Okay, the title of this talk is The Real Civil War, R-E-E-L. The phrase is not original with me. There is a book of that title, which covers many of the movies that have been made by Hollywood that deal with the war between states. And I still use civil war as shorthand. Everybody knows what I'm talking about. But that's not a definition of civil war, per se. And it's just an expression everybody uses, and everybody knows what you're talking about. And it's easy to say. So my true belief, of course, is it's a war for Southern independence or the war to prevent Southern independence. But I always called it civil war for shorthand purposes. How helpful are feature films in teaching American history? Did Davy Crockett, played by John Wayne, actually throw a lighted torch into the powder magazine at the Alamo, blow himself up? Does Gone with the Wind accurately represent the lives of most Southerners in the 1860s? Did Colonel Joshua Chamberlain actually lead a successful bayonet charge down Little Round Top, Battle of Gettysburg? The answers are no, no, and yes. More than 800 films with the American War Between the States as either the setting or as a specific story from the war were produced between 1903 and 2003. Now, I don't expect that you've seen most of those 800 films, because 400 of them are lost. They were silent films, and when they made silent films, they would just tape over current film they would just reshoot and reshoot and a lot of films were lost but they were all reviewed and they were all written about so we we know about them but many of them have either not been discovered yet or have been destroyed over time that still leaves about 400 films where the Civil War is the theme. It is a unfortunate truth that the majority at least Well, I don't know if it's still true. It was true a few years ago that the majority of Americans got their American history from Hollywood, from films and television. And had you done a man-on-the-street interview just a few short years ago, whatever a person knew about American history, that's where they got it. Even though they had to take mandatory history classes in high school, the influence of Hollywood, even on the high school teachers, is remarkably extensive. Kind of an amazing phenomenon. A lot of people are visual learners, and for Hollywood, it's entertainment. So historical accuracy always takes a back seat, or almost always takes a back seat to the entertainment value of a film. As soon as a book or a movie introduces dialogue into the narrative, it becomes fiction. So there isn't a feature film is actually historically accurate in the same sense that, say, a book can be or the documents upon which something is based. It's difficult to find out what actually happened in the past and the history books are really what the author says about the past. That's called historiography. But Hollywood television and movies was commonly known as popular culture, which also includes books and plays and music and other things. have tried to provide a medium to communicate the past in some way. Some of America's best actors, actresses, and directors have taken the Civil War as a movie screen canvas upon which to display their talents, and you'd be amazed, and their skills. The struggle, of course, is to find a balance between the entertainment and truth, and entertainment always wins. A list of A-list actors who fought, who re-fought the war on the silver screen and some of these, maybe most of them you won't, maybe not have heard of, Buster Keaton, John Wayne, William Holden, Richard Widmark, Jimmy Stewart, Clark Gable, Clint Eastwood, Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman, Matthew McConaughey, and Curly Larry and Moe. Oh, you have heard of them. Oh, you have heard of them. Oh, I'll have to tell you about their Civil War movies. They made a whole bunch of, well, the silent films were 15 minutes long. So Curly Larry and Moe grew up during the silent film era and then on into the 1920s and 30s. on vaudeville, and they made a lot of short films, but they did do two of them based on the Civil War, and they're a scream, too. And I'll tell you a little bit about one of those. Vivian Lee, Jean Tierney, Elizabeth Taylor, Ann Bancroft, Susan Hayward, Nicole Kidman, and many more well-known actresses shared the headlines in Civil War-related films. I need to issue a disclaimer. I realize that some of you may not. even watch movies, consider it a waste of time, which is fine. And some of the names I just mentioned are outside your frame of reference, which is also probably a good thing. But I am assuming that you've maybe seen at least one Civil War related film in your life. And I could be wrong, but I'm assuming that. I cannot recommend movies that I think you should watch, generally speaking. There are some that I can say, that your families could handle. But every family has a different, kind of a different place where they draw their cliff as to what they're going to allow their children to see. and everybody's different. So all the modern Civil War films that are really excellent films for their own sake are extremely violent and have bad language and such. So I'm not going to recommend any films, but I'm going to tell you about some of them. How important is the Civil War anyway when it comes to film? in the powerful documentary film, The Civil War, released in 1990 by filmmaker Kent Burns, who is considered the foremost documentary filmmaker. I had a number of historians that he included in that narrative on the Civil War. One of them was Shelby Foote of Mississippi, and he said this, just regarding the importance of the subject as it relates to the documentary film that he was a part of. Any understanding of this nation has to be based, and I mean really based, on an understanding of the Civil War. I believe that firmly. It defined us. The Revolution did what it did. Our