Series / The Civil War

"Before the war, it was said 'the United States are' - grammatically it was spoken that way and thought of as a collection of independent states. And after the war it was always 'the United States is', as we say today without being self-conscious at all. And that sums up what the war accomplished. It made us an 'is'."

— Shelby Foote

Ken Burns' landmark eleven hours and a half long documentary about the American Civil War, narrated by historian David McCullough, it was presented by WETA in Washington D.C., and aired from September 23 to 27, 1990 on PBS. It set records at the time as the highest-rated program in PBS history.

Although Burns had done other documentaries before, they had only been feature length. This was the one that put him on the map and showcased his unique style: the mini series style format allowing him to delve in-depth to the topic, with interviews with historians Shelby Foote, Barbara J. Fields, Ed Bearss, and Stephen B. Oates, as well as Daisy Turner, a 104-year-old daughter of an ex-slave who passed away before the film aired.

Like many of Burns's film, he had an All-Star Cast to read excerpts of letters, newspaper articles, documents and memoirs of the participants of the war:

• Sam Waterston as President Abraham Lincoln
• Morgan Freeman as Frederick Douglass
• Arthur Miller as General William Tecumseh Sherman, John Brown, and others
• Julie Harris as Mary Chestnut
• Jason Robards as General Ulysses S. Grant
• Paul Roebling as Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain
• Garrison Keillor as Walt Whitman and others
• George Black as Robert E. Lee
• Christopher Murney as Elisha Hunt Rhodes
• Charley McDowell as Sam Watkins
• Horton Foote as Jefferson Davis
• George Plimpton as George Templeton Strong
• Philip Bosco as Horace Greeley
• Terry Courier as George B. McClellan
• Jody Powell as Stonewall Jackson, Nathan Bedford Forrest, and others
• Studs Terkel as Benjamin Butler and others
• Laurence Fishburne as various
• Jeremy Irons as various
• Kurt Vonnegut as various
• Derek Jacobi as the funding credits announcer for the off-air version and others
• Paul Anthony as the funding credits announcer for the broadcast version

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Tropes:

