11.  Post-bellum and Westerns

There are two  interesting,  important,  and  little-noticed features of films about  the South  in the  period  after the War for Southern Independence. First, until recent times they generally portray the mainstream view of “Reconstruction” as corrupt and oppressive that prevailed before the Marxist coup in American history writing. Carpetbaggers are shown as vicious, greedy, and unprincipled, and Southerners as generally honourable people struggling against oppression.  Hollywood was all on our side on the badness of Reconstruction. Indeed, that was the American consensus at the time.  Even the impeccably Bostonian Samuel Eliot Morison of Harvard in his standard college history text deplored Reconstruction.

Second, such earlier films generally avoid most of the troubled Reconstruction South. Usually they are  set in the western South - Texas, Indian Territory (Oklahoma), New Mexico, Arkansas, and Missouri.  They often show sympathetic ex-Confederate people moving or returning West, which was indeed a major theme of Hollywood Westerns for a time. Such Reconstruction stories thus become in popular perception “Western” rather than Southern.  This is conspicuously true of such classics as **The Searchers, **True Grit, and **Lonesome Dove, all stories of frontier Southerners.


 “Western” is vague and elastic in the American imagination.  American  thought,  writing,  discussion,  and cinema  presentation  of  “the  West” is  confused  and lacking in any clear idea of what the term should  mean.  Of course, Hollywood today usually means by “the West” the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains, the last settled regions.  But the West actually began in 1607 just beyond the palisades of Jamestown in Tidewater Virginia and was a moving process for almost two centuries. The historian Frederick Jackson Turner, a Midwesterner, famously announced that the frontier ended in 1890—but he did not allow for the Texas and Oklahoma oil men who pioneered Alaska after that date.


Southerners were present everywhere during the great period of Western movement and were earliest and predominant everywhere except the Great Lakes and the Pacific coast.  The American consciousness has put this truth down the memory hole:  Western is assumed to be good and American (i.e., Northern) and Southern to be bad and un-American.  This is done automatically and without reflection.  The treatment of Texas provides a proving ground for this observation:  if one likes Texas and wants to present it favourably, then it is “Western.” If one does not like Texas and wants to give it a bad rep then it is “Southern.”  Of course, Texas is simply Texas, unimaginable except as a creation of Southerners and an extension of their homeland into new terrain. 


Southerners acquired almost all the new territory of the U.S. after the Revolution, often against fierce Yankee opposition. They were also generally the earliest explorers and settlers of new territory. Daniel Boone moved west from North Carolina and Davy Crockett from Tennessee. Lewis and Clark were Virginians.  Most of the men of the Alamo were Southern volunteers.  The “mountain men,” who first explored the Rockies, like Jim Bridger and Kit Carson and Charles Bent of Bent’s Fort, were mostly from the South. In fact, the Cattle Kingdom began in the colonial South long before it reached Texas and merged with the Mexican version.  And it was Texans who spread the Cattle Kingdom to the Northern plains, although Yankee and Brit capitalists swiftly moved in. (The late great Mel  Bradford  told  me that there was a very large Confederate flag prominently displayed in the Cattlemen’s Club in Cheyenne. No telling if that is still so.)


The story of the West in general American thinking gets assumed into generic “America.”  The multitude of watchers of the Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett television series in the 1950s never had any notion that this was Southern history.  People are still shocked to learn that Boone’s and Crockett’s relatives were Confederates.   Even though the people and settings are Southern, almost any time in film where Southern characters are sympathetic they are honourary Yankees.  It is only the bad people who are obviously Southern.

Now there are some good films about the explorers and settles of the Northern plains and Rockies.  **Jeremiah Johnson, **Heartland, and **O Pioneers!  come immediately to mind.  But “the West” was mostly Southern.  The Philadelphia novelist Owen Wister understood this perfectly when he entitled his 1902 Wyoming novel The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains.  The Northern West is mostly about sodbusters, Yankee schoolmarms, snowstorms, and McCormick reapers.  (The inventor Cyrus McCormick was from Virginia.)   


Think about it.  What is “a Virginian” doing in Wyoming?  In fact, Wister was right on target.  The cowboy, insofar as he is a heroic, chivalric figure and not merely a labourer in the hard and dirty business of moving livestock on the hoof, is a Southern gentleman moved to a new environment. 


The schmaltzy Western  movies  and TV  series  of  the 1950s  and later  perpetrated a cultural atrocity which would be eternally  shameful  were Americans any longer capable of experiencing shame: “the Singing Cowboy.” Several  generations got their idea of the West from “Roy Rogers” (Leonard Slye from Iowa) singing “Happy Trails” in movies  that  were  utterly  anachronistic  in  their time  and  settings.  Or from showbiz celebrities from the North pretending to be cowboys.   Even the horses became stars.  And there were the comic Westerns.   The great and grim civilisational feat of the conquest and settlement of a continent, one of the most noble parts of American and world history, became juvenile commercial fluff imagined by Hollywood urbanites who had not a clue of genuine frontier history.


Remember that as you watch your “Westerns.”
​

The moguls were so ignorant of anything authentic that they almost always hopelessly misused the honourable terms “sheriff” and “marshal.” A sheriff is an elected official of a county, not a local officer who can be removed by the town.  And a U.S. Marshal is an officer of a federal court with a wide jurisdiction, although there can be, I suppose, such a person as a Town Marshal.


**The Searchers (1956). The American Film Institute declares this the best Western of all time, and the British Film Institute lists it as the seventh best movie ever made.  It is certainly a great film.  It is set in the Texas frontier ravaged for several generations by war between Texans and the Comanche.  (The U.S. Army had little to do with this war, neglecting the Texas frontier, especially during “Reconstruction.”) John Wayne, a former Confederate soldier, lives out a long and epic quest for his niece who was carried off as a child by the Comanche.  There is a great deal of authentic flavour of the time and place.  I must point out, however, that almost nobody talks like a Texan. The one character with an unmistakable Southern accent is a fool, a buffoon. This is unconscious Yankee prejudice.  These are all Southern people, but in the Yankee mind they are Americans and “Westerners,” so a Southern accent is an automatic marker for something that is inferior.  Remember, this is a Southern story.


**True Grit (1969). In what is perhaps his most beloved role, John Wayne is Marshal “Rooster” Cogburn, an ornery lawman on the border between Reconstruction Arkansas and the Indian Territory.  Based on a novel by the Arkansas writer Charles Portis, True Grit, like most “Westerns,” is really a “Southern” story.  A feisty young woman enlists Cogburn’s reluctant aid for a mission into Indian Territory.  The film is deservedly popular and often considered John Wayne’s best.  The remake, (X)True Grit (2010), though widely praised, is much inferior.  Everybody in it acts and talks like they come from California and have not a clue about the people they are impersonating.  The young woman’s Christianity disappears completely. A  Smithsonian production called (X) “The Real True Grit” epitomises the confusion of West and South. The “experts” speculate about whether a brave and adventurous girl like Mattie Ross could have really existed, and then get into discussions about “Calamity Jane” and such stuff.  Mattie Ross was not a frontier moll, she was a Southern lady.


**Rooster Cogburn  (1975).  In this enjoyable sequel Rooster (John Wayne) tangles with the Yankee schoolmarm Katherine Hepburn.


**Hondo (1953).  It is implied that Hondo (John Wayne) is an ex-Confederate.


**Hondo and the Apaches (1967). Pretty good film based on the TV series with the Hondo character.

(T) Texas (1941).  Ex-Confederates Glenn Ford and William Holden go to Texas. 


(T) Texas Rangers (1951) is pretty good on context although not in the plot. 

**The Rebel (TV series, 1959 - 1961.  Ex-Confederate roams the west doing good deeds.

**Lonesome Dove (1989-90) is of course about the Southern frontier and the expansion of the Texas cattle kingdom, although the scalawag author of the novel on which it is based plays down the Southern element.  Yet the movie and its prequels and sequels (**Return to Lonesome Dove, **Streets of Laredo,  and **Dead Man’s Walk are inescapably Southern.  Some of the actors, like Tommy Lee Jones, Robert Duvall, Sissy Spacek, and James Garner act like real Southern people.  Dead Man’s Walk is actually set in the antebellum period.


**Comanche Moon (2008).   This Lonesome Dove prequel is actually set in the Confederate period and does not disguise the fact.


**Red River (1948) and **Chisum (1970).   John Wayne “westerns” that present the heroic early pioneers of Texas through antebellum, Confederate, and post-bellum years, although they do not make a point of it.  In Red River Montgomery Clift leaves the ranch to join the Confederate army.


(T) Belle Starr:  Bandit Queen (1941).  Weak on history but entertaining and good on “Reconstruction.”  Randolph Scott at his best. The accents are good, although Gene Tierney tends to overdo it, and there is great “Dixie” background music.   (X) Belle Starr (1980) may be a little closer to history but is slow and boring.

**Geronimo: An American Legend (1993). Dramatisation of the true story of Charles Gatewood, a lieutenant in the postbellum U.S. Army who came from a Virginia Confederate family.  Gatewood worked hard to understand the Apaches and a great risk to himself brought Geronimo in with a peace agreement.  The dishonourable, ethnic-cleansing Yankee government then repudiated what they had agreed to and shunted Gatewood into obscurity. Jason Patric, though a New Yorker, does one of the most faithful Southern accents in recent times.


**The Missing and **Open Range (both 2003). Excellent truthful stories of hardship, danger, and courage on the rugged Southwestern frontier.

**The Long Ride Home (2003).  Randy Travis trying to get home to his family after years of dodging the law and the lawless.

**Reckoning (?).  This toughly realistic Southwestern seems to have fallen through the cracks and I can find little information.  (It is not to be confused with a 2018 Western or any other films of the same title.)   The main actors seem to be relatively unknown Southerners and all of the good guys have authentic accents.  And for once the chief villain definitely does not speak Southern.


Nearly every major Hollywood star of the 1930s—1960s at some time played a sympathetic Confederate character, often in the Reconstruction era.  Something sure to send today’s guardians of culture into frantic pearl-clutching. A few examples:

**The Proud Rebel (1958).  Alan Ladd is an ex-Confederate travelling to Illinois and Minnesota in search of a cure for his traumatised son.  Northerners give him a hard time but he triumphs in the end. (And I have to mention Alan Ladd in **Shane when he tells the gunman “Your’e a lowdown Yankee liar,” before finishing him off.)


**Escort West (1958).  Victor Mature is a widowed ex-Confederate soldier heading West with his young daughter in search of a new life.  A brave and honourable man, he comes to the aid of two Northern women in peril from Indians.

**Dallas (1950).  Gary Cooper is a Confederate hero from Georgia fighting very nasty Carpetbaggers in Texas who are not only oppressing Southerners but Mexicans as well.  Meeting a decent Northerner he comments:  “That Yankee furriner is talking like an American.” The star does pretty well on the accent most of the time. Cooper plays another ex-Confederate in (T) Vera Cruz.

**Three Violent People (1956). Charlton Heston returns home to fight carpetbaggers who want to seize his land.

Four Southern stars with a similar ex-Confederate theme:

**El Paso (1949).  Ex-Confederate John Payne cleans up corruption

**The Vanquished (1953).   Confederate John Payne returns to his Texas home and successfully counters the Carpetbaggers.

**The Stranger Wore a Gun (1953).  Tough ex-Confederate Randolph Scott fights bad men in Arizona.   Based on the novel Yankee Gold.  Not to be confused with the unrelated Stranger with a Gun (1958).

**Hell on Wheels (TV, 2011—2016).  A recent surprising revival of the good Confederate moving West genre. Anson Mount, a native Southerner, is the hero in this complex and tough drama of railroad building in the West.

A few non-Western Reconstruction films:

(T) Tennessee Johnson (1942). Andrew Johnson is portrayed as a hero by Van Heflin.  This is hard to find but is worthwhile for its portrayal of President Johnson struggle against the evil Radical Republicans.

**Menace on the Mountain (1970).  Southern families fighting against corruption and violence in North Carolina right after The War.

**The Keeping Room (2014).  Bleak but telling story of Southern women suffering Yankee depredations as the war ends.
____________________________________________________________
JESSE JAMES
The exploits of Frank and Jesse James (along with the Younger brothers) have fueled a library of movies and TV shows, far more than it is possible to survey here.  Many of them are just mediocre “Westerns.”  A few understand that the James boys came to their path as outlaws because they were victims of “Reconstruction” oppression. 


(T) Jesse James (1939) and (T) The Return of Frank James (1940), with the major stars Henry Fonda and Tyrone Power, are old standbys, not very strong on Southern but telling the story well enough.

