Dear Citizen’s and Elected Officials:
I don’t get a morning paper to read with breakfast anymore, although good neighbors bring over theirs a couple of days later for me to catch up upon, and to recycle. Therefore, and I hate to admit it, that I turn on CNN early now to catch up on what new turn of events is pushing America to the brink in this Presidential election year of 2016.
So there he was, Carl Bernstein, of Watergate investigative reporting and All the President’s Men fame (I’ve lost track of where he has ended up on the political spectrum), covering the Republican Convention in Cleveland; this was the morning after the night, Tuesday night, when NJ Governor Christie conducted a mock trial of Hillary Clinton, with the Greek Chorus-Republican Right audience shouting “Guilty!” after each charge and, being unable to control itself, then chanting loudest to “Lock Her Up”…someone else, a consultant to the Trump campaign on veterans affairs, said Sec. Clinton should be shot by a firing squad for treason. It made me think of the temperature in South Carolina during the 1850’s run-up to our Civil War, the shooting one. The South Carolinian hotheads were called “fireaters" then; today, a whole party seems to have been fanned by the spreading flames.
Is there any wonder then, that Bernstein said that this election year is the culmination of a long running, low level cultural Civil War, and that November will be the equivalent of the Battle of Gettysburg. That battle, the real thing, was fought between July 1-3, 1863, or 153 years ago.
You will see, below, in what follows, why Bernstein’s comments registered with me. At the end of June, 2013, I published an essay called The High Ground: Gettysburg, 1863, 'What Then Must We Do?’ 2013. I am posting Part I, which was my effort to place the American political stalemate of that year in the context of what was being fought over in that small crossroads town a century and a half-ago. I agree with Bernstein’s analogy, and I don’t believe things have changed much in the intervening three years; if anything, they have intensified, gotten much worse, with blood now being shed in this nation with 300 million firearms floating amidst an angry, alienated citizenry.
I go back and forth in my own mind between two grand competing historical analogies: our time versus the 1850’s, culminating in Civil War with the election of Lincoln in 1860; and the 1930’s in Weimar Germany, when a shaky democratic tradition could not hold itself together under a surging middle-class populism, and the earthquakes of a lost war, failed left revolution (1918), a nearly fatal inflation in 1923-1924, and then the collapse of capitalism itself, 1929-1932. You know who won in January of 1933. But this second analogy, to Weimar Germany, is an essay just around the bend, for another day.
Instead, you have Part I to consider, our times in the flow of the American Civil War, brought to you with my own frames of reference, many economic, as I review the four hour long movie “Gettysburg,” the one the nation would not show itself, to help heal itself, in the summer of 2013. I still think it could help, but I don’t think its candor about the cost of our Civil War, or candor in general, except the most inflammatory kind from the Right, is something our nation is ready for.
I share the racial justice legal activist Bryan Stevenson’s lament, when he called for a National Truth and Reconciliation Commission on the Great Incarceration and the state of race relations, and hoping that his book Just Mercy would achieve it, “truth and reconciliation,” that he had to settle for telling the truth: there was no impetus for reconciliation that he could detect, and this from a man who radiates what Martin Luther King once radiated, a man who literally, in his speech and demeanor, turns the other cheek. Not winning a Commission, which had a better chance than my muted call for a similar Commission on what happened to the Working Class, Stevenson instead has been conducting a campaign of physically marking the location, with plaques in the ground, of infamous slave trading sites in the Deep South, an act of courage, still, even today.
And now, without further introduction, here is my essay from June 30, 2013, on the High Ground marked by the Battle of Gettysburg:
Part I: Gettysburg
When Ken Burn’s documentary “The Civil War” took the nation by storm in September of 1990, drawing in 40 million viewers over five evenings, I felt as if I had been shaken by a trumpet call of high artistry, summoned out of my daily life as an environmental activist and ordinary suburbanite to witness something very profound. There had been nothing like its combination of photography, eminent narration and haunting music ever seen or heard before. The only comparable that comes to my mind is the now forgotten CBS News series “Whitepapers,” from the 1960’s, with a portion of …. Aaron Copeland’s Appalachian Spring serving as the dramatic musical introduction. Although Burns’ Civil War theme song was a very recent composition by Jay Ungar, it didn’t sound very modern; it sounded like something one might have heard drifting over the “the Wheatfield,” “the Orchard,” “the Devil’s Den” or the “Sunken Road” as the dead and wounded were collected after the slaughter.
