to grapple with in 90-180 minutes -- Maybe the best we can hope for is to raise awareness of (& interest in) the historical records & interpretations?
How can movies best direct viewers into actions (further learning, deeper engagement)?
You may laugh, but I think Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter comes close to what you are seeking. If you look at it critically, it has a lot to say. And of course, it’s fun to watch, too.
I agree, though I suspect Bouie is looking for a Civil War drama. It would be interesting to look at movies like ALVH and Wild Wild West as attempts to address some of these tougher questions through a fantasy/comedy lens.
I finally read "Killer Angels." I can see why it won awards and is so popular. But I did get annoyed every time some Confederate commanders complained about "why all these Yankees say the war is about slavery. It's not!" A more updated version would show the Confederates kidnapping African_Americans around the area to bring back to sell into slavery.
It's a wonderful work of historical fiction. A more updated version of KA would also need to show units from the Army of the Potomac being ordered to New York City to help put down the draft riots.
No argument, but also: it's my understanding that Sec War Stanton stipulated that the four regiments from the AoP sent to NYC all had to have been raised in NEW YORK CITY.
That made sense, Copperheads would have been the first to claim it was an invasion force. (Plus, troops from NYC didn't need maps and all spoke the local dialects.)
It would also be fun to insert Ltc Arthur Fremantle into the production. The CW's most famous war tourist, he got a platinum ticket to see the PA Invasion. After catching a lift with Dorsey Pender he caught up with Lee just as Heth's division incited the battle. Incomprehensibly, he missed Pickett's Charge! But unable to resist the adventure, he talked his way into the Union and decided (like any tourist) to visit Manhattan.
Yep, Fremantle blundered into the Draft Riot! He wandered around completely unmolested, getting more entries for his war diary, which made him an international best-selling author.
During his 3 months in the Confederacy and NYC, he was a combination of 'Zelig' and Chauncey Gardiner (Peter Sellers in 'Being There'). All the rebel politicians and generals assumed he was there as an unofficial (wink, wink) representative of the British Government.
Just from what I read, in Lee's retreat, Cavalry general Kilpatrick was sent to raid one of the CSA wagon trains. I'm not certain which train it was. Two accounts overlap: one says Kilpatrick recaptured about 1000 POWs, the other account says 1300 mostly enslaved workers, free blacks (I am guessing these were freed persons captured by Lee's army), and a few wounded ANV troops were captured; no mention of Union captives there.
The CSA army's trains were spilt into three columns. Pickett's tattered division was assigned to guard the Union POWs at the end of the train passing through Monterrey Pass, 4 miles into South Mountain. Apparently behind Pickett, Grumble (he had that kind of personality) Jones' small brigade was the rear of the rear guard.
A tip given to Custer by a civilian indicated that the ANV wagon train had passed that way. Custer's Michigan division became the advance force against the ANV rear guard. Kilpatrick pressed forward to take advantage of this intel coup.
In the dark and rain it became impossible to know how large the opposing force was, or even if it was an opposing force. Custer's division charged into the rear of Jones' brigade; a mere eight troopers held them off for awhile. Seven other divisions under Kilpatrick then charged and the brigades got so intermixed the numerous Federals fired at each other several times. At one point, now according to the other version, Kilpatrick's divisions found Pickett and rescued 1000 Union POWs.
Lee's final report said 4000, not including the wounded POWs left on the field. Also, he noted 2000 paroled POWs, probably Milroy's defeated forces at Winchester captured either in Early's battle or rounded up in the drive towards the Susquehanna River. Lee's 4000 number was inexact and the two reports (three now counting Lee's) don't say anything about the 1000 lost POWs being counted in the 4000 or not.
And that's all I know, with a little knitting together of the two accounts.
I have thought about this and maybe a story of the Peninsula, where Federal troops from a particular regiment encounter slavery and what the impact is on them. This would be a kind of fictional take on Glenn David Brasher’s book on the Peninsula. McClellan and his opinions would feature prominently, as well as Lincoln’s evolving thoughts through this period, but the crux of the story are these men.
