Brother Against Brother: The American Civil War Dramatized on Screen

“War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.”
Union General William T. Sherman, before beginning his brutal March to the Sea.

“It is well that war is so terrible—we should grow too fond of it.”
Confederate General Robert E. Lee, upon seeing thousands of Union soldiers slaughtered at Fredericksburg

War is universally acknowledged as a terrible force that rends the fabric of civilization and reigns misery on those caught in its implacable path, even if the cause is just. For the same reason, war is the perfect subject for cinema. In Screenwriting 101 we learn that if there is no conflict, there is no story. War is conflict writ large, with all the inherent tensions and drama therein. At its essence war is a visual experience: it is bleeding wounds, broken bodies, decimated landscapes, grieving widows, hollow-eyed survivors—elements that film is uniquely qualified to portray.

Steven Spielberg’s World War II magnum opus Saving Private Ryan (1998) is most remembered for its opening sequence of the D-Day Normandy invasion. Its searing, realistic images managed to disturb jaded movie audiences raised on a regimen of on-screen violence. The horror of war that Spielberg conjured was distinctly different from all the slasher flick/gangster genre/serial killer fare that had come before. His use of cinema verite from the Allied soldiers’ perspective placed the viewer in the battlefield in a way not previously seen even in the best war films, though the keen viewer can sense an artistic debt to Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957).

If war is conflict writ large, then a civil war is writ in boldface type. When brother fights against brother, the blood they spill fertilizes the ground for future storytellers. The clash of cultures and ideals in the American Civil War has provided modern filmmakers with a host of subjects, battles and personalities to explore on screen. At the heart of the Yankee vs. Confederate conflict is the original sin of slavery, with consequences that echo to this day. Indeed, the Civil War has been called the last battle of the American Revolution since its seeds were planted in the early compromise that permitted slavery to continue in the newborn nation.

The most infamous Civil War film is director D.W. Griffith’s silent epic The Birth of a Nation (1915). Taking an unabashedly pro-southern point of view, the film portrays blacks as childlike innocents before the war and sex-crazed aggressors after emancipation. Griffith goes so far as to make heroes of the Ku Klux Klan, who (according to the film) seek to restore southern honor after the grievances and humiliations of the Reconstruction. Though controversial even in its day, it was a huge box office hit. To view it today provides a remarkable chance to look back in time and witness at once a sea change in racial attitudes. The film continues to elicit wildly varying reactions from critics. Roger Ebert noted, “The Birth of a Nation is not a bad film because it argues for evil. Like Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, it is a great film that argues for evil. To understand how it does so is to learn a great deal about film, and even something about evil.”

The central figure in the Civil War will always be Abraham Lincoln, who saved the Union at the cost of his own life. His life and death is well-documented and has been given the cinematic treatment over the years with varying degrees of success. Director D.W. Griffith, master of the silent film, was far less adept at working in the new sound era and his biopic Abraham Lincoln (1930) shows it. Starring Walter Huston as the president, it is a lumbering affair with poor supporting performances and stilted dialogue. Worse yet, the surviving prints of the film are of a substandard quality with visible scratches, poor audio and missing scenes. A better Lincoln film is John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) with Henry Fonda as a young version of the future president. The youthful Fonda was understandably nervous about playing an American legend, worrying that a poor performance would damage or even derail his career. Ford reminded him that he’d be playing not the Mount Rushmore figure but instead a “jackleg country lawyer,” easing Fonda’s mind and enabling him to craft a fine performance. In typical Hollywood fashion the court case at the heart of the film is a fictional one, though with elements of an actual Lincoln legal stratagem woven into the story.

Canadian actor Raymond Massey was the physical epitome of Lincoln in Abe Lincoln In Illinois (1940) since he shared the president’s distinct hatchet-face profile. The film is a biopic spanning Abe’s life from age 22 to the eve of his first inauguration on the brink of war. Beyond the physical similarities, Massey gives a more complete and complex performance than his predecessors. He lends a sense of authenticity when recreating Lincoln’s famous oratories which are more familiar on the printed page. His Lincoln is both ambitious and filled with self-doubt, fearing that he cannot live up to his own vision of himself. Massey explores the dark side of the man that scholars have uncovered: a man prone to depression and melancholy. The portrayal of Lincoln’s wife Mary Todd (played by a young Ruth Gordon) is unusually realistic for its time, including her profound psychological problems that haunted her and affected her husband.