And then there was Ken Burns himself telling us the Civil War was absolutely central to any understanding of American history. Well, by all that was presented to my senses, that surely seemed to be the case; but I’m not sure that intellectualIy I ever quite bought Burn’s premise, that what unfolded between 1861 and 1865 was still deeply relevant for a nation living in the afterglow of Ronald Reagan, with sunset services being ministered by the very ordinary and unimaginative George H. W. Bush (and Republicans insisting it was still a sunrise.) In that fall of 1990, I just could not, despite the great work of Burns, connect our bloody Civil War to the currents of my, and our collective, American life, which were just about to embark upon a decade which came to be known as the “Roaring ‘90’s,” Bill Clinton’s decade, and the decade of the “Committee to Save the World,” perhaps the closest America will ever come to a repeat of the mood of the 1920’s, with all that which the earlier decade portended.
Although Burns’ series, and especially its music, stayed with me like a ghost waiting to be re-awoken, the connection and centrality he asserted for the Civil War would only come in part, and in an unusual way, and one I do not believe will be easily recognized or accepted by most Americans, even today, although the political and economic events of subsequent years urge me at least, if not us, to make that connection. The central problem is this: in the America of 2013, just as in the America of 1990, it is inconceivable for the “popular mind,” the American “civic” mind, to grasp the reality that Americans were once busily engaged in physically slaughtering each other to such an extent that they were “adrift in a sea of blood.” Although, one has to admit, if one has even a decent “ear” for politics, that the Republican Right has done its very best to help us understand such a disposition, without the actual shooting.
Here’s what has unfolded in those subsequent years to make the connection for me, if not quite for the general public. America, you see, in my mind’s image, has been engaged in a low level “civil war” since at least the presidency of Bill Clinton, one between the Right and the Left, which is fought on religious, cultural, political and economic grounds, even if the Democratic Party center has to play the “stand-in” for an actual left that, at least in economics, has never found the high ground much less launched a sustained campaign from it. From the attempted impeachment of Bill Clinton in his second term, to the contested lost election of 2000, to a General Sherman-like “total” political warfare conducted against President Obama, the Republican Right has executed a shameless obstructionism which denies the traditional and necessary democratic processes within the machinery of government itself – to the point where Bill Maher has recently used a very Civil War like word to describe it – “Treason” - (even as the Center and Right charge national security state whistleblower Edward Snowden and others with the same). Americans can look the other way, can continue the call for compromise and moderation – “cooperation and bi-partisanship” – but substantively, it is nowhere to be found wherever the role of the federal government is front and center unless it pertains to, of course, matters of the National Security State; and in that “realm,” how far is the Center from the Right?
The one great exception, one that may be very well holding the country together, is that there is, surprisingly, still some crucial common ideological ground between the Center and the Right around “the free market.” You can say, oh no, look at the Right’s reaction to Obama Care, but observers with that reaction confuse Republican tactical absolutism (give the Democrats no lasting legislative achievement, none, in recognition of how long the glow lasted from FDR’s New Deal programs; deny them the tactical high ground, no matter what…) with ideological matters centered on the political economy: the President’s healthcare plan is corporate based, setting up regional marketplaces, just as the failed global warming legislation envisioned putting Goldman Sachs and the Wall Street trading desks at the center of the carbon credit “market.” I could repeat this analysis on the fraught topic of “debt and deficits,” but that would be an essay in itself (as it has been for me in 2010 and 2011). In matters of the political economy, President Obama is well within the conservative tilt of what we have considered our most “reforming” Presidents, from T.R. to Wilson and even FDR (and I would include Lincoln within this framework, following the wonderfully insightful work of Richard Hofstadter’s American Political Tradition, 1948.) Bill Clinton’s new model democratic party, with its outreach to China and its undermining of American labor, its unifying of the labor market via welfare reform, its financial deregulation and its clear anti-statism/big government declaration, cemented the remaining pieces of the Reagan legacy, assuring that the tools necessary to fight global warming (and the financial crisis) would no longer be available in a scope adequate to the new crises.
