VMI hosts premiere of Civil War film

LEXINGTON, Va. - A statue of Stonewall Jackson faces the parade grounds of Virginia Military Institute and must be saluted regularly by newly enrolled cadets.

On Thursday night, about 130 cadets and 450 guests participated in the unveiling of an epic salute to the Confederate general and VMI professor at the Virginia premiere of "Gods and Generals." The movie, shot in part at VMI, stars actor Stephen Lang as Jackson.

"From the first day you come here, they tell you about VMI's involvement in the Civil War. It's nice to get a chance to see it (on the big screen) and see it recognized," said one cadet, freshman Patrick Grey.

Several cadets said they were honored and a bit dazzled to have Hollywood take an interest in their school.

"I was able to meet the big actors on Monday. That was pretty cool," senior Douglas Warner said.

The movie also stars Robert Duvall as Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee and Jeff Daniels as Union Col. Joshua Chamberlain.

"Gods and Generals" examines life during the Civil War and looks at many different aspects of Stonewall Jackson's life.

Jackson is shown both ordering the execution of deserters and developing a friendship with a 5-year-old girl. The audience sees the general trading gold braid from his cap for the girl's paper soldiers, and then sees how the friendship ends with her death from scarlet fever.

"That's the real hankie job when you get to that," said Danville native James I. "Bud" Robertson, a Virginia Tech professor who was a historical consultant on the film.

Jackson's religious convictions often take center stage in the film. Robertson said it would have been impossible to accurately portray Jackson otherwise.

"God has fixed the time of my death. I do not concern myself with that," Jackson says in the movie when asked how he can be so serene in battle.

Lang told the Register & Bee he spent time at VMI and read extensively to understand Jackson.

"I've been asked, 'How do you prepare for this role?' and I say you need to have two hands for it, because you've got to have the Bible in one hand and you've got to have Bud Robertson in the other," said Lang, referring to Robertson's biography of Jackson.

Early in "Gods and Generals," Jackson and his wife, Anna, are shown praying together in their house in Lexington before he leaves for war. Throughout the movie, there is a focus on life at home with soldiers shown leaving their families or singing "Silent Night" with a family that adopted them during Christmas.

"We really have tried to adhere to the truth - to present these people as they were in the middle of the 19th century ... blacks and whites, men and women, in their full humanity," said Ron Maxwell, the film's writer, producer and director. "This film will take you to where they lived."

Associate producer Dennis Frye said he believes the film will have a broad appeal.

Author Jeff Shaara, on whose novel the movie was based, said he was pleased with the adaptation of his book to film.

"The only pressure we really felt ... was to tell the truth. Do not cover up anything, do not pander to any kind of modern sensitivities," said Shaara, adding reactions so far have been encouraging.

"People are, first of all, surprised that something that comes out of Hollywood is not filled with political correctness. It's simply a historically accurate story."

Shaara, Maxwell and others stressed they researched characters and events at length. The movie made use of about 3,000 Civil War re-enactors and was shot entirely in Virginia, West Virginia and Maryland.

U.S. Sen. George Allen, R-Va., and other political leaders appear briefly as extras in the movie.

"It's a perfectly legitimate ploy," Maxwell said. "This is American - it's especially Virginian - history, and why not have a Virginia senator adding to the ambience."

Black actors portray slaves who contribute to the Confederacy's war effort but also make clear their desire to be free.

While "Gods and Generals" looks at the human side of the Civil War, no war movie would be complete without battle scenes, and this movie is no exception.

Lines of riflemen advance across exploding fields. The movie captures bloody bayonet thrusts and the boom of cannons. After the battle scenes, the fields are shown littered with the corpses of soldiers and horses.

The movie covers the first Battle of Manassas (or Bull Run), the Battle of Fredericksburg and other events between early 1861 and 1863. It is a prequel to the movie "Gettysburg," ending just before the historic battle.

"Gods and Generals," which runs about 3 1/2 hours, opens nationwide on Friday. Its world premiere on Feb. 10 was in Washington. It will also be shown in Richmond on Tuesday.

"I'm enjoying it thoroughly," Robertson said near the end of the premiere evening at VMI. "I think we have a hit on our hands."

Cadets in the Fray

The most celebrated schoolboy performance of the war was the baptism of fire of the Virginia Military Institute Cadet Corps at the Battle of New Market, Virginia-the only such instance in the war. The action took place in the Shenandoah Valley outside the village of New Market, in rolling country between a fork of the Shenandoah River and the flank of Massanutten Mountain. It was fought May 15, 1864, between a Federal force of some 6,500 under General Franz Sigel and Confederates about 4,500 strong, under General John C. Breckinridge.

The Cadets had marched in from Lexington, leaving the younger ones on their campus disconsolate, feeling disgraced at missing the opportunity to fight. The corps was 215 strong when it reached New Market, and was put into the opening battle on Sunday morning. They were eighteen or under, some of them sixteen, and reputedly even younger. (Tradition has it that some were only fourteen.)

They marched behind their commander, Lieutenant Colonel Scott Shipp, twenty-four, who rode a dappled gray horse. The boy soldiers heard their first cheering near the front, as General Breckinridge rode by "like the Cid," in the words of young John Wise, son of a Virginia governor. Boys in an artillery battery recognized friends among the cadets as they passed, and called gibes: "Here come the wagon dogs! . . . Ho, bombproofs, get outa them good clothes."