involvement in European wars, beginning with the First World War, did what it did. But the Civil War defined us as we are, and it opened us up, opened us to what we became, good and bad things. That is very necessary if you're going to understand the American character in the 20th and 21st centuries. To learn about the enormous catastrophe of the 19th century, it was the crossroads of our being. And it was some crossroads. I'm going to survey some of the major Civil War films. I can only really comment on a couple or a few of them. Because like I said, there are 800 to choose from. And I've chosen a few of the most that had the largest impact on American culture. And some of them still resonate. The first great Civil War film, and I mean by far, was entitled Birth of a Nation. And it was released in 1915. It was a silent film. The dialogue was put up words up on the screen and pianos played the background music and the typical silent film. except that it was about three-and-a-half or four-and-a-half hours long. It was the first, you might say, full-length feature film, and it was some movie. It was previewed in the White House of Woodrow Wilson, and he commented that it was a story that was like written by fire. It was an impressive film, The Birth of a Nation. And it established what's commonly called a trope for future Civil War films. That is, it had elements in the story that get repeated over and over again in all the other films, or in most of the other films, up until modern times, up until recently. And still even recently, some of these same tropes Now, the film industry dove into romance as a theme very early on in Hollywood. And just as a side note, all the big Hollywood producers starting right in the late 1890s up until today, up until modern times, but initially All the big Hollywood producers were immigrants, Jewish immigrants, from Poland and from Russia, primarily. And they were the big Hollywood producers. And they introduced a lot of the depravity and the things that became standard fare in Hollywood filmmaking. And it's still true today, although they're not immigrants. Just sort of an ironic side note to the film industry. Anyway, this blockbuster film, Birth of a Nation, starts in the pre-war era. and it has a southern family and a northern family and they become friends and northern boy falls in love with southern belle and It looks like the families are going to intermarry, etc. But the war comes. War separates the families, and the oldest son of the southern family becomes a colonel in the Confederate Army, and the oldest son of the northern army becomes a colonel in the northern army, and the younger sons all participate. A whole bunch of them get killed in the war. Now the battle scenes for Birth of a Nation are tremendous. They had cast of thousands, I mean multiple thousands, and they had Civil War veterans on the set to direct how marching was conducted and how the battles were fought. and all of the technical details that they tried to get in silent films. And of course, silent film actors, they had to act with their faces because you can't hear them. There's no verbal dialogue. They're talking, but the words are up on the screen sometimes. But their acting is exaggerated, and some of it is just absolutely brilliant. Well, imagine a film with thousands and thousands actors in it, or at least characters that are fighting Civil War battles and being overseen by Civil War veterans, of which there were still many thousands of them still living during that period. So the battle scenes in Birth of a Nation were worth the price of admission, which was about five cents. And the war is fought, a number of them get killed, and the war is over and now what the film is really about is reconstruction. And every single thing in the film is a stereotype. It's the Hollywood stereotype. This is what the South and Southerners are like. This is what the North and Northerners were like. The greatest hero of them all, Abraham Lincoln. And he's going to remain the great hero in all the Civil War films that are made. And that's one of the tropes. Southerners, Northerners, Abraham Lincoln, and in the end, reconciliation between the sections because reconciliation was the big theme. in America in the first couple decades of the 20th century and the last decade of the 19th century. This is the Reconciliation Monument in this picture up here that was installed by President McKinley who was a northern general, actually he was a sergeant during the Civil War, became President of the United States and had this monument built constructed by a Confederate veteran, Moses Ezekiel, one of the most famous sculptors in the whole wide world and a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute, first Jewish graduate, created that monument in Italy. and they shipped it over and had a huge ceremony, installing it at Arlington Cemetery. And the whole point was reconciliation. And Hollywood picked up on that, sort of the popular mood of the country. And there's always, by the way, also been a relationship between Hollywood and the government in Washington, especially during wars though. World War II, during World War II, Hollywood became the propaganda arm of the United States government, period. But the theme of reconciliation is common. But then there are stereotypes. There are two types of black people, and they're all living in the South. And there's two kinds. There's the kinds that are loving and kind and subservient. And when you're talking about the Civil War and the pre-Civil War era, They're all good characters, they're all subordinates. Slavery is a benevolent institution. Everybody's happy. They like to dance. There's all kinds of different stereotypes that are put there. But the other type are the ones that are taken by unscrupulous northern politicians, and they are turned to support the Republican Party, which