In many ways, the Right’s fears about Global Warming governmental activism, echo and reflect the fears of the federal government which the Antebellum South expressed, especially its chief ideologue, John C. Calhoun. No matter what the issue concerning the exercise of federal power: banking, tariffs, internal improvements, a government powerful enough to carry out those missions had the potential to tamper with slavery. War, especially war for more land, useful for the expansion of slavery as well as that of yeomanry farming, was a different matter. So much in the same way that an all-out effort to combat Global Warming threatens the nature of contemporary capitalism (and therefore key aspects of the American Dream that equate financial success with good character) by giving environmentalists and scientists a new standing and offering a critique of existing goals, values and lifestyles – and the direction of investment now controlled by Wall Street (including private equity capital, the shadow banking system and hedge funds) – the South of the 1850’s was threatened by what was increasingly viewed as a “radical” new economy in the North.
I’ll finish my point with one very recent news item buried on the bottom of page B6 of the New York Times Business section (June 20, 2013). It stated that “Michael Froman, a senior White House economic adviser and classmate of President Obama at Harvard Law School…won Senate confirmation to be the next United States trade representative…The vote was 93-4.” With grand European and Pacific (the TransPacific Partnership) trade matters at hand, this was an appointment of significance, as were the two additional biographical details stated at the very end of the AP story: “Mr. Froman worked as Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin’s chief of staff during the Clinton administration. He was a managing partner at Citigroup and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations before joining the Obama administration.” Now how could this happen at a time of otherwise total gridlock? It can only be explained by the existence, in certain core economic matters, of a consensus between the Center and the Right which escapes what we have come to expect in most other matters: total stalemate. But let me be clear, since I write from the left, not the Center: this economic consensus between the Center and the Right is coming at the expense of the common man, not just here but in Europe and geographical spaces around the globe, and although we have seen and heard Lincoln invoked and celebrated, and will hear much more of that living through the 150th anniversary of the Civil War years (and Spielberg has “spoken” already, hasn’t he?), the best of Lincoln’s “free labor” economics was “born and raised” in the 1830’s and 1840’s, the “classical” years, the Utopian years of “the producers,” the small farmer, the small merchant, the local manufacturer. When the economic Right sketches out its ideal world, which it rarely does in clear historical terms, accompanied by, in this policy area, at least, the Libertarians, this is the time they are really talking about, even if one never hears them name it, despite Mr. Rove’s admiration for President McKinley and his Gilded Age.
This was, by my accounting, the most intensive and “purest” form of capitalism the world has ever seen, a society where everyone was striving, “on the make,” trying to improve their material condition in what Lincoln repeatedly called “the race of life.” Yet by the 1880’s, Lincoln’s dream – which is really the foundation for all that we have come to mean by “the American Dream,” had become a national nightmare of Robber Barons, urban boss corruption (and no small amount of co-operation between the two) and millions of recent immigrants working in the vast industrial factories, mines and railroad yards where 35,000 of them were killed each year by accidents - the highest rate in the Western world; and where so many of them seemed stuck, landless, property less and seemingly fodder for those nascent “labor demagogues” whom all the “right people” so greatly feared. It seemed to be, just 30 years later, a long, long way from the war to “Save the Union” and to, by necessity to win the war, free the slaves. The Union had been saved, but the former slaves, and their often now landless white yeoman “fellow citizens” were again well enchained by less formal, but no less oppressive economic methods under the “crop lien” and “tenant farming” systems. These methods would persist to bedevil New Deal agriculture reformers and not fully disappear until the mechanization of cotton harvesting, which began in the Mississippi Delta in the late 1940’s, thereby helping to set off a “great migration” of southern black sharecroppers to the mostly unwelcoming - and thoroughly unprepared - industrial areas of the northeast and Midwest.
