[On October 12th,
1870, Robert
E. Lee died—but not before the post-war
deification of Lee was already well underway. So this week I’ll
AmericanStudy that process and other aspects of Confederate memory, leading up
to a special post on a great recent book on the subject!]
On the benefits
and drawbacks of bestselling historical novels about the Civil War.
As I detailed in
this
post on Joshua
Chamberlain and his heroic, battle- and potentially Union-saving charge
down Little Round Top at the Battle of Gettysburg, I first learned about
Chamberlain the same way I imagine a great many Americans have: through Michael
Shaara’s Pulitzer-winning novel The
Killer Angels (1974, and source for the 1993 film Gettysburg in which
Chamberlain was portrayed brilliantly
by Jeff Daniels). While of course a novel shouldn’t be the sole or central
way we learn about history, that process has to start somewhere; and if a novel
is a hugely successful and popular one (as Shaara’s was upon release and has
been ever since), it can provide precisely such a starting point for further
investigation and understanding for a great many audience members indeed. I
know that Civil
War historians are sometimes frustrated by how much emphasis
is placed on Chamberlain, an emphasis that is certainly due to Shaara’s
(and then the film’s) depiction; but from everything I can tell the book gets
both him and the histories quite right, and in any case it helped add them to
our collective memories which to my mind can only be a good thing.
While Chamberlain
is a main character in Shaara’s novel, he’s far from the book’s only focus, and
another key element of The Killer Angels
is its presentation of multi-layered, deeply human versions of all the battle’s
key generals and leaders, including Confederate ones like Robert
E. Lee, James Longstreet, and George Pickett.
Of course those men were all human, and so there’s nothing necessarily wrong
with depicting them as such (and indeed a novel that didn’t present its
characters as human would almost certainly be a failure). But in a historical
novel about a Civil War battle, featuring such prominent, humanizing portrayals
of Confederate generals makes it quite likely (if not indeed inevitable) that
readers will sympathize with those characters as much as with Union leaders
like Chamberlain, and thus will find themselves in at least some key ways “rooting”
for both sides in the battle. That may make for compelling fiction (and Killer Angels is indeed one of the most
readable historical novels I’ve encountered), but it also makes for troubling
(to say the least) history, for any Civil War battle and doubly so for one that
so influenced the course of the war and American history.
After Michael
Shaara’s tragic death from a heart attack in 1988 (when he was only 59 years
old), his son Jeff took up the legacy of his Civil War historical novels,
publishing both Gods
and Generals (1996 and a prequel to Killer
Angels) and The
Last Full Measure (1998 and a sequel to both). I’ll admit that I haven’t
read either of those books, nor any of Jeff
Shaara’s many other historical novels (four of which are set in the Civil
War’s Western Theater, and the others set during other time periods/wars), so I
don’t mean to imply that this paragraph’s critiques are necessarily applicable
to those books (I’d love to hear in comments from folks who have read either or
both of Jeff’s books). But I have seen the 2003 film adaptation of Gods and Generals,
and would entirely agree with historian Steven
Woolworth’s assessment (in a scholarly review in the Journal of American History) that it is “the most pro-Confederate
film since Birth of a Nation, a
veritable celluloid celebration of slavery and treason.” Again, I don’t know if
that’s the case with the novel, and I’m not suggesting it’s the case with Killer Angels—but I would argue that
there is a connection between depicting Confederate and Union generals at a
battle like Gettysburg with equal sympathy and ending up another convert to
that neo-Confederate, Lost Cause perspective on the battle, the war, and America.
Last memories
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other aspects of Confederate or Civil War memory you’d highlight?
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