is behind Reconstruction. These guys are mean, and they're easily manipulated by the government. they're going to do nothing but cause trouble in the South. So you've got only two kinds of people, two kinds of black people in the South during Reconstruction. And this blockbuster film has, during Reconstruction, the girl that was going to marry the Northern officer, she gets chased by one of these Reconstruction military Yankee black soldiers and she jumps off a cliff rather than being caught. And what that does is that spurs her brother, the little colonel from the Civil War, the Confederate colonel, to organize his neighbors to protect the families and a war breaks out in South Carolina and a huge battle breaks out between the northern abolitionist politician who's controlling everything and his soldiers, most of whom are black, and the Home Defense League, and the title Birth of a Nation, the nation that's given birth to is the Ku Klux Klan. So they don their sheets, and they have an army of 500 cavalrymen, and they charge the blue coats, and they have another great big battle during Reconstruction. Of course, none of this ever happened. But it's all part of the Hollywood mystique of putting together these various stereotypes into a narrative to inform the American people what history was like. And since it was premiered in the White House and the President gave it two thumbs up, This became the biggest blockbuster movie in American history. Huge. And it was a silent film. And the first one like that and about the last one like that on that kind of scale is really something. And it was based on a book, a novel. A lot of these Hollywood movies purport to be based on true events. It's actually based on a novel, a quote historical novel that took an incident of the Civil War or the Civil War as a context and then built kind of an entertaining narrative around it and that's kind of how it works. But I recommend that you do see the Birth of a Nation, if you can ever find it anywhere. It is technically still in print, but don't expect to see it on television, shall we say. It is considered today the absolute ultimate racist Hollywood film ever conceived and produced. And it's really a period piece of the silent film age and the stereotypes that were present at that time. And also, it introduced all the standard tropes for Civil War films. Now, I'm going to fast forward. Well, actually, let me mention one more silent film. And this one I can recommend. It's rated G, or sub-G. It's entitled The General. Has anybody ever seen The General with Buster Keaton? Oh my goodness. You have been deprived culturally. I've seen Birth of a Nation. Oh, you've seen Birth of a Nation? You're the first person I've ever met that said, oh, okay. I've seen Birth of a Nation. I think the worst thing about that movie, sorry to interrupt, You'll see the same thing in the Dome of the Capitol in Washington but in that one it's Jesus welcoming George Washington into heaven with all the angels singing And then after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, a very famous painting was done with Abraham Lincoln ascending to godhood and being welcomed by George Washington. And that was very popular in America at the time. So the second commandment has not fared well among some of the great heroes of all of whom would have never allowed for something like that. I mean Washington and Lincoln both would have decried any such idolatry with them as the focal point. But this is one of the things that artists and propagandists of various kinds, but especially Hollywood, It includes that kind of stuff. But the general, the Birth of a Nation is definitely worth seeing. As far as that goes. The general, 1926, Buster Keaton, is a comedy. All Buster Keaton movies are comedies. He was a superb Olympic class athlete. And he really puts it on display in this movie. But this particular film actually is a comic rendering of something that actually happened in the Civil War. And they do a great job at reproducing it. Now they add stuff to it. They add to the story. They leave things out, of course. But it is an amazing and interesting film. It's called The General is the name of a train engine. And the train was stolen by Yankee spies who went down to Marietta, Georgia, stole a train first thing in the morning while everybody was eating breakfast. Did you check on your car while we were in here? While they were eating breakfast, they steal the train and they head for Chattanooga from Atlanta and Marietta. And the plan is for the train with these Yankee Raiders on it, and they were all volunteers from an Ohio regiment, and their job was to destroy all the bridges over all the rivers that flow underneath the train trestles. and destroy all the bridges so Confederate reinforcements can't get to Chattanooga. And then when you get to Chattanooga, a Union army is going to come over from Alabama and join the Raiders and they're going to capture Chattanooga. This is early 1863, I think, or late 1862. And it's a very strict timetable, you know. It has to be exact. That train has to be in Chattanooga at a certain time, and the Yankee Army has to be there. And when the train didn't arrive at the time, the Yankee Army returned to Alabama. They didn't go very far. They stayed put. The Raiders failed to be there on time. The reason they did is they were being chased by another train that was going backwards. and that was being run by the engineer of the General. He refused to let his train be stolen and so he borrowed another train and they had this chase scene through North Georgia. Speaking of Hollywood, Walt Disney made that into a movie called The Great Train Chase. I forgot to put that on my sheet, I remember that one now. But that was a Walt Disney film, The Great Train Chase. But this one's called The General, and Buster Keaton is a little, he's a little short guy, but