The Civil War Historians Respond (review)
Brooks Simpson

 

The unwary reader who picks up this volume and examines its title might understandably assume that it is primarily about how historians responded to Ken Burns's The Civil War. It is both more and less than that. Only a handful of established historians, all professionals possessing advanced degrees, voice their concerns; it would belittle the discussion to say that it was just about a single PBS documentary, even one possessing such great impact and celebrity. This is a book about contested terrain in Civil War scholarship - and about history in general. Which stories should we tell? How should we tell them? Who, in fact, are "we"? For there is something smacking of professional wrestling in this book, as it all too often pits "filmmaker" versus "historian," despite editor Robert Brent Toplin's insistence that Bums is better classified as a "filmmaker/historian." Even this term leaves a false impression. Burns's film is history, both in the story it tells and in the artifact/text it has become. In turn, Bums is a historian who chooses to use film as the medium for his message, much as some of us use words, numbers, or images. Indeed, many of the same objections that several historians raise about Burns's film could with equal appropriateness be directed at some of their colleagues' work.

The scholars themselves disagree over what stories they believe worth telling. Gary Gallagher reminds us that "any documentary about the Civil War that failed to place military events at least close to center stage would itself be open to charges of distortion (42)," although he wisely questions the amount of time given to Shelby Foote's favorite Confederate, Nathan Bedford Forrest. As Gallagher suggests, military history at its best incorporates political and social history to draw connections between battlefront and homefront, headquarters and capitals. Catherine Clinton, however, wonders why Burns did not spend more time on women and the war in an essay marked by a painful self-awareness about her ambivalence toward the project. She expresses distaste for "the shrillness of Burns's critics" (65), but several of her own comments ("Burns sold emancipation down the river" [64]; "when it comes to women, he not only doesn't get it, he doesn't seem to care" [67] will make some readers wince, as will her blunt remarks about the profession. Gabor Boritt embraces Burns's work as art even as he raises reservations about it as scholarship on Gettysburg and Lincoln. Both Gallagher and Boritt highlight errors of fact, sometimes almost apologetically - although I suspect they would not be nearly so hesitant to do the same if they were discussing a new book. And Boritt stumbles when he informs us that Lee ordered the "bold-headed" Richard S. Ewell to take Culp's Hill "if practicable" (90-91; it was Cemetery Hill) in a section dedicated to recounting Bums's slips. The Civil War is sloppy in places - as is the volume that accompanied it. Example: Barbara Fields's essay in the companion volume claims that Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation did not free any slaves not already freed by congressional legislation (the Emancipation Proclamation, unlike the Second Confiscation Act, did not distinguish between secessionist and unionist slaveholders in emancipating slaves in Confederate-controlled areas). Burns's work should be held to the same standards of factual accuracy that we apply to other works of scholarship; not to do so is to engage in condescension, as if Burns did "well enough" for an amateur. It might be better to ask how any historian would choose to write about the Civil War within the parameters of the series - perhaps two hundred printed pages of text. What would you include? What would you omit or slight? What stories would you tell - how would you tell them - and which ones would end up on your cutting-room floor? Try it sometime - it ain't easy.

Burns's own essay, marred by a tone of defensiveness and self-congratulation, validates some of the complaints about his work. Declaring that John Pope "so often signed his dispatches 'headquarters in the saddle' that Lincoln finally said Pope had his headquarters where his hindquarters ought to be" (159) is myth-making with a vengeance: Pope did not sign dispatches as Burns alleges, and Lincoln did not make the crack Burns attributes to him. Sometimes history should get in the way of a good story; one later reads his remark that "in simplification we murder" (167) with a knowing smile, although Burns is not in on the joke. Perhaps he is too intent upon delivering a sermon on what (and who) makes good history. There is no admission of error or musings on what other choices he might have made: one finds instead a tedious self-commemoration of his struggle to realize his vision, in which he compares himself to Ulysses S. Grant in his possession of "four o'clock in the morning courage" (169, 171). What Bums would have done in Grant's boots on the morning of April 6, 1862, is perhaps better left unanswered. In describing a confrontation with a group of historians who "argued quite spitefully and belligerently" (171) with an early draft of the script, Bums reveals that he remains scarred by the experience, most so when he joyfully details C. Vann Woodward's reminder to the scholars that they were there to offer constructive criticism. (Not surprisingly, Woodward's own concise contribution to the volume lauds Bums as if the filmmaker were one of his graduate students.) Burns's reaction to the "vitriol" directed his way by those professional historians critical of his work ("Were they jealous, as many suggested, of the film's great popularity? Had they been left on the cutting-room floor? Had they been promised to be interviewed and then not been?" [172-73]) is graceless and unworthy, suggesting that the rivalry is not all on one side. In contrast, Geoffrey C. Ward's reflections are usually calm and measured, explaining choices, admitting mistakes, yet defending ground when necessary; Toplin's own essay shrewdly reminds us that this is one person's version of the Civil War, not a definitive rendering of the topic, even as it glosses over Burns's inadequate explanation of the coming of the conflict.

Some of the most pointed criticism directed at Burns's work concerns the final episode, which addressed the war's end and its aftermath. Both Eric Foner and Leon Litwack rightly take Bums to task for his cursory and abbreviated treatment of Reconstruction - a period that did much to determine what the war had, in fact, achieved. Burns's camera, which captured with such poignancy the aftermath of battle at Antietam and Gettysburg, was nowhere to be found when it came to the aftermath of war at Memphis, New Orleans, or Colfax; Foote tells no folksy tales about Forrest's genius during Reconstruction. And it is disingenuous for Bums and his defenders to argue that he was not making a film about Reconstruction when at the same time Bums offers a view of Reconstruction that emphasizes the theme of national reconciliation. Once more he reminds us of that noble moment when Joshua Chamberlain ordered his men to salute the surrendering Confederates led by John B. Gordon. But there are other images he overlooked. Henry Wise cast aside Chamberlain's good wishes, declaring, "You are mistaken, sir, we won't be forgiven, we hate you, and that is the whole of it!" Gordon's grace at Appomattox was more than tarnished by his later participation in the Ku Klux Klan; Chamberlain, questioning the emphasis some placed upon the fate of the freedmen, embraced Rutherford B. Hayes's policy of reconciliation. Their accounts of the surrender ceremony are part of the romanticized postwar literature that portrayed the conflict as a war of American brothers - white brothers, one might add. Perhaps it was all too fitting that black soldiers were not present at the ceremonies at Surrender Triangle, for they would have sounded a discordant note; in light of what followed, Burns's comment - "reconciliation, Chamberlain made his greatest contribution to war" (158) - sticks in one's throat.