| abstract
| - In 1861, a group of Southern states seceded from the American Union and declared themselves independent as the Confederate States of America. From there events took on a life of their own and the situation devolved into a full-blown war. The war was the result, like so many civil wars, of the failure of internal politics. In this case, the great failure was to resolve tensions over the future of Slavery in America; the 'Slave States' feared that the central government in Washington D.C. would attempt to regulate or ban the slave trade and the practice of slavery, an unjustified fear but one understandable in the context of the liberalisation of the Northern Free States, where Anti-Slavery groups modelled after their British counterparts had begun to flourish. Abolitionists were in many respects a vocal minority, however, though the people of the North generally agreed that slavery was a violation of the principles of free labour and that the black population should be shipped back to Africa - removal of course being preferable to attempts at integration, for there was no escaping the possibility of miscegenation and cultural degeneracy that would come with harbouring such a large population of free negroids. Like the The American Revolution, this was a civil war that tore families, towns and states apart. Nationalism had truly developed since then and where before people had largely been torn between ideals, people were now divided just as much if not more by State and local loyalties, for 'National' nationalism had yet to supersede these. It was for their States and for Freedom that, as in the English Civil War, about 2-5% of the total population of the United States died and far more were left impoverished, displaced, maimed and traumatised. Again as in the Revolution, the victory of the government was almost guaranteed; but no world powers aided the unsympathetic cause of these rebels, who were left to face the far superior manpower finance and industry of the central government on their own. The result was almost inevitable; the whole affair appeared a very close-run thing, especially given the rebels' early successes, but the Army learnt (however slowly) from its mistakes and made good on its material advantage, grinding the rebels down and eventually crushing them after four years of the bloodiest fighting North America has ever seen. The rebels - The Confederacy - still engender sympathy in certain states, generally those that rebelled. Such people often prefer to think that the rebels fought for Freedom from the tyranny of Central Government more than the Freedom to own and use people as they saw fit. This was the American Civil War, The War of the Rebellion, the War Between the States, the War of Southern Treason, the War of Northern Aggression, Lincoln's War, the Slaveholders' Revolt, and the Late Unpleasantness, an era which pitted brother against brother, and where the armies of the Blue and the Gray shot cannons and Minié Balls at each other across smoke-filled battlefields. The Southern part of the United States at this time is a world filled with romantic, tall-columned plantation houses where delicate Southern Belles sashay in large skirts and Corset Faint at every available opportunity. Where chivalrous, cigar-chomping, white-tuxedo-wearing Southern Gentlemen pistol-duel at dawn and where the phrase "Damn Yankees!" is used with a fair degree of regularity. Slaves work the fields down here, although whether a production chooses to show the more realistic aspects of slave life depends a lot on the era in which it's made. (Don't expect to see many whitewashed "happy" portrayals of slaves in any modern series.) In the North, there is industry and patriotism, and Abolitionists cry out against the evils of slavery from every pulpit. Abraham Lincoln is a pretty popular guy in these parts -- he spends most of his time in the Oval Office, brooding over battle maps and writing deep historical speeches on stovepipe hats. Ask him why he's fighting the war and he'll tell you it's to free the slaves. (Never mind that this runs contrary what he actually said when asked, during the war. This is Hollywood History,where heroes are pure and their motives always perfectly clear. Similarly ignored are all of the explicit references to preserving slavery made by Southern governments and politicians during this time, because the product has to be sellable in all fifty states. In actuality, Lincoln at first refused to make freeing the slaves a Union war aim. Doing so would have made the border states--slave states that stayed in the Union--leave. When the mood was right, he presented the abolition of slavery (in those states which were in rebellion) as a means of critically undermining the rebel war effort. Two years previously by this time, a lawyer-turned-general had made his major contribution to the war effort by declaring he claimed three slaves who had been used to dig trenches on the grounds they were contraband of war, and then expanding that legal fiction to encompass any slave, whom the Union then emancipated on the grounds they didn't want them; since the most die-hard racist and advocate of slavery who supported the Union could see the logic of seizing rebel