Posted on 01/07/2004 2:58:42 PM PST by quidnunc
2003 was a big year for Civil War movies. Gods and Generals, based on Jeff Shaara's novel of the same name hit theaters in the spring. Gods and Generals was a paean to the Old Confederacy, reflecting the "Lost Cause" interpretation of the war. This school of Civil War historiography received its name from an 1867 book by Edward A. Pollard, who wrote that defeat on the battlefield left the south with nothing but "the war of ideas."
I know from the Lost Cause school of the Civil War. I grew up in a Lost Cause household. I took it for gospel truth that the Civil War was a noble enterprise undertaken in defense of southern rights, not slavery, that accordingly the Confederates were the legitimate heirs of the American Revolutionaries and the spirit of '76, and that resistance to the Lincoln government was no different than the Revolutionary generation's resistance to the depredations of George III. The Lost Cause school was neatly summarized in an 1893 speech by a former Confederate officer, Col. Richard Henry Lee: "As a Confederate soldier and as a Virginian, I deny the charge [that the Confederates were rebels] and denounce it as a calumny. We were not rebels, we did not fight to perpetuate human slavery, but for our rights and privileges under a government established over us by our fathers and in defense of our homes."
Cold Mountain, based on Charles Frazier's historical novel, was released on Christmas Day. It too is about the Civil War but Cold Mountain is a far cry from Gods and Generals. This is the "other war," one in which war has lost its nobility and those on the Confederate home front are in as much danger from other southerners as they are from Yankee marauders. Indeed, Cold Mountain can be viewed as the anti-Gods and Generals.
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(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
On any given day, there's more intelligent analysis on National Review Online than there is on World Net Dumbly in a year.
1) I was hoping for both main characters to die the whole movie. Just can't make a movie work that way. Both were fairly contemptible people.
2) The entire movie just was infused with this "Hey, I'm trying to win an OSCAR" feel.
Problem with criticising TEP is at times the people who did like it for some unaccountable reason always accuse people who didn't like it of being uneducated low-lifes who only like violent action adventures or something; nothing could be further from the truth in my case.
Main other movie which I cannot fathom the popularity of is Forrest Gump. No idea how on earth that thing could win awards.
Of course we don't base our opinions on fiction. I can't believe the neocon National Review has stooped to the point they're trying to quash Southern rebellion based on a work of fiction. What's next, taking the gospel of lincoln from a Socialist sympathizer? Oh, sorry that's already been done hasn't it?
In time, Sandburg’s socialist convictions became so strong that he began to write papers on how a reformed government should be and pamphlets to distribute to the public promoting socialist ideas for the Wisconsin Socialist Party. Even in his poems began to glorify socialist values and protesting the government and government leaders"
Or perhaps we could ask McPherson, whose work was partially the basis for Ken Burns' work of fiction. That is, if he can take the time away from giving interviews to the World Socialist Web Site
Of course we all know from our fourth grade history books that northerners absolutely loved the President and supported his tariff war one hundred percent. Must be why the worthless man had to send troops to shut down more than a few newspapers
Another hit piece from those fun loving knuckleheads that brought us the Frummer, Canadian expatriate extraordinaire
Hear, hear! The Old South was a disgrace. Good riddance to bad rubbish, they deserved Sherman and everything else they got. I would have hanged every slave owner and overseer, had I been in command.
-ccm
Where would I find that?
Art. 4, Sec. 3:
Clause 1: New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.
It prohibited the federal government from doing so. The states could do as they pleased. It was no more a slave document than was the US Constitution. The federal congress was required to prohibit the introduction of new African slaves, and Jefferson Davis did veto a bill attempting to do just that on 28 Feb 1861.
Sailer's evidence doesn't support the kind of conclusion she (or apparently he) wants to draw from it: of course there would be comparatively little race mixing in majority Black Gullah areas. The Black population was so large that any such activity would necessarily have little effect on the genetic make-up of the Black population, but it doesn't mean that such activity didn't occur, as the diarist Mary Chestnut would have told him. And in any case, not all South Carolina is lowland Gullah country. That doesn't mean that the film's depictions of race relations are correct, but Mercer's choice of what she takes to be evidence says a lot about her way of thinking and lack of expertise about the period.
