Posted on 09/18/2002 2:08:57 PM PDT by stainlessbanner
Perhaps the most moving moment of Ken Burns' 11-hour documentary "The Civil War" is the reading of Sullivan Ballou's July 14, 1861 letter to "My very dear Sarah," written days before he was killed at the first Battle of Bull Run. Americans hearing his words 129 years later treasured them almost as much as the Union major's widow must have, reciting the letter at weddings and funerals.
The Ballou letter epitomized the great achievement of Burns' film, which PBS is rebroadcasting over five nights beginning Sunday. Burns gave viewers "the impression of being present in the past," as historian Robert Brent Toplin puts it. When the film first aired in 1990, 40 million Americans were riveted. Gabor Boritt, director of Gettysburg's Civil War Institute, believes it's the "finest evocation of the Civil War ever attempted," challenging our very idea of what history is.
But the version of history that "The Civil War" tells was itself challenged; historians questioned the documentary's themes, interpretations and conclusions even as they acknowledged Burns' storytelling brilliance. The criticism ranged from annoyance with factual errors -- Abraham Lincoln's age when he was assassinated, for one -- to frustration that the film, at significant points, did not reflect the latest Civil War scholarship.
The debate, in Toplin's words, was a kind of lovers' quarrel, and one largely conducted out of public view. It is a quarrel worth revisiting -- and not merely for the benefit of students of the war. The film so successfully evoked the 1860s that, as Toplin's book suggests, for many Americans today it is the war.
Ever since Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865, Americans have been trying to make sense of this bloody and costly conflict, and its causes and aftermath. At the center of it all is the struggle to understand the role of slavery and how the emancipation of enslaved blacks redefined ideas of democracy and freedom.
This is contentious ground. Burns' film -- like the historian's work -- is filled with interpretation and points of view.
"We, as filmmakers, had no set agenda," Burns wrote in answer to his critics. "We felt that slavery was bad, George McClellan timid, but that the rest of the war, North and South, male and female, black and white, civilian and military, was a vast and complicated family drama, poetic as well as social in dimension, emotional as well as didactic in context and scope, instructive to the heart as well as the head."
Burns, taken aback by the vigorous and even angry criticism, countered that his film was never intended to be comprehensive. Toplin, editor of film reviews for The Journal of American History, was so intrigued by this wide-ranging debate that he invited a number of historians -- as well as Burns and his chief writer, Geoffrey C. Ward -- to contribute essays to a 1996 book on the subject, "Ken Burns' The Civil War: Historians Respond."
In his essay, Burns wrote about requiring "four o'clock in the morning courage" to make his film, invoking Grant's storied coolness in battle. And, in fact, a number of respected historians -- knowing the obstacles better than most -- openly admired the attempt. Still, they lament what they call missed opportunities.
Gary W. Gallagher, a prominent Civil War scholar at the University of Virginia, finds that Burns leaves viewers with "a skewed sense of the war's military dimension." He considers Burns' approach to military issues not only conventional, but lacking the benefit of the latest historical thinking.
In the first episode, viewers are told that "the odds against a Southern victory were long." But the South, as Gallagher details, had advantages that "evened the initial balance sheet." The Confederacy's size, alone, was an obstacle to Northern troops. But Gallagher is not just concerned with an accurate tally.
"Burns' appraisal of resources drapes a mantle of hopelessness over the Confederate resistance, imparting an especially tragic quality to the costly battles that follow," Gallagher wrote in the Toplin book.
On-camera historians were chosen to convey the war's complexities, nuances and disagreements, explains Ward, who wrote the script as well as the film's companion book, also titled "The Civil War." The constant challenge before them, as Ward saw it, was trying to impart the essence of the war to an audience that may or may not know much about it.
When one of those historians, Barbara J. Fields, is asked today to describe how she judges the film's historical success, she uses the word "dissatisfaction." Fields, a Southern historian at Columbia University, captured a nation's imagination with her on-camera eloquence, repeatedly asserting the central role of slavery and emancipation in the war and its legacy.