powerfully built and a good actor, fantastic actor, very athletic. And he's the engineer and they stole his train, so he's going to get it back. And it's just one funny skit after another all the way through the whole film. So I recommend that one highly. Oh, and then one of the Three Stooges. Everybody know who the Three Stooges are? Oh yeah, okay, good, good. I saw them all, every single one, every Saturday morning. But this one, this one, Curly Larry and Moe, I said they're famous actors that were in Civil War films. They had to get from, they had to carry a message from point A to point B. The problem was, to the left hand side was the whole Union Army. with their rifles and cannons pointed into no man's land and the Confederates are on the right hand side and they're all pointing their weapons into no man's land and Curly, Larry and Moe have to go between the two armies without getting shot. So they dress up with the right hand side of their uniform being gray and the left hand side of their uniform is blue. So whichever side they're viewed from, gray, blue. and they can just walk between the lines with the message. But they also take a flag and they put a union stars and stripes on one side of the flag and the Confederate battle flag on the other side of the flag. So one of them's carrying the flag and one of them's carrying the message and they're marching between the lines and the wind blows and the flag flips sides. And both sides figure out that it's a ruse instantly and they all open fire. Anyway. I told you, famous actors. Probably the most, that's called Uncivil Warriors, probably the most famous Civil War themed film was Gone with the Wind. That was released, theatrical release was 1949. And that is based on a novel of the same name, Gone with the Wind. It's really the only great novel written by Margaret Mitchell, who was a woman that lived in downtown Atlanta. Her house is a historic site, or was. I don't know if they've burned it down in the last couple years or not. But it was a very famous historical site you could visit. And she wrote this book, and it made her a millionaire because it became one of the great wildfire runaway bestsellers, Gone with the Wind. And they made it into a film in Hollywood. And it's a romance, and the Civil War is just a setting. Atlanta, Georgia during the Civil War is the setting for the film. And it's actually about one particular woman, Scarlett O'Hara, who was born and raised on a plantation just outside of Atlanta. And talk about the stereotypes that you find in all the Civil War films leading up to that one. are there. They're all collected and in a very fantastic acting and cinematography way are combined into what became the highest grossing film in Hollywood history. Now, you won't, I don't think you'll see it in the top 10 grossing movies if you Google it, but if you take the money that Gone with the Wind has made and the number of people that have seen it, it actually still surpasses the highest rated, highest grossing film that Hollywood ever made. And it's set in the Civil War and Reconstruction. And you don't actually see any battles. There's no battles in the movie, it's just that's the occasion for the film. And the real point of the film takes place during Reconstruction with the Union soldiers now in Atlanta. There's that, Pitty Pat says, Yankees in Atlanta, how did they ever get here? But they did. And so the post-war Atlanta is trying to reconstruct. And it's about Scarlett O'Hara who's navigating her way through life in between all kinds of crises and men and political problems and all kinds of stuff. It has lots of humor in it and Academy Awards left and right as a result of this film. But there are no battle scenes and it's not, it's a Civil War movie only in the sense that that is the setting of it and very cleverly, cleverly done. 1951 another novel was put on the big screen, The Red Badge of Courage, and that starred the most highly decorated World War II American soldier, Audie Murphy, who went from fighting the Germans in Italy to Hollywood, and I think he made about 26 films, something like that. But he starred as himself in the Audie Murphy story. He played himself as a World War II hero, highly decorated, a hero in every sense of the word. But he plays He plays Henry Fleming in Red Badge of Courage, which is a novel, not written by a Civil War veteran, but after the war. But Civil War veterans read the book. And they said, this is the most accurate description of what it was actually like for the foot soldier in the war itself. So the novel, Red Badge of Courage, won all kinds of awards. And it's been read by every public school child for the last 150 years, or however long it's been out there, 100 and some years. And it is a great book. It's among the great books. description of battle and the feelings of the soldier and that sort of thing. Well, they made it into a film, a very successful one in 1951 starring Audie Murphy and then it was remade a number of years later in 1974 starring Richard Thomas and not quite as good but okay. Both of those films were rated PG as is Gone with the Wind. 1959, well 1951, same year as Red Badger Courage, a film was made entitled Drums in the Deep South and it was purported to be a story of some Confederate soldiers who I've been given the task of stopping General Sherman from getting to Atlanta, and it never happened. It doesn't depict anything that actually occurred in the war, but it's a clever tale and interesting to watch. The Confederates get some cannons up on top of a mountain overlooking the rail line. which is Sherman's supply line. And they cut the supply line and Sherman sends a whole army up to wipe out this squad of Confederates on top of this hill. And it's not half bad. It's a B movie at best, starring Guy Madison. And then in 1959, The Horse Soldiers came out. That was a John Wayne film. And it