I would extend the story to Antietam as a climax and have the initial Emancipation Proclamation as its close. By closing on this, it shows the story is not at its end, but merely a beginning of its own, as the story is indeed a complex one.
As an aside and a bonus I would also need the period material culture, customs, and military tactics to be as correct as possible. Nothing takes me out of a period piece more than to have those off.
This movie will never be made for the reasons you describe, but a man can dream, right?
"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." Is it possible you're being a little pessimistic here? The slave-holders tried to destroy the Union. Did that not have a radicalising effect on Unionists, making them abolitionists? I don't claim to know of any evidence for this, just observation that opinions don't always change gradually, but sometimes suddenly in a crisis. Doesn't always last, of course.
Louisa May Alcott's Little Women is very much a Civil War novel, and Greta Gerwig's recent version is the best thing I've seen about the northern home front, and a fine counterpoint to GWTW.
Thanks for reminding me that I still need to see this film.
I read E. L. Doctorow's The March within a year of its publication in 2006 just as I was confirming the suspicion I had held for a year or two that I did indeed have a Civil War ancestor. It began in 2001 a month or two after 9-11 when I accompanied my wife to a meeting with nurses in Atlanta, Georgia where she was scheduled to speak. We spent a Sunday afternoon there at Stone Mountain with two Samoan nurses my wife had worked with in Samoa in 1991 and again for a number of months from 1993 to 1996 and beyond. I found myself in the position of having to interpret this monument to these Samoans we had known for about a decade. A year later my wife had a meeting in Geneva, Switzerland and I went along. It was my first trip to Europe. I flew into Amsterdam, spent two nights there, then flew to Geneva where I met up with my wife for the weekend. On Monday morning I got on a train to Munich and enjoyed the last day and a half of Oktoberfest in the first week of November before boarding a train for three nights in Berlin. I took day trips to Schloss Sanssouci in Potsdam and to Spandau and I saw the Brandenburg Gate while the new U.S. Embassy there was officially opened. I had known since early childhood that my father's family were Germans who moved to Wisconsin sometime in the 19th century and that my grandfather had been a minister there and preached in both German and English. He died in 1932 more than twenty years before I was born. His wife, my grandmother, died in 1956 and saw me only once while I was still an infant in 1953. On my trip to Berlin I had no clue where to even begin a search for my German roots. As it happens, living in Manila, it began with a dial-up connection to the internet, using Google to Search my own surname. I found a cemetery transcription of a small church graveyard in Tilden, Wisconsin, not far from Chippewa Falls and about an hour's drive from the Twin Cities. I found a Census Record from 1910 for Chippewa Falls. I also found a Plat Map for a Scott Township in Sheboygan County bordering Lake Michigan and a roster for Company F of the 27th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry with a soldier named Wilhelm Lubach, who enlisted on October 18th, 1864 and died of disease on July 27th, 1865. But what really made me curious was an emigration record from a German genealogy site called the Neumark List. It was Germans mostly from what had been West Germany searching for relatives and ancestors who had lived before 1945 east of the Oder in what had since become Poland. I joined the list and tried to recollect what I could from two years of high school German and another year and a half at the college level. Reunification of Germany was a complex process as most of the five million Germans living east of the Oder who survived WWII were transplanted to what we used to call East Germany. I followed the List for more than a year before I determined that the Kreis Koenigsberg where my ancestors lived when they registered to emigrate in 1855-56 was not the city where Immanuel Kant was born and lived out his entire life. That city has been known as Kaliningrad since the end of WWII. It's a Russian exclave between Poland and Lithuania and Russia's only ice free Baltic port. Kreis Koenigsberg is a county about seventy miles from Berlin. Koenigsberg was a town that was that county's county seat, now known as Chojna. Zehden is a small town in that county on the Oder at the point where the Finow Canal connects to the Oder. You can get in a boat and go all the way to the Kurfurstendamm in downtown Berlin without getting out of the boat. The Port of Berlin is actually the city of Stettin on the Oder about twenty miles from the Baltic. The Poles call it Szczecin. Reading E L Doctorow's The March is quite disorienting until you are three or four chapters in. I learned today that it has been made into a stage play that was performed in Chicago at the Steppenwolf Theatre in 2012, but I think it's still considered an off Broadway production. Half a dozen Doctorow novels have been made into films that received critical acclaim but achieved disappointing results at the box office. The March was written knowing that it would eventually become a movie. It's quite cinematic and photographers documenting Sherman's march to the sea and beyond are among the main characters. The only question is when.