Clyde Wilson's contribution doesn't add up to much either. Western North Carolina had unionist and secessionist strongholds, and some mixed areas. Some Home Guards may well have been somebody's grandfathers, but they weren't necessarily the grandfathers of those they were hunting, nor were they likely to be particularly sympathetic or kindly to those they did capture (in fairness to the Home Guards, some deserters organized themselves into fighting bands of bushwackers and weren't particularly nice either). And of course, to get back home, a deserter would have to pass through areas where he'd be a stranger, and thus fair game for Home Guards who did take their job seriously.
Clyde's view looks like damage control or spin. I'd have to see more evidence, but it was wartime, and most accounts reflect the savagery of the day. Try this and this for a start. It's doubtful that Clyde Wilson's smiling paternalistic visions of the Old South have much substance behind them. Robert E. Lee was a good deal more honest about things than Wilson, and didn't bother to sugar-coat things.
On the whole, Mercer's doing just what Hollywood does: she's projecting modern-day attitudes back on past times. The fact that her modern-day views are opposed to Hollywood's doesn't make them any more accurate a reflection of the period she's writing about.
Mercer and Owens are both reviewing the politics and not the movie. From the looks of the previews and trailers, the movie's depiction of a Southerner fed up with fighting for someone else's cause is one of the best and most accurate things about the movie. The film's cinematic lushness and grasping after epic sweep look to be more controversial and less successful, but it won't be the only Civil War film with those failings.
Passage from Owens' review of Cold Mountain in National Review, January 2004:
This school of Civil War historiography received its name from an 1867 book by Edward A. Pollard, who wrote that defeat on the battlefield left the south with nothing but "the war of ideas...The Lost Cause school was neatly summarized in an 1893 speech by a former Confederate officer, Col. Richard Henry Lee: "As a Confederate soldier and as a Virginian, I deny the charge [that the Confederates were rebels] and denounce it as a calumny. We were not rebels, we did not fight to perpetuate human slavery, but for our rights and privileges under a government established over us by our fathers and in defense of our homes."Compare it to this passage from Owens' review of Gods and Generals in National Review, February 2003:
The second got its name from a book written in 1867 by Edward A. Pollard, who wrote that all the south has left "is the war of ideas." The Lost Cause interpretation was neatly summarized in an 1893 speech by a former Confederate officer, Col. Richard Henry Lee. "As a Confederate soldier and as a Virginian, I deny the charge [that the Confederates were rebels] and denounce it as a calumny. We were not rebels, we did not fight to perpetuate human slavery, but for our rights and privileges under a government established over us by our fathers and in defense of our homes."I suppose it makes for efficiency...clip the same quotes out and sentences of an old review, change a few words and the order around slighty, stick it in a new review about another book or movie and ship it off to the frat boys at NR for publication. Evidently he hasn't learned much since the last time he got caught recycling material from old reviews in "new" ones.
Re: castigating slave-owners - nah, takes too much energy to really do it right, e.g., tell you the story of what happened to the slaves who fought for their freedom (broken on the wheel first, then hanged in public squares as a warning, or crucified), nor to go into the ins and outs of encouraging your enemy's slaves to rebel as a way of damaging them economically (done in war time by Brits, French, Spanish, Indians, and Mexicans - but it had a way of backfiring), nor the long and convoluted history of the Jacobin influence on slaves in French colonies - silly blacks thought that "all men have the right to liberty" meant them, and it got so bad that the slavers had to import directly from Africa to get slaves that hadn't had their minds poisoned by all those silly ideas about human rights, nor why Virginia made it almost impossible for freed blacks to remain in Virginia (same thing, poisoning slave minds with silly and dangerous ideas about human rights).
You'll have to wait for the book but it won't be nearly as fun a read as Cold Mountain. Prolly sell 30 copies, if that many. ;^)
Okay. Now that has to be one of the most asinine statements ever written in a movie review. I sure can deny that Inman and Ada Monroe and Ruby and Teague are part of the story of the confederacy for the simple reason that they are all FICTIONAL CHARACTERS in a FICTIONAL NOVEL written 140 years after the war!
Here's the same little passage in Owens' review of a book on the war by David W. Blight for Claremont, December 2002:
As Edward A. Pollard wrote in the 1867 book that gave this interpretation its name, "all that is left the South is the war of ideas." The essence of the Lost Cause thesis was (and remains) that the war was not about slavery, but "states' rights." It is neatly summarized in an 1893 speech by a former Confederate officer, Col. Richard Henry Lee. "As a Confederate soldier and as a Virginian, I deny the charge [that the Confederates were rebels] and denounce it as a calumny. We were not rebels, we did not fight to perpetuate human slavery, but for our rights and privileges under a government established over us by our fathers and in defense of our homes."