• Ambiguous Syntax: “Major corporate funding for The Civil War was provided by General Motors.” Okay, but when that’s read aloud we can’t see the italics…
• Bowdlerise: UK broadcasts of the series are edited to remove some of the more gory and disturbing photos of dead soldiers and also excise some language no longer considered politically correct, such as the word "retarded" (describing one of John Wilkes Booth's accomplices). However, they leave the multiple instances of the "n" word intact.
• Brilliant, but Lazy: George McClellan went all out training and preparing his soldiers for fighting, and it was hoped that his brilliance in this area would lead to the North quickly crushing the Confederacy. Lincoln hadn't counted on McClellan outright refusing to move against the Southern armies once in Virginia (while demanding more men for his army) and often failing to take the initiative when he did fight (which got him removed from his generalship after he failed to pursue Lee's retreating army after Antietam). Some suggested that McClellan's behavior was perhaps motivated by treason, perhaps because he did not like or respect Lincoln and had his own eye on the presidency. (He would indeed run against Lincoln in 1864 and lose.) Others have postulated that it was because he was afraid of the responsibility of ordering men to their deaths, either out of a genuine love for his meticulously trained soldiers or a fear of being blamed for their fates.
• Cassandra Truth: Sam Houston knew that the ultimately the North would win and the South would lose the war terribly and he tried in vain to stop Texas from seceding, and was disposed of for his troubles.
  • William Tecumseh Sherman knew early on that the war would be long and bloody, and was removed from command for saying so, thought to be insane. After recovering from a bout of melancholia, he was reinstated when it was realized he was right.
  • At Gettysburg, Longstreet tried to convince Lee that Pickett's Charge was a bad idea. Lee refused to hear him out. Even many of the soldiers who made the charge were convinced it would fail. They were right.
• Child Soldiers: The minimum age of 18 for enlisting was not rigidly enforced. The film points out that some drummer boys were as young as nine, and that the youngest combat soldier wounded in the war was 12.
• Desecrating the Dead: During the Harper's Ferry incident in 1859, the corpse of one of John Brown's followers, Dangerfield Newby, an African-American ex-slave, was brutalized, including his ears being cut off for souvenirs.
• Didn't Think This Through: During the siege of Petersburg, Union soldiers used gunpowder to literally blow a hole in the Confederate fortifications around the city. The initial plan was to use a division of the "United States Colored Troops", who had been trained and rehearsed in a careful battle plan that did not include running down into the giant hole in the ground — half the division would go around the crater on one side, while the other brigade would go around the crater on the other side; they would then extend the breach to both sides of the crater while also rapidly pushing through to seize strategic points beyond the Confederate lines. Unfortunately, these trained troops were replaced at the last minute with a division of white troops^note General George Meade was reportedly worried about the political implications of getting a bunch of black men killed, but also seems not have trusted the abilities of the United States Colored Troops, although they had been training for the attack for weeks at that point. These replacements charged down into the giant thirty-foot-deep hole in the ground without considering they might need ladders to get back out of the crater, leaving the Union troops sitting ducks for the Confederate defenders. To make matters worse, the Union commander of the replacement troops was a Dirty Coward, taking refuge in a bomb-proof shelter with a bottle of booze while his men were slaughtered, and was dismissed from the Army for his cowardice.
• Don't Celebrate Just Yet: In some battles, one side or the other seemed so likely to win at one point that the soldiers let their guard down and began to rejoice rather than paying attention to what was going on around them, with disastrous results. A few examples:
  • The Union was thought so likely to win the first battle of Bull Run (Manassas) that spectators from Washington came to watch and even gathered souvenirs. The Confederate victory turned out to be a brutal wake-up call for both sides: the North realized it had underestimated the resolve and skill of the Confederates, and the South realized the North wasn't going to give up despite the defeat. It was made even worse by the fact that retreating Union soldiers got caught up in the panicked flight of the Washington spectators, resulting in a wild rout back over the Potomac. The Confederates, for their part, could not press this advantage as they had taken far more casualties than they had bargained for and many of their deployed generals had either died or been wounded in the battle.
  • The Battle of Shiloh turned out to be this on several fronts. The first day of the battle ended with the Confederacy getting the upper hand, despite the death of Confederate commander Johnston, and Johnston's replacement, Beauregard, declared a victory over Grant. The Confederates then were beaten back once Union reinforcements arrived overnight, and the Union ultimately won, but at a frightful cost: the battle's 23,000 casualties exceeded the combined total of dead in all America's wars to that point. This also proved a wake-up call for Grant, who had believed the Confederacy was tired of fighting and ready to give up and now realized how wrong he was.
• Dramatic Irony: It’s not until after the end of the incredibly bloody Battle of Shiloh that we’re informed the name “Shiloh” means place of peace.
• Fate Worse than Death: Antebellum slavery is described as usually (though not always) being this, with one ex-slave describing the condition as "all night forever."
• Foregone Conclusion: Historian Shelby Foote may have sympathized with the Confederacy, but he made it clear that he felt that the CSA had no chance of winning the American Civil War. He described the Union as fighting with one arm behind its back, and the only result of many more Confederate victories would have been that the Union would use that other arm as well and crush the Confederacy with its full military strength.