depicts a very specific Civil War action called Grierson's Raid. And Benjamin Grierson, he becomes the hapless victim of that man at the Battle of Bryce's Crossroads. But a year before that, he took a raiding party of several regiments of cavalry and he left somewhere around Memphis and went all the way down through Mississippi, through the back country of Mississippi, all the way around past Vicksburg and came out in Union held territory in South Mississippi. It was one of the longest raids of the Civil War and it was successful. They did all kinds of subterfuges to throw the Confederates off his track. And there was no army that was after him, but there were small groups of militia here and there trying to stop him. And the film So the film is designed to kind of depict Grierson's raid. And it's not bad for a cavalry film seeking to show something from the Civil War that actually took place. And it does give you a little bit of the flavor of the difficulty of pulling off a stunt like that. Of course, there is a romantic interest. They plan the raid in this plantation house and the woman who owns the plantation house is upstairs listening in on the plans. They catch her, they force her to go with them. so that she won't tell the Confederates that Grierson, oh it doesn't go by the name of Grierson, they all have different names than what happened in the Civil War. But it's called the Horse Soldiers. It's rated PG and it has a couple really stunning scenes in it and some humor too. John Wayne gets in a fist fight with William Holden who's his surgeon. They don't like each other. Typical John Wayne kind of film for those of you who like John Wayne films. 1965, Jimmy Stewart starred in the film entitled Shenandoah. And in that Civil War film, it's a family in the Shenandoah Valley who, when the war comes to the Shenandoah Valley, the dad, which is played by Jimmy Stewart, wants to sit out the war. He doesn't want his sons fighting in the war. He doesn't want anybody in his family getting killed for stupid reasons. And so he makes them stay home. But the sons are itching to join the Confederate Army. And that's kind of the scenario. A couple of them succeed in joining them. And it's a tragic story in the end. and it was made really at the height of the escalation of the Vietnam War and there was a very strong anti-war sentiment in Hollywood at the time and the film is considered kind of an anti-war film although it was and it wasn't based on a any particular true story but Shenandoah Valley was known to have a number of families who were unionists or who wanted to sit out the war. A lot of pacifists, especially in Rockingham County where we sit now. There were quite a few pacifist German sects around here who did not want to fight and wanted to sit the war out. So it's based on a general reality of the Shenandoah Valley. It's quite well done, and it is considered somewhat anti-war because of some of the speeches that Jimmy Stewart, who was a real, true, real-life warrior and a hero of World War II, when he came home, he never made another pro-war movie when he came back from World War II. Once he saw what it was really like, he did not want to portray War in a Favorable Light, and Shenandoah is that film. 1965, a film, it's PG-13, and it becomes, it's not the first one, but it's probably the best of this particular genre of Civil War films. These film and it spawned a number of other ones that were similar settings, and the setting is the West, like West Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, places like that, which often, more often than not, are after the Civil War, and you've got ex-Confederates going West trying to make a living, and you've got ex-Union soldiers, and you have Union cavalry that are out there to exterminate the Indians, And it's interesting that the men that were picked by the Republican administration in the post-war era to go out and exterminate the Indians were William Tecumseh Sherman, who burned up Mississippi and Georgia and South Carolina, and General Sheridan, who destroyed the Shenandoah Valley, and David Hunter, who got it all started in the Shenandoah Valley by burning down VMI and destroying Washington later Washington and Lee. Those three guys and General Crook, who commanded a Union Army in West Virginia, who raided down into Virginia and destroyed a lot of property and families in Virginia during the Civil War. And those four guys were all sent out west, along with George Custer, to exterminate the Indians. After all, they did such a good job on the South. So they were sent out West. So the West becomes in Hollywood a setting for post-Civil War tragedies and combat and that sort of thing. Major Dundee, though, is a little, is interesting. The Apaches are on the war path. They've gone off the reservation. They have to be stopped. This is during the Civil War. There aren't enough Union soldiers to send out there to fight the Apaches. And so someone comes up with the brilliant idea of going to a bunch of Confederate POWs and saying, we will get you out of this prisoner of war camp if you will Don a blue uniform and go out and fight the Apaches with us. And then after that, we'll see, maybe you'll be able to go home. Yankee promises, never good. Well, the colonel that has all these men that were captured along with him, he decides to go ahead with it, but they wear their gray uniforms. So you've got Union cavalry, And you've got Confederate cavalry riding side by side out through West Texas to fight the Apaches. And the Confederate officer actually had a higher rank than the Union officer. during the war, but now he's subordinate to this Yankee officer and has to do what he says. And you can see the tension that is created by a script like that. That's called Major Dundee and it's Charlton Heston is the Union officer and they go out to fight the Apaches together and it makes for some