**Frank and Jesse (1994), which includes Randy Travis as Cole Younger, comes closest to representing the real history and is the truest to life James movie in my opinion. 

** The Long Riders (1980), about the failed James and Younger raid in Minnesota. Arthur Hill, a good director, gives the last period of the James-Younger gang an appropriate epic treatment.  The atmosphere and accents are good.   (X) The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972), on the same subject in worthless and seems to have no purpose other than to degrade the characters.

Most of the other films on the subject are hardly worth your notice.   (X) The Lawless Breed with “Rock Hudson” as Jesse James and the silly (X) The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford may be safely ignored.

WHAT COULD BE:  The stories of any one of the most conspicuous carpetbaggers—Adelbert Ames, Henry Clay Warmouth, etc., would make entertaining and informative flicks.  Many carpetbaggers were extravagant characters blatantly and joyfully corrupt.  Their careers would be a good way to tell the truth about “Reconstruction.”  The Texas Rangers appear in many mediocre Westerns, few of which touch the real story.  What marvelous films could be made of the Rangers in their greatest period after The War and their heroes like John C. Hays, “Rip” Ford, and L.H. McNelly.  But such stories would be unkind to noble and oppressed Mexicans and Redskins.

More Southern Westerns set in later times appear in subsequent chapters.

10. Spielberg’s  Lincoln


​(X)  Spielberg’s Lincoln. Life is short. Although I am a devoted if amateur student of Hollywood’s treatment of the great American War of 1861-65, I intended to spare myself the ordeal of Spielberg’s Lincoln.  However, the honoured editor of America’s bravest and best journal (Tom Fleming of Chronicles) instructed me to go.  I have always found such instruction to be wise.  And so, I bit the bitter pill or swallowed the bullet, or whatever, and went.  You may regard me as having suffered in your behalf, Gentle Reader, and be relieved of the burden of attendance.

Daniel Day-Lewis portrays Lincoln, following in the footsteps of Walter Huston, Henry Fonda, Raymond Massey, Gregory Peck, and Sam Waterston—all better looking than the real thing.  One side of Lincoln’s face was deformed, he had moments of doddering unconsciousness from having been kicked in the head by a horse, and, as everyone noted, his arms were disproportionately long, which led his accomplices to call him “the Ape” behind his back.  But I suppose one should not complain about that—actors and actresses are always better looking than the real life people they mimic.



After all the praise lavished upon the Irishman Day-Lewis’s portrayal of Lincoln, I was surprised at how poor it was.  The appearance is wrong. The accent is very wrong for a 19th century Midwesterner born and raised among people from the upper South. Worst of all, Lincoln is played with a strange diffidence such as no successful lawyer and politician ever had.  It is like Jimmy Stewart with a beard and spectacles, the humble saint that many imagine Lincoln to have been. Nearly all testimony of the time disputes the tender Lincoln family relations that are presented early on to establish the gentle benevolence of the man.  His wife and his children were considered nuisances by most of the people around them.



The film begins with a false portrayal of the battle of Jenkins Ferry, which was a victory by outnumbered (as usual) Confederates, that put an end to a major Union cotton stealing campaign.  There was no massacre of black troops nor any massacre of Confederate prisoners by blacks in retaliation as is claimed.   Most Northern soldiers would have slaughtered their black “comrades” before allowing them to slaughter Confederate prisoners. I suppose this invention makes a gratifying vicarious revenge fantasy for the leftist homosexual screenwriter. The 1st and 2nd Kansas Regiments (Coloured) are described inaccurately as cavalry.  There were no black cavalry units in active service in the war, though sometimes infantry may have been mounted on mules.  Northern soldiers would have balked at blacks riding while they walked.  During the war black soldiers were mostly labor and garrison troops, and occasionally, as at Fort Wagner and the Crater, sacrificed in forlorn hopes to spare the lives of white Northerners.  Ambrose Bierce, a frontline Union soldier for the entire war, said he never saw any black people except the servants and concubines of Union officers.


It reminds me of an Italian flick I once saw, in which a tall, handsome black American paratrooper drops in to liberate an Italian village.  There were no black paratroopers and very few black combat units in World War II.  The U.S. Army was as segregated as it was in the Civil War.  There is no question that affirmative action is aggressively alive and well in entertainment. Black men are portrayed as proportionately more numerous than they were as combat troops in Vietnam and later wars, as well as more frequently than is likely as brilliant surgeons, scientists, philanthropists, admirals, judges, noble statesmen, and such.


The film shows Lincoln in friendly conversation with black soldiers who were veterans of Jenkins Ferry, though how they got to Washington from Arkansas is not explained.  Such a scene is unlikely.  Lincoln throughout his life had relatively little contact with black people. They were by law excluded from settling in Illinois. Some were run out of Springfield in Lincoln’s time and there was at least one lynching there after the war.  He did receive a delegation or two at the White House, to whom he hinted that the best thing their people could do was to emigrate to some friendlier clime. He spoke to them. They were not allowed to reply.  Lincoln, an earthy man of his time and place, adept at amusing the yokels around the cracker barrel, probably, like most Northerners then and later, used the n-word routinely.  As Frederick Douglass observed, Lincoln was emphatically “the white man’s President.”


We are told that Lincoln had never accepted slavery, which is belied by both his legal and political careers. And that he had fought the war to end slavery, something which he denied repeatedly. The strangest thing about the film is that the producers chose to build it around the machinations leading to acquiring Congress’s two thirds vote for the Thirteenth Amendment emancipating the slaves.  If I wanted to make an attractive dramatization of Lincoln there are many other events that I would choose:  his adoption of “free soil” and the Republican party late in his career; the Cooper Union speech; his winning the nomination in 1860 over better-known men; the Fort Sumter crisis; the Emancipation Proclamation; the second inaugural.

Obviously, these makers of a film about Lincoln wanted the film to be all about slavery, requiring a basic perversion of accuracy. A number of authorities have pointed out that Lincoln did not play a very active a role in the Thirteenth. Nor at the time was it as important or decisive as portrayed.  The presentation of the political and Constitutional issues is full of erroneous and presentistic assumptions and incoherent reasoning. There seems disinterest in the fact that Congress proposing the amendment was just that.  The amendment still had to be ratified by three-fourths of the States.  What did that mean when more than two-fifths of the states were fighting the Union or kept “loyal” only by the Army? And when Lincoln relied on the silly theory that they were still States though temporarily controlled by mobs of lawbreakers, while many in his party contended that the “rebellious” states were no longer states. Anyway, the question could not be settled until the war was over.


Besides, the amendment meant little. Confederate opinion had already accepted that slavery had been altered by the war and was willing to give up slavery in exchange for freedom from the invading tyrant.  In the brief postwar period before harsh Congressional Reconstruction descended, the Southern states ratified the Thirteenth readily and breathed a sigh of relief at putting down the burden. The real issue left untouched by the Thirteenth was what would be the status in American society and law of the people thus freed.


But like so much of the treatment of The War we are subjected to, the charity for black people actually takes second place to the white-washing of Northern behavior, to safeguarding what Robert Penn Warren called “the treasury of virtue.” The amount of whitewash needed to keep up the fraud of a benevolent North far exceeds what was needed for Tom Sawyer’s fence.


Another Italian flick I saw (I waste a lot of time, even though life is short) purported to be a dramatization of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.  In this film, a group of Catholic brethren are maintaining a fort deep in the South for the protection of runaway slaves.  No such thing ever existed, nor would antebellum Southerners have allowed it for a day. Further, despite today’s Yankeeization of most American Catholics, the Roman Catholic Church never discountenanced slavery in the U.S. It generally disapproved of abolitionist agitation, and not only because most abolitionists were also virulently anti-Catholic. Not to mention that the Church lived comfortably for centuries with slavery in Latin America.  The poet laureate of the Confederacy was Father Abram J. Ryan. Pio Nino sent a Missouri Confederate chaplain to preach against the Yankee recruitment of cannon fodder. Bishop Las Casas, the saintly prelate of the Spanish Indies, thought slavery was bad for Indians but good for black people.  


​Meanwhile, don’t reward Spielberg by buying an absurdly over-priced theater ticket.  Instead, rent Gore Vidal’s Lincoln, a 1988 film with Sam Waterston and Mary Tyler Moore as the presidential couple. Unlike Hollywood moguls and writers, I know a little something about 19th century America, and I feel assured in telling you that Waterston and Moore are vastly more authentic Lincolns than the Irishman Day-Lewis and the Flying Nun, Sally Field.  The portrayal of Lincoln is sympathetic but honest.  You will learn some genuine American history rather than endure the fantasies of people who have remade that history in their own image.

9. Confederate Hollywood

From the beginnings to rather recent times portrayals of Confederates have been a mainstay of American cinema.  After all, the Confederacy is a rather large and interesting slice of American history.  Given the virulent malice today against everything Confederate, it might surprise many folks to see that during Hollywood’s Golden Age an astounding number of major stars of American cinema have had no objection to portraying Confederates, usually as sympathetic characters.  Many of such films showed Confederate flags in favourable contexts and sometimes in glorification.  What has changed in recent times is that there have been evil Confederates appearing more often on the screen and the once popular theme of good Southerners oppressed by Reconstruction has disappeared.


The list below presents Northern and foreign actors who have played more or less attractive Confederates.  The list does not include 1) those who portrayed very villainous Confederates;  2) those who were Southern-born or have Southern background; and 3) portrayals of Southerners not in the Confederate period:

• Nick Adams: The Rebel
• Tod Andrews: The Gray Ghost
• Armand Assante: The Hunley
• Christopher Atkins: Guns of Honor
• Richard Basehart:  The Andersonville Trial
• Anne Baxter: Three Violent People
• Louise Beavers: Belle Starr
• Noah Beery: The Last Outpost
• Tom Berenger: Gettysburg
• Ward Bond: Gone with the Wind
• Marlon Brando: Appaloosa
• Walter Brennan inimitably played Confederates and other Southerners in many films although he was born in Boston. Brennan was for decades the strongest conservative in leftist Hollywood.
• Lloyd Bridges: The Blue and the Gray
• Pierce Brosnan: The Son
• Bruce Cabot: The Best of the Badmen, The Undefeated
• David Keith and Robert Carradine: The Long Riders
• Jim Caviezel: Ride with the Devil
• Montgomery Clift: Red River
• James Coburn: Major Dundee
• Gary Cooper: Dallas, Vera Cruz, Operator 13
• Robert Cummings: So Red the Rose
• James Dale: Echoes of War
• Jane Darwell: Gone with the Wind
• Olivia de Haviland: Gone with the Wind
• Colleen Dewhurst: The Blue and the Gray
• Angie Dickinson: Gray Ghost       
• Brian Donlevy: The Woman They Almost Lynched
• Michael Douglas: The Ghost and the Darkness
• Clint Eastwood: The Outlaw Josey Wales, Ambush at  Cimarron Pass
• Hope Emerson: The Guns of Fort Petticoat
• Errol Flynn: The Santa Fe Trail, Rocky Mountain
• Henry Fonda: Jesse James, The Return of Frank James
• Glenn Ford: Texas
• John Ford: The Birth of a Nation
• John Forsythe: Escape from Fort Bravo
• William Forsythe: Echoes of  War
• Clark Gable: Gone with the Wind
• Kathryn Grant: The Guns of Fort Petticoat
• Peter Graves: The Raid
• George Hamilton: The Long Ride Home
• Richard Harris: Major Dundee
• Gabby Hayes: Arizona Kid, Southward Ho!
• Van Heflin: The Raid
• Charlton Heston: Three Violent People, Arrowhead
• William Holden: Texas
• Leslie Howard: Gone with the Wind
• Rock Hudson: The Undefeated, The Lawless Breed
• Alex Hyde-White: Ironclads
• Jason Isaacs: Field of Lost Shoes
• Jewel: Ride with the Devil
• Van Johnson: Siege at Red River
• Richard Jordan: Gettysburg
• Stacy and James Keach: The Long Riders
• Buster Keaton: The General
• Arthur Kennedy: Red Mountain
• Alan Ladd: Red Mountain, Proud Rebel
• Stephen Lang: Gods and Generals
• Vivien Leigh: Gone with the Wind
• John Lund: Five Guns West
• George Macready: The Rebel
• Hattie McDaniel: Gone with the Wind
• Tobey Maguire: Ride with the Devil
• Victor Mature: Escort West
• Doug McClure: Shenandoah
• Dylan McDermott: Texas Rangers
• Joel McRea: Border River, The Outriders
• Ray Milland: Copper Canyon
• Thomas Mitchell: Gone with the Wind
• Chris Mitchum: Rio Lobo
• Elizabeth Montgomery: Belle Starr
• Jeanette Nolan: The Guns of Fort  Petticoat
• Maureen O’Hara: Deadly Companions, Rio Grande
• Dennis O’Keefe: The Eagle and the Hawk
• Eleanor Parker: Escape from Fort Bravo
• Barbara Payton: Drums in the Deep South
• Gregory Peck: The Yearling
• Tyrone Power: Jesse James
• Jurgen Prochnow: Guns of Honor
• Ronald Reagan: The Last Outpost  (Cavalry Command)
• Pamela Reed: The Long Riders
• Christopher Reeve: The Bostonians
• Jonathan Rhys-Myers: Ride with the Devil
• Jorge Rivero (Mexican star): Rio Lobo
• Cliff Robertson: The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid
• Roy Rogers: The Arizona Kid, Southward Ho!
• Kurt Russell: Mosby’s Marauders
• Tom Selleck: Last Stand at Saber River 
• Martin Sheen: Gettysburg, Guns of Honor
• Madolyn Smith: The Rose and the Jackal
• Robert Stack: Great Day in the Morning
• James Stewart: Shenandoah
• Meryl Streep: Secret Service (her opening monologue is in front of a large Confederate flag)
• Margaret Sullavan: So Red the Rose
• Donald Sutherland: The Hunley
• Shirley Temple: The Littlest  Rebel
• Gene Tierney: Belle  Starr
• Lawrence Tierney: The Best of the Badmen
• Constance Towers: The Horse Soldiers
• Claire Trevor: Texas
• Tom Tyler: The Best of the Badmen
• Skeet Ulrich: Ride with the Devil
• Jan-Michael Vincent: The Undefeated
• John Wayne: The Searchers, True Grit, and doubtless others.
• Richard Widmark: Alvarez Kelly
• Jeffrey Wright: Ride with the Devil
• Robin Wright: The Conspirator
• Here are some Southern-born or Southern background actors who have also played Confederates: Claude Akins, Gene Autry, Glenn Campbell, John Carradine, Patricia Clarkson, Joseph Cotten, James Craig, Robert Duvall, Frankie Faison, Miriam Hopkins, Jeffrey Hunter, Ben Johnson, Kris Kristofferson, Anson Mount, Audie Murphy, John Payne, Dennis and Randy Quaid, Tex Ritter, Will Rogers, Randolph Scott, Randy Travis.​

