FILM: Battles and beards
Gods and Generals
Away Down South in Dixie
In America, the subjects of the Union are not states but citizens.
—Tocqueville
Historical films come in all shapes and sizes, and are usually enjoyable. Some are pretty good and hard to find serious fault with (Young Winston and Waterloo spring to mind). Some are wildly inaccurate in the details, but capture the gist of things quite well (Ken Russell’s Cromwell, redeemed by Alec Guinness’s splendid performance as Charles I, or even the same director’s orgiastic The Devils, which says some truly uncomfortable things about religious hysteria and the willingness of people to go along with totalitarianism and injustice). Some pass themselves off as accurate, but are not (Zulu, Lawrence of Arabia, the latter in particular being a romance bearing only loose resemblance to the actual course of events). Some are just plain travesties (Gangs of New York which reinvents the Civil War Irish pogrom against the negroes of New York as an Irish rebellion against “oppression” by British-Americans) which can only serve to deepen and perpetuate ignorance. Some, perhaps the most common category, are tolerably accurate as far as they go but only present one side of the picture (Patton, Gandhi and Michael Collins — all linked by an unfair treatment of the British, not to mention Muslims, Ulster Unionists, etc).
Gods and Generals, the recent epic film of the American Civil War, tries to be a serious historical film, accurate in detail and dialogue, of the sort I have long dreamed about, and perhaps goes some way towards showing why such a film is an impossibility. Even within the confines of a very long film (four hours including interval, with a five-hour version to be released as a TV miniseries), it is impossible to put across enough nuances of opinion to create an entirely balanced story.
This film received an absolute panning from its British reviewers (many of whom showed their ignorance by confusing the 1861-5 Civil War with the 1775-83 War of Independence against Britain), for its sympathy to the South. Much of the criticism was rather unjust — the Southern whites did feel that they were fighting for their independence, and whilst an invasion for humanitarian reasons to end slavery might be morally justified by today’s standards, this was not at the time the overt cause of the war. Invading to reconquer breakaway states is much harder to justify, at least if self-determination means anything, and there is no denying the romantic yearnings to which this war gave rise: those who criticized the film’s use of the phrase “the cotton states” should perhaps reflect on the haunting words of ‘Away Down South in Dixie’, which spread like a bushfire among the Confederate Armies, reminding them that they were fighting to defend “the land of cotton”. But then arguing that the American Civil War (and what a war: responsible for the deaths of over 600,000 soldiers; three times as many Confederates alone died merely in Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg as Allies on D-Day in 1944; there were more casualties, dead and wounded, at Gettysburg alone than combat deaths in Vietnam), was not about slavery is like trying to argue that the First World War was not caused by German aggression — when all is said and done, the states would not have quarreled in the first place if it had not been for slavery, and no amount of sophistry can hide the fact.
Like the 1995 film of Gettysburg to which it is a prequel, Gods & Generals was financed by media tycoon Ted Turner, and he can be spotted in a brief Hitchcock-style appearance sitting behind General Lee at a performance of ‘The Bonny Blue Flag’. The effect of Turner’s money can be seen in the thousands of extras and the nitpicking attention to detail (even period locomotives). I was very impressed, and convinced by, the way in which the freshly-raised Confederate forces of 1861 were shown marching with a ragtag of flags and uniforms (some of them even of 1776 vintage), many of the Southern officers still wearing their regular army blue jackets. By the following year, all this has been rectified and the Confederates are assembled in grey uniforms under their familiar “Stars and Bars” flag. And of course the viewer cannot fail to be amused by the impressive adornment of authentic facial hair sported by the actors (Zulu Dawn is one of the very few other films to get Victorian beards right).
Apart from the period detail, and the excellent and stirring music (do “great events” really seem so stirring to those who take part in them? I doubt it. Many must seem anticlimactic or even barely be noticed at the time), Gods & Generals does leave something to be desired as a piece of filmmaking. Many of the battle camera shots are repetitive, there is the obligatory bit of bad CGI (a recreation of the 1860s town of Fredericksburg), and one particularly cringeworthy moment when the camera lingers on the blood dripping from a wounded man onto the black and white keys of a grand piano. There is also a lack of the dramatic character development for which most people look in a film. That said, I wasn’t bored at all, and neither were the other twenty or so American Civil War buffs in the cinema with me.
