The film’s powerful call to national unity in the face of profound division seemed ideally suited to the bitter post-Vietnam cultural climate. In 1989, in his inaugural address, George H.W. Bush had asserted that “the final lesson of Vietnam is that no great nation can long afford to be sundered by a memory.” Interest in the Civil War, which had been growing since the mid-1970s, suggested that America could in fact be united by one. Michael Shaara had shown as much in 1974, when he published his much-beloved novel, The Killer Angels. His page-turning account of the Battle of Gettysburg offered an appealing portrait of valor, honor, and patriotism that stood in stark contrast to the painful scenes of America’s last days in Vietnam. Burns himself was one of many fans of the novel to be swept up in a rising tide of enthusiasm for the Civil War that made James McPherson’s massive history of the war, The Battle Cry of Freedom, an improbable bestseller in 1988.
But it was Burns’ film, with its tidy vision of national consensus, that consummated the growing romance with the Civil War. The film was perfectly calibrated to please most every constituency in the post-Vietnam culture wars. While many noted an anti-war crosscurrent in its brutal images of mangled limbs and bloated corpses, the film’s dominant notes present an unapologetic patriotism and an appealing vision of war as a source of honor, high ideals, and unity of purpose—precisely what had been lost in Vietnam and its aftermath. Burns’ Civil Warwas arugula and red meat happily sitting together on the same plate.
For all its appeal, however, The Civil War is a deeply misleading and reductive film that often loses historical reality in the mists of Burns’ sentimental vision and the romance of Foote’s anecdotes. Watching the film, you might easily forget that one side was not fighting for, but against the very things that Burns claims the war so gloriously achieved. Confederates, you might need reminding after seeing it, were fighting not for the unification of the nation, but for its dissolution. Moreover, they were fighting for their independence from the United States in the name of slavery and the racial hierarchy that underlay it. Perhaps most disingenuously, the film’s cursory treatment of Reconstruction obscures the fact that the Civil War did not exactly end in April of 1865 with a few handshakes and a mutual appreciation for a war well fought. Instead, the war’s most important outcome—emancipation—produced a terrible and violent reckoning with the legacy of slavery that continued well into the 20th century.