  • Early in the war, some, especially in England and France, believed Confederate victory was a foregone conclusion, owing to the incompetence of Union generals and the strength of the Southern resolve, not to mention the Confederacy's "cotton diplomacy" (halting cotton shipments to Europe until European nations recognized the Confederacy). Foreign support for the South evaporated after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, as European nations were not about to support a nation committed to the preservation of slavery. Vicksburg fell only a few months later, giving the North possession of the entire Mississippi River, and this alone convinced many Confederates they were doomed.
  • Due to Northern anti-war sentiment and despair with the heavy losses suffered by Grant's army in the spring and summer of 1864, Lincoln's losing the election to George McClellan was considered a foregone conclusion, until Sherman conquered Atlanta, which convinced many Northerners the war was winnable after all and led to Lincoln winning a second term. Not that said second term would last long, sadly.
• Foreseeing My Death:
  • Sullivan Ballou, a Major from Rhode Island, wrote a letter to his wife Sarah a week before the First Battle of Bull Run (Manassas), which was essentially a farewell in case of his death. He would indeed be fatally wounded in battle a week later, and Paul Roebling's reading of his letter to Sarah became one of the series' most memorable moments.
  • Before the battle of Cold Harbor, many Union soldiers pinned slips of paper with their names to their clothing, so that their bodies could be identified if they were killed. Many of them indeed were.
• Foreshadowing: A spine-tingling example occurs in Episode Seven, in which it's mentioned that John Wilkes Booth appeared in a production of Julius Caesar with his brothers, and the narrator quotes Brutus' dialogue about possible future political assassinations similar to that of Caesar. A few months later, Booth made this prediction come true.^note It's worth noting that Booth's father and brother both had the middle name of Brutus. And after Booth murdered Lincoln, many Southerners applauded the act, referring to Booth as "our Brutus."
• General Failure: A whole string of them on the Union side (most notably McDowell, McClellan, Pope, Burnside, and Hooker), until Lincoln chose Ulysses S. Grant. There were a number on the Confederate side too, most notably Braxton Bragg, Jubal Early, and John Bell Hood.
• Historical Hero Upgrade: Ultimately played with on both sides.
  • For Lincoln, the documentary doesn't sugarcoat his initial views on slavery: halt its expansion instead of immediate abolition, or his initial plan to have freed slaves moved to an African colony, something which historian Barbara J. Fields rips him for and dispels the notion of values dissonance.
    I lose patience with the argument that because of someone's time, that his limitations are therefore excusable, or even praiseworthy. It is not true that it was impossible in that time and place to look any higher. Think of Wendell Phillips, who, commenting on Abraham Lincoln's proposal to colonize black people out of the country, was sarcastic. He said, ‘colonize the blacks? A man might as well colonize his own hands, or when the robber is in his house, he might as well colonize his revolver.’
  • The film also doesn't neglect to mention that many in the Union did not support emancipation, and that a number of Federal soldiers actually chose to desert rather than fight to end slavery. The fear of such a backlash, it's suggested, was what convinced Lincoln not to issue the Emancipation Proclamation sooner.
  • Absolutely averted with the Confederacy as whole. The film makes absolutely clear that slavery, the white supremacy that fueled it, and the South's refusal to even consider abolishing it was undisputedly the cause of the War. Even though most Confederate soldiers were not slaveowners, they still likely had a vested interest in retaining white supremacy.
  Confederate VP Alexander Stephens: Our new government is founded upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man.
  • The film makes no mention of Union general William Tecumseh Sherman's own racism and support of white supremacy, although it does mention Philip Sheridan's contempt for Native Americans. Nor does it mention Ulysses S. Grant's anti-Semitic General Order No. 11, which was meant to expel all Jewish inhabitants of Kentucky, Tennessee and Mississippi. Jews across the nation protested, Lincoln opposed the order, and it was speedily revoked.
  • Zig-zagged with Robert E. Lee. It does state the myth that he didn't approve of slavery or secession (he had no love for slavery but no real opposition to it either, and felt that secession was a mistake but that he was powerless to oppose it in the case of his native Virginia), but it doesn't hide the fact that on his march to Gettysburg that he had freed slaves captured and sent back to the south, or that he refused Grant's request for the Confederate Army to make no distinction between black and white soldiers either.
• Hypocrite: Mary Chesnut was disgusted by the idea of married plantation masters engaging in intercourse with, and siring children with, slave women^note Which was often, if not most of the time, rape, despite their outright contempt for Black people and refusal to see them as equals.
• Instrumental Theme Tune: While not written for the series and recorded seven years before it aired - in fact, The Civil War was not even the first Ken Burns documentary to utilize it, as it was used (in a slightly different arrangement) in 1985's Huey Long - Jay Ungar's "Ashokan Farewell" became indelibly linked with the series, and even received radio airplay after the series propelled it into the national consciousness.
• The Ken Burns Effect: Not the Trope Maker by any means (Burns cites the documentary City of Gold (1957) as his inspiration), but most certainly the Trope Codifier and, by association, the Trope Namer.
• Outliving One's Offspring: A very sad fate that awaited hundreds of thousands of parents, both Union and Confederate, whose sons went to war.
  • Union Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs turned his grief over his son's death into a form of Laser-Guided Karma for Robert E. Lee, helping transform the grounds of Lee's mansion in Arlington, Virginia, into a national cemetery for Union soldiers, so that no one could live there ever again.