The film starts with Colonel (as he then was) Robert E. Lee (a splendidly-underplaying Robert Duvall, a Virginian in real life) refusing the US government’s offer to command the Northern Army. He rejects the offer because he feels a greater loyalty to his home state of Virginia. We are then shown Virginia seceding from the Union, and Thomas Jackson, an instructor at the Virginia Military Institute starting to train Confederate troops. The film presumes a certain amount of knowledge, both of the American Civil War and of military history in general, from the viewer: Jackson is shown urging that his men train with bayonets, “sarissas” of this war, the viewer being assumed to know that the sarissa was the long spear carried by the men of the Macedonian phalanx. At Bull Run the initial US invasion of Virginia is beaten back, and as other troops flee, Jackson’s brigade stands firm, earning him the nickname by which he known to posterity: Stonewall. Instead of dramatic development, the film concentrates on two other battles.
The first of these is Fredericksburg, where the US forces are led by the blithering incompetent Ambrose Burnside (his cheeks adorned by the luxuriant facial hair named after him — I won’t spell it out). To the despair of his subordinate generals, Burnside passes up the chance to take Lee by surprise and ford the river at a shallower point, insisting that the Northern Army of the Potomac cross ‘in good order’ over a narrow bridge and attack Lee in his prepared positions overlooking the town. The result is a predictable fiasco and slaughter, as the US troops make an uphill frontal attack across open ground — as the November night falls, men are still crawling desperately up the slope, sheltering for cover (and probably for warmth as well) behind the corpses of their dead comrades. A particularly tragic battle between Union and Confederate Irish regiments takes place, although Americans will perhaps be saddened to learn that this sort of thing was nothing new, and that the Royal Irish Regiment and the Wild Geese had fought one another viciously in the Wood of Sars at Malplaquet in 1709.
It is a pity that we get to see so little of Duvall’s Robert E. Lee, but the Fredericksburg sequence concentrates mostly on the Northern side, in a vain attempt at balance. The main Northern character is Colonel Joshua Chamberlain, a college professor who (as academic men in wartime so surprisingly often do) took to soldiering like a duck to water, and whose 20th Maine Regiment later held the key hill of Little Round Top at Gettysburg. All that is shown in the 1995’s Gettysburg, but in Gods and Generals Jeff Daniels simply doesn’t convince in the role. Mira Sorvino, in a brief appearance as his wife, makes a blatant appeal to a modern audience by regretting his leaving home to fight for his anti-slavery beliefs. It is lucky that that they put these modern sentiments in the mouth of a Northern woman — a wife of that era, and especially a Southern one, (whatever she privately thought) might more likely have told her husband that she would rather be a widow than the wife of a coward. As it is, I was merely struck by her emaciated Atkins–Dieted fingers, as incongruous as any set of perfectly-capped Hollywood teeth.
The third act of the film is dominated by Stonewall Jackson — a fine, if somewhat stagey, performance by Stephen Lang. Compared in his own lifetime to Oliver Cromwell, Jackson was both a superb military leader and the stuff of which fanatics are made. Like that other Lieutenant-General, he spent much of his time trying to discern the will of God from events (as opposed to acting from a clearly-defined moral code), often an excuse for opportunism. His belief that God has set the time for his death, and that nothing he can do can alter it, makes him fearless in battle, but also allows him to execute deserters as an example, and to aim to ‘kill every one of’ the Northerners. He himself is opposed to slavery (rather shamefully, the film ducks this issue by not showing any Southerners who are actually in favour of their “peculiar institution”). Some of the criticism of this performance is misplaced: people in the 1860s did declaim theatrically, read the Bible together (as Jackson does with his much-younger wife), and talk endlessly about religion. Many southern blacks were loyal to their owners, and served the Confederate forces like Jackson’s freedman cook. Nor is there anything odd for the time about the touching friendship which Jackson evolves with a five-year old girl at Christmas 1862 — critics should perhaps reread Alice in Wonderland.