slaves, the legal fiction was so widespread that escaped slaves were (and are) habitually referred to as contrabands. The Emancipation Proclamation merely declared it a universal matter; it was ostensibly written as a war measure that only freed slaves in rebel-held areas--where public opinion didn't matter very much. But by the end of the war, the national mood shifted, and Lincoln helped pass the Thirteenth Amendment that completely ended the institution. Emancipation also had the effect of making European public opinion--already wary about the Confederacy--turn decisively in favor of the Union, more or less making recognition of the Confederacy politically unthinkable. Meanwhile, on the battlefield itself, the Age of Dakka has dawned, which means that everything anybody knew about warfare is wrong again. Hollywood Tactics are played straight, and while this is justified, that doesn't make anybody any less dead. There is smoke and blood everywhere, with doctors severing gangrened limbs left and right, bugles blowing, drummer boys drumming, and cavalry charging every which way (often resulting in casualty figures upwards of 30%, per battle). Expect to see at least one man from either side bravely carrying a tattered unit flag until he gets shot with a Minie ball and crumples artfully in a heap. The Real Life effect was enough, especially near the end of the war when the campaigns were relentless, to churn out men suffering from "soldier's heart" -- we can recognize them with hindsight as Shell Shocked Veterans. The widespread ignorance to this kind of trauma - until (the aftermath of) World War One - is probably because the US Civil War was the 19th Century's only protracted conflict between newly-industrialised states on this kind of scale, the Franco-Prussian war being too brief to really count. In the 1910's, around the 50th anniversary of the war, Civil War films (then silent) became extremely popular, with hundreds being produced, including the (in)famous Birth of a Nation. Most films had a theme of reconciliation; a film about the civil war that did not portray southerners as heroic victims (as did Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind) risked having no audience or bookings in the states of the old Confederacy. Most early Hollywood studio bosses were first and second generation European immigrants, so they had no personal association with the war to motivate them to make movies that automatically wrote off a quarter or a third of all theater screens before the production even began.
* Other than Quantrill's Raiders (Missouri guerrillas whose ranks include Jesse James, the Dalton Brothers, and other famous outlaws) Confederate soldiers are almost always shown as as heroic and respectable. Where individual Confederates were villainous, there would be noble Confederates around as contrast. Confederate officers are gentlemen, Confederate enlisted men are tough, have thicker accents, but are very loyal to their officers.
* Confederate soldiers are superior to Union soldiers in every way. They are braver, more clever, more noble, and just more tragic. Battles where the Union showed innovative strategy (such as Vicksburg) are forgotten or given a one-off mention in favor of showing battles that "prove" the Union only used We Have Reserves. This occurs even if the Union soldiers are the heroes of the movie or television episode.
* Union soldiers and politicians are thuggish and venal. If motivation is brought up, they are likely to wonder why they are in the army, and why there is even a war going on. The black soldiers are the exception, since they know exactly what they are fighting for, and - conscious of the good example they must set - act with the utmost discipline and valor.
* Race and slavery is seldom, if ever, mentioned as a motivation for the war. If slaves are involved in the story line at all, some or all of them will be loyal to their masters, and there is often a Loyal Slave scene in which they protect the family home from Yankee invaders or aid their masters to outwit the Yankees or escape them. There may even be a one-off scene where southern generals or gentlemen sit down and have a talk about how the conflict is definitely not about slavery.
* Quite often there might be a specific Slave Denial scene. In this scene a slave or slaves is questioned about slavery, asked to turn against their masters, or offered their freedom--and they turn it down, often with a simple silent denial. This scene turns up in Civil War epics made as recently as the 1980s (the TV mini-series North and South)!
* There were plans in place to raise Southern Black regiments; the war ended before the plan got off the ground. One Confederate commented on the irony: "If they do not fight well, we are lost. If they do, our country is built on a lie."
* There were also white regiments from every Confederate state fighting for the Union. Ironically, "hillbilly" stereotypes in movies and TV (including Granny Clampet from The Beverly Hillbillies) are often portrayed as Confederate diehards. In reality, Appalachia was strongly pro-Union during the Civil War (West Virginia so much so that they formed their own state) and many regions suffered retaliation from the Confederate government.
