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'Death and the Civil War' PBS View More Images from this story Visit the Photo Place |
BY CLINT SCHEMMER
At 8 o'clock tonight, PBS' "American Experience" premieres a documentary that confronts a central fact of the Civil War era: human loss on an unimaginable scale.
Much as Alexander Gardner's photographs of unburied soldiers at Antietam made that toll vivid and real for visitors to Mathew Brady's New York studio 150 years ago, "Death and the Civil War" brings home the most common shared experience of the conflict.
The documentary by filmmaker Ric Burns looks at how Americans then coped with the casualties--and how their suffering changed the nation in ways that still reverberate.
The war killed 2 percent of America's population--750,000 soldiers, Blue and Gray, more men than were lost in all of its other wars combined. Yet the nation had no proper graveyards for those fallen, no communal way to honor their sacrifice, no sense of obligation to reclaim and bury their corpses.
But that's the story writ large.
Burns starts his documentary with one small but unforgettable story that happened at Spotsylvania Courthouse.
Narrator Oliver Pratt reads the last letter of Pvt. James Robert Montgomery, with Company A of the 11th Mississippi Infantry, written from the battlefield on May 10, 1864. The viewer hears Montgomery's words and sees his blood-spotted stationery, as the young soldier informs his father, Allen, that he has been mortally wounded.
"I know you would be delighted to receive this from your dying son," Montgomery wrote before asking that his body be re-interred in his home state.
Montgomery's grave was carefully marked, and a friend ensured that his last words made their way home to his family in Mississippi. But the private's body was never found. It likely remains, somewhere, in Spotsylvania's hallowed ground.
"That letter is astonishing," Burns said in an interview. "Montgomery is making his own funeral arrangements, notifying his own next of kin improvising his own 'good death.'
"He is assuring his father that he is at peace, trying to establish a connection with his moment of death that can't take place in person. His father and family can't surround his deathbed."
The immense carnage of the Civil War, happening on distant fields far from family, deprived millions of that precious last instant, that understanding, that was so critical to 19th-century Americans and their faith.
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"Death and the Civil War," airing at 8 tonight on PBS, relies on archival images and letters to weave its tales of human dignity amid the horrors of battle. Scenes were filmed Viewers will see some familiar photos, but countless more that have never been screened before. Some of the most interesting ones were shot by photographers in the Fredericksburg area, where 100,000 fell in four major battles, making it the most blood-soaked place in the entire Civil War. You'll see Andrew J. Russell's famous 1863 wet-plate image of a dead Confederate soldier lying on Sunken Road after the Second Battle of Fredericksburg. In another photo, African-Americans bury a row of dead soldiers in what are now the streets of Fredericksburg. "Death and the Civil War," as it traces Americans' attempt to make sense of the bloodshed In the next few days, three local events will mark the 150th anniversary of Lincoln's preliminary proclamation, announced Sept. 22, 1862, and the prelude to the war. All of them are free. 7 P.M. FRIDAY: The University of Mary Washington will host "A Fireside Chat: Looking at the Emancipation Proclamation," an informal discussion with three top scholars--Edna Greene Medford, history department chairwoman at Howard University; Frank J. Williams, founding chairman of the Lincoln Forum; and Harold Holzer, author of several books on Lincoln. James I. Robertson Jr., Virginia Tech history professor emeritus, will introduce the panel. The event, in George Washington Hall's Dodd Auditorium, is sponsored by Virginia's Civil War sesquicentennial commission. Register at VirginiaCivilWar.org/emancipation or call 804/786-3591. 9 A.M.-NOON SATURDAY: Commemorate the August 1862 crossing of the Rappahannock River near Remington by slaves, an act of self-emancipation captured in one of the Civil War's most famous photographs. On the sesquicentennial of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, historians John Hennessy, Clark Hall and Dr. Dianne Swann-Wright will speak; the River Bank Choir will perform a hymn-sing; the crossing from Culpeper to Fauquier will be re-created; and names of Culpeper-born slaves will be read. 540/547-2395; thequestforhistory .blogspot.com. 2 P.M. SUNDAY: Tony Horwitz, author of the popular "Confederates in the Attic," speaks at the Culpeper County Library about his new book, "Midnight Rising," on John Brown and his raid on Harper's Ferry; clva.org. |