But am I getting ahead of myself a bit here, because I began by talking about the Civil War, and I have jumped many, many decades beyond that; but not so far ahead in this sense: I also began by wondering, despite Ken Burns’ fine work, about how relevant his, and “our” Civil War is for today’s world? I have to confess, all through junior high, high school and even college, and right through Burn’s mesmerizing series, I could not experience, really feel in the gut, the level of antagonism that led to the great slaughter in our first Civil War. For all Burns documentary enhancements and brilliance, something was missing for me…and I suspect that is still the case when it comes to the war for most of our citizens. It is only by hard personal and career experience, and family life too, and fighting the Republican Right in almost all its manifestations today, and in matters economic especially, that I can really grasp the emotional intensity that fueled that War, one where a Union officer and his Confederate prisoners can end their respectful conversation about what they are fighting for with the parting words: “‘See you in hell, Billy Yank; See you in hell Johnny Reb.’”
For behind the War to Save the Union and eventually, and belatedly, to Free the Slaves” lay two competing forms of capitalism. Cotton was truly “King,” king of the exports and earning half of all American Antebellum trade dollars; and entering the war, in 1861, the value of the slaves themselves, literal “human capital,” exceeded the value all the industrial capital of the North according to the eminent Civil War and Reconstruction historian Eric Foner.
Consider now, in all its full resonance and irony for the divided America of 2013, James M. McPherson’s summary of what the two sides were doing all that fighting about from April of 1861 until April of 1865. McPherson is considered the dean of American Civil War historians, with this passage taken from his concluding chapter of perhaps the best one volume history of the war, his 1988 book The Battle Cry of Freedom, from the Epilogue, entitled, suggestively, “To the Shoals of Victory”:
Thus when secessionists protested that they were acting to preserve traditional rights and values, they were correct. They fought to protect their constitutional liberties against the perceived northern threat to overthrow them. The South’s concept of republicanism had not changed in the three-quarters of a century; the North’s had. With complete sincerity the South fought to preserve its version of the republic of the founding fathers – a government of limited powers that protected the rights of property and whose constituency comprised an independent gentry and yeomanry of the white race undisturbed by large cities, heartless factories, restless free workers, and class conflict. The accession to power of the Republican Party, with its ideology of competitive, egalitarian, free-labor capitalism, was a signal to the South that the northern majority had turned irrevocably toward this frightening, revolutionary future. Indeed, the Black Republican party appeared to the eyes of many southerners as ‘essentially a revolutionary party’ composed of ‘a motley throng of Sans culottes…Infidels and freelovers, interspersed by Bloomer women, fugitive slaves and amalgamationists.’ Therefore secession was a pre-emptive counterrevolution to prevent the Black Republican revolution from engulfing the South. ‘We are not revolutionists,’ insisted James B. D. DeBow and Jefferson Davis during the Civil War, ‘We are resisting revolution…We are conservatives.’
Today, in late June of 2013, both American parties fully embrace “free-labor capitalism,” the Right with Utopian zeal, the Center sharing that zeal in matters of trade and globalization and the military might to back it up, tempered by a slightly more robust “safety net,” but still no tampering with that free-labor market, now a world-wide one embracing billions of new workers. Just as the South imagined full blown nightmares unfolding with the election of the moderate Lincoln, the Right of today conjures radical fantasies up about the moderate centrist Obama, and with, I suspect, even more contemplating Hillary’s 2016 run. While Lincoln was driven by both abolitionists and the events of the war to free the slaves, today there is no political economy equivalent to the abolitionists to drive the current President to rise to the occasion presented by the joint crises of climate and capitalism. And in my reading of Naomi Klein’s essay Capitalism vs. the Climate, I also hear those Antebellum Southern- like fears of threats to property, the current prerogatives of income and power distributions and social control itself in the absolute opposition of the Right to the very notion that growth at all costs economies can alter something as grand as the existing natural order.