In the Enola Gay President Truman, considering whether to drop the atomic bomb, is seated in front of an array of flags, one of which is Confederate, or possibly a Mississippi or Georgia flag. Robert Redford plays an actor wearing a Confederate uniform in (X) Inside Daisy Clover. In **The Ghost and the Darkness Michael Douglas is a famed lion hunter, an American who is described as having come to Africa because his people lost a war. In (T)Warm Springs Franklin D. Roosevelt is inspired by the example of Confederate general Francis Nicholls, who lost an arm and a leg in the War but went on to become Governor of Louisiana. In (T)Texas (1941) William Holden calls a carpetbagger “a dirty Yankee.” In the postwar setting of (T)The Missouri Traveler (1958) Lee Marvin survives unscathed a lavish presentation of the Southern flag and anthem.

Scorcese’s Gangs of New York (2002)

Martin Scorcese, in an interview, candidly described his Gangs of New York as an “opera.”  He had been asked whether the event s portrayed were true to history.  I took his reply to mean that the events of the movie were selected and organized for dramatic emphasis and were not to be taken as literal factual record.


And, indeed, as a historical record of 19th-century New York, the film has many failings. Nevertheless, it has provoked some useful discussion of the historical context – specifically for the light it sheds on the Lincolnite mythology of the Civil War era. It seems that the accepted idea of the gloriously united North trampling out the wrathful grapes of slavery and treason is not so sound a picture of the real thing after all.


For one thing, the film gives a glimpse of the rather nasty nativism among Northerners, a great many of whom hated Catholics and immigrants as much or more than they hated Southerners.  None of the above fit into the Yankee ideal of true Americanism.  Nativist gangs burned down convents in Philadelphia and Boston when such things were never dreamed of in the South. This window into the real history of the antebellum North becomes even more significant for three reasons.


1) Nativists of the American Party went en masse into Lincoln’s Republican Party and made up a strong element of his support. Though, of course, Lincoln cared nothing about religion and he and other leading Republicans were too savvy politicians to embrace overt nativism. Republicans did not generally like immigrants, but they loved the militaristic German centralisers who flooded into the Midwest after the failed revolutions of 1848. Confederate General Richard Taylor recorded in his memoirs that when he surrendered at the end of the war, a German Union general lectured him on how Southerners were now to be taught true Americanism.  Taylor was the grandson of a Revolutionary officer and the son of a President. (Does this maybe give you a little hint of where Straussians and Neocons are coming from when they claim exclusive monopoly on the meaning of America?)  These Germans made the most solid core of Lincoln’s support, with the possible exception of tariff-protected manufacturers and New England “intellectuals.”


2) The film can open the door on another dirty little secret.  We have heard a lot about immigrant criminal gangs. The fact that vigilante law prevailed over much of the North before and during the war has been conveniently forgotten. Besides the tens of thousands of his critics Lincoln jailed without due process, thousands more were killed, injured, intimidated, and run out of town by proto-fascist gangs of Republican bully boys called “Wide Awakes.”  They played a major role in making sure Northern elections turned out right, i.e., Republicans won.  And you thought ugly mob violence was something that only happened in the South!


3) Although the film does not give a satisfactory view of the New York City draft riots, it lets us in on at least part of the secret when the draft rioters point out the $300 men who had bought exemption from conscription. The fact is that no affluent Northerner fought in the war if he didn’t want to - certainly not Rockefeller, Morgan, Gould, Swift, Armor, Goodyear, and the others who were making fortunes out of government contracts.  Nor most of the patricians - only one of five military age Adamses served and Teddy Roosevelt’s father bought an exemption. Lincoln’s worthless son Robert spent most of the war at Harvard.  Sherman once complained that men of wealth were found in the ranks of the Southern army and lamented that Northerners were not like that.


But that is not all the story. The “riots” did not start out as race pogroms, though they degenerated into that. They started out as organised civic resistance to the draft, encouraged by the Democratic state government. Everyone knew very well that the Lincolnites enforced the draft at a much higher rate in areas that opposed them than they did in Republican areas - according to studies by the New York playwright and historian John Chodes, the draft was imposed in New York City at four times the rate for Massachusetts.  And the conscripts were well aware that they stood a good chance of being used up as cannon fodder by Republicans who knew if they lost four men for every Southerner killed they would still end up on top, as long as the immigrant flow kept up. About a fourth of the total enrollment of Lincoln’s armies were immigrants, many of whom were brought over and paid bounties for enlisting. The situation was so bad that the Pope sent persuasive priestly orators to Ireland to warn the people about being used up for Union cannon fodder.


Perhaps we can begin to recognize the historical fact that millions of Northern citizens did not willingly go along with Lincoln’s war. And the opponents were not limited to the New York City draft rioters.  Who opposed the war: free traders who were on to the Republican tariff game; traditional Jeffersonians and descendants of Revolutionary families (outside of New England) who understood that killing Southerners and overthrowing legitimate state governments, as well as suppressing freedom of speech and press, were not exactly what the Founding Fathers had in mind; Irish and German Catholics, though that history has been suppressed as one of the fruits of Lincoln’s victory.


The truth is that Lincoln’s party did not save the Union and the Constitution. It was a Jacobin party that seized power and revolutionized the North as well as conquering the South. Gangs of New York can perhaps open a window that will encourage further historical discovery along these lines.


Alas, the wrong lesson is drawn by one of the usually fine writers at Vdare.com, Steve Sailer, who sees the movie as Scorcese  making points for immigrants against the natives.  According to Sailer: “When the Civil War came, many Irish and other immigrants in New York City refused to fight for the Union that had given them refuge.”


Wait a minute. That was a civil war going on here. Can a newcomer really be faulted for not wanting to take sides in a civil war?  I think rather it shows real patriotism and good sense. And how about that “refuge.”  Here is a Dublin paper commenting in 1861: “We cannot but recollect that in the South our countrymen were safe from insult and persecution, while ‘Nativeism’ and ‘Know-Nothingism’ assailed them in the North.” Sailer is a well-known advocate of immigration restriction, but immigrants are OK, it seems, when they kill Southerners.


How about John Mitchel, the Irish patriot who had been exiled to Van Diemen’s land, from whence he escaped to the land of freedom, where he joined the Confederate cause of liberty, to which he gave the lives of two sons?  It is not true, by the way, that the Union General Burnside’s sacrifice of the Irish Brigade at Fredericksburg was a great exhibit of Irish devotion to the Union cause? The so-called enthusiasm was political propaganda drummed up by Republican promotion of Gen. Meagher as an Irish leader, which he wasn’t. Irish recruiting fell off sharply after Fredericksburg.


Let me recommend to those who want to use conditions in the War of Southern Independence for the otherwise worthy cause of immigration restriction a recent work: Clear the Confederate Way!  The Irish in the Army of Northern Virginia by Kelly J. O’Grady.  The book covers much more than the title suggests.  And while you are at it, take a look also at The Jewish Confederates by Robert N. Rosen.


The film bypasses yet another little secret, an unknown matter that is finally exposed in Dr. Samuel Mitcham’s The Greatest Lynching in American History:  New York, 1863 (Shotwell Publishing, 2020).  In response to the riots the city paid the $300 exemption fee for the conscripted men.  So much for Northern enthusiasm for Lincoln’s war.

No, I am not referring to (X)Roots or to Ken Burns’s pseudo-history.  My subject is the film Guns of Honor. Most of the world knows of the Hollywood celebrity “Martin Sheen,” (born and baptized Ramon Antonio Gerardo Estevez). Much of the world knows that he portrayed General Robert E. Lee in the film Gettysburg.  I am even on record mildly complimenting his performance. Few people know that Sheen played an admirable Confederate officer in another movie. It was known as Guns of Honor, released in 1994. Here is the official description by the producing company: “A stellar cast, including Martin Sheen (Gettysburg), Christopher Atkins (The Blue Lagoon) and Jurgen Prochnow (Interceptor) star in this fast and furious adventure set across the Rio Grande just after the great Civil War.  Defeated Confederate soldiers, branded outlaws by their own government, are recruited for one final mission to restore their lost glory. Aided by a beautiful former Southern spy, they are assigned to run guns to the Mexican government. After blasting it out with the local rebels, these renegades must then pass through territory controlled by the invading French army.  With nothing to lose, they ride bravely into battle, determined to regain their honor and prepared for anything that lies ahead!” 


I once owned a VHS of this movie and it was not bad, Sheen being, of course, the admirably brave, honourable, and able Confederate commander.  Foolishly, I tossed out the VHS tape thinking that I would replace it with a DVD. Well, I have the newly purchased DVD. The cover of the disc container shows Sheen and Atkins, well-armed, before a very large waving Confederate flag, just as did the VHS container.  The back cover of the disc holder displays word for word the description cited above, as does the selling information on Amazon. But, alas, an entirely different movie has been substituted on the DVD. It is a film, from the same company the same year, formerly called Trigger Fast. In what now is sold as Guns of Honor  there are no Mexicans, nothing taking place across the Rio Grande, no Confederate flags or uniforms, no beautiful Southern spy, no French army, no glory, lost or otherwise, and no General Sheridan (who  appears  as a character in the real Guns of Honor). Sheen and Prochnow barely appear, in the first few minutes of the substitute.  Trigger Fast is not bad and seems to be more or less about ex-Confederates suffering under Reconstruction in Texas.  This theme is so vaguely and faintly portrayed that most viewers will not understand that Sheen, Prochnow and other good people are ex-Confederates.  They will assume that this is just one more Western with an evil cattle baron against the small fry.


What can explain this deception other than as an attempt to delete the Confederacy from film history? This is certainly Orwellian as well as probably an actionable bit of fraudulent advertising. Somewhere the real Guns of Honor still exists, perhaps in a foreign country or in cyberspace. We ought to find it and make it available, even if we have to bootleg it.

A noted Southern writer sent this comment in response to our earlier discussion of **Gods and Generals:


“I was invited to preview the director’s cut of G&G in 2002 or 2003.  When several friends and I went out at the intermission, we were all streaming tears. I was mostly deeply moved, and no less by the movie’s second half. One scene that particularly moved me showed two slaves talking over a soldier’s coffin in camp. One had been the slave of the now dead Confederate soldier. The other asked him how he felt about freedom, did he plan to run away, etc. The dialogue was precisely what you expect from slaves conflicted between love for the masters they had grown up with and desire for freedom. Last line was the dead soldier’s slave saying, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do now, but I know this much [tapping on the coffin], this Rebel’s in heaven.’ I bawled. Then the movie came out. The scene that had so moved me nowhere appeared, but instead had been substituted by the wretched sequence with Donzalea Abernathy, the slave in Fredericksburg, quoting a long and not pertinent passage out of Esther.  Not possible to tell you how disappointed and disgusted I was. Fear struck Maxwell, it appears, over the impact of that scene and its truthfulness.”