  • Abraham and Mary Lincoln never sent any of their sons to the front,^note Their oldest son, Robert, was the only one old enough to fight, and he was away at Harvard but they knew the grief of losing a child all too well: they'd already buried a son in Springfield, Illinois, several years before the war, and then their 11-year-old son Willie died of typhoid in 1862. Mary Lincoln barely came back from that and then had to endure her husband's assassination in 1865 and the death of her youngest son, Tad, six years later. Then her relationship with her only surviving son, Robert, was irreparably damaged when he tried to have her committed to an insane asylum. Not surprisingly, she never recovered.
• Pyrrhic Victory:
  • As historian Barbara J. Fields explains the famous Emancipation Proclamation was this for the slaves since they were all located in territory founded on the notion of white supremacy and there was no way the Confederacy would treat the proclamation as gospel. Rather, it was a signal that the only real way to win their freedom was to fight for it:
    "The Emancipation Proclamation did nothing to get them their freedom. It said that they have a right to go and put their bodies on the line if they had the nerve to believe in it, and many of them had the nerve to believe in it, and many suffered for that."
  • Ultimately the Union victory, since although the film doesn't go into too much detail does state in the epilogue that white supremacy eventually was brutally reimplemented in the South and that Black people, particularly in the South, wouldn't be successful in procuring some of their basic rights for another century.
    Barbara J. Fields: Who won the war? The Union Army obviously won the war, in the sense that they were the army left standing and holding their weapons when it was all over. So the Soldiers who fought in the Union Army, the generals who directed it, the President who led the country during it, won the war. If we're not talking just about the series of battles that finished up with the surrender at Appomattox, but talking instead about the struggle to make something higher and better out of the country, then the question gets more complicated. The slaves won the war and they lost the war. Because they won freedom, that is the removal of slavery. But they did not win freedom, as they understood freedom.
• Please, Don't Leave Me: Mary Lincoln went into tearful hysterics at the bedside of her dying husband, begging him to speak to her. She was so unhinged she finally had to be taken out of the room.
• Reports of My Death Were Greatly Exaggerated: When Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, one of the heroes of Gettysburg, was severely wounded at Petersburg in 1864, his survival was believed so unlikely that he was promoted on the spot to brigadier general and newspapers reported his death as a fact. The wound he received did eventually kill him, but not until 1914, when he was 85 years old.
• Screw the Money, I Have Rules!: The summer after the war, despite being in dire straits, Robert E. Lee refused a $50,000 offer from an insurance company for the use of his name, saying he could not accept payment for services he did not render.
• The Rival: Grant vs. Lee, one of the greatest military rivalries of all time. The two ultimately came to view the other as a Worthy Opponent, and while this did not translate to friendship after the war, it did result in cordial relations during the Appomattox surrender and a number of goodwill gestures on the part of Grant, such as allowing the now ex-Confederates to keep their horses in order to help with resuming farm work and travel once they returned home.
• Title Drop: As with other Ken Burns documentaries, the titles of most of the episodes come from a quotation used within the episode. For example, "Forever Free" (Episode 3) comes from the Emancipation Proclamation, and William Tecumseh Sherman famously said, "War is all hell" (Episode 8).
• War Crime Subverts Heroism: While many of the Union soldiers thoroughly enjoyed themselves during Sherman's March, others believed the actions committed against civilians during said march were morally beyond the pale. One soldier (voiced by Studs Terkel) is quoted:
  "The cruelties practiced on this campaign toward the citizens have been enough to blast a more sacred cause than ours. We hardly deserve success."
  • Even the narrator doesn't neglect to mention that slave cabins were looted by the Union troops as much as the homes of whites. This didn't stop escaped slaves from following the Union soldiers en masse. It's not mentioned, however, that Sherman, himself a white supremacist and not opposed to slavery, considered them a nuisance, and that most of the ex-slaves eventually turned back. Also not mentioned is the incident at Ebenezer Creek.^note In December 1864, Union Brigadier General Jefferson C. Davis (no relation) ordered his men to withdraw a pontoon bridge over the creek just as 600 Black freedmen were about to cross. This resulted in many of the ex-slaves drowning as they attempted to wade through the water and others caught by Confederate cavalry and returned to slavery. Some of Davis' troops did attempt to help the freedmen, but had to stop when the Confederates showed up and began to fire at them, and were ordered to resume the march.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Episode 6, "Valley of the Shadow of Death," is bookended by letters from Spotswood Rice, a former Missouri slave turned Union soldier who was trying to regain custody of his daughter who was still enslaved. The episode ends with Rice's defiant letter to his daughter's owner, telling her she had no right to keep his daughter from him and that she'd burn in hell if she insisted on it. Rice is never mentioned in the series again and we never learn whether he was successful in reuniting with his daughter once slavery was abolished. Rice would go on to become a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal church.
• Winds Are Ghosts: When Major Sullivan Ballou of the Union Army wrote a letter to his wife before the First Battle of Bull Run in which he was killed a week later he included the lines:
  "But, O Sarah! If the dead can come back to this earth and flit unseen around those they loved, I shall always be near you...always, always, and if there be a soft breeze upon your cheek, it shall be my breath, as the cool air fans your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by."
• Young Future Famous People: A number of them are profiled or mentioned in this series, including Jesse James (a lieutenant of Confederate outlaw "Bloody Bill" Anderson); George Armstrong Custer, flamboyant and harboring delusions of grandeur even then; and Theodore Roosevelt, who watched Abraham Lincoln's funeral procession as a young boy in New York. John Wilkes Booth also gets a mention in episode one, as he attended the execution of John Brown.

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