What Fields regrets, as she puts it, is the absence of critical pieces of the story. What is left unsaid, she argues, is why Northerners who did not care about slavery one way or the other ended up supporting a war that became as much about emancipation as reunion. Nor does she believe that the film adequately explained the Confederacy to viewers, or helped them understand why so many white Southerners who did not own slaves -- which was most -- supported the Confederate cause.
"I remember there was a response from a certain number of white Southerners who said the show was biased, and I think that was inaccurate," said Fields. "But I think where that came from was that this was the best these people could put into words their feeling that something had been left out, that to them was a very important part of the lore of the war."
In the last episode, Burns brings the war to an end. The script reads:
"Four million Americans had been freed after four years of agony, but the full meaning of that freedom remained unresolved. ... It would take another century before blacks regained much of the ground for which so many men had given their lives."
Ward reminded his colleagues in his essay for Toplin's book that they did a documentary on the war -- not on the Reconstruction period that followed. Still, he believes their film addressed the postwar period more than any other had to that point.
But Fields, along with her Columbia University colleague Eric Foner, believes that the immediate aftermath of the war and how it formed in the American memory are critical to understanding what the war meant and still means.
Fields, in fact, found the film's language and sentiment echoes of the late 19th century efforts "to put an end to the controversy by essentially forgetting the former slaves and their descendants, by getting out of the business of enforcing their rights." Foner maintains that the civil rights legislation and constitutional amendments adopted after the war were "essential to an understanding of the war's legacy" -- and not only to African-Americans.
"Transcending boundaries of race and region, they redefined freedom for all Americans," Foner wrote in an essay titled "Ken Burns and the
Romance of Reunion."
Much of the film's emotional power comes from the well-chosen detail. But historians spotted a number of errors or misstatements. Gallagher refutes the claim that William Tecumseh Sherman was orphaned as a young boy, for one. And when the film introduces the battle of Gettysburg, the narrator proclaims: "The South came in from the north that day and the North came in from the south."
"But," Gettysburg's Boritt noted, "the Confederates came in from the west, then the north. Mundane facts at times lose out to the well-turned phrase or the enticing image."
Despite their arguments with Burns' film, historians recognize their debt to him. Interest in the war spiked after the film aired, sending Americans to bookstores and battlefields to learn more. And that may be the documentary's greatest contribution of all.
"Many of those so inspired," Gallagher said, "do not end up agreeing with everything Burns says, but they would not have begun their own journeys toward understanding the Civil War were it not for watching `The Civil War."'
(Delia M. Rios can be reached at delia.rios@newhouse.com)
In case you missed it - Ken Burn's Civil War will be re-televised starting 22 September, 2002. Check your local schedules at PBS
Did the fine folks at the Declaration Foundation harass him over the alleged discrepancies?
Or was it meant to indoctrinate ordinary folk, in the manner of Ken Burns' Jazz?
Ken, there's a difference between 'not being comprehensive' and twisting the truth to fit your lie.
ArcLight, I understand your argument. However this is a situation where the documentary is supposed to teach, educate. Not continually regurgitate the lie of the lincoln myth
LOL!! What do you think?
Ladies and gentlemen, anyone looking for a perfect demonstration of what my good friend billbears is talking about need look no further than the typical southron supporter's post.
Well, it might have been an obstacle, but history shows that it was quite surmountable.
The South was never going to defeat the North militarily. The South's hope (and strategy, IIRC) was to defeat the North's will to prosecute the war to a military conclusion.
They miscalculated.
Hmmmmm.....does the term "reparations" come to mind?
Where we're usually trying to straighten out the cut and paste drivel from leftist historians like McPherson and presenting historical fact instead
LOL! My esteemed friend, would you agree that a version of this documentary produced by yourself would be vastly different than one I produced?
Tut, tut, tut, my good fellow. I've read too many posts from too many southron supporters to believe that is true for the overwhelming majority of the postee's. Present company excepted, of course.
Present company excepted of course, there are some of those on the side of the north as well
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