The War for Southern Independence (continued):  The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

​
**Searching for Lincoln (2015) cannot be praised too highly.  It is a compendium of suppressed truth that the world has long been waiting for, skillfully produced and perfectly on target.   It takes as its mission the correction of the multiple falsehoods of “what everybody knows” about Honest Abe and his role in history. There is a temperate, pictorial, and hard-hitting review of the real as opposed to the fantasy Lincoln in such matters as race, slavery, the Constitution, economic motives, war on civilians, POWs, and much else.   Perhaps the greatest points of emphasis are two neglected truths: 1) Lincoln did not wage war to save the Union or the Constitution.  He waged war to preserve government power.   2) He is responsible for the dangerously unlimited regime under which we suffer today.  Until Americans understand that and free themselves from Lincoln worship we will continue in subjection.


**Searching for Lincoln is almost entirely a Northern production, created by Eugene and Dete McGowan. Well-known Southern defenders participated in the creation, including Professor Thomas DiLorenzo and the brave doyenne of Copperheads, Mrs. Valerie Protopapas of New York. Get a copy for your children and grandchildren and anyone else you know who is suffering through a current educational institution at any level. Perfect Christmas presents for friends and relatives.

 (T)Field of Lost Shoes (2015).  I have written a good bit about the treatment of the South in film. A new entry into that dubious field is the recent Field of Lost Shoes. It purports to tell the story of the Virginia Military Institute cadets who at great sacrifice participated in driving back the invading Yankee arsonists and vandals at the Battle of New Market in 1864.  It does enact this bit of history, sort of, after a fashion.


In 96 minutes, including a half hour of battle action, you will not be offended by even a faint glimpse of a (shudder!) Confederate flag.  (This horrid object is apparently now banned entirely from V.M.I., even in commemorations of New Market.)  The first 10 minutes are devoted to a slave auction in which brutal Southerners break up a family—quite unlikely in Lexington, Virginia, in 1864. We see a flashback of this as the cadets march toward battle, reminding us that, after all, they were fighting against noble opponents who wanted only to free the slaves.


At midpoint we have a severe beating given to an intelligent, kindly slave for something he did not do.  We see Lincoln morally offended that the Confederates are sending “boys to be massacred.”  But this is absurd.  There were plenty of soldiers in both armies as young as were the cadets. Besides, Lincoln inaugurated the bloodshed, although he doubtless did not anticipate the great volume that followed, and he could have avoided it or stopped it at any moment if he had been willing to give up the benefits the war brought to his political party and to Northern Big Money men. (At least in this one, Lincoln is correctly ugly, does not look like a movie star.)

The civilian population of Virginia seems to be fat and prosperous and suffering no privations in 1864 although their region had been repeatedly sacked and looted by Yankee soldiers.  V.M.I.’s first Jewish cadet, Moses Ezekiel, later to become one of America’s greatest sculptors, is portrayed as being doubtful about the Confederate cause. There is no evidence that he was ever anything other than a loyal Southerner. I suppose it was thought that since he was Jewish he had to be a “Liberal.”

Grandmother always said that when you have to critisise you should add something nice if you can:  There is a good and sympathetic portrayal of John C. Breckinridge by the Brit actor Jason Isaacs. The characters actually talk like Southerners and some of the time even act like Southerners.  The battle scene is vivid, although not very accurate, I think.

It could have been worse, I suppose, but with a little honesty it could have been much better.

Here are some films that mainly concern the North, but are worthwhile because they have some realism in their treatment of the dangerous myth of the righteous Union cause.


**Gore Vidal’s Lincoln (1988).  Most film portrayals of Lincoln are hagiographic fantasies (the worst example being (X) Young Mr. Lincoln with Henry Fonda).  This presentation, though sympathetic, is realistic about the shrewd politician Lincoln (Sam Waterston).  It presents a fairly candid view of Lincoln’s character, of his unstable wife, his devious associates, his loser son Robert, and the seamier side of wartime Washington.


My take on Spielberg’s celebrated (X)Lincoln will appear in a later chapter.

**The Andersonville Trial (1971). This is a dramatisation of the 1865 military trial and condemnation of Captain Henry Wirz, commander of the Confederate prison camp at Andersonville, Georgia.  Richard Basehart plays Wirz effectively.  The film is tinged with Northern righteousness but manages to show some of the moral ambiguity, propaganda lies, and perjured testimony which characterised the acts of the Radical Republicans who ruled at the time.

**The Prisoner of Shark Island (1936) shows the ruthless imprisonment of Dr. Samuel Mudd of Maryland, an honourable man who was guilty of treating Booth’s injuries.

(T) Gangs of New York (2002).  My analysis of this award-winning Scorsese blockbuster appears in a later chapter.

(X) The Conspirator (2010) about the trial and execution of Mary Surratt as an alleged Lincoln assassination conspirator.  This film whitewashes the brutality and illegality of her imprisonment and trial and the anti-Catholicism and paranoia of the Radical Republicans who executed her.  There is even a suggestion that Mrs. Surratt might not have been hanged if her son had not escaped.  What kind of people nonchalantly kill the mother because they can’t catch the son?


(T) Copperhead (2013).  Ron Maxwell’s rendering of Harold Frederic’s 1893 novel about persecution of an antiwar family in upstate New York Lincolnite territory.


WHAT COULD BE:  A truthful life of Bedford Forrest would be a great contribution to American history and refute a lot of conventional lies.  Any number of events in Forrest’s career would make a great movie:  Brice’s Crossroads, an honest presentation of Fort Pillow, the epic recounted in Donald Davidson’s poem “The Running of Streight,” and many others. 

A life of Jefferson Davis would make a marvelous three-part series:  up to the point of his being elected President; the War; and his imprisonment and postwar life.  This would be a very American work.  Mrs. Varina Howell Davis is one of the most remarkable women in American history—intelligent, hard working, brave, loyal, and participant in a long span of American history.  Compared to Mary Todd Lincoln, who was unstable, insanely jealous, embezzled White House funds, and ended her life in an asylum.  A biopic of Varina would be marvellous, right up to her passing away as an honoured citizen of New York.  (I pray regularly to my Maker that nobody makes a film out of the recent awful book Varina by the scalawag writer Charles Fraser).  A film about the Davises could be realistic, not like the fantasies which must be concocted about the Lincolns.


Jeb Stuart is an intrinsically interesting character.  The epic voyages of Raphael Semmes, one of the most interesting characters of the time, would be a natural.  Any one of the 100 events in James R. Kennedy’s Uncle Seth Fought the Yankees would make a popular flick.


EXECRABLES:   Evil Confederates appear in a great many movies recently.  Often they are vicious killers of women and children.  The ignorance and malice of those who are responsible for these films is unforgivable.  How to explain?  They think it will sell, but most importantly we have here the well-recognised phenomenon of bad people projecting their own sins onto others. Yankee atrocities against Southern civilians are as heavily documented as anything in history and were indeed official policy, but nothing remotely similar can be found on the Confederate side.
 
Here are some WBTS losers to avoid at all costs:

(X) Cold Mountain, based on the scalawag novel that misrepresents Western North Carolina in the War between the States and serves no purpose except to assure Yankees that Confederates were not only evil but stupid.  The movie incorporates every hackneyed cliché about Southern white people:  rapists, incestuous, murderous, treacherous, ignorant, dimwitted, hypocritical, etc.  The novelist Charles Fraser has discovered the key to the bank—trash the homefolks and cater to the outsiders’ hostile beliefs.  One fears that some people actually believe this driveling parody of history.   


(X) The Beguiled, some viewers find this Clint Eastwood vehicle interesting from the psychological viewpoint, but it looks to me more like a Yankee fantasy about loose Southern women.                                              

(X) The Horse Soldiers:  This John Wayne adventure tale seems to be popular, but it incorporates every anti-Southern idea in the catalog.  There are an insipid Southern belle, vicious rednecks, and stupid Confederates who lose every battle.  It is about a heroic Yankee cavalry raid in the South—false in its premise because most such raids were designed to rob and terrorise civilians and were usually thwarted by Forrest or other Southern cavalrymen and had to retreat to their base.  It also shows Yankee benevolence toward Black people, which anyone who knows anything about the behaviour of Northern soldiers can only find unbelievable.  Worst of all, it tacks on a fictional misplacement of the story of the Virginia Military Institute cadets at New Market and uses that for some comic relief. Directed by John Ford, who was in his 70s and said to be dissatisfied with the film.   

(X )Last Stand at Saber River.   Tom Selleck is a Confederate soldier who returns home and is harassed by bad Yankees.  Could have been a good and true story.  But wait a minute.  It seems he has deserted because of the evil Gen. Forrest’s brutal massacre of unarmed prisoners at Fort Pillow (which, of course, is not true) and he is also harassed by a crazy Confederate who wants to continue the war, a man who incidentally kills women and kidnaps children.  This vileness is based on a story by the Hollywood crime writer Elmore Leonard, who knows less about The War than my neighbour’s cat.


(X) The Run of the Arrow with Rod Steiger as a mean and unlikely Confederate.

(X) Operator 13:  The fair Marion Davies as a mulatto Union spy.         

(X) The Last Outlaw, with Mickey Rourke, nonsense.

(X) Alvarez Kelly, which turns the dashing cattle raid of Confederate cavalry on Grant’s supplies into a vicious personal vendetta. 

(X) Journey to Shiloh which seems to have no purpose except to show how bad Confederates were.    

(X) A Time for Killing also known as (X) The Long Ride Home (not the Randy Travis version), Confederate rapists and murderers.

(X) North and South, trashy John Jakes pseudo-historical fiction made into trashy TV series. 

(X) Mosby’s Marauders, a weak unreal TV series—besides Mosby’s men were not marauders. The Yankees were.                                                              

(X)Saddle the Wind, silly.                                                                              

(X) Sommersby (1993), Jodie Foster and Richard Gere in a pointless rip-off of the French classic The Return of Martin Guerre. 

Ignorance and malevolence are evident in recent online ads for some Confederate films, written by people with no knowledge but with pre-programmed assumptions.   The Southern chivalry displayed in **Rocky Mountain becomes “Rebels use a Yankee bride to lure Union troops into Indian country.”   The official notice of (X)Alvarez Kelly describes Gen. Tom Rosser, leader of the splendid Confederate cattle raid, as a “brutal Southern officer.”  This for a man who was in business in Minnesota just after the war, was a U.S. consul in Canada, and served the U.S. Army in the Spanish-American War. I wonder if people in Minnesota thought he was a sadist?  The flick Way Down South is described as about “segregation” in antebellum Louisiana.  Now Louisiana had slavery before the war but it did not have “segregation” until fifty years later.  Segregation was invented by Yankees who were repulsed at the everyday intimacy of black and white people in the South.


Despite occasional good spots, we all know that Hollywood now has Confederates slated most of the time to be unrelievedly evil.  I saw a feminist revenge flick, which shall remain nameless here, that opens with Confederate soldiers attacking a town, directing artillery against a church full of civilians, killing women, and shooting little children in the back.  Let us say that this scenario is not only untrue but is a complete reversal of the truth.  These are things the boys in blue might do, not our people.  Do I sense that familiar psychological phenomenon of “projection” at work - blaming others for our own sins?


The worst thing about Hollywood’s hatred of the South is it deprives not only Southerners but all Americans of our history and renders our forebears into alien and dead abstractions. There is yet another evil product—the sense of righteousness which has been an American problem since the first Puritans sailed into Massachusetts Bay.  If Sherman burning his way through Georgia and South Carolina was a holy exercise against evil, then obviously dropping bombs and missiles on women and children two thousand miles away who have done us no harm is OK. 


And what to say about the two television films from which most Americans seem to have gotten their knowledge about the War Between the States?  (X) Roots:  a fantasy which dissolves when you understand that black slavery was invented and sustained by Africans and that transfer to the South was a net gain for Africans and their descendants.  (T) Ken Burns’s The Civil War:  A wealth of intrinsically interesting material carefully crafted by a biased agenda of presentistic propaganda. 