interesting if not humorous, repartee between the Confederates and the Federals, who are now on the same side. But it spawns a whole bunch of Western-setting films. And of course, following that, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in 1966, a year later, which is an Italian film, actually. and it depicts the Civil War, it depicts a story within a story, and it does have one battle in it, and it's the Battle of Loretta Pass, and it involves stolen Confederate gold, and Clint Eastwood is one of the characters looking for the gold, and there are two other guys. The good, the bad, and the ugly, of course. The film's long. It's about three hours long, at least. Longer than most films. And it was a very critical success. And it was filmed in Italy, or North Africa or someplace, by Italian. The only English speakers in the film are the three main stars. Lee Van Cleef and Clint Eastwood and Eli Wallach. And then there are a bunch of other things. Tully Savalas was in a Civil War film called A Reason to Live, A Reason to Die, 1972. I think that's R-rated. In 1976, the outlaw Josie Wales, it's a Clint Eastwood production and he's the main character. And it really shows the war in Missouri. There are two films that have been made that really show how the Civil War within the Civil War, the real Civil War that was fought in Missouri, and it's worth a whole program sometime just to talk about what happened in Missouri during the Civil War. It's an amazing story, but Actually, the outlaw Josie Wales kind of sets that up. Josie Wales is a Missouri farmer who is raided by a bunch of Union soldiers who've been unleashed on the civilian population of Missouri. They burn the homes and they kill the women and children and all of this. And that's what happens to Josie. He loses his family to these raiders. who they call the Red Legs, and all that's historically accurate stuff that really happened. Not this specific story, but similar things. It's based on reality. And so then he joins a Confederate guerrilla group, and they do the same thing. They retaliate. They go into Kansas and get their pound of flesh. And it's a guerrilla warfare in Missouri through the whole war. In the end, Clint Eastwood, Josie Wales, heads for Texas to get away from the Redlegs, and they're chasing him. They put out an APB, and there are Union soldiers between Tennessee and Texas, or Missouri and Texas, and they're all looking for Josie Wales. Unfortunately, none of them make it to the end of the film, but he does. And so, R-rated film, but really depicts brutal warfare in the, and during the Reconstruction period too. In 1989, a film was made which is, to this very day, considered the favorite and best Civil War film by all the big Civil War writers in our country. James E. MacPherson, Gary Gallagher, you can just go down the line, William C. Davis. They've all been asked, what's the greatest Civil War film ever made? And they all say the same thing. They say the movie Glory is their favorite film by far. You know, truth be told, there are so many historical, non-historical things in the film. They've actually taken what's What's an interesting story, and they've gilded it with all kinds of other things to try and make it look worse, worse and worse and worse than it actually was for those soldiers. But it's about a black regiment raised in Massachusetts, the 54th Massachusetts Infantry. In 1863, the Union Army began creating regiments of black soldiers. By 1865, over 100,000 black soldiers were in uniform, in blue uniform, and serving the federal government. Most of them were, the vast majority of them were former slaves. who ran away or were living in the North when the war came, whatever. But they were organized into regiments. And initially, they were just sent to dig ditches and build forts and protect wagons and things like that. They would not be given a combat role because Union white soldiers would not fight alongside them. And as the black preachers in the North discovered, Northerners had the same view of race as Southerners, a different view of slavery, but they had the same view of race as Mark Noel has discovered in reading the sermons of evangelical preachers North and South and black preachers as well. And so the whites would not serve alongside them and there were all kinds of fights and contentions and the reality, just to give you for instance, anyway the film stars Denzel Washington and the other famous, the tall guy. Morgan Freeman. Yeah, Morgan Freeman. Morgan Freeman and Denzel Washington together in this film. And Washington got an Academy Award for it, or at least a nomination, I don't remember which. But it really introduced him as an actor, fantastic actor. And the film is great. But it is rated R. And it's not, it doesn't hew close to the historic line on that regiment. I mean, that regiment was gallant and they fought in a number of battles with success. And they were well-led in all of that. But Hollywood piled it on to make it as bad as they could, to make the barriers as high as they could make them. And the 54th still overcame them. But the barriers were certainly much higher than the reality. In any case, it is a tremendous Civil War film, and like I said, it's the favorite of all the academic historians. the big guys in Civil War history. And it's because it was well acted and also because it's really the first Civil War film that centered on black troops. 100,000 fought in a war. Their story's never been told by Hollywood. And so they decided that they picked one of the most distinguished units and told their story, which is It's well done and entertaining and all of that, but also graphic and definitely earns us our rating. 