Hi Craig,
Thanks so much for sharing this story. I am going to make sure that my wife, who is from Germany, also reads it. I would love to see "The March" turned into a Hollywood film.
There was the drama "Mercy Street" which was, alas, cancelled after two seasons. Living just outside Alexandria, my wife and I really enjoyed it.
I really enjoyed it as well.
My vote for a Civil War film is one that focuses on the life of Robert Smalls. Born into slavery in South Carolina, Smalls commandeered a Confederate ship (that he'd been working on) in order to rescue his family and other enslaved people. He turned the ship over to the Union forces and then served in the Navy.
His story highlights (1) how Confederate forces relied on enslaved labor, (2) the resistance in the Union Army to the service of Black soldiers, (3) the unique journey that four million enslaved people experienced on the path to freedom, and (4) the active role enslaved people played in their emancipation.
An internet search shows some productions in development. I hope they make it to the big screen.
Hi Sarah,
I agree. His life would make for a wonderful feature film. I have also heard of a production in the works, but I can't say where it is in terms of development. Let's keep our fingers crossed. Thanks for the comment.
I've never seen the American TV film Andersonville dir John Frankenheimer, although I've read the unrelated novel of the same name by MacKinlay Kantor, but I imagine it would do something to counter the "noble Confederates" myth.
Andersonville: The Last Depot by William Marvel is the best account I've read of all that transpired at Andersonville. Henry Wirz wasn't as monstrous as the made for TV movie makes him out to be. He was a German who had the misfortune to enter the U.S. through the Port of New Orleans and to sign on with the Confederacy. His skills were such as could have been useful in the North where the overwhelming majority of Germans served. His trial and hanging on the spot that now houses the United States Supreme Court might have gone differently if German-American veterans had spoken up on his behalf for a little leniency in view of the circumstances under which he worked. The brother of my mother's great grandfather died at Andersonville in April 1864, two months after the camp opened. Abraham Steele was among the first five hundred of the more than 10,000 prisoners who died there. Sherman's march could have intervened and didn't. My relative was one of eight soldiers from the 80th Ohio captured at Tunnel Hill in the Battle of Chattanooga. Five of the eight survived Andersonville. Two were shipped north on the overloaded Sultana when it exploded on the Mississippi. One drowned. The other made it to shore. My Civil War ancestor's unit, the 27th Wisconsin, lost roughly one quarter of its manpower to disease, ten times its losses to combat and those were not unusual casualty figures.
Such a movie will have to be an active intentional collaboration between the primary sources left behind by Civil War era authors & the modern artists who interpret them.
Thanks for the response. I always think it's important to remind people that movies are not works of historical interpretation. We shouldn't expect them to be accurate to the degree that we expect historians to be.
Absolutely -- Historians should be involved, clearly -- But artistic interpretation is a different mindset.
Maybe "The Civil War" is too big a set of stories & ideas for any one movie to grapple with in 90-180 minutes -- Maybe the best we can hope for is to raise awareness of (& interest in) the historical records & interpretations?
How can movies best direct viewers into actions (further learning, deeper engagement)?
I suppose revisionist "Lost Cause" mythologies also fit that description -- Just not in a positive way.
You may laugh, but I think Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter comes close to what you are seeking. If you look at it critically, it has a lot to say. And of course, it’s fun to watch, too.
I agree, though I suspect Bouie is looking for a Civil War drama. It would be interesting to look at movies like ALVH and Wild Wild West as attempts to address some of these tougher questions through a fantasy/comedy lens.
I finally read "Killer Angels." I can see why it won awards and is so popular. But I did get annoyed every time some Confederate commanders complained about "why all these Yankees say the war is about slavery. It's not!" A more updated version would show the Confederates kidnapping African_Americans around the area to bring back to sell into slavery.