(X)Roots and Ken Burns are likely to show the way to what we can expect from now on in popular media portrayals. It is a strange and unsettling feeling for an aware Southerner to know that he and his are the objects of hatred and lies from fellow citizens who he has never harmed and toward whom he has never intended any harm. But for the most part, Southerners do not even notice. We are an easy-going and tolerant Christian people and do not go out of our way to search out and deplore what other people are up to. Besides, as the late Tom Landess once observed, Southerners are so used to abuse that, like an old injury, we hardly notice it.

Interestingly, one of the major Northern characters in Gettysburg is played by a Southerner—Texan Sam Elliott as John Buford (not entirely off since Buford was from Kentucky and had a cousin who was a Confederate general). Even more peculiar, Johnny Cash is cast as John Brown in (X)The North and the South miniseries and Texan Rip Torn plays U.S. Grant in the miniseries (T)The Blue and the Gray. Think about it. I suspect it is because it is Southerners who best convey the persona of Old Americans and that movie creators gravitate to this unconsciously.

Ronald Maxwell’s Civil War films are achievements for the ages. They are a  glorious and courageous homage to real American history.  They show that at least one American filmmaker is still capable of creating an epic and still has an authentic respect for the American past. (I understand that Maxwell has sought to raise funding for the final film of his War between the States venture, to be called “The Last Full Measure,” but has so far been unsuccessful.)


**Gettysburg  (1993).  It is interesting that Confederates get a bit more screen time and the main Confederate characters are highlighted while the only featured Union characters are (Southern-born) Sam Elliott as Brig. Gen. John Buford (also Southern), and Jeff Daniels as a well-played Col. Joshua Chamberlain. Chicagoan Tom Berenger’s Longstreet is about as good as can be hoped for.  After many viewings and the passage of time I do see a few weaknesses in Gettysburg. These are due to the script following the Shaara  novel The Killer Angels as a source rather than actual history. Important parts of the battle are overlooked but that is probably unavoidable from time limits. While Pickett was not the brightest star in the galaxy, I don’t think he was as great a buffoon as he is played. Some of the conversations do not ring true, although I grant they provide useful information that otherwise could not be worked in. I don’t care for the bit of Yankee superiority where the Irish immigrant makes fun of the speech of  Southern soldiers whose grandfathers founded the U.S. As the biographer of General Pettigrew, I can assure you that the scene in which he offers Longstreet a copy of his book before the great charge is very implausible. The film could have used more genuine rousing Southern music to portray the Confederate spirit.


Get the tar and feathers ready, boys. Here goes:  I know that Martin Sheen is rightly disliked for his personal politics, but allowing that no one living can possibly represent Lee, I think he does not do too bad a job, much better than Robert Duvall’s Lee in Gods and Generals.  Sheen’s Lee is believable  as a deeply moral and great man.


**Gods and Generals  (2003).  This is somewhat more satisfying of Maxwell’s two, in my always humble opinion, because it covers more time and has a remarkable portrayal of Stonewall Jackson as a man and a great leader.  The New Yorker Stephen Lang does well in the part.  It also illustrates Yankee atrocities and makes clear that Southern soldiers are defending their homeland.  The music is good.  It would have been well to show more of Jackson at his height in the Valley campaign, but only so much can be done in a few hours.  As I said above, I don’t think Robert Duvall is successful as Lee, although he is a great actor of Southern demeanour who has played many parts superbly.  In 1861 Lee was a man  in vigourous late middle age with a daring military genius lurking just below the surface. Duvall, in my opinion, makes him too old and has the wrong accent. Duvall is too redneck to be Robert E. Lee, as pleasing as it is to have him aboard.  


While Yankee atrocities against civilians are shown there is one misleading  note. A Fredericksburg family has their black maid claim that the house is hers on the theory that the Yankees would therefore not loot it. This is pure phony Yankee righteousness. Anyone who has looked closely at the behaviour of Yankee soldiers in the South knows that they were more likely, not less likely, to abuse and rob black people than white.  Black people had less hope of an effective protest. 

**The Littlest Rebel  (1935). Who can possibly forget “America’s sweetheart” Shirley Temple and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson in this pleasant bit of Americana. Of course, there is the obligatory falsely benevolent Lincoln.


**Hunter’s Raid:  The Battle of Lynchburg  (2010).  This  is an excellent  docudrama, independently and locally created by the Historic Sandusky  Foundation of Virginia. It portrays the massive Union raid of 1864 and its defeat by the old men and boys of Virginia. Remarkable and ought to be imitated all over the South. The subtitle is “Defending Hearth & Home.”

**Rocky Mountain (1950). A rare and moving Hollywood treatment of Confederate chivalry.  Errol Flynn leads a small party of Southern soldiers on a mission in the California outback.  In the end they die fighting defending Northern women from hostile redskins.  The last scene shows a  Northern officer raising a Confederate flag on a mountaintop in honour of  these heroic  Southern men. It is said that Ronald Reagan wanted Flynn’s role.

**Ride with the Devil  (1999). A compelling and realistic picture of Yankee depredations in Missouri during the War Between the States and the Southern resistance. It is faithfully based on the novel Woe to the Living  by  Arkansas novelist Daniel Woodrell who also wrote the book on which the  acclaimed Winter’s Bone was based.  The Northern stars Tobey Maguire, Jewel, and Jeffrey Wright and the Brit Jonathan Rhys-Myers seem to have no trouble playing Confederates. The film was created by the Chinese director Ang Lee, with a remarkable freedom from the usual Yankee righteousness.

**The Outlaw Josey Wales  (1976). Clint Eastwood is a Southern survivor of Yankee ethnic cleansing in western Missouri.  Like many such he heads to Texas to start a new life on the frontier. Based on a book by Asa Earl Carter, a speechwriter for Governor George C. Wallace of Alabama. Carter also wrote the “Native American classic” The Education of Little Tree.

(T) Ambush at Cimarron Pass (1958). Clint Eastwood had one of his most substantial early roles as a Confederate.

**Drums in the Deep South  (1950). An OK war movie with good guy Confederates.

**The Guns of Fort Petticoat  (1957). Inspiring and well-told story of women, their men folk all away fighting for Dixie, organising and countering a big Indian attack.

**Pharaoh’s Army  (1995). The realistic experiences of a Kentucky mother and son after Yankees take over their homestead. 

(T) Ironclads (1991). A pretty good presentation of the historic battle between the Virginia and the Monitor in 1862 and of the Confederate Navy hero Catesby Jones. Alas, you have to wade through a lot of unreal Hollywood stuff about a female spy, romance, slavery, etc. to get to the battle.

**The Rose and the Jackal  (1990).  An interesting though fictionalised  account of the Confederate spy Rose O’Neal Greenhow as prisoner of the Yankees. Good on the darkness of Yankee-occupied Washington. 

​**The Field of Lost Shoes  (2014). My take on this film will appear in a later chapter.

**Firetrail  and  **The Last Confederate: Here are two excellent films that are surprisingly  recent.  These are largely the product of regional inspiration and regional talent on both sides of the camera and reflect genuine regional memory, a thing rare in America and even rarer in cinema. As renderings of historical experience they are faithful and subtly artistic. Costume, action, dialogue, and personalities carry conviction as a representation of the real experiences of real Americans in the horrors  of  Sherman’s  terrorist  campaign against  Southern  civilians.  Contemporary manners-challenged viewers might find the dialogue in Firetrail and The Last Confederate a little slow and stilted, but it captures truly the times and the people portrayed. In those days they understood what George Garrett has written: that manners are a recognition that our fellow human creatures, all of them, are made in the image of God.


**Firetrail (2007).  This gem about South Carolina during Sherman’s criminal campaign has accurately been called “superbly directed” and “genuine and authentic.”  It is amazing that this vivid and truthful re-creation of history could be produced these days.  The little-known Southern actors, men and women, are wonderfully true.  A must see.  WARNING: a shortened version of Firetrail  was marketed in 2014.  This version is so hacked up it is not worth your time.



**The Last Confederate (2005).  Like the preceding item, this film seems to have been largely made by Southerners.  It is another great truthful  retelling of South Carolina during Sherman’s  March.  This and Firetrail come as close as is possible to showing the real experience  of Southern  soldiers and civilians.  Both are well-told and with appealing characters.   Amazing  achievements for this day and time. 

**So Red the Rose (1935).  A Mississippi plantation family in the war, based on the Stark Young novel. This film is admired by many Southerners.  It has many fine scenes. Randolph Scott is very good. The cast, mostly non-Southern, tries a little too hard on the accents.  Sometimes, in my opinion, it gets a little too precious in its portrayal of plantation life, although sound on The War. A major flaw is the plantation master played by a comic actor as almost a drunken buffoon. I suppose the creators of the film thought they needed some supposed humour.


**The Hunley (1999).  A pretty good rendering of the story of the innovative, heroic, and tragic Confederate submersible that tried to break the blockade at Charleston.  The only bad aspect is a truly ridiculous mis-portrayal of General Beauregard by the Canadian Donald Sutherland. He actually did not bother to learn anything about Beauregard before acting the role.


**Hangman’s Knot (1952).  A party of Confederates faces a dilemma when they realise they have seized a Yankee gold shipment not knowing the war was over.  They are, of course, honourable men, and led by Randolph Scott,  try to do the right thing.  In the process they fight bad Yankees and protect good ones.

**The Angel of Marye’s Heights  (2010).  A good treatment of Confederate soldier Richard Kirkland, who risked his life to tend Yankee wounded on the battlefield of Fredericksburg. According to the jacket he is an “American” hero. Strange, I have never heard of any “American”  Yankee doing anything comparable. Especially good because it shows Kirkland’s  family and background, giving a true idea of who Confederate soldiers were.

**Great Day in the Morning  (1956).  Southern miners in  Colorado outwit  the Yankees and get their silver to the Confederacy.

(T) The Last Outpost , aka Cavalry Command  (1951).  Ronald Reagan, a second-string Hollywood actor of whom you may have heard, wears the gray and leads brave and honourable Confederates, flags flying, to the rescue.

(T) The Undefeated  (1969)  A mildly interesting account of Union and Confederate soldiers getting together to fight Mexicans at the end of the war—if you can stand “Rock Hudson” as a Confederate.

(T) Two Flags West  (1950). Another one about Confederate POWs helping  the Union fight Indians in the West.

**The Gray Ghost  (1957). A one season TV series about Col. John S. Mosby. Bold, smart, and honourable  Confederates. Too bad there are not more episodes.

(T) The Blue and the Gray  (1982). Somewhat watchable miniseries that  makes an effort to be even-handed.

(T) The Eagle and the Hawk (1950). Confederate John Payne helps Mexicans against the French invaders.

(T) Escape from Fort Bravo (1953) and (T) Major Dundee (1965).  Sometimes interesting  accounts of Confederate POWs in imaginary far West prison camps.
More discussion of War for Southern Independence films will appear in the next several chapters.

Symbols Used

** ​Indicates one of the more than 100 most recommended films.  The order in which they appear does not reflect any ranking, only the convenience of discussion.

(T)   Tolerable but not among the most highly recommended

(X)   Execrable.  Avoid at all costs

​NOTE:  Most of the research for this book was done in the age of the DVD.  “Streaming” is now becoming dominant.  There should be no difficulty in finding the recommended films in that medium.

This piece was originally published in 2019.

​If Amistad is not yet a household word like ET or Jurassic Park, it soon will be with the power of Steven Spielberg behind it.  (When I started this review awhile back, that was my first sentence, but I may have been wrong.  Late reports indicate the box office is lagging.) 


Amistad is really two movies. One, about the 19th century slave commerce between West Africa and Latin America, is a good piece of film-making. The other, about American politics and law, is completely hokey and misleading.


Nobody knows for sure, but from the mid-1500s to the mid-1800s between11 and 15 million black Africans were transported to the New World, a vast undeveloped region with a voracious appetite for unskilled labour.  Every maritime nation in Europe participated in this trade. Only about five to six percent of the Africans ended up in North America, the vast majority going to South America and the Caribbean.  By the time of the Amistad incident, 1839, the market was largely limited to Cuba, a Spanish colony, and Portuguese Brazil. And the shippers involved were limited to Spanish, Portuguese, and American New Englanders.


In case you haven’t heard, the Amistad was a Spanish ship bound from West Africa with captured slaves to be sold in Cuba. The captives revolted and killed most of the crew.  After drifting for a long time, the ship was intercepted by a U.S. coast guard vessel and taken into a Connecticut port. (How it got that far north is not made clear in the movie.)