In Paul Krugman’s now habitual laments over the policy establishment’s indifference to his understanding of our economic crisis and persistently high unemployment and to that establishment’s fixation with the “morality play” of debts and deficits, he only reveals the limitations of the economics profession itself. Krugman fails to see the connection between the old Protestant Ethic, of economic success the outcome of individual thrift, hard work, perseverance and, above all, good character – in short – a grand “morality play” – descended from a line running from at least our Puritans through the more secular Ben Franklin to Lincoln himself, all times when it made much more sense, and drawn from eras when capitalism hadn’t yet reached its “takeoff” industrial, much less its post-industrial, now hi-tech phase. God forbid that anything about the nature of capitalism itself ought to interfere with these versions of the American Dream and character formulations, which have carried over the 19th century’s obsession with “sound money” and balanced budgets to the 21st, confusing the old household economy with the national one.
God forbid that the national policy establishment, Right and Center, would read the speech delivered by its own humanities award recipient of 2012, Wendell Berry’s Jefferson Lecture, which had something important to say about contemporary economics and the pace of technological change, and which said that capitalism itself had two great tendencies: towards oligopoly and monopoly, and the elimination of labor. If indeed it was true that Lincoln stood for the common man, including the common laborers of his day, before they owned land or started their own businesses, urging them all the while to improve themselves, he must be very restless in his grave at the thought that the common man today stands abandoned by both parties, more cruelly by the Ivy League-tinged Democratic Party than by the Republicans, who abandoned that notion entirely during the Gilded Age of the late 19th century. And as for the economics profession itself, and Krugman’s laments about it, the concept of “labor” and the “common man” in all its rich historical meanings have virtually disappeared from its equations, models and formulations, no better demonstrated than by a nation awash in MBA’s, and in microeconomics’ marginalisms having nothing to say about the fate of our minimum wage, languishing far behind both inflation and labor’s missing share of productivity gains for going on 30 years now.
So with these cautionary and qualifying comments behind us, this summer still irrevocably marks the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, the largest and bloodiest battle ever fought on the North American continent, with 165,000 troops engaged and 51,000 casualties. Although it was the second Confederate invasion of the North – the first being blunted at the Battle of Antietam in (Sharpsburg) Maryland in September of 1862, with 23,000 killed and wounded, historians see Gettysburg as the high tide of the Southern cause and the decisive battle in a war that would still last two more awful years. Prior to Gettysburg, a letter had been prepared by the Confederate government for presentation to President Lincoln offering peace - on Southern terms. It was to be delivered when Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia had destroyed the Union’s Army of the Potomac in battle - on northern soil.
As Lee marched his separated army corps northward in June of 1863, he had already captured the world’s admiration as a brilliant and daring military strategist, one who was always on the attack and willing to throw away “the book” by continually dividing his smaller forces in face of a larger, but usually more passive, Union army. So this Army of Northern Virginia, which struck some civilians who watched it march by as composed of so many lean men looking like “hungry wolves,” was at the height of its fame and confidence. Lee had told Confederate civilian leaders, while preparing the plans for the invasion, that “‘there never were such men in an army before…they will go anywhere and do anything if properly led,’” according to Professor McPherson. And all this at the doorstep of poor President Lincoln, who was about to change generals yet again.
I first came across the movie “Gettysburg” (1993) while doing research for my essay “Heading Down the Road to Disunion” which appeared in September of 2011. This four hour long movie had been broken into viewers’ favorite segments on YouTube, and the one that seemed to dominate the public’s fancy was the one portraying Colonel Joshua Chamberlain and the 20th Maine’s bayonet charge on the second day of the three day battle (July 1-3) which prevented Confederate forces from flanking the Union lines, lines that stood astride the high ground just south of Gettysburg itself. The 20th Maine had been ordered to hold the line at all costs; they were the far left flank, atop of a hill named Little Round Top, the anchor of the entire Union army spread out along the already appropriately named Cemetery Ridge - and they were now out of ammunition.