1992, there's a film entitled The Gangs of New York. Now if you just saw the title of that film, you wouldn't say, oh, there's an interesting Civil War film, I'll bet. It's about the Irish immigrant gangs in New York City during the Civil War. And as more and more Union troops became casualties in the South, Abraham Lincoln was scrambling to fill the ranks with more soldiers. And he even sent recruiters to Ireland. And they recruited on the streets of Dublin. And it got so bad that Jefferson Davis sent a an embassy to the Pope in Rome. And to say that the Union is recruiting Irish boys to come over to America and get slaughtered in battle. And the Pope tried to put a stop to it. He gave the Vatican, the only foreign power that recognized the Confederacy, by the way. And so he sent a I don't think it had the status of an encyclical, it was a letter, whatever those are called, to Ireland, to the bishops in Ireland and said stop. the recruiting by the United States of Irish boys. But why not respond to that? Irish teenager, no work, hungry as a bear. He's going to get three meals a day, a free suit of clothes, a rifle, and he gets to fight. I mean, what self-respecting Irish lad wouldn't want that? And so that's what That's what the federal government took advantage of. Well, in New York, there are 100,000 Irish immigrants in New York. And so the federal government also instituted the draft. And so they began drafting men who'd escaped, who didn't volunteer to fight for the union. So they began drafting in thousands of guys who didn't want to fight, who didn't want to go. And in New York City, These were mostly Irish immigrants. And the gangs in New York City were very anti-black. And they saw that the government had changed the purpose of the war from preserving the Union to adding to it the freeing of the slaves. And they would have none of that. And so they resisted the draft in New York City, so much so that they rioted the gangs of New York rioted in 1863 in June and July and they burned down, for instance, they burned down an orphan, a black orphanage. They hanged anybody they caught on the streets, hanged them from the lampposts. It was a civil insurrection in New York City and General Meade, was instructed to send a veteran brigade of Union soldiers into New York City to settle the matter and so he did. He sent a brigade of Union infantry into New York City with their artillery and they cleared the streets and put an end to the rioting. It would be interesting to see that happen today actually. But they went to New York and they put an end to the Irish gangs that were creating violence and terrorism all over New York City. So that film, needless to say, is rated R. But it's all about the draft riots. And it stars Daniel Day-Lewis and Leonardo DiCaprio, who's A-list actors. But not a film I could recommend in 100 years. And then 1993, movie Gettysburg. How many have seen the movie Gettysburg? Ah, this is better. Okay. Movie Gettysburg was produced and I got to be in it for a whole week, the biggest charge and such, based on a novel, Killer Angels, which I also have a copy of that. I don't know if I put it out or not. I do have a nice copy, a real nice copy of Killer Angels, that the movie Gettysburg was based on. It is a panoramic film from the previous century of filmmaking. It has many A-list and B-list actors in it, and about 10,000 other wannabe actors in it, Civil War reenactors. And it's a spectacular film based on based on that book, based on Killer Angels, which is about the Battle of Gettysburg. It's seen from General Longstreet's point of view. It was classified by the critics as neo-Confederate, which is just the worst thing you could ever be accused of. I almost want to be a regular Confederate, not a neo-Confederate. But it was labeled neo-Confederate, and it was trashed by all the usual suspects. But it, in the end, just about made back the money that Ted Turner invested in it. And it's another long film. The director's cut is almost four hours long. That film was followed up in 2003, 10 years later, with a prequel. that had been written by the son of the guy who wrote Killer Angels. Michael Schara wrote Killer Angels and his son Jeff. Gods and Generals, yeah Jeff Shara did, which is the prequel to the Battle of Gettysburg and shows the death of Somal Jackson, Charlottesville. Just as an interesting note between these two films, the Gods and Generals ended up losing about 70 million dollars for the investor which was Ted Turner and that's why the third film has never been made is because he lost almost a hundred million dollars in making those two films because people just didn't go to see them and the critics just trashed both films totally because they believed they were too favorable to the Confederacy. But in between the making of those two films, the director, Ron Maxwell, became a Christian. partly because of his study of Stonewall Jackson in part and in part the witness of Christians who were involved in the making of those films and also became friends with Ron Maxwell and so he made a profession in between, became a believer and when when Gods and Generals was going to be made, he went to Jeff Shara and asked him if he could eliminate a few of the characters from the book, which is a novel anyway, but the characters represent real people and the story represents a real story. And he said, I want to emphasize Stonewall Jackson's Christian faith. And Jeff Shara said, You bought the film rights, do whatever you want with it. He's a super nice guy. I don't think he's a Christian, but he really is a fine gentleman. And he gave Ron Maxwell. permission to do whatever he wanted to do with the film, and so he did. And so the film actually is not an exact rendering of the novel, of the book, Gods and Generals. It emphasizes the Christian faith of Stonewall Jackson in areas that Jeff Shara didn't do, didn't appreciate Jackson really for his Christian faith like Ron Maxwell does. That's how the film, and this film was absolutely trashed by the critics. I have a file full of reviews and commentary on