Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know about the Civil War (review)

An age-old question within the historical profession is whether historically based films educate their audiences and, if so, with what degree of success. In his most recent work, Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten, the University of Virginia’s Gary Gallagher argues a convincing case for the power of the historical film to influence its audience.

Since Ken Burns’s miniseries The Civil War, America’s great conflict has enjoyed a resurgence in popular culture, and, as a result, scholars have begun to examine the on-screen interpretations. Perhaps best known is Robert Brent Toplin, whose Ken Burns’s Civil War: The Historians Respond initiated the scholarly critique of his dramatic representation of the war. In 2007, Brian Steel Wills’s Gone with the Glory appeared, offering the first comprehensive study of Civil War cinematic interpretations. Despite the common ground shared by Wills’s and Gallagher’s works, their approaches differ significantly. Wills chronologically compartmentalizes the films while Gallagher attempts a more thematic approach.

In order to accomplish his task, Gallagher isolates four main themes, which, in effect, become subgenres of Civil War films. He determines that most Civil War movies, particularly those that preceded the Civil Rights Movement, fell into the “Lost Cause” category because they espoused the valor and righteousness of the Confederate cause. History is replete with classic examples such as Gone with the Wind. The second classification is the “Union Cause,” which focuses on the northern justification for preserving the union. This category is most elusive as it can be seen only in certain characters rather than as a predominant theme throughout a film. Third, the “Emancipation Cause” places the freedom of slaves above the cause of union as can be seen in Glory. And last, Gallagher isolates the “Reconciliation Cause” theme which he sees running throughout Gettysburg.

Try as he might to distill nearly a century of Civil War filmmaking into an orderly and thematic study, Gallagher falls short. No one can lessen his contribution in painting the broad portrait of this genre, but his “big picture” analysis does not translate well to examining the influence of the silver screen. For example, much of Gallagher’s academic work has been devoted to exploring how Confederate nationalism drove loyalty within the South. However, in focusing attention on the nationalism motive, his work appears to ignore pragmatic motives. His examination of film confirms this suspicion when he describes three films which do not fit clearly within one of the subgenres. Andersonville, Pharaoh’s Army, and Ride with the Devil completely avoid the traditional measurements of loyalty and share an inglorious and often brutal pragmatism that one seldom sees in the more orderly and organized theaters of war. Gallagher might have benefited from following the leads of historians of Civil War borderlands, the geographic region in which many of these titles are set, by constructing another subgenre which would focus attention on life surrounded by one’s enemies where personal motivations, backcountry interests, and the complexity of captivity rise to great importance.

The second part of Gallagher’s book examines Civil War popular art. In what first appears as an odd combination of movies, statuary, paintings, and other assorted art, Gallagher finds an effective avenue to illustrate how deeply popular interpretations reach into the public mind through the popularity of artists like Don Troiani, Dale Gallon, and Mort Künstler. These men came to Civil War art as interest in the conflict was growing in the 1980s, and their artwork has done much to popularize the war, particularly the Confederacy and its generals, within collectors’ circles.

Readers will note that Gallagher makes a strong attempt to push his Confederate nationalism thesis throughout the book with mixed results. Just as some movies speak directly to Gallagher’s argument and offer affirmation, many others show the tenuous nature of attempting to paint...