The American left, and the Obama Administration, not that we should equate the two – were also seemingly out of ammunition at the end of that modern summer of discontent in 2011. The mood was one of defensive frustration at the audacity of the Republican Right and its policy of fiscal hostage taking and all-out obstructionism. The American left was disenchanted with President Obama; he wouldn’t fight, no matter the provocation from the other side. At the time, I thought America was heading down another road to disunion, although I doubted it would end up in open warfare or literal, geographical secession, and I haven’t changed my mind. But ungovernability in the face of major crises…with no consensus…that’s a form of disunion as well. In terms of degrees of separation during a time of widespread economic suffering, the gaps were chasms large enough indeed, between that Right and Center, and even larger from the more full bodied proposals on the left, which never had a chance to reach the national dialogue much less the policy tables of Washington.
It took me more than a little while to realize that there was a whole movie called “Gettysburg,” broken into two free parts on U-tube, videos which get periodically closed down due to some legal/patent/copyright infringement but still magically re-appear. But I had never seen the movie on any channel, least of all Ted Turner’s own “TCM,” despite his having put up $20 million or so to have it made, and despite its success originally as a cable TV series and, briefly, at the box office back in 1993, and I’m sorry to say that I entirely missed it when it first appeared.
So now, 20 years later, I settled in to watch Part I, the first two hours, here (Editors Note: Video no longer available due to copyright problems. This short clip will give you some idea, though, of what is missing:
) I have to say, having seen more than my share of war movies over the years, that this one is emotionally captivating without a shot even being fired until the 45 minute mark. The acting is so far above average, and across ten or twelve characters, that it puts most American war movies to shame. In no small part, that’s because the characters are not stoically silent: they speak about what they are up to, and the director Ronald Maxwell, working closely from Michael Shaara’s Pulitzer Prize winning historical novel of 1975, The Killer Angels, is interested in exploring why the two sides are fighting. He does so through the words of the officers – and sometimes the men – who are about to kill each other in numbers never before seen in America. Starting with Jeff Daniels who plays Col. Joshua Chamberlain and Kevin Conway who portrays his aide with a marvelous Irish brogue and reminds viewers, with his dialogue, that the many Union troops who were Irish were not, by any means, fighting to free the slaves so that their wages – low enough already – would be driven down upon liberation; Tom Berenger as the thoughtful, skeptical General James Longstreet at odds with Lee over tactics and strategy; Martin Sheen as Robert E. Lee, whom I can’t imagine being played any better and more accurately in terms of what he stood for…the manners, the tenderness towards his horses in the morning and the contrasting iron will that does not blink at sending 15,000 men to near certain death in the afternoon (murder or slaughter some would call it speaking of Pickett’s charge…not far from Longstreet’s view); Richard Jordan as a Virginia brigade commander under General Pickett – General Lo Armistead – who is haunted by his friendship and respect for Union General Winfield Hancock and his pre-war pledge “that may God strike me dead if I should raise my arm against you….) and Sam Elliot as General John Buford, commander of the two federal cavalry brigades first on the scene, who, by seizing the preliminary high ground on the first day of battle, July 1st, block Lee from seizing the even higher ground that the Union Army will be driven to by the day’s end, those geographical features with the famous names that have come down to us over the 150 intervening years.
It is the “high ground,” tactically, in the military sense, and in the motivations and reasons the war is being fought, politically, which create the high emotional pitch behind this beautifully paced movie, with a superb musical score being created by Randy Edelman – a score as good as the sound track behind Ken Burns’ documentary. The music supplies just the right emphasis to remind the viewers of the high stakes – openly stated by the leaders on both sides - and as background – at times almost like high church music – as the major characters explain why they are willing to sacrifice so much in the terrible July heat of 1863.