Though set decades before the Civil War, Spielberg’s Amistad (1997) shows the political tide beginning to turn against slavery. The 1839 slave revolt on board the Spanish ship Amistad reached the highest levels of the American legal and political worlds. (Ironically, neither the ship nor its slaves had been bound for the US, having been steered to New York from Cuban waters by a surviving Spanish crewman after the revolt.) The Supreme Court case had President Martin Van Buren supporting the Southern view for political expediency, while former president John Quincy Adams argued for the abolitionists. In one scene a South Carolina senator threatens Van Buren with a civil war over the case, nearly a generation before war became inevitable. The dry courtroom sequences are not Spielberg at his best since he is an action-oriented director. More to the point, there is much poetic license given to the legal machinations and the personalities involved to heighten the didactic effect. As with the opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan, the most effective part of the film is the “middle passage” scenes including one in which some of the captive Africans are thrown overboard to their deaths in a harrowing illustration of the moral cost of the slave trade. A good companion piece to Amistad is the English film Amazing Grace (2006) which likewise presents the British abolitionists’ legal and political struggle to outlaw the slave trade in their nation. An important distinction is that slavery itself existed in the British Empire’s colonies, not on its own soil, unlike in the United States.

Wars are always ripe for the melodramatic treatment, perhaps none more than the Civil War. One of cinema’s most enduring works is Gone With The Wind (1939); even the title shouts melodrama. Producer David O. Selznick threw everything Hollywood had into this four-hour Technicolor epic. It is a wealth of images and snippets of dialogue that have become engrained in pop culture over the decades. There is the green dress fashioned from curtains, showing the ingenuity and determination of Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh). There is the burning of Atlanta that signaled Confederate defeat. There are Scarlett’s declarations “As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again” and “Tomorrow is another day”. There is Rhett Butler’s (Clark Gable) once controversial “I don’t give a damn!” and the iconic image of him carrying Scarlett up the staircase, an oblique image in the days of the Hollywood production code.

Beyond the enduring images is the complex relationship between mistress Scarlett and slave Mammy (Hattie McDaniel), pointing up the subtle contradictions of the antebellum south. McDaniel was the first African American to win an Academy Award for her supporting role, quite an achievement at a time when the military was still segregated and Jim Crow ruled the south. Yet today the conventional wisdom says the film, like The Birth of a Nation, is hopelessly racist in its portrayal of “happy slaves” or at least contented ones like Mammy. Such a view misses entirely the dignity of McDaniel’s Mammy. Full of wisdom, wit and love, she is treated as an equal even before emancipation. She is the family rock, and the only one who can reign in the tempestuous Scarlett. The undeniable humanity of Mammy, and that of the real life slaves the character was drawn from, is precisely what made slavery an untenable institution. At the same time that Selznick’s film dazzled the world, William Faulkner explored similar themes concerning the consequences of the south’s “peculiar institution.” The black maid Dilsey in Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury (1927) is a 20th century version of Mammy. The final words of Faulkner’s book capture the unsentimental essence of both women: “They endured.”

Director Anthony Minghella’s Cold Mountain (2003) is similar to GWTW; both are love stories revolving around a southern woman who goes from riches to rags due to the war. Confederate soldier Inman (Jude Law) grows weary of the horror of war and sets out to return to his home in North Carolina and to his beloved Ada (Nicole Kidman). In addition to the protagonists, the damaged southern landscape looms as a silent character scarred from skirmishes great and small. The deserter Inman encounters friends and enemies on his long journey, and cruelty from Yankee and southerner alike. A subplot concerns the brutality of the “home guard”, paramilitary units of southern men whose duty was to stay home and root out Yankee sympathizers. War is portrayed as a malignant force disturbing all in its path, turning menainst one another even if their political sympathies are the same or if they have none at all.

Glory (1989) is a modern big-budget Hollywood treatment of the Civil War. It contains the requisite epic battle scenes but the dramatic heart of the film is the story of the first all-black regiment fighting for the Union. Many were ex-slaves who had been granted their freedom or had escaped to the north. These were men who had something even more at stake than the average Union soldier as the freedom of their brethren in the south hung on the outcome. Led by white Boston-born officer Robert Shaw (Matthew Broderick), the 54th Massachusetts regiment made history in an army that would not see full integration until after World War II some eighty years hence. Shaw had to struggle to have his peers and superiors take his regiment seriously as the 54th was seemingly assembled for publicity purposes rather than as a real fighting unit. Fight they did, though in a losing cause in the unsuccessful effort to take Fort Wagner. Their grit and determination was nonetheless recognized and resulted in the formation of other regiments of black soldiers fighting for the northern cause.

