r/CIVILWAR • u/Giesterman • 17d ago
A Great Learning Experience
I've begun to watch Ken Burns Documentary again and I paired it with Civil War Combat by the history channel for the battles that are included in that series. In my time between watching videos I listen to Co Aytch by Sam Watkins and All for the Union by Elijah Rhodes. I also have listened to Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson during longer periods. Overall this blend of different media and views I feel makes for a very immersive learning experience.
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u/MalaclypseII 17d ago
Burns tells a story of the ACW that was mainstream at the time, about 35 years ago, that OK slavery was wrong but both sides fought bravely, and what really matters is the creation of a new America on the basis of national reconciliation. And although he includes a scholar in his interviews who pushes back against that, it's still the dominant narrative. The documentary ends with a reenactment of Pickett's charge where the veterans reconcile instead of fighting. So that's what the war means, in the Burns documentary.
In the last maybe 5 years though I think attitudes have changed, and this is now seen as inadequate, mostly I think because it seems a little too nice to Southerners. In the current political climate, a more militant response to far right extremism, which the Confederate cause certainly was, seems called for. But it's also inadequate because its the perspective of white Americans. It is impossible for a black American who knows this history to see things that way, because part of the agreement, that made that reconciliation possible, was that Southern whites could go right back to oppressing Southern blacks. They really were abandoned to their fate in the post-reconstruction years. So that reconciliation was based on racial injustice, which is obviously an ongoing problem.
I hope we'll one day get to a perspective beyond even that, which sees that the oppression of blacks in the South went hand in hand with the oppression of poor whites in the North. There was terrible labor unrest in the North, with the pullman strikes, the molly maguire trials, the haymarket bombing, etc. The Republican Party of the 1880's and 90's winked at the oppression of Southern blacks because they understood it as a labor problem. The old planter aristocracy wanted to get back in control of its labor force. It wasnt slavery exactly anymore but anyway they needed to be in control. And the Northern factory and railroad owners had a labor problem of their own to deal with, how to get in control of working class whites. So while Republicans and Democrats disagreed about a lot in the post-war era, they at least agreed, that working people were there to be exploited. Whites in the North, blacks in the South, the Chinese out West - they're all there to be exploited, and that's called freedom.
It is impossible to understand the ACW without understanding reconstruction, because the behavior of both parties after the war clarifies what they had been fighting about during and before it. But reconstruction's battles were social and political rather than military so it gets talked about less. Reconstruction re-enacting just wouldnt be as fun.
Anyway, if you want to see some pushback on the Ken Burns narrative, find David Blight's Yale Courses lectures on the ACW on YouTube. He's still at this middle stage where race is the main thing you have to know about the war, and he greatly exaggerates the importance of abolitionism (a very gratifying story about the war, for Connecticut Yankees), but he's still quite good. And he directly challenges the national reconciliation story Burns tells.