Union Calvary General John Buford – Sam Elliot – first on the scene for the Union side – is obsessed with seizing good high ground – because he is haunted by the memory of murderous, failed Union charges going against similar ground held by Confederates – like the stone wall at the base of Mayre’s Heights at the Battle of Fredericksburg in December of 1862 or Burnside’s Bridge at Antietam earlier, in September. He has a terrible premonition: of seeing the Union army having to charge across the great open fields of fire below the ridges held by Lee’s Army – urged on by hot telegraph messages sent by “politicians” urging “attack, attack.” Lincoln isn’t mentioned, but implied, since he is always urging his too cautious generals to do just that. The great irony of Buford’s soliloquy is that Lee will place his Confederate army in just that tactical position that Buford feared would be the Union army’s disastrous fate.
Meanwhile, while Buford is anxiously awaiting the arrival of the first Union infantry, the 1st Corps under General Reynolds, Colonel Chamberlain (Jeff Daniels) of the 20th Maine is about to deliver a great speech to a company of Maine “mutineers” who want to go home after they feel their enlistment terms have been unfairly extended. Before Chamberlain addresses them, their spokesman makes a case – the case of the common Union soldier – who has fought well – but has not been well led by the Generals of the Union army and indeed, by the “West Point officers” below them.
Far better, and deeper than George C. Scott’s in “Patton,” or anything said about why the officers of the “The Band of Brothers” were fighting the Germans in World War II – or indeed, any comparable statement made in American war movies about “why we fight” – the modest, slightly apologetic, Lincoln-like speech made by Colonel Chamberlain is – even more than the bayonet charge he leads two days later, the intellectual and emotional high point of the movie. Since it occurs in the first 30 minutes of the movie, readers who venture in that far can decide, with just that little initial investment, whether Mr. Maxwell’s and Mr. Edleman’s additional efforts merit their time. My feeling is, if history and memory count for anything in this land of short historical memories, there isn’t any better tribute you can pay to the thousands who died at Gettysburg than to hear the Maine Colonel – an abolitionist who had listened to evening talks by Harriet Beecher Stowe at Bowdoin College – explain to potential Union deserters why they ought to stay and fight. Here at www.youtube.com/...
The Colonel says, with some historical exaggeration, that there has been nothing like this army and what it is fighting for in all human history - (the vast citizen armies of the French Revolution, 1792-1800, fighting against all the monarchies of Europe, chanting La Marseillaise, might object…) it is not fighting for glory, loot, or even land…for in the America of 1863, “there is always more land.” Rather, it is fighting “to set men free.” It is – they are – fighting because all men “have value,” and ultimately, they are fighting for “each other,” the right to build a life based on their own pluck and merit, in a society fluid enough to give these ideals reality. “Here is a place to build a home.” This is the abolitionist cause speaking, the idealist “left” of its day, and if at times it sounds like the free labor, common man of Lincoln’s formulations it is because it does embody that, but it goes further, and it is certainly not the view of the average soldier under him, nor the Union cause or army in general...as the New York City draft riots would prove just a few short weeks after Gettysburg.
On the Confederate side, there is nothing to quite match the speech made by the spokesman of the Union mutineers, or Chamberlains’ reply; Martin Sheen’s Lee is full of understated graciousness and eloquence and an awareness that his cause – and both sides in the war – “are adrift in a sea of blood,” and he urges General Longstreet that he must “hold nothing back” in his attack, the war must come to an end with this battle. It falls to some lighthearted campfire speechmaking in front of her Royal Majesty’s military attaché to the South, and General Armistead’s speech to him about the background of the Virginian troops about to make Pickett’s charge late on the final day, July 3rd, to make the case for the Confederate cause.
And so, with me staking out the claims I have for this movie, and given this year, the 150th anniversary of such a momentous event, the question now becomes: why does this movie have no life on the movie channels, including Turner’s own? Why isn’t the nation about to do itself a favor, an honor, and conduct a proper memorial to the great sacrifices of that day by watching this movie, even if it is filed away after that, to wherever it now reposes?