That makes it a triple recycle!
"Indeed, the dirty little secret of the Confederacy — swept under the rug by the Lost Cause school — is that some 100,000 white southerners (along with 150,000 blacks) — at least one battalion of white troops from every Confederate state except south Carolina — served in Union armies during the course of the war."
Owens' statistic of 150,000 blacks who fought from the south on the northern side is an historical falsehood. According to the official records of the United States Government 178,975 blacks served in the union armies during the war. Of this figure the home state of 5,896 was not recorded. The remainder were identified by state and those coming from the southern states do not even come close to approaching the figure given by Owens. Per the government's records:
47,490 black troops came from northern states
8,344 black troops came from the seceded but disputed border state of Missouri
23,703 black troops came from the non-seceded but disputed border state of Kentucky
93,542 black troops came from the "CSA 11" states
So even if one were to include all of the CSA 11 states AND the two disputed border states in the total of "southern" black troops, Owens is still 25,000 soldiers short of his stated figure.
The next question: what of these alleged 100,000 white southern soldiers in the union ranks who have supposedly been kept "secret" all these years? In reality, a total of 86,068 whites from the "CSA 11" states are recorded to have served in the northern armies, including those already enlisted at the war's start who did not resign. Thus Owens' figure is some 14,000 men too high.
The 86,068 figure itself is also somewhat misleading due to one key reason: 62,964 of those 86K came from two unionist regions in two CSA states: Eastern Tennessee and what is now the state of West Virginia. That leaves a grand total of only 23,000 unionist white southerners from 9 entire states plus the non-unionist regions of two others, Virginia and Tennessee. Owens' claim that every CSA state provided at least "one battallion of white troops" to the yankee armies is similarly misleading because most of these states did not even provide enough troops to fill units of comparable size to any standard northern state unit. The state of Georgia, for example, is known to have provided a grand whopping total of 195 white southern soldiers to the yankee cause. South Carolina gave zero. Virginia proper as we know it today is recorded to have provided 42. Mississippi provided 500. The rest save Arkansas sent between roughly one and three thousand a piece, with AR providing just over 8,000 (less than a tenth of the 110K that AR provided to the confederacy). Thus these so-called unionist units from the south were of a miniscule size everywhere except for the admittedly unionist hotbed of east Tennessee and the region that is now West Virginia.
And it wasn't even recognized by all of what is now West Virginia for that matter. The unionist sympathies in WV came not from the whole state but rather a geographically isolated but concentrated hotbed (and it was indeed a hotbed - the population there was demonstrably unionist by about 10 to 1 in their voting patterns. They also provided about 30K soldiers to the north). This overwhelmingly unionist region consisted of the WV panhandle at Wheeling and the counties immediately south of it along the PA border and Ohio river. That it was unionist is little surprise either - the WV panhandle was the only part of the original south that extended north of the mason-dixon line and it was geographically closer to places like Pittsburgh than Richmond.
Shortly after Virginia voted to secede by referendum in May 1861 a group of angry west virginians centered around the Wheeling region called a convention there and set up their own rump government. They claimed to represent the whole state and purported themselves to have the loyalty of basically all the counties in WV today. In reality they did not. Roughly half of the counties they claimed as their own (1) voted in favor of secession in the referendum and (2) did not have elected representation present at the Wheeling rump convention. The unionists in the panhandle region simply presumed to act on their behalfs and claimed them as their own.
The rump government at Wheeling quickly fell into favor with Lincoln and began to organize itself into a new state, West Virginia. They passed "legislation" permitting the formation of this new state and "enacted" it by a statehood referendum of their own. The referendum they held was one of those Saddam Hussein style elections where only people loyal to them got to vote and something like 99.9% voted "yes" on statehood. So by all reasonable measures WV statehood was a sham operation that violated the letter and spirit of the constitution. It was, however, "legal" in an extremely loose sense that depends entirely upon one selectively and somewhat dishonestly applying the letter of the law to attain a specific desired event. The Lincoln administration simply happened to be a time in our history where playing fast and loose with the meaning of the law was permissible on the executive's part, so as a result we got the state of West Virginia.
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