Ken Burns Civil War Documentary.....

I was initially rather sceptical about a free month's Netflix trial, yet when it arrived on my computer courtesy of my family - I was delighted to see Ken Burns famous (American) Civil War series there in its entirety! I first saw this ground breaking series in Canada in the early 1990s, when staying with a pal from university in some remote corner of Nova Scotia. The American PBS channel were showing it every night at some absurdly late hour, and it became a nightly ritual that we'd get back to his parents house every evening in time for the next instalment. I knew almost nothing about the American Civil War then, it was all new - and utterly compelling. Years later I saw a set of DVD discs on Ebay of it, and bought them expectantly, but when they arrived they were scratched ad unplayable! I sent the discs back, and have waited to see the series again, until now!

Burns and his team did an amazing of telling the story of the American Civil War militarily, biographically, politically, socially, racially and culturally through an carefully edited series of contemporary diaries, articles, letters and papers, voiced by great actors; to the accompaniment of archive photos of people and places; set to the most perfectly executed sound-track, and interspersed with 'talking heads' commentary segments.

The series is basically a straightforward chronology of the conflict, charting the origins of the conflict, it developments, key movements, battles and strategies, until the final Union victory, and the assassination of Lincoln. It examines the main strategies, such as Lee's invasion of the North, all the main battles (famous names such as Antietam, Wilderness, Gettysburg, Bull Run), key incidents within those battles such as "Pickett's Charge" at Gettysburg; it looks at all the main characters, Grant, Lee, Sherman, Longstreet, Forrest, MacLennan, Hill, Lincoln and Davis etc, and of course the emerging importance of the legal status of slavery as a war aim for both sides. All of this is hugely informative, and provides the uninitiated with a crash-course in the every aspect of the era from social customs to military technology.

As the series returns to the same diarists over-and-over again, its possible to chart the course of the war from individual perspectives too. Southern and Northern voices are both represented in this, as are the views of both back and white people affected by the conflict. Mary Chestnut, in the Southern aristocracy was an avid diarist in the war, and her 'voice' is a remarkable historical document, as the Sam Watkins, a Union soldier and writer who recorded 'his' war too. By the end of the series these voices become familiar, and almost as close to the viewer as if they had been interviewed. Morgan Freeman's voicing of Fredrick Douglass' words is brilliant too - amazingly powerful in fact. 

The talking-heads are interesting too. They feature a retired Congressman, the historian Barbara Fields, and Shelby Foote the Southern Writer. They each pull in different directions in their comments too, the politician wants to see the conflict as part of the great American narrative, Fields is a sharply incisive academic historian who wants to emphasise the centrality of racial injustice as a central theme in American history, and while Foote is no apologist for the Confederacy itself, he certainly wishes to rescue the historical voice of the average Confederate soldier. Foote's contributions are in fact highly memorable, as he drawls from a vast array of anecdotes, told in the first person as if he had been a participant!

Obviously the causes of the conflict are a huge source of division even today. The Confederacy claimed to be fighting to protect states rights, not primarily to defend slavery (although of course these two things merged in practise), while the North began by fighting to save the Union, but ended up tangled-up in a fight to end the evil of slave-holding. Fields and Douglass are persuasive in their analysis of the centrality of racial questions, but Foote adds an important side note when he intones, "The average southern soldier wasn't a slave-holder" - he was fighting for his state's independence. In many of these questions Burns allows a variety of perspectives to be heard, and one wonders if that would be the case today; or whether if he was making it today he would have to be far more one-sided. For instance, Mary Chestnut's diaries of the ruin of the Old South, left decimated by the Northern Armies of Sherman and Sheridan, are well-written and moving. Sherman's terse commentary of his battering of the Confederacy in his 'March to the Sea' campaign, adds weight to

the sympathy that one cannot help but feel when a first-hand account of war, and decimation of towns, cities, homes, farms and families, is read. This especially the case when the reading is accompanied by mournful music, and photos of the ruins. Then however we are immediately reminded that Richmond was devastated because it was the capital of a slave-empire, the symbolic embodiment of a system of grotesque evil. The we are diverted again by Abraham Lincoln's assessment that the while horror of the war was a divine judgement on whole the USA for the sin of slave-holding.

The haunting music isn't in fact a piece from the 1860s, but a far more recent tune called Ashokan Farewell. It so wonderfully frames the awful scenes of the dead, the injured and the fallen that it became highly sought after, following the release of the series, apparently.

After having amazed by this series back in 1992, I was interested to see how it would stand up after all these years (and my acquisition of a degree in American history!) All I can say is that I thought it was wonderful to see it again. Powerful, instructive, and very moving - and highly relevant today.  The horror and sadness of war are powerfully and profoundly displayed here. 

Huge, (really huge!) amounts of ink have been spilled commenting on this series, some lauding it, other criticising it. One or two of those criticisms are probably valid; but they do not detract from the overall brilliance of this tremendous series, which certainly is worth watching at least twice.