the film, and I even had to write some letters to the editor to try and straighten some of those people out, or at least to tell them what I thought about their analysis. And some of them were big conservative pundit, political pundit types that are real popular with, say, National Review and other conservative public, so-called conservative publications. These guys came out of the woodwork to criticize and to blame Ron Maxwell for not making the movie all about slavery, because that's the only thing significant about the Civil War to learn. from their perspective. And so another film was never made. But Gods and Generals, 2003, if your family watches any kind of war films, that one's rated PG-13, but now you know a little bit of the back story of it. 1999, a movie entitled Ride with the Devil. based on a book called The Devil Knows How to Ride, which is a legitimate history by a scholar. And it's just very well written. It's a brilliant book, really. And one of the ironies of Ride with the Devil is that the director was one of the most famous directors in the world, and he's Chinese. His name is Ang Lee, and he's done a number of very famous films, and he's an A-list director, film director. He read The Devil Knows How to Ride, and it's the story of William Quantrell, who was an Ohio school teacher who had come to Missouri, and he became a He ended up joining the Confederate Army and leading a band of guerrillas behind Union lines throughout the war until he eventually was killed. And it's really about, again, the story of the war in Missouri. And that's what Ride with the Devil is all about, is the Civil War that took place in Missouri. And the main character is played by Tobey Maguire before he became Spider-Man. And it is a well-acted, film but it is violent, graphically so. So it's up there with the accurate, kind of accurate films that depict some specific part of the war to try and depict through a story, through a storyline, through a narrative. And anyway, Ang Lee read the book, and he said, this is a movie. And so he made the movie, and it was in the theaters for one day. And then it was gone. And my theory is, it has a black Confederate soldier, which is historically accurate, in the film. And they cannot have that, because it blows all their theories. And he's based on a real character, too. He's based on a real person. Even has the same name. Of a black Confederate soldier for whom there is a biography. And it is one of the best ones I've ever read. It's really terrific. What's that? Oh, yes. Oh, this movie? Oh, sure. Yeah. This movie is available on cable TV. And it's sold, Amazon sells it and such. But it's called Ride with the Devil. It's a hard film. It's very hard. But interesting. 1996. I skipped over Andersonville. That was a made-for-TV film about Andersonville Prison. My oldest son, who was a member at the time of the Williamsburg Fife and Drum Corps, was picked to be in that because they had a little Fife and Drum Corps there at Andersonville Prison. He got to come down to Georgia and wade through the mud. for the filming of that. And it's about the Union prisoners in Andersonville and the strategies they used to try and survive and how they preyed on each other in gangs and stuff like that. It was a made-for-television. Not a pleasant film, but historically follows the lines pretty closely. 1999, The Hunley, made-for-TV movie about this Confederate submarine, The Hunley. Very well done. I thought a little soap opera-ish myself, but the submarine's the star of the film. And then let's see if I need to mention anything else here. 2015, Field of Lost Shoes. It's about the Battle of Newmarket. And there are two films by that name, and one is a documentary, and it's an award-winning documentary, and they show it at the Newmarket Battlefield, Virginia Military Institute. And the other, Field of Lost Shoes, was a feature film. And I thought that was a little soap operish too. Battle scenes are excellent. It's about VMI and the boys that were called out to fight at New Market. Not bad. That's PG-13 rating. And then I'll wind up with two Lincoln related films and there are many. The Conspirator in 2010, recommend that film to you. Although the beginning of it you might not like. But it's about the trial of the Lincoln conspirators after he was assassinated and they were rounded up and they were put on trial. And it's mostly about the trial of Mary Surratt. and how she was railroaded by the military commission that was appointed to kill off all the Lincoln conspirators. And they were given their marching orders from the Secretary of War ahead of time. It was a military commission. Everything about it was unconstitutional. And it's a great film. It's really brilliant. It's called The Conspirator. It's PG-13. I think probably because there's some consumption of alcohol in Washington, D.C. at that time. And there are also a few bad words in it and an opening battle scene in the film. But the story itself is very, very well constructed. Okay, I will stop there. There are other films I could talk about. You can always ask me about other ones if you want or about any of these and whether I, you know, told you enough about them to pique your interest. I'm not recommending any but the G-rated films just because not everybody's on the same same level. Oh, it was not. It was not. It was one of the few. Yes, it was one of the very few that was not. And the director, D.W. Griffith, was the director and he was the son of a Confederate soldier. And the book that it was based on is entitled The Clansman by F.W. Dixon, who wrote a whole bunch of novels. He's a Southern novelist, also the son of a Confederate veteran. So it's based on that novel entitled The Clansman, and it's what Hollywood took that book and made this spectacular film based on that particular book. Any other questions? Thank you, Dr. Potter. I appreciate it.