Is it a lack of political “correctness?” There is only one black person in the movie, a “runaway,” who appears very early on, discovered by the 20th Maine. He is mute with exhaustion and terror; Chamberlain offers him a reassuring pat on the leg and medical care from the regiment’s medical officer. And that’s it; the fate of the slaves and the fight over their meaning is left to the words and speeches of officer’s – and a few enlisted men – from both sides.
Women? They appear only in the idealized references of Confederate General Armistead about Union General Hancock’s wife – beautiful with a singing voice to match - from his pre-war memories. They are an ideal couple. Before being killed at the stone wall in Pickett’s charge, he asks General Longstreet to deliver his personal bible to her - should he be killed. And, then, a ten second speaking role: young Maryland farm daughters query the marching Union troops, before the battle, with a friendly smile, perhaps at the thought of so many eligible young men suddenly appearing –and about to disappear for good – “I thought the war was in Virginia.” That’s it. Is that ground enough, along with the stamp of Ted Turner’s money, to prevent this movie from attaining anything even remotely like the status of “Gone with the Wind?”
Or has the presentation of the South, its cause and its leading officers, been too even handed, keeping the awful, peculiar institution almost entirely out of sight, with that one mute exception? In that sense, the movie did not mention, much less cover, several less “courtly” aspects of the South’s invasion of the North: in McPherson’s account, Lee forbade plundering of private property in Pennsylvania, but still “the army destroyed Thaddeus Steven’s ironworks near Chambersburg, wrecked a good deal of railroad property…and seized all the shoes, clothing, horses, cattle, and food they could find – giving Confederate IOUs in return…Southern soldiers also seized scores of black people in Pennsylvania and sent them south into slavery.” Including a number from Gettysburg itself, according to National Geographic’s 150th Gettysburg Anniversary Special Edition account I read.
For my Maryland and Montgomery County readers, these actions foreshadowed more of the same when, a year later in July of 1864, Confederates under General Jubal Early’s much smaller force of 15,000, a mere raiding party, threatened Washington, DC in what started out to be a diversionary action. The rebel forces held some Maryland towns for ransom of a sort, McPherson writing that “the rebels levied $20,000 on Hagerstown and $200,000 on Frederick, besides drinking up the contents of Francis Preston Blair’s wine cellar, burning down the Silver Spring home of his son Montgomery the postmaster-general, and putting the torch to the private residence of Maryland’s governor.”
So this movie’s cultural absence is more than a bit of a mystery to me; am I mistaken about its power and quality, sufficient enough to make a divided and edgy contemporary American nation reluctant to sit down and contemplate it - despite the fact that one can find portrayed the bonds between Americans surviving even amidst the terrible war itself, so that I can say in fairness that some of the harshness and horrors of the Civil War have been removed, in a movie otherwise notable for its realism - and one made well before the technological advances that brought the horrors of Omaha Beach home for millions in Saving Private Ryan? Viewers should be grateful for that bit of technological lag; Spielburgian realism brought to a portrayal of the Gettysburg battlefield would be unbearable, unwatchable…in that sense the military aspects in “Gettysburg” have been sanitized, which allows the viewer to concentrate on the dialogue and the meanings. In reality, when Union General Reynolds arrives with his infantry to save the necks of Buford’s cavalry on July 1st, bringing Buford to wipe away a concealed tear…he was out on quite a limb (and in so many ways, aren’t millions of Americans waiting for Reynolds to arrive?) Reynolds is shot in the head by a Confederate sharpshooter, but in the movie it appears as if he has died of a heart attack…
Being restless over the mystery of this movie, I put the question to one of our nation’s leading 19th century cultural historians, David S. Reynolds, the author of “Mightier than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America” and “John Brown: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights,” among many other works, who was kind enough to answer me promptly by saying he didn’t know, that it puzzled him as well, because he thought highly of the movie.
So there I will let the matter rest, upon the high ground staked out by the victorious Union troops, and the equally high ground staked out, successfully, by those who acted in and produced this movie which should help us all “Long Remember the Summer of 1863,” and perhaps even, think more deeply about where the high ground might lie in the super-heated summer of 2013.