It's a wonderful work of historical fiction. A more updated version of KA would also need to show units from the Army of the Potomac being ordered to New York City to help put down the draft riots.
No argument, but also: it's my understanding that Sec War Stanton stipulated that the four regiments from the AoP sent to NYC all had to have been raised in NEW YORK CITY.
That made sense, Copperheads would have been the first to claim it was an invasion force. (Plus, troops from NYC didn't need maps and all spoke the local dialects.)
It would also be fun to insert Ltc Arthur Fremantle into the production. The CW's most famous war tourist, he got a platinum ticket to see the PA Invasion. After catching a lift with Dorsey Pender he caught up with Lee just as Heth's division incited the battle. Incomprehensibly, he missed Pickett's Charge! But unable to resist the adventure, he talked his way into the Union and decided (like any tourist) to visit Manhattan.
Yep, Fremantle blundered into the Draft Riot! He wandered around completely unmolested, getting more entries for his war diary, which made him an international best-selling author.
During his 3 months in the Confederacy and NYC, he was a combination of 'Zelig' and Chauncey Gardiner (Peter Sellers in 'Being There'). All the rebel politicians and generals assumed he was there as an unofficial (wink, wink) representative of the British Government.
Be great if it could refute the lies of Gangs of New York, but that would probably be too much to include.
Good point. That would add quite a lot to the context.
BTW, what happened to the Union POWs captured at Gettysburg? Were they herded south under guard as well?
Just from what I read, in Lee's retreat, Cavalry general Kilpatrick was sent to raid one of the CSA wagon trains. I'm not certain which train it was. Two accounts overlap: one says Kilpatrick recaptured about 1000 POWs, the other account says 1300 mostly enslaved workers, free blacks (I am guessing these were freed persons captured by Lee's army), and a few wounded ANV troops were captured; no mention of Union captives there.
The CSA army's trains were spilt into three columns. Pickett's tattered division was assigned to guard the Union POWs at the end of the train passing through Monterrey Pass, 4 miles into South Mountain. Apparently behind Pickett, Grumble (he had that kind of personality) Jones' small brigade was the rear of the rear guard.
A tip given to Custer by a civilian indicated that the ANV wagon train had passed that way. Custer's Michigan division became the advance force against the ANV rear guard. Kilpatrick pressed forward to take advantage of this intel coup.
In the dark and rain it became impossible to know how large the opposing force was, or even if it was an opposing force. Custer's division charged into the rear of Jones' brigade; a mere eight troopers held them off for awhile. Seven other divisions under Kilpatrick then charged and the brigades got so intermixed the numerous Federals fired at each other several times. At one point, now according to the other version, Kilpatrick's divisions found Pickett and rescued 1000 Union POWs.
Lee's final report said 4000, not including the wounded POWs left on the field. Also, he noted 2000 paroled POWs, probably Milroy's defeated forces at Winchester captured either in Early's battle or rounded up in the drive towards the Susquehanna River. Lee's 4000 number was inexact and the two reports (three now counting Lee's) don't say anything about the 1000 lost POWs being counted in the 4000 or not.
And that's all I know, with a little knitting together of the two accounts.
I have thought about this and maybe a story of the Peninsula, where Federal troops from a particular regiment encounter slavery and what the impact is on them. This would be a kind of fictional take on Glenn David Brasher’s book on the Peninsula. McClellan and his opinions would feature prominently, as well as Lincoln’s evolving thoughts through this period, but the crux of the story are these men.
I would extend the story to Antietam as a climax and have the initial Emancipation Proclamation as its close. By closing on this, it shows the story is not at its end, but merely a beginning of its own, as the story is indeed a complex one.
As an aside and a bonus I would also need the period material culture, customs, and military tactics to be as correct as possible. Nothing takes me out of a period piece more than to have those off.
This movie will never be made for the reasons you describe, but a man can dream, right?
I love that book, but I think what you are describing here is a movie for Civil War enthusiasts, but nothing something for the general public.