Thus the Amistad case relates largely to the history of West Africa and Latin America.  Only by an accident of navigation did it become an American issue, and then only as a case in admiralty and diplomacy. In the long run it was a minor case that set no precedents. Spielberg wants to make this incident bear the whole weight of the American slavery that lasted two and a half centuries and the Great Unpleasantness that ended it. Thousands of Amistad study kits were sent out to schools with this goal. The trouble is, as an account of American history, the thing will not bear the weight.  The Amistad had exactly nil influence on (eve of Civil War figures) the nearly four million American slaves (most of whom had been here for some generations); on the 395,000 slaveholding families; on the 488,000 free blacks (most of whom, contrary to the usual assumption, were in the South); nor on the issues and events which led to the bloodiest war in American history.  Of course, if there had been no slavery and no slave trade, there would today be no such thing as an African-American. The people would not exist.


One of Spielberg’s assistants called me early on, wanting advice on the characterisation of John C. Calhoun, who I am supposed to know something about.  For a moment visions of fat Hollywood fees danced before my eyes. Then, I remembered what Grandmother said:  Stand up straight, look ‘em in the eye, and always tell the truth. I had to say, well Calhoun had nothing to do with the Amistad case and nothing to say about it.  (The assistant, by the way, identified himself as a South Carolinian. By his speech and the fact that he had had a scholarship to Harvard, I assume he is an African-American.  He was very good, almost as slick as a young Strom Thurmond. I would advise him to come home and go into politics.)


Calhoun is shown in the movie (and the actor who plays him is good, by the way) as declaiming about slavery and impending civil war in relation to the case. This did not happen and could not have.  I have since learned where they got it.  Like Ken Burns, Spielberg’s people have been taken in by the great Boston-o-centric stream of American myth and “history.”  They got the idea of using Calhoun from Samuel F. Bemis’s romanticised biography, John Quincy Adams and the Union, as well as the idea that the case was some kind of major event and triumph for Adams. The idea of having Adams, one of the nastiest major figures in American history, portrayed by Anthony Hopkins as a shrewd, cuddly old teddy bear, I assume they thought up in Hollywood itself.  Get his picture and look at that cold hateful face some time. I guarantee the next time you have indigestion you will see it in your nightmare as one of the devils tormenting you in Hell. Randolph of Roanoke called him Blifel after the Puritan hypocrite in Tom Jones.


Bemis claimed that Calhoun introduced resolutions in the Senate on the Amistad case to “thwart” Adams.  (The statesman Calhoun never acted from such petty motives.)  Bemis even quoted two of the resolutions, conveniently leaving out the third which was specific.  In fact, Calhoun’s concern at this time was a different question.  British officials in Bermuda and the Bahamas were undertaking to free the slaves on American coastal vessels that came by stress of weather into their waters (It was common for plantation families to move with their slaves from the South Atlantic to the Gulf coast states by ship.) The British freed any who came into their hands, as a matter of policy. They also executed those guilty of killing, like the Amistad Africans, and later paid indemnity to the U.S., an admission of illegality.


Adams was at this time a marginailsed figure, a failed President who could not even get elected Governor of Massachusetts.  Calhoun was much more influential at this point.  By falsely setting up Adams as an antagonist to Calhoun, Bemis and the movie lend more importance to Adams than is deserved.  There is also the question of motivation.  It is all a love of liberty on Adams’s part, according to this rendering. (Part of the larger myth that the later brutal conquest of the Southern people by the government to establish a political and economic empire, something Adams longed for but did not live to see, was to be entirely explained as a righteous crusade to free the suffering black man.)


Adams had become President in an election that was brokered in the House of Representatives under cries of a “corrupt bargain.” He had proceeded to propose grandiose plans of centralisation and mercantilism, repudiating everything that had been taught by Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe. He was immediately shot down and destroyed by Southern strict constructionists. He hated what one of his descendants called “the sable genius of the South” and devoted his last years to attacking it.  It had nothing to do with freedom or with the welfare of people of African origin.


Foreign importation of slaves to the U.S. was illegal and negligible after 1808.  Participation in the slave trade to other countries was also illegal for Americans.  But in fact, New Englanders, who had plenty of shipping, continued to invest and participate in the traffic from Africa to Latin America on a considerable scale, including the Brown family who endowed Brown University, and Thomas H. Perkins, the Boston merchant prince who bankrolled Daniel Webster’s career, as well as many lesser fry. The last known New England slave ship, sailing out of Maine, was captured in1862, a year in which oceans of blood were being shed for the alleged purpose of freeing the slaves.


By the 1830s the British, who had not long before been the largest slave traffickers in the world, had declared emancipation (of a sort) in their colonies and undertaken to suppress the transatlantic trade by naval power.  Many governments, including the U.S., approved the object, but they were not too happy about the Brits claiming rights of search and seizure of other countries’ ships on the high seas, something which indeed Americans had declared war against in 1812.  In 1842, Americans agreed to participate in the suppression of the trade as long as the Brits followed strictly laid out rules.  Southern naval officers, diplomats, and other officeholders carried out their duties in this regard conscientiously and generally favored the policy.  For instance, Henry A. Wise, later governor of Virginia and a Confederate general, while he was U.S. Minister to Brazil in the 1840s made serious efforts to intercept the New Englanders trading Africans to that country.


The fact was, except for a few hotheads seeking to provoke the Yankees, there was no interest in the South in slave importations after the early 19th century, even though the demand was high. The natural increase was abundant, fertility and longevity being almost equal to the white. (There is still a difference today.) No one wanted to disrupt the settled and peaceful system that existed. The Confederate States Constitution, unlike that of the U.S., absolutely forbade foreign slave importations. The determination of Southerners to prevent malicious outsiders from interfering in their society is, of course, an entirely different question. Amistad diverts attention away from the real issues of American history.


Some other things about this movie that I find distorted.  Adams makes a pretty speech about liberty to the Supreme Court.  I do not find evidence that this speech was actually delivered.  What appears in the printed court record is legalistic, though it is possible the speech could have been made in unrecorded oral argument.  In the film, Cinque, the leader of the Amistad captives, is present in the Supreme Court, which did not happen.  And there is a totally fictional character, played by Morgan Freeman, an affluent free black man. Contra the film, no black man, no matter how affluent, would have been permitted to sit in a courtroom or ride in a carriage with white people in the North in 1839, especially in Connecticut.


This is mentioned in the film bur not dwelt on: The Northern judges who first dealt with the case ruled against the freedom of the Amistad captives.  The Supreme Court, with a majority of slaveholding Southerners, rendered the proper decision. The Africans had been illegally seized and were freed. Then, according to American law, they had to be sent back to Africa.  In addition, a law professor friend tells me the movie badly distorts the legal issues and proceedings of the case, though these take up most of the film.


Here is the real clincher, which you can bet is not in the movie. Samuel Eliot Morison, one of the leading American historians of all time, wrote in his Oxford History of the American People that Cinque, the leader of the Amistad blacks, went back to West Africa and became a slave trader himself (1965 edition, p. 520).  Being from Boston, Morison did not have to give any source for this statement and does not.   Some writers have affirmed, others have denied this story, none of them having cited any source. In fact, except for the court record, everything that has been portrayed about the Amistad case is in the realm of romance rather than historical scholarship. The court record is full of lawyers’ and diplomats’ lies, but at least it’s a document.


Morison’s story is inherently likely. He was well connected in New England maritime circles.  New England ships frequently went to the coast of West Africa to sell rum and buy slaves and could have easily heard news of Cinque.  Morison could have had the story word of mouth from an old man who had been there, or his descendants. Also, that Cinque became a slave trader is highly plausible.  What else could the man do? His native village had been dispersed.  West Africa had little else to trade for European goods except its people.  It would have been the best entrepreneurial opportunity open to him. The region’s economy and politics consisted largely of competition between chiefs for market share of captives to be sold.


To further develop the hokeyness of Amistad’s portrayal of American life and politics, let me review the unknown history of another slave ship case. In 1858, a U.S. navy vessel intercepted a suspicious looking ship near the Cuban coast.  It turned out to be the Echo out of Providence, Rhode Island, with over 400 Africans on board, many of them in very miserable condition. The officer who captured the slaver was John N. Maffitt, who a few years later would be famous as commander of the Confederate raider Florida.  The captain and owner of the slaver was Edward Townsend, a well-educated man from what passed for a good family in Rhode Island.  He alleged that the Africans were all war captives or families of executed criminals and he had saved them from certain death.  He also said that had he completed his voyage, he and his silent investors could have cleared $130,000, a staggering sum in those days.


Maffitt took Townsend to Key West to be prosecuted.  The Northern-born federal judge, later a Unionist, refused to take jurisdiction.  Maffitt then had him sent to Boston, where the court had jurisdiction on the presumed point of origin of the Echo. There the federal judge also refused to proceed and Townsend walked free, though guilty of a crime equivalent to piracy in U.S. and international law.


The Echo, its crew and captives were taken to Charleston. The people of Charleston provided them with food, clothing, and other necessities and treated them with sympathy.  The U.S, District Attorney in Charleston was James Conner, who a few years later would lose a leg fighting in the Confederate army.  Unable to get hold of Townsend, he vigorously prosecuted the crew.  The juries felt, however, probably correctly, that the miserable polyglot lot were as much victims as criminals, having been shanghaied or tricked into the voyage.  The mortality rate of the captives in the Yankee slave ship Echo was over 30 percent. The survivors were returned to Africa, though it was reported that many of them did not want to go. 


​I recount this case to provide some contrast to the cartoon version of the history of American slavery given in the movie. The movie gives a distorted picture and very possibly will arouse hatred at a time when it is the last thing needed.  The rehearsal of ancient guilt and outrage is not a healthy activity for Americans, African or otherwise. It requires selecting out a few scapegoats to blame for all the long record of the crimes, misfortunes, and follies of mankind. The psychologists call this projection. Its purpose is to save us the trouble of examining our own problems and sins.

You may read Part 1 here.

Colonial and Revolutionary Southern history does not have a strong presence in film, unless one counts the documentaries and pseudo-documentaries that make the Revolution a New England achievement and have George Washington and Thomas Jefferson talking like they came from Ohio. The celebrated television dramas about John Adams give him an anti-slavery opinion which he did not have at that time or ever, and portray Southerners as mincing fops or honourary Yankees like George Washington in (T) The Crossing.  (Will the television series (X)Sons of Liberty ever admit that Sam Adams was a slave owner?)

​** The New World (2005) is well-made and about as good as we are going to get for Jamestown and Captain John Smith and Pocahontas.  It brings out something of the drama and mystery of encounter with a new world.


 ** The Howards of Virginia (1940) is an example of a fairly sound treatment.  


(T) Sangaree (1953) is Hollywoodish but does give some idea of the early tobacco era in Virginia        


** The Patriot (2000), by Mel Gibson, is based (loosely) on the career of Francis Marion.  It makes some good points about some of the experiences of the War of Independence, although in presenting the war in South Carolina it is more of a comic book than a reliable history.


**The Great Meadow (1931).  Seeming a little innocent for the 21st century, this early talkie is an earnest effort to create for the screen Elizabeth Madox Roberts’s great novel of the early settlement of Kentucky.

​
WHAT COULD BE.  The Revolutionary War, after it was stalemated in the North, was won in the South, by Southerners.  But long ago the Revolution was made into a New England achievement and since then early American history has become irrelevant to a population that counts its origins in Ellis Island.   But imagine what a fantastic thing an independent free Southern film industry could be!  A real biography of Francis Marion; the British occupation and resistance in Charleston and South Carolina; the Battle of Kings Mountain; some of Simms’s Revolutionary War novels; the real life of Washington up to the point where he refused dictatorship and went home, like Cincinnatus; Morgan’s Virginia riflemen; a real life of Daniel Boone; the tragic fates of the South Carolina signers of the Declaration of Independence; the real Constitutional Convention before it was distorted by nationalist reinterpretation. There is nothing that I know of on Jefferson, beloved for generations by most Americans, except one silly piece on alleged miscegenation, (X) Jefferson in Paris.
​

Given today’s ignorant and fanatical hatred of Southern history, it is interesting how generally sympathetic treatment of antebellum society was before the 1960s.  

​
**Jezebel (1938).  Bette Davis plays an imperious Southern belle who is transformed by love into an angel of mercy. Davis won an Academy Award for this role. Like many movies, good and bad, Jezebel is set in New Orleans. Davis, although from Boston, is quite good.  It is said that she was given this role as a consolation prize for losing out on Scarlett O’Hara in **Gone with the Wind.   Jezebel is considered one of Davis’s best roles and one that marked her rise to stardom.


(T) Way Down South (1939). Set in antebellum Louisiana, this over-imaginative musical gives an idea of what people think the Old South was like.


(T) Reap the Wild Wind  (1942). An OK John Wayne adventure set in antebellum Charleston and Florida.


