Anybody watching the Civil War on PBS this week?

[redhen]

What is the exact name of the series...

 

[woodmort]

Time magazine did an interesting story on the Civil War this week that deserves reading. Also a series of photos taken of the state of current battle fields using re-enactors. One in which they are restaging a battle over backyard fences in a housing development in Tennessee.

 

[WyandotteTX]

The name of the series is "The Civil War, A Film by Ken Burns"
It has been one of the best shows ever put on PBS and will be shown on those channels occasionally.

 

[mamaKate]

I saw the last episode. Really biased. They didn't even use the word "reconstruction." All the Union leaders were heroes and the Confederates were monsters and crackpots. I was so mad I had to go to You Tube for a dose of Hank Jr's "If the South Woulda Won We'd a Had it Made."

 

[WyandotteTX]

The Union leaders were Heroes. I am a Southerner all my life but you seriously would have wanted the South to win? You would have enjoyed having other human beings enslaved within your country? Assanine.
I think the show is very unbiased in my Historical opinion. But the overlying specter of slavery cannot be sugar coated to make anyone sound good so there is going to be blame placed somewhere....
I really dont know what show you were watching but in this series they almost deify(that means make a God of) Stonewall Jackson and Robert E Lee.......There is a right and wrong within the context of the Civil War. IF you think otherwise I am sorry that hate still consumes you...

 

[Q9]

Quote:
Reality check. The high-ranking Union leaders, for the most part, were complete monsters - one notable exception being the very honorable Joshua Chamberlain. He was wrong, but he still behaved like a man. Grant? Threw his own soldiers' lives away in insane, suicidal "human wave" attacks. Remember Cold Harbor? Then there's Sherman. He rampaged through the South, allowing his soldiers free reign to loot and burn, and sometimes rape, and on mercifully rare occasions murder. Sheridan burned out the food producing Shenandoah Valley after Stonewall Jackson was removed from the picture. It's estimated that 50,000 civilians died as a direct result of their actions. Union artillery was infamous for lobbing shells at purely civilian targets - at least once they specifically targeted a Mass in order to hit the crowded civilians. And all of this was sanctioned by Union high command. Need I mention General Butler?

Lee's army never intentionally harmed civilians, and in fact Lee went out of his way to minimize any inevitable damage when he struck north. Speaking of Lee, he emancipated his slaves in 1862. Grant never voluntary freed his - they were freed by a state emancipation act.

As Union armies would pass through plantation areas, they would forcibly conscript "freed" slaves - effectively putting them into an even worse form of slavery. Union soldiers, for the most part, treated African Americans - free or slave - absolutely horrendously. They actually tended to be MORE racist than the average Southerner - in fact, diary entries from these soldiers show their disgust at how friendly Southern whites were with blacks.

Had the South won, the cost of slavery would actually have become prohibitive - the US would no longer be obligated to return escaped slaves, making escape even easier. The Confederate Constitution in Article One, Section 9 explicitly prohibits the slave trade. Virginia, North Carolina, and a few others were already on the verge of passing compensated emancipation measures, which would have made escapes from neighboring states still easier. The very idea that the Confederacy would not have peacefully emancipated the slaves fairly soon really has no basis in reality. EVERY OTHER CIVILIZED COUNTRY on the planet had already emancipated their slaves - the CSA would have done the same. Ironically, the radical abolitionists did more than anyone to harden Southerners against emancipation. If the Confederacy had won, the Northern radicals would have been irrelevant, and a much less harmful form of emancipation could have been enacted. As things turned out, reconstruction and the North's method of emancipation completely soured race relations.

 

[turney31]

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Just wondering why this thread is still open?

 

[Q9]

Quote:
Just wondering why this thread is still open?

Because aside from the thinly veiled accusation of racism in WyandotteTX's post, everyone's been very polite.

 

[Robo]

Quote:
Just wondering why this thread is still open?

Because aside from the thinly veiled accusation of racism in WyandotteTX's post, everyone's been very polite.

I agree with Q9's previous post, and this one. The North was racist too, they practically owned the Irish people... Oh, and most of the Union commanders were not so heroic. Sherman was a mad man, remember Sherman's Neck Ties? He melted the rails and wrapped them around a tree. To use them again they would have to cut the tree and melt the rails. Then they took women and children out of their homes letting them keep nothing, all their worldly possessions were burned and they watched. Grant was an alcoholic and Burnside was just an idiot. The Confederates would have eventually freed the slaves, and heck we might be doing better today... Not that I believe that the south was completely right, but still it wasn't all about slavery and the North was no better.

 

[turney31]

Quote:
Just wondering why this thread is still open?

Because aside from the thinly veiled accusation of racism in WyandotteTX's post, everyone's been very polite.

Fair is fair.