The final battle is Chancellorsville in May 1863. Those who like to look out for the inevitable hilarious anachronism in this sort of film should watch when Jackson leans over to kiss his baby daughter goodbye: look out for the white panel on the wall above her crib, concealing the electric lightswitch. Jackson, by now commanding half of Lee’s army, leads a daring 17-mile march, taking the US forces by surprise in flank and routing them. It was Lee’s masterpiece, and Jackson’s finest hour, and we are shown him riding slowly and implacably, surrounded by revolver-toting staff officers, among the fleeing Northern troops. Whether, with Jackson at his side, Lee might have gone on to win the subsequent battle of Gettysburg, we shall never know, as that night Jackson was wounded by what we would nowadays call friendly fire. Weakened by the amputation of his left arm, he dies after a deathbed sequence which is drawn out to the point of mild absurdity.
There ends the film. But how much was left out between Bull Run and Fredericksburg! There are no Seven Days’ Battles, in which Lee made his name defending Richmond against the Army of the Potomac (which had landed by sea on the Yorktown Peninsula). We do not get to see Jackson make his name fighting off three larger Northern forces in the Shenandoah Valley campaign, studied even at the time in Europe as a masterpiece of guerrilla warfare. We do not see Lee’s invasion of Maryland, culminating at the stalemate of Antietam on 17 September 1862, Lee’s subsequent retreat used by Lincoln as a good enough occasion for his Emancipation Proclamation. At the risk of antagonizing the border states of Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland and Delaware, Union states which still practiced slavery (as indeed did the District of Columbia) Lincoln gained the moral high ground, making British intervention impossible, and weakening the resolve of blacks and poor whites to fight for the Confederacy. After Emancipation, 180,000 black troops fought for the union. Nor is there any diplomatic context: British intervention is a factor often omitted in American accounts. Britain came close to recognizing the Confederacy in 1862, not least out of cynical balance-of-power reasons on Palmerston’s part. If the Royal Navy had broken the naval blockade, and allowed the cotton trade (the disruption of which was causing serious distress in Lancashire) to resume, the Confederacy might well have pulled through. Instead, we just fast-forward to Fredericksburg.
Much British sympathy for the Confederacy, at a time when the English upper classes were surrendering their political influence with imperceptible gradualness, derived from the perception that it was a war of aristocrats defending themselves against industrial democracy (the future Lord Salisbury had nightmares of Hatfield House being attacked by Northern troops). Gods and Generals of course plays up to this, not only in its title but also in the stress on the heroic leadership of Stonewall Jackson. Sentiment aside, one has to wonder how seriously to take all this. In ancient times (and much of these attitudes were carried forward by mediaeval knights) only the leisured class, who pursued military glory for the polis, were free. Until the late eighteenth century, the lower orders were barely deemed to exist — an aristocrat would describe himself as being ‘alone’ if only servants were present (and as late as the 1930s, as shown in the Robert Altman film Gosford Park, visiting servants at a house party were known by the surname of their master to avoid confusion). Free men lived theatrically, on display before their inferiors. The warrior-citizen avoided luxury and enslaved the helots or serfs who worked, and was expected to sacrifice himself to his country, class or polis. This set of attitudes survived into our own time as the conduct expected of an army officer — think Alec Guiness in Bridge on the River Kwai, or in the real world Charles de Gaulle sitting contemptuously upright as his car was machine-gunned by the OAS, and surviving.
Unfortunately none of this has much to do with what America has contributed to the world. The process by which democratic society replaced ancient traditions was a very slow and gradual one: some trace it back to the rule of bishops in Late Roman cities, with their insistence that all men were equally worthy of the Church’s attentions, or to Charlemagne demanding oaths of loyalty from serfs and slaves, as well as free men. By the sixteenth century modern notions of the State and the individual were evolving. But as early as the 1830s Tocqueville, in his book “Democracy in America”, had twigged that America was pushing these developments further, with class distinctions eroded and business dominant over all areas of society. In a democracy government appeals to the mass, and the media (press in those days) becomes vital in shaping opinion, and allowing people to feel they are participating by sharing opinions — and it may be that social resentments and perceived injustices can be used as a source of centralization.
