After writing two short posts about American Experience?s Death and the Civil War I decided to write up something a bit more comprehensive for the Atlantic.? You can read it here in its entirety.
In his interview with Harvard president and historian Drew G. Faust about American Experience?s new documentary Death and the Civil War, Stephen Colbert laments, ?You are beginning to make the Civil War sound like a downer.? While it garnered a good laugh from the audience, the comment betrays an important aspect of how Americans have remembered the Civil War and the kinds of narratives that are celebrated.
Ric Burns?s latest film is based largely on Faust?s book This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
At its core, the Civil War challenged what Americans had come to know as the ?good death.? Death was something that happened at home, in the presence of loved ones. The dying person?s last words signaled an acknowledgment of the end and a reassurance that the soul would be at peace for all eternity. Death was all too familiar in antebellum America, but these transitional practices brought comfort to all those involved, and perhaps a conviction that the process of dying itself could be conquered.
Burns effectively conveys the tragic and sudden undoing of these sacred rites with what many fans of PBS?s American Experience series have come to appreciate as the Ric/Ken Burns formula: multiple narrative voices, photographs, music, and thoughtful commentary by historians ? in this case, including J. David Hacker, Mark Schantz, David Blight, and especially Drew Faust herself.
The program brings home the scale of death during the war, as well as individual stories of suffering and grief that engage the viewer both intellectually and emotionally. We hear the voices of soldiers as they write home to tell their families of their wounding and likely death. What comes through is not simply how unprepared the military was in responding to the logistics of death, but the larger question of how the war reshaped the relationship between the individual and the state.
The one aspect of the program that falls short is its exploration of how Americans (mainly northerners) came to terms with their dead as part of the sacred work of preserving the Union. Death and the Civil War bombards the viewer with the emotional and psychological toll of death and suffering, but doesn?t include much about redemption and meaning.
Consider the death of Nathaniel Bowditch, a second lieutenant from Massachusetts, who was killed in battle in 1863. The viewer feels his father?s intense pain, but understands very little about what his son?s death meant to him. ?To become a heroic martyr, officers had to perform conscientiously,? writes Frances M. Clarke in her book, War Stories: Suffering and Sacrifice in the Civil War North
Such Victorian-era assumptions about an ideal battlefield death may be difficult for us to fully appreciate, but for loved ones on the home front, such news reinforced their conviction that the death was meaningful and the cause was righteous. The beautiful scrapbooks that Bowditch?s father lovingly created, which include his son?s letters, are referenced at the very end of the film ? not to demonstrate the father?s need to frame his son?s death as that of the heroic martyr, but to highlight the continued pain of his loss.
Part of the difficulty is that we are much too quick to allow Lincoln?s ?Gettysburg Address? to bring a transcendent meaning to the war. Not surprisingly, the speech gets a full reading in the film and receives thorough analysis by the commentators. Lincoln?s address is an important window into the Civil War, but Burns?s focus on it leaves the viewer with the impression that Americans were helpless victims of so much death and suffering until Lincoln unburdened them at Gettysburg in November 1863. The speech was eventually embraced for providing the transcendent meaning that subsequent generations of Americans yearned for, including our own, but in 1863 the nation was already well versed in the language of death and redemption.
The film?s emphasis on the lingering sectional bitterness over how to commemorate the Civil War dead serves as a fitting conclusion. Although it says nothing about the significance of Lincoln?s death, it does explore the decision by the federal government to re-inter only Union dead in newly established national cemeteries, as well as efforts in the former Confederate states to honor their dead. From the viewpoint of the United States, not all dead were equal. The Civil War continues to be marketed and even interpreted through a language of reconciliation, which makes it difficult to acknowledge that it was a bloody civil war in which even the dead continued to divide Americans for years to come.
Despite these shortcomings, this film deserves a wide audience. Colbert?s reference to the Civil War as a ?downer? underscores the extent to which our collective memory has glossed over the horrors of war. This film may help visitors to Civil War battlefields look beyond serene and tapered landscapes, gift shops, and monuments that glorify violence, if only to catch a glimpse of them as the killing fields they once were. Ultimately, it may encourage us to take more responsibility for our own dead, from the day our country sends them into harm?s way until the moment their bodies return home.
Source: http://cwmemory.com/2012/09/19/a-worthy-death-a-review-of-death-and-the-civil-war/
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