Some cadets wanted to fight for their honor on the spot, but were herded on. John Wise and three others were left behind as a baggage guard, but he made a dramatic speech to his crew and they deserted the post, leaving a Negro driver in charge of the wagon; they joined the cadet column. Henry Wise, another of Governor Wise's sons, was one of their captains; the night before he had chided the boy soldiers for cursing, and for chicken stealing, but had later eaten some cold fowl in camp with them.

About noon, when a black thundercloud hung over the valley, the cadets joined the Confederate line of battle in the center -the place of honor, the history conscious among them thought. They came to a hill crest, passed their own little battery in action, and went down a slope into the open. They heard musket fire and artillery, but nothing seemed close until a clap burst overhead. Five men went down in C Company: Captain Govan Hill, and Merritt, Read, Woodlief, and John Wise. Just before he lost consciousness Wise saw Sergeant Cabell look at him with a pitying expression. "Close up, men," Cabell said.

The line reached a ravine within 300 yards of a busy Federal battery-the six fine guns of the 30th New York, under Captain Albert von Kleiser. The ravine gave cover from the cannon, which fired from a crest studded with young cedars. The ditch was filled with cedar scrub, briers, stones, and stumps, and the cadets were a few minutes in passing through; even so, they were out before the older veterans on their flank, the 62nd Virginia.

Once the cadets halted under heavy fire while the file straightened, and the advanced flanks came even with the center. A dwelling, the Bushong House, split their line, and by companies they passed on either side, marking time beyond, restoring the line once more.

Colonel Shipp halted them. "Fix bayonets," he said. Almost immediately he was struck by a shell fragment, and fell. Several cadets were wounded at this moment, and the file lay down. Someone yelled an order to fall back on the next Confederate unit, but Cadet Pizzini of B Company swore and said he would shoot the first man who moved backward. Captain Henry Wise got to his feet and shouted for a charge on the guns, and the line went up after him.

A Federal Signal Corps captain, Franklin E. Town, on the hill beside Von Kleiser's battery, watched the cadets come on with such fascination that it did not occur to him that he might be captured. The big guns had already changed from shrapnel to canister and then double canister, so that the air was filled with murderous small iron balls. The cadet corps did not falter, and in these last yards lost most of its dead and wounded.

Captain Town saw: "They came on steadily up the slope. ...Their line was as perfectly preserved as if on dress parade. ....Our gunners loaded at the last without stopping to sponge, and I think it would have been impossible to eject from six guns more missiles than these boys faced in their wild charge up that hill."

The cadets were soon among the Federal gunners with bayonets. Lieutenant Hanna felled one with his dress sword, and Winder Garrett caught one with his bayonet. One cadet found Lieutenant Colonel W.S. Lincoln of the 34th Massachusetts on the ground, pinned by his fallen horse, but still defiant, and ready to shoot with a cocked pistol; the cadet subdued him with a bayonet. With wild yells the cadets greeted the sight of the Institute flag over the guns, waved by their tall ensign, Evans, and celebrated their victory on the hilltop while the rainstorm broke.

Of John Wise's disobedient baggage guard of four, one was dead and two were wounded. The corps had eight dead and forty-four wounded, all told.

The 62nd Virginia, charging beside them, had seven of its ten captains shot down, four dead, and a total of 241 killed and wounded. The chase went on for three miles as Sigel's force withdrew to Rude's Hill and beyond, and there was fighting, especially by artillery, after dark. The next day, when he passed the VMI battery at the roadside, General Breckinridge stopped to pass compliments: "Boys, the work you did yesterday will make you famous." Dave Pierce, a boy soldier not too young to understand military life, called back: "Fame's all right, General, but for God's sake where's your commissary wagon?"

An impressive ceremony still a part of VMI life today celebrates May 15 on the Lexington campus. Selected cadets at roll call snap their replies as the names of the New Market casualties are called: "Dead on the field of honor, sir."

Source: Part of a larger piece entitled "How Young They Were" from the book "The Civil War, Strange and Fascinating Facts" by Burke Davis.

"The only pressure we really felt ... was to tell the truth. Do not cover up anything, do not pander to any kind of modern sensitivities," said Shaara, adding reactions so far have been encouraging.

The critics will be laying for them, with the probable exception of Roger Ebert. I say this because the movie has several things about it that PC Hollywood won't like:

1. Robert Duvall is open about having a religious life, and he went so far as to explore those themes in The Apostle, which made Hollywoden's toes curl with discomfort. He has been getting a pretty cool reception since then from people who were wild about him when he was portraying the drinking, whoring, swearing Augustus McCrae in TV's Lonesome Dove, or the cynical Max Mercy in The Natural.

2. This animus will be redoubled by the realistic portrayal of Thomas Jackson, who was even more religiously zealous, and militarily zealous, than this article conveys. The real Jackson was everything PC people love to hate: he was P-non-C and absolutely sure of himself and his relationship to God.

3. The environment for introducing a movie about the Civil War is harsher than when Gettysburg came out, because of the continuing cultural attack of The New York Times and the NAACP against any reference to the antebellum South, or its people, that is not pejorative. I predict flatly that the film will be criticized for "moral obtuseness" or some such, for failing to discern the inner Rottenness and Utter Blackness of Confederate officers and men and failing to portray them as hate-puppet caricatures with Simon Legree hatchet-faces, snaggle teeth, nasty fingernails, and greasy, stringy hair.

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