* The reason Appalachia (especially West Virginia) was so strongly pro-union was that the mountainous topography separated them from the government seats, prevented them from using plantations as means of income, and meant most trade and transportation came from Northern states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Maryland. Therefore those areas didn't have as strong a loyalty to the state's governments when they seceded. The economic and social differences in West Virginia were so great that they had pushed to form their own state as early as 1820, the secession just gave them a opportune vacant seat to take advantage of.
* Or the CSA was nearer, the nearer would be more able to be irritating and they disliked The Government whoever it was, because rednecks are Just That Ornery.
* This is perhaps a bit of an oversimplification. There were also religious differences at work (Presbyterian and Baptist backwaters vs. Episcopalian Tidewater), class differences (wealthy plantation families vs. impoverished, disenfranchised mountain folk), even ethnic differences (Scots-Irish hillbillies vs. Anglo plantation aristocrats) all contributing to the animosity. A hundred and fifty years later the differences have not all been forgotten, either. This war was essentially the Trope Codifier for modern battlefield tactics: less about cavalry, more about infantry, and keep your Dakka handy, 'cuz Swords aren't useful anymore. In fact, the Gatling gun was invented and used during this war, the predecessor to rapid-fire automatic weaponry. The world even got a sneak preview of World War One in the form of the trench warfare that took place at Cold Harbor, Petersburg, and Vicksburg. Of course, like it does so often, the world proceeded to completely ignore it. Like World War II, this war was waged on battlefields but won in factories; the highly industrialized North could mass-produce muskets, cannon, and ships that the agrarian South could only import. Also, this war had the first recorded successful sinking of an enemy ship by a submarine, and they did it completely blind. And the first battle between two fully-armoured ships, the CSS Virginia (an ironclad) and the USS Monitor (founder and namer of its class, first all-iron ship, first rotatable gun turret) at Hampton Roads. Current historical estimates are that about 620,000 American soldiers died in the Civil War. That's more armed-forces casualties than in every other war the United States has fought, combined... and does not include civilian deaths (which came out to another 41,000, for a total of over 660,000 out of a combined population around 34 million). Read that figure again. More Americans died in a single day at Antietam than on D-Day, or at Pearl Harbor, or in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The casualties for the three-day Battle of Gettysburg almost equal those killed in the entire Vietnam War. The destruction and loss of life were immense, even 'medieval'; it was like something out of Homer, or perhaps the Thirty Years War. The costs of the war—not just the immediately obvious ones like having to pay for raising armies, but also vast swaths across entire states laid waste, cities burned and farms looted, interruptions in trade, factories idled and mines closed for lack of labor, two-and-a-half million maimed and crippled veterans who could not support themselves and required pensions—caused an economic depression that lasted for a generation after the war. Some regions took generations to recover; in fact, some authorities believe that areas of the South, which took the brunt of the destruction (particularly during late 1864 and early 1865, when Sherman's army group smashed its way through Georgia and the Carolinas) didn't completely recover until... quite a bit later. Admittedly, the Civil War took a big toll upon the Southern states of the American Union, where most of the war was fought. Not only was property destroyed, but more importantly a lot of wealth disappeared virtually overnight; wealth in the form of Confederate government bonds and currency - which became worthless when the Confederacy was dissolved in '65 - and in slaves - who were declared free by the Federal Government as a means of sabotaging the Confederate war effort. Slavery had shaped the southern economy for decades, the profitable and dependable returns from investing in cotton production discouraging investment in other forms of agriculture, raw-resource gathering, primary and secondary industries. The efficiency of slavery had discouraged investment in industry and commerce, which ultimately - as technology developed - turned out to be far more profitable than agriculture ever could or would be. The south had been prosperous, but the central-northern United States were more prosperous and growing at a far faster rate. What the war did was destroy much of the wealth of the south and force a fundamental restructuring in its economy, leaving it to lag behind the rest of the United States until the New Deal and the advent of the 'New South' in the mid-twentieth century. The southern states were not impoverished, nor left backward (relative to most of the world) by the Civil War... but the war did leave them struggling to adapt to a more... normal state of economic affairs, something that would have been difficult even had there been a smoother and more gradual end to slavery (a virtual impossibility in any case). Narrated by Ken Burns. And since motion film hadn't been invented yet in the Civil War, but photographic film has, here's a bunch of shots zooming in and out and panning over some static images.
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