(T) The Iron Mistress (1952).  This film depicts the life of the great Deep South pioneer Jim Bowie as portrayed by Alan Ladd.  It contains one possible version of the disputed origin of the famous knife that carries Bowie’s name and that was a weapon of choice for Southern men for several generations.  Bowie’s life is somewhat fictionalized and romanticised in the style of 1950s Hollywood, but the film depicts life in Louisiana and Mississippi in the 1820s and 1830s quite well.


Two films portraying the sectional conflict of the late antebellum era are worth presenting.   


**The Santa Fe Trail (1940), the story of Bleeding Kansas, Harpers Ferry, and John Brown.   Among the young newly-minted Army officers involved are Jeb Stuart, played by the dashing Errol Flynn, and George Custer, played by a rather plodding Ronald Reagan. (When was his performance not plodding?)  This film is a good example of the good will toward the South that characterised the American mainstream in the era it was made.   (I have never been able to understand why the title has nothing to do with the movie.)


** September Dawn (2007).  This is based on a true event.   A party of pioneers from Arkansas heading west paused briefly in Mormon territory.  For no apparent reason they were massacred (man, woman, and child) by the Mormons.  A surprisingly recent glimpse into the Yankee hatred of Southerners that so pervasively characterized the 1850s. The DVD includes interviews with descendants of the Southern victims.

Because of its deserved historical fame, the Texan War of Independence of the 1830s has attracted a lot of cinema.  ​

(T) The Alamo  (1960).  Best known, or most notorious, is this John Wayne production.  Wayne directed and sunk a lot of his own money into this film in the interest of well-intentioned rah-rah Americanism.  But the film is more Hollywood than Alamo.  Midwesterners Richard Boone, John Wayne, and Richard Widmark play the Southern heroes Houston, Crockett, and Bowie, and a Brit, Laurence Harvey, plays Travis. All too typically Hollywoodish are too much “comic relief” and the teeny bopper idol Frankie Avalon (who is said to have been frightened by snakes during the filming). The movie is Americanised at the expense of its Southern history. In fact, the Northern “Americans” who took over the U.S. half a century later in the WBTS hated and reviled the Texans who fought for their independence. I am sorry folks, but John Wayne, complete with coonskin cap and playing for humour, does not make Davy Crockett.  True, the real Crockett was a famous bear hunter and humourist.  He was also a well-dressed politician who owned several slaves.

**The Alamo (2004).  This is a much better version of the great Texan epic.  It is much more faithful to the historical event and has some real Texans, Dennis Quaid and Billy Bob Thornton as Houston and Crockett, and the Virginia-born Patrick Wilson as Travis.  This film is a real epic with genuine drama and historical sense.  The only thing I find wrong are two obligatory concessions to PC. The Spanish hidalgo Santa Anna is portrayed as a dumpy little mestizo that nobody would follow anywhere. The ending, when the survivor Mrs. Dickinson leaves the Alamo is falsified.  Actually, she left with her little girl and a slave boy. Even the Wayne version gets this right.


** Texas Rising (2015). This series also has some feel of real history, despite a ridiculous subplot about Santa Anna’s mulatto mistress who spies for the Texans. It presents the story of the war of independence with relative accuracy, with people who really act like they belong to the time and pays attention to some of the lesser known Texan heroes like Deaf Smith and Juan Seguin. And Santa Anna is well and appropriately portrayed by Oliver Martinez. 


(T)  Two for Texas (2013).  Based on a James Lee Burke novel, this movie is pretty good for the battle of San Jacinto.


**Gone to Texas (1986). This miniseries presents a believable picture of the life of Sam Houston (played by Sam Elliott) and the Texas War of Independence.

​
(T)  James A. Michener’s Texas (1994).  About what you can expect from a TV miniseries of its time made from a mediocre novel.  Some of the accents are well done and Bowie, Travis, and Santa Anna are good.  Much time is taken up by an irrelevant and unlikely romance. They keep talking about the rich land of Texas but everything is filmed on the dry and dusty plains. 

WHAT COULD BE:  If there were a real Southern cinema industry what could be done for American history!  How about a series on the remarkable early career of Andrew Jackson with an epic finale of the Battle of New Orleans, the date of which (January 8) was long celebrated by Americans second only to the Fourth of July?  Among other things such an epic would be a demonstration of genuine Southern multiculturalism as contrasted to the phony official multiculturalism of the U.S. today.  What a magnificent epic a film about Lewis and Clark could be produced by people with a real sense of history!  There are many other Old South topics and personalities that would make good cinema.  How about a life of Calhoun, that would educate Americans greatly about antebellum history, or a drama of the Great Triumvirate of Calhoun, Clay and Webster?   But, alas, all we have is an endless procession of dubious slavery films, beginning with the plagiarized fantasy (X) Roots.


EXECRABLES:  Poor imitations of Andrew Jackson have appeared in several films and Charlton Heston’s portrayal in (X) The President’s Lady (1953) fails as history.  The same can be said about (X) The Far Horizons (1955), allegedly about the Lewis and Clark expedition.  (X) The Jayhawkers (1959):  Jayhawkers was the name applied to the vicious Republican gangs from Kansas who terrorised Missouri before and during the War Between the States.  In this movie “Jayhawkers” are bad Southern bandits.


I once saw an Italian movie called Uncle Tom’s Cabin.  In this film a group of Catholic priests and monks are operating a fort in the South in which they militantly protect runaway slaves.  It is hard to get any more ridiculous than this.  Southerners would not have tolerated such a thing for a minute.  Further, despite what Catholics of today like to believe, the Church never condemned the domestic slavery of the Old South. Pio Nino expressed sympathy for the Confederacy and sent priests to combat Yankee recruitment of cannon fodder in Ireland. The Church did condemn abolitionists, most of whom were extremely anti-Catholic, as dangerous radicals. 


The ad for a PBS epic on slavery tells us of “an African prince” who was “imprisoned on a Mississippi plantation” for years.  It is hard for people with no understanding of the past or of human nature to grasp, but plantations were not prisons.  There was no barbed wire, no guard dogs, no watchtowers, no armed jailers, and very few locks. Frequently planters slept in an unlocked house with their slaves.  Nor do I think “prince” was a common term among Africans, there being no clear hereditary rule of descent for rulers, who were generally the last survivors of bloodbaths.

​
The black face minstrel show was a standby of American popular culture, particularly in the North where it was invented.  Dozens of movies over a long period featured musical and comedy black-face material.  For instance, the famous Bing Crosby’s (X) Dixie (1943).  It is set in the antebellum period and is a highly fictionalized biography of Dan Emmet, the writer of the great American song “Dixie.” 

The primary purpose of this series of weekly essays is to identify films that are enjoyable, satisfying, and informative for Southern people, native or adopted.  For better or worse, like it or not, movies are a major entertainment and art form of our time.  Most of us will spend a good many hours in a lifetime watching them.  Their stories and characters have real impact on the way we see the world.


The cinema has existed for over a century now and has produced an immense volume.  No one can possibly master the field.  We can only make a guide to what we have found to be worthwhile.  This becomes more important as American film, like American society, sinks steadily into ever further depravity.  In today’s cinema, sex, violence, perversion, and obscene language are pervasive, although tobacco smoking and Confederate flags are forbidden immoralities.  We, of course, expect that families will exercise judgment as to what is or is not appropriate for the young.


The South is a large segment of American life, with a long-lived separate history and culture—if not a nation of its own then certainly the next thing to it.  Its representation in American movies follows an irregular path that reflects the particular times in which films were produced.   Up to the 1960’s, Hollywood had friendly tolerance and even admiration and affection for the South.  Since then the main motif has been hatred and slander that casts us Southerners in the role of devils or clowns.  This latter is not surprising since the South remains a reservoir of conservative, telluric connection to Western civilisation and thus an enemy to those who want to replace civilisation with an egalitarian and libertine world of their own defective imagination. 


Mainstream America lacks any real cultural identity.  So, it has often sought to define itself as the righteous Non-South, using the South as the hated Internal Other that is the source of all the sins that Americans fancy they are not guilty of.   Or else it has tended to absorb what is favoured about the South into an artificial “America,” as in George Washington talking and acting like he was from Ohio.   We are often either evil unAmericans or honourary Yankees.  All of this reflects the psychological needs of Northerners, including the masters of the media, and says little about the real Southern people. 


Twentieth-century American filmography is so vast that a lifetime of study could barely master it.  Just the bad films about the South would take a large chapter to list.  What we have done is call to attention a number of things which Southerners might watch with interest and pleasure.  We have also pointed to some of the worst of the many distorted and offensive manifestations of   Hollywood’s hatred of the Southern people.


The most important human wisdom is contained in stories, not in formal expositions.  (Think Incarnation.)  In times past people got their stories from the classics, the Bible, and the novel.  Movies are now the primary story-telling medium.  Stories are guides to and an expression of a people’s culture and their culture is best understood from their stories.  Actors and actresses give some evidence of the state of culture because acting, if well done, is a form of cultural expression that requires some art—intelligence, grace, imagination, empathy.  


Southerners are in the position of having our talents exploited and our stories filtered through the misperceptions of hostile outsiders.  We are the only people of the American Empire who are persistently and safely slandered by Hollywood.

​
The South is immensely rich in history and human quality. We have all the ingredients for a great cinema to rival the best of other nations.  There is real Southern talent enough on both sides of the camera to create a true Southern cinema.  But, of course, there is no money, without which there can be no film— unlike literature, in which it is still barely possible to publish good books.  If Southerners were free, actually or spiritually, to tell our own stories like the other peoples of the world, there could be a world class Southern cinema.  The most beautiful of all the world’s national flags and the most rousing of all the world’s national anthems would be honoured by good people everywhere. 

** Indicates one of the more than 100 most recommended films.  The order in which they appear does not reflect any ranking, only the convenience of discussion.

(T)   Tolerable but not among the most highly recommended

(X)   Execrable.  Avoid at all costs

​NOTE:  Most of the research for this book was done in the age of the DVD.  “Streaming” is now becoming dominant.  There should be no difficulty in finding the recommended films in that medium.

“ . . .  the play’s the thing . . .”       –Hamlet, Prince of Denmark


 The treatment of Southerners by Hollywood has been schizophrenic.   To today’s provincially urban masters of Hollywood, whose idea of American history begins with Ellis Island, Southerners are unfamiliar and considered strange and dangerous.  Films set in the South quite often portray ugly people and situations.  Southern accents are invariably the sign of a villain, even in stories set in Boston, Chicago, California, or Alaska.  There is a whole library of evil Southerner movies.  However, at the same time, films about ordinary folks set in the South sometimes have likable characters even today.  Because many Americans know from personal experience that Southerners are not cartoon villains but often honourable and agreeable people. 


From the earliest days of American movies through the 1950s, almost a half century, the Hollywood portrayal of the South was to a considerable extent friendly and even admiring.   The 1950’s and 1960’s continued this tradition but tended to absorb what is Southern into a generic Americanism that eclipsed its Southern aspects. This was the era when historical dramas were good on costumes but bad and silly on history.  (I am reminded of a movie director in an Evelyn Waugh novel who gave John Wesley a sword and a mistress.)  In the 50’s and 60’s blue-eyed starlets played Indian maidens; Ava Gardner, Elizabeth Taylor, and Natalie Wood became mulatto, apparently because they had dark hair; the avuncular Midwesterner Ronald Reagan was taken seriously as a Westerner; a coonskin cap identified a ridiculously unhistorical Davy Crockett; and “country music” singers had to disguise their Southernness by wearing pseudo-cowboy outfits. 


Curiously, in the 1960’s and 1970’s the South rode high in popular culture even as the cinema began to be pervasively South-hating.  The Southern persona of Burt Reynolds flourished.  Southern TV shows had the highest national ratings in the age of Jimmy Carter with The Beverly Hillbillies, The Andy Griffith Show, Hew-Haw, and a little later The Dukes of Hazzard.  Perhaps the difference between television and film relates to the fact that television responds to ratings while movie directors are free to indulge their own distorted view of the world.


Of course, Southern characters were only popular because they could be condescended to as inferior to Northerners.   Even when good people, such TV Southerners were invariably comically backward and ignorant. Apparently in contrast to the North, where all the women are cool, poised, and beautiful Meryl Streeps and all the men are suave and dashing Tom Cruises (or cool, beautiful Meryl Streeps).  Curiously, through a long period of history Southerners were noted for their gentlemanly and ladylike qualities.  Anyone who has spent any time around rich Ivy Leaguers knows that any Southern “redneck” has better manners, a kindlier attitude toward strangers, more chivalry, and more personal integrity than the Northeastern “aristocracy.”


The schmaltz of the 50’s quickly gave way to the revolutionary 60’s and 70’s and a South-friendly Hollywood began to turn into a South-hating Hollywood.  Since then the South has usually fared badly with Hollywood. 


