It must have been part of filmmaker Ken Burns' plan. The accumulation of detail upon narrative detail. The eventual blurring of one battle into another, of one charge into the next retreat. It must all have been intended to wear the viewer down.
Speaking solely for the spuds on my sofa, I know that by the time Hour 10 of Burns' PBS The Civil War miniseries rolled around this autumn, I could have sworn that I personally had lived through the siege of Vicksburg. By the time the Yanks took Richmond, I was convinced that the series had lasted as long as the interminable war itself.
I don't think that my tube-tied attention span is that much worse than the American average. So I'd bet that, like me, much of the 1990 Civil War viewing public was just as war-weary as was the 1864 voting public. But, like the folks who re-elected Honest Abe that year, we all kept coming back for more. We kept coming back because Burns and Co. (with the help of General Motors' millions) performed miracles with still photography, sound effects, and the glorious character of America's many speaking voices.
This old, old story was never better told. But we also kept coming back because the Civil War is in fact, as the series hype insisted, the greatest American story.
It's also a story in which all but the most recently minted Americans can recognize themselves. For most of us -- black and white, Northern and Southern -- this is our story. Hispanics, too, are represented since the story really begins with the U.S. conquest of northern Mexico. One of us may identify with the New England abolitionist, another with the runaway slave turned soldier, and another with the woman left at home to pick up the pieces and weep at the folly.
I know that I heard the echoes of my ancestors' voice in the poor white Southern conscript's resentment when the wealthy (i.e. slaveholding) soldiers were relieved of duty. As my homeboy Shelby Foote noted, people like my people were only fighting because the Yanks were in the neighborhood and they had no other choices. But then notions -- foolhardy, guilt-ridden, or otherwise -- about the Civil War have always been closer to the surface in the South.
For one thing, we all grew up surrounded by the war's graveyards. In my childhood memory, the siege of Vicksburg is more vivid than many events I witnessed firsthand. And in my lifetime the South has undergone a wrenching, and finally glorious, series of social upheavals that amounted to the final chapter (a century late) of postwar reconstruction.
FOR BLACK AMERICANS, NORTH AND South, the Civil War has until recently been a zone of silence. Last year the film Glory, about an all-black union combat regiment, began changing that. Burns' The Civil War continues the process by consistently making a few key points. The first, and most essential, point is simply that black people were a part of the story from beginning to end in every phase as fighters, politicians, citizens, and slaves.
In addition, whatever causes white Americans may have been fighting for in the War Between the States, African Americans were clearly and unequivocally fighting for their freedom, by any means necessary and on every available front. In fact, to the extent that the cause of African-American freedom did become part of Union war aims, it was not because of the idealism or, even less, altruism of the Northern Fathers (Father Abraham included) but because of the determined struggle, political and military, waged by black people themselves on their own behalf.
To my eyes, having been exposed at close quarters to all of the various conflicting versions of the Civil War story, the previously obscured role of African Americans in the political and military struggles of the time seems like the missing piece of an especially perplexing puzzle. As a white Southerner, I've always been defensive about the Civil War, not because of any sympathy for the Confederates' cause, but because it has been so much the occasion for Northern assumptions of moral superiority. They were, after all, the ones who fought the great crusade to free the slaves. "As he died to make men holy may we die to make them free ..." and all that.
White Southern tradition has always held that the Civil War really represented a conflict between the emerging industrial society of the North and the fading agrarian society of the South, with slavery as a peripheral issue trumped up by the Yankees for tactical purposes. This economistic interpretation certainly makes sense in light of Northern willingness (in 1876) to sell out black aspirations when Northern capitalists required the favor of the white Southern elite. But the old Southern interpretation was also a self-serving dodge often trotted out by people seeking to avoid coming to terms with the historical reality of slavery and its legacies.
The answer that emerges in recent scholarship is that the Civil War was a war to end slavery, mostly because the slaves and ex-slaves made it so. But also because making it so did, for a time, come to serve the interests of Northern politicians and industrialists, who lost interest in the plight of black Americans when their own interests were no longer at stake.
What is truly unique and interesting about the Civil War is the moral content and ultimate meaning that the slaves and ex-slaves (and a few white allies) breathed into the otherwise deathly and death-dealing conflict. This is simply another rediscovered chapter in the story of redemptive heroism that the daughters and sons of Africa have enacted on these shores. And that is the truth that will keep marching on.
Danny Duncan Collum is a contributing editor of Sojourners.
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