It is true that modern western society still needs to be defended, a fact which often seems lost on the political classes of France and Germany, and large chunks of the British media, and in so far as the American armed forces have always been disproportionately southern, the South may be said to contribute more than its fair share to the process. But it is also true that success in modern war is determined not by heroism, admirable as that quality may be, but by the industrial and technological might generated by the American way of life. This was as true in the 1860s — after 1864 Lee’s strategic skill counted for little as the Confederacy was simply steamrollered by a North which had at last got its act together — as it would be in the 1940s, or indeed in the Gulf Wars of 1991 and 2003.
Something was lost with the demise of the aristocratic-warrior society, and Fukuyama, quoting Hegel, called the sense of self-worth "Thymos". But nostalgia is probably not the best place to start looking to regain it. And anybody still tempted to romanticize the military life still has a chance to go to the cinema and check out the Joaquin Phoenix vehicle Buffalo Soldiers, a disturbing and blackly comic tale set in the US Army in Germany in the late 1980s.
Of battles, beards & democracy in America
How did events come to such a pass? Given the moral revulsion which existed against slavery by the early nineteenth century, it is hard not to see some kind of break between North and South as, sooner or later, inevitable. The powder trail can be traced at least back to President Polk’s Mexican War (1846-1848), which was widely seen (and bitterly opposed) as a plot to add more Slave States to the Union. This did not happen — Texas was the last new slave state, and the addition of California permanently tipped the balance in the Senate, previously so carefully maintained (rather like the balance between Protestant and Catholic in Greater Germany after 1648) in favour of the Free States. The defeat of Mexico was the USA’s first major foreign war (in so far as Americans ever regard the Western Hemisphere as “foreign”), and many of the future Civil War generals, like Grant and Lee, served as junior officers.
In the 1850s “Bloody Kansas” was the last attempt to found another Slave State. After years of guerrilla warfare in Kansas and Missouri, Congress, which now had a majority of Free States in both houses, rejected the petition for Statehood. Kansas was not admitted, as a Free State, until after the Southern States had seceded. 1859 also saw the crackpot martyr John Brown inflame the South by his attempt to start a general slave revolt.
Secession was of course finally triggered by the election of Abraham Lincoln, an avowed Abolitionist, in November 1860. By the time Lincoln was inaugurated the following March, seven States had left the Union. President Buchanan did nothing to stop them but neither did he willingly turn over federal installations to the seceding States. Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor was still held by the United States Army, and it was attacked by Confederate forces on 12 April 1861. Lincoln’s response set off the secession of four Border States, including Virginia. Lincoln raised armies to save the Union (moved at least in part by the need to prevent the port of New Orleans, vital for its control of the mouth of the Mississippi, falling into hostile hands), and many Northerners, and some Southerners, who responded to that didn't want to free the slaves, let alone allow civil rights for freedmen.
Southerners did not believe Lincoln's promises to leave slavery untouched. Perhaps he might have kept his promises if there had been no secession, but as we have seen War brought Emancipation, even in loyal Border States (Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, & Delaware), by the Thirteenth Amendment. Some criticism of Lincoln is far-fetched: that he abused civil liberties and suppressed dissent (a bit rich, as the South had actually been censoring mail even before the War to suppress even private discussion of Abolition, and was the first to employ conscription; Southern civilian Unionists were massacred by Confederate forces in Texas), or that he founded today’s bloated Federal state (blame that one on Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and the need for large states to fight twentieth-century wars), or that he removed the only real check on the Federal Government (blame that one on a Federal Army and Supreme Court, both of them dating from the 1780s). Those who scoff at Giscard d’Estaing’s latest escapade would be better-advised to take note.