Director Ang Lee’s films are remarkable for their diverse settings and subjects; consider that he directed both the Jane Austen classic Sense and Sensibility (1995) and the Marvel Comics action pic Hulk (2003). In The Ice Storm (1997) he explored the breakdown of the American family in 1970s suburbia. In Brokeback Mountain (2004) he gave a sober account of homosexuality in the most iconic of American archetypes, the cowboy. In Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), Lee achieved the nearly impossible task of making the martial arts genre—a cinematic joke—not only respectable but poetic. Likewise he took on the Civil War in his 1999 film Ride with the Devil with impressive results. Lee’s film tells the tale of Confederate sympathizers in the western territory of Missouri, where Union/ Confederate sympathies were divided even among family members. These are not regular soldiers but men who take up arms on their own without uniforms—a guerilla unit before the term was coined. Called Bushwhackers, they are proud of their heritage, and seek to run off the Yankee intruders who would dictate how the south is run. As in most of Lee’s films, the natural landscape is prominently featured. The Bushwhackers pursue (and are pursued by) Union troops through the woods of Missouri and Kansas. The title is a reference to real-life Bushwhacker William Quantrill, known as the devil for his ferocity in fighting the north. The men depicted in the film are a fictionalized composite of Quantrill’s Raiders, including a black character (Jeffrey Wright) that was based on John Noland, a free black man who was one of the Raiders fighting for the South, a contradiction which was more common than is realized today. Though their cause was not a just one, the Bushwhackers are nonetheless portrayed as honorable men fighting for what they saw as their heritage.

In the four hour film Gettysburg (1993) the famous battle is given the epic treatment, appropriate for a single battle that in three days’ time produced as many dead as in the entire Vietnam War. The film centers on two opposing characters: Union Colonel Joshua Chamberlain (Jeff Daniels) and Confederate General James Longstreet (Tom Berenger), successor to Stonewall Jackson. Chamberlain and Longstreet grimly seek to retain their honor as the bitter fruits of war stack up around them. Gods and Generals (2003) is a prequel to Gettysburg that depicts the first half of the war, a time when the outcome was very much in doubt. It is a quite complex treatment of what was a complex war. For many northerners, the issue of slavery was not the foremost issue; preserving the union was. Likewise many in the south saw naked northern aggression as their main impetus. The story centers on Confederate General Stonewall Jackson (Stephen Lang) and his series of victorious battles up to his death at Chancellorsville. Jackson is portrayed as an honorable, deeply Christian man who fights for his homeland even though he abhors the prospect of secession from the Union.

Two Mark Twain stories are the basis for the seldom-seen but remarkable television film A Private History of a Campaign That Failed (1981). It is a combination of Twain’s story of the same name and a later short anti-war piece. In the confederate south, a group of young boys attempt to live out their naïve storybook fantasies about the glories of war. They form their own platoon (complete with marches learned out of a book) and set out for the woods to fight the hated Yankee intruders. Mistaking a civilian rider for a Yankee scout, the amateur soldiers kill the innocent man. Realizing what they’ve done, the disillusioned boys scatter and the story suddenly shifts to a different place and time (Connecticut, 1898). A preacher in a Protestant New England church sermonizes about the glories of battle to a group of fresh-faced young soldiers bound for the Spanish-American War. Into the church walks a stranger, who the viewer recognizes as the ghost of the man killed by the southern boys some 35 years earlier. Taking the pulpit, he delivers Twain’s “The War Prayer,” a short piece written around 1905. (It would not be published until six years after Twain’s death; he feared that it would be seen as unpatriotic and might adversely affect his livelihood.) Playing the stranger, actor Edward Herrmann preaches Twain’s words, telling the congregation that when they pray for victory in war, there is a second prayer in their hearts— one regarding the enemy. It is this unspoken prayer which he articulates:

“O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it — for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen. Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits!”

Herrmann’s performance is a clinic in pure dramatic acting. Starting off the prayer strongly but at an even pace, he builds to a verbal crescendo to prove the raw power of Twain’s words. Upon his departure from the church, the preacher cautions the troubled congregation that they must pray for “…this poor deluded man, this lunatic.”

As the 21st century continues to unfold, new generations of filmmakers will no doubt continue to revisit the war that saved America. From Manassas to Antietam, from Gettysburg to Ford’s Theater, from the plantations of the confederate south to the churches of the abolitionist north, the material is there waiting to be used. Some of these stories are already well documented while others are nearly forgotten, merely awaiting the right artist to retell the tale.