Until the late 60’s, our cinema—whether contemporary or costume drama, comedy, Western, or war—reflected a general baseline of Middle American values.  It was not usually great art, but it was consoling entertainment and a source and reflection of a national consensus.  And it portrayed with sympathy the real “diversity” of this far-flung Union—New England, the Big Apple, the South, the Midwest, and the West.


The catastrophe known as The Sixties was marked by a collapse of morals, political fanaticism and violence, multiculturalism, and the ever tighter centralised control and enforced uniformity of all phases of life by the bicoastal elite—accompanied by degradation of the American cinema.  Now we have godless nihilism and self-indulgence, violence for violence’s sake, every form of sexual promiscuity, filth for the sake of filth, and “creativity” generally limited to technological fantasy, sequels, prequels, dramatization of comic books, and rip-offs of European and Japanese stories. The masters of our multicultural monoculture have little talent but plenty of power and money and our cinema now reflects their minds and souls.


This is not the whole picture, of course. There are still “independent” productions that portray actual American people and situations and that manage to come to public attention. It is possible, with some enterprise, to make a good movie.  The problem is getting anyone to hear about it and get it distributed.  The mass media seldom reflect anything but what works our masters want to be celebrated and the absence of those works they want to be censored or ignored.  All you need to remember is the reception given Mel Gibson’s **The Passion of the Christ and Ron Maxwell’s historical epic **Gods and Generals.


There was one positive aspect to Hollywood’s turn from the happy talk of the frothy, phony 1950’s to a more mature and serious approach:  more realism about the history of America and other lands.  The 2004 version of **The Alamo is greatly superior to the 1960 John Wayne version in truth and drama.  **The New World of 2005 is better than anything previously done by Hollywood on Captain John Smith and Pocahontas.  Likewise, the 1992   **Last of the Mohicans is more vividly real than earlier versions.  **The Virginian of 2000 is head and shoulders above its many predecessors.  Liberation from the childish 50’s has had some positive benefits.


Like it or not, movies are the main art form of our time, the story-telling medium that reaches the largest audience and captures the attention of us all, high and low, wise and foolish.  It is also true that movies, like literature and architecture, reflect something of the soul of the particular nation that produces them. If so, judging by Hollywood, we indeed need to be concerned about the American soul.

After a screening in the White House, President Wilson remarked: “It is like writing history with lightning.  And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” Birth dealt with the War Between the States and Reconstruction in a portrayal primarily centered on a Southern family and with many of the major stars of silent cinema.  Although its importance can hardly be denied, the film is now out of favour, largely because of a realistic portrayal of the Southern oppression in Reconstruction that Wilson described as “so terribly true.”  


Actually, there is nothing in the movie that any reasonable Northerner of the time could not have agreed with.  Birth is very much a landmark of the spirit of sectional reconciliation that prevailed at the time, two years after the friendly reunion of Northern and Southern soldiers at Gettysburg.  There is a generous treatment of a Northern family and an inter-regional romance. The only dubious note is a somewhat saccharine portrayal of Lincoln, but this was very much in the spirit of the time.  Southerners found it useful to portray a kindly Lincoln who, if he had lived, would have avoided the worst evils of Reconstruction. There are various versions available, but the most complete seems to be the one of 192 minutes.


Griffith produced many other films of lasting interest.  Although condemned as “racist,” both Griffith and the Southerner Thomas Dixon, on whose books Birth was based, were liberals for their time in the true sense of that label.  They attacked the excesses of capitalism and defended working people and immigrants in an era when respectable Northerners were devoted to Big Business and ideas of Anglo-Saxon superiority.  


**The General (1926).  Two of the great silent classics of early American cinema have Confederate connections, and indeed both are on any list of the world’s greatest movies.  One is The Birth of a Nation. The other is The General starring the inimitable Buster Keaton.  It is based on a true story of a Southern railroad man who engaged in a heroic long-range pursuit of a train stolen by Yankee soldiers.  (“The General” is the name of the stolen locomotive.) Keaton is the Confederate who is disappointed (as is his sweetheart) at his not being allowed to join the army because of the importance of his job.  No viewer can forget the heroic aspirations, the   incomparable action, humour, and the pathos of this film. Orson Welles called it the greatest comedy and probably the greatest movie ever made.  (Disney did a tolerable film of the same incident as (T) The Great Locomotive Chase.)

​**Judge Priest (1934).  It is said that John Ford, later among the greatest of American directors, was one of the Ku Klux riders in Birth of a Nation. In Judge Priest, taken from the popular Irvin S. Cobb stories, Ford makes a gentle portrayal of people in postwar Kentucky proud of their recent Confederate cause. The star of that film was Will Rogers, certainly one of the greats of early American movies and another son of a Confederate soldier.  (I once read a description of Rogers as “a Midwestern humorist.”  This for the Oklahoma son of an officer in the Confederate Cherokee brigade who gently criticized Yankee ways in his pioneer radio commentaries!  (As far as I know Ohio and Iowa are not noted for humour.)   Rogers was   undoubtedly the No. 1 American movie star and a beloved figure when he made Judge Priest.  All of Rogers’s films are enjoyable and clearly if not obtrusively Southern.

**The Sun Shines Bright (1953). Ford liked Judge Priest so well that he did the same story again, perhaps even better, in The Sun Shines Bright. These films show an attractive Southern life—post-Confederate plain folks who had their foibles like all of us but created decent and pleasant communities. ​

​**My Old Kentucky Home (1935). In his last film Will Rogers is a shrewd horse trainer who solves a long-standing family feud.

Note: This piece was originally published in 2015.

​What to say in brief compass about the South?—a subject that is worthy of the complete works of a Homer, a Shakespeare, or a Faulkner. The South is a geographical/historical/cultural reality that has provided a crucial source of identity for millions of people for three centuries. Long before there was an entity known as “the United States of America.” there was the South. Possibly, there will still be a Southern people long after the American Empire has collapsed upon its hollow shell.


One fine historian defined the South as “not quite a nation within the nation, but the next thing to it.” The late M.E. Bradford, whose genial spirit watches over us even now, defined the South as “a vital and long-lasting bond, a corporate identity assumed by those who have contributed to it.” This is, characteristically, a broad and generous definition. He proceeded to illustrate that when visualizing the South, he always thought “of Lee in the Wilderness that day when his men refused to let him assume a position in the line of fire and tugged at the bridle of Traveler until they had turned him aside.” This was clearly a society at war, not a government military machine.


The South is larger and more salient in population, territory, historical import, distinctive folkways, music, and literature than many of the separate nations of the earth. Were the South independent today, it would be the fourth or fifth largest economy in the world. Citizens of Minneapolis consider them¬selves cultured because of their Japanese-conducted symphony that plays European music, and assume that the Nashville geniuses who create music all the world loves are rubes and hayseeds. New Yorkers pride themselves on their literary culture. Yet in the second half of the 20th century, if you subtract Southern writers. American literature would be on par with Denmark or Bulgaria and somewhere below Norway and Rumania.


Southerners are the most regionally loyal citizens of the United States. But paradoxically—or perhaps not—they have traditionally been the most loyal to the country at large, ready to repel insult or injury without the need to be dragooned by any ridiculous folderol about saving Haiti or Somalia for democracy. Southerners have given freely to the Union and generally avoided the demands for entitlements that now characterize American life. But their loyalty has been severely tested, especially considering all they have ever asked in return is to be left alone.


Southerners have less reason to be loyal to the collective enterprise of the United States than does any group of citizens. The South was invaded, laid waste, and conquered when it tried to uphold the original and correct understanding of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. It took 22 million Northerners, aided by the entire plutocracy and proletariat of the world, four years of the bloodiest warfare in American history and the most unparalleled terrorism against civilians, to subdue five million Southerners—all followed by the horror of Reconstruction. During this entire period, “the Northern conservatives” never opposed the smallest obstacle to the devastations of the radicals. In fact, the Northern “conservatives” have never, in the course of American history, conserved anything.


Since the War, the South has been a colonial possession, economically and culturally, to whatever sleazy elements have been able to exercise national power. A major theme of the American media and popular culture is ridicule and contempt for everything Southern. A major theme of American historical writing is the portrayal of the South as the unique repository of evil in a society that is otherwise shining and pure.


A severely condensed but essentially accurate interpretation of American history could be stated thusly. There are two kinds of Americans. There are those who want to be left alone to pursue their destiny, restrained only by tradition and religion: and those whose identity revolves around compelling others to submit to their own manufactured vision of the good society.


These two aspects of American culture were formed in the 17th century, by the Virginians and Yankees, respectively. The Virginians moved into the interior of America and carved their farms and plantations out of the wilderness. Their goal was to re-create the best of English rural society. They merged with even more vigorous and independent people, the Scots-Irish, to form what is still the better side of the American character.


The Yankees of Massachusetts lived in villages with preacher and teacher. They viewed themselves as a superior, chosen people, a City upon a Hill. As far as they were concerned, they were the true Americans and the only Americans that counted, ignoring or slandering other Americans relentlessly — a sentiment persisting to this day.


The days of Jefferson and Jackson illustrate the freedom and honor underlying America when ruled by the South. During their eras, Virginians gave away their vast Western empire for the joint enjoyment of all Americans, (thus making possible the Midwest and West) and labored to erect a limited, responsible government. The New Englanders, during the same periods, demanded a reserve of lands for themselves in Ohio; instituted a national bank and funding system by which their money-men profited off the blood of the Revolution: passed the Alien and Sedition laws to essentially enforce their own narrow ideological code on others; opposed the Louisiana Purchase; and demanded tariffs to protect their industries at others’ expense. All of which was done in the name of “Americanism.”


This profiteering through government, which John Taylor of Caroline called the “paper aristocracy,” has always been accompanied by moral imperialism and assumptions of superiority that are even more offensive than the looting. It is from this that the South seceded. It is this combination of greed and moralism which constitutes the Yankee legacy, gives the American empire whatever legitimacy it can claim, and fuels the never-ending reconstruction of society. That is why we use Marines for social work, so that our leaders can congratulate themselves on their moral posture. That is why every town in the land is burdened with empty parking spaces bearing the symbol of the empire, so that the Connecticut Yankee George Bush can posture over his charity to the disabled. That is why, right now, wealthy Harvard University receives from the treasury a 200 percent overhead bonus on its immense federal grants, while the impoverished University of South Carolina receives only 50 percent of its much smaller bounty.


The term American is an abstraction without human content —it refers, at best, to a government, territory, standard of living, and a set of dubious and dubiously observed propositions. It refers to nothing akin to values or culture, nothing that represents the humanness of human beings. It could be reasonably argued that there is no such thing as an American people, although we have persuaded ourselves there was when shouldering the burdens of several wars. There was perhaps a time earlier in this century when an American nationality might have emerged naturally. But that time has passed with the onslaught of new immigrants.


Unlike the term American, when we say Southern, we know we imply a certain history, literature, music, and speech: particular folkways, attitudes and manners: a certain set of political responses and pieties: and a traditional view of the proper dividing line between the private and the public. Things which are unique, easily observable, and continual over many generations.


The bloody St. Andrews cross of the Confederacy is a symbol throughout the world of heroic resistance to oppression —except in the U.S., where it is in the process of suppression. Southerners are democratic in spirit, but they have never made a fetish of democracy and certainly not of what Mel Bradford called “Equality.” With T.S. Eliot, Southerners intuitively recognize that democracy is a procedure and not a goal, a content, or a substitute for an authentic social fabric. However free and equal we may be, we are nothing without a culture, and there is no culture without religion.


The South, many believe, still has a substantial authentic culture, both high and folk, and it still has a purchase on Christianity. That is, the South is a civilizational reality in a sense which the United States is not, and it will last longer than the American Empire.


For a long time we have been asking what the South can do for the United States. A proper question to now ask is what can the United States do for the South? The Union is nothing except for its constituent parts. The Union is good and just to the degree that it fosters its authentic parts. That is precisely why our forefathers made the Constitution and the Union and gave consent, voluntarily, to them —to enhance themselves, not the government.


As the Southern poet Allen Tate pointed out, the wrong turn was taken in the War Between the States when the United States ceased living by the Southern conception of a limited partnership and became instead a collection of buildings in Washington from which orders of self-justifying authority were issued. The great classical scholar and Confederate soldier Basil Gildersleeve remarked that the War was a conflict over grammar—whether the proper grammar was “the United States are” or “the United States is.” We have been using the wrong grammar.

​
The South’s lost political legacy was laid out by Rev. Robert Lewis Dabney, Presbyterian theologian and Stonewall Jackson’s chief of staff, several years following the War. Echoing Calhoun he said: