Print

Preface As historian Thomas Cripps said, “Movies not only wear history at best as a loose garment, but their makers care more for following well-tested recipes for making good grosses than for the niceties of history” (Cripps 1995). There is no movie genre where this is truer than Civil War movies. The American Civil War is a mightily contested arena of scholarship, making it difficult for an amateur historian/screenwriter to discern the best or most factual material. And however divided Civil War scholars are, they don’t bring anywhere near the fervor to Civil War history as “buffs,” reenactors, and fringe groups with racial axes to grind do. Civil War movies almost universally erase the past, and for good reason. The nation’s years of Civil War were painful, destructive, and unpleasant. Psychologists tell us people don’t like to remember bad things, and given the opportunity, we will forget the defects of our personal and national pasts in favor of a story more palatable, more moral, more heroic. No past is more painful than the moment when the United States went to war against itself, so there is a powerful impulse to forget that past. Worse, in our national need to rewrite (and then film) the Civil War, we had to erase its cause—slavery. In so doing, we created a present where we continue to struggle with the legacy of slavery, creating a present where many Americans believe two centuries of legal human bondage left no great national scar. Our movies and television programs tell us enslaved people were happy, their owners were misunderstood men of honor, and the entire slave economy stood as a shining moment of magnolias and gentility. Our Civil War movies, for the most part, allow Americans in all regions of the nation to believe slavery played no part in the war and that all the soldiers fought for a worthy cause. Then there are the gendered messages. Civil War