What was it all for? The Union was saved, and slavery was abolished, but the “color question” continued to poison American politics for another generation, until it was solved by restoring almost the status quo ante in the South. Most southern whites had no intention of allowing political equality. Nor did Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, the Southern Democrat Unionist who succeeded as President after Lincoln’s assassination. He believed that the Southern States had never really left the Union and had the same powers that they had had before the War. Congress responded to the Southern States’ “black codes” with the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which Johnson vetoed. For the first time in history, Congress reversed a veto, and when the Supreme Court declared the Act unconstitutional, Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment to protect the civil rights and voting rights of blacks. The Southern State governments were replaced by Reconstruction regimes. Congress passed a law attempting to prevent Johnson from firing Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton (who was of course in charge of the Union occupation forces in the South). Johnson did so anyway and was impeached. He was vindicated by one vote and later went back to serving as a US Senator from Tennessee.
Johnson’ successor Ulysses Grant (who had been the implacable Northern commander-in-chief from 1864), was vilified with charges of corruption, most of them concerning a patronage system which had existed since the 1830s (and which Grant himself reformed in 1870), or over messes from Johnson's that Administration Grant's Administration cleared up, or about events which he handled effectively, eg. the attempt of Jay Gould and James Fisk to corner to the gold market on September 24, 1869. But the real poison of his Administration was the race issue. Grant enforced the Fourteenth (civil rights) and Fifteenth Amendments (voting rights), neither of which Lincoln had at first supported. Georgia was temporarily returned to military rule to force the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment. Fraudulent elections and race riots (including a massacre of 300 blacks) were suppressed in Louisiana. Habeus corpus was suspended and parts of the South Carolina put under martial law in order to suppress the Ku Klux Klan (enforcing the anti-Ku Klux Klan Act of April 10, 1871). But there was no choice but to accept elections, in Texas and elsewhere, which returned Democrats to power honestly. The North had fought to preserve the Union, and had accepted Abolition, but by now the North had had enough of the cost of enforcing civil rights for blacks. The Republicans lost the House of Representatives in 1874, the lame duck Congress passing the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which was soon gutted by the Supreme Court. Ironically, Grant’s last year in office was 1876, the Centennial of the Declaration of Independence, and also the tragic climax of the Indian Wars. Grant was sympathetic to American Indians but could not stem the flow of gold seekers into the Black Hills of Dakota. The defeat of Custer followed, and thereafter the near-genocide of the Indians.
Rutherford B. Hayes succeeded Grant in 1876, with a minority of the vote and a hung Electoral College, by a deal to end Reconstruction with the withdrawal of Federal troops from the South. The South, provided it stayed in the Union, was now free to ignore the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. The Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896 (after a year of 230 lynchings in 1892), which allowed Segregation laws, put segregation — Jim Crow and peonage (slavery by another name) in place, the former until the 1960s.
It is an infinitely depressing story, but it does not end there. In 1912 Woodrow Wilson became the first Southerner (and only the second Democrat) elected President since the Civil War. He even purged black postmasters and brought Segregation into the Federal government. By now the Confederacy was being romanticised. The Civil War was no longer called the "Great Rebellion" and Wilson himself is supposed to have provided the name for D.W. Griffith's racist epic, The Birth of a Nation (1915) — which may have helped to inspire the actual of the Ku Klux Klan.
Wilson’s presidency also saw an event which has long stuck in my mind. In 1915, on Confederate Memorial Day in Atlanta (which had been sacked by General Sherman in 1864) a girl named Mary Phagan was found murdered. It was pinned on the manager of the pencil factory where she worked, a “rich Jewish Yankee” named Leo Frank. Convicted after a travesty of a trial, with a racist and anti-Yankee mob howling outside the courthouse, his death penalty was commuted by a sympathetic Governor of Georgia, who had to spend the rest of his life in California after this act of political suicide (his wife really did tell him that she would “rather be a widow than the wife of a coward”). Frank was lynched, a photograph of his hanging body circulating as a popular postcard for years afterwards. It was an ugly event, encapsulating an ugly time in American history. The prosecutor had known perfectly well that Frank was innocent, but there was no posthumous pardon until 1986. On the day of the murder, the town had been gathered to watch 200 Confederate veterans parade before Stonewall Jackson’s aged widow.
James Steerforth works in the London bourse
James Steerforth, September 1, 2003 10:31 AM