In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

126 he myth of william t. Sherman created by Southern writers in the last decade of the nineteenth century became widely accepted and disseminated during the twentieth century. hollywood films presented the lost Cause mythology to worldwide audiences. Professional military men and historians used the myth of Sherman to make arguments about events in the twentieth century. it is now difficult for modern historians to write about Sherman without being affected by these myths. The united daughters of the Confederacy would never be as influential again as they were during the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth. during that time, a udC president had met with three sitting presidents in the white house—roosevelt, taft, and wilson—to discuss how the government could aid the udC. The organization had achieved most of its goals. By the time war broke out in europe in 1914 the lost Cause mythology was well entrenched. woodrow wilson was the first southerner to occupy the white house since andrew Johnson and the first to be elected since Zachary taylor in 1848. wilson was not just a southerner by birth. his History of the American People was steeped in lost Cause mythology. Pro-Confederate textbooks were common in southern public schools, and monuments to Confederate heroes could be found throughout the South.1 william tecumseh Sherman’s place in lost Cause mythology was secure by the time uS troops entered the Great war in 1917. Sherman was a monster whose soldiers, on his orders, burned and pillaged throughout the South. if davis, Jackson, and lee were the holy trinity, in this mythology, then Sherman was the devil. The Confederate Veteran published editorials that compared Sherman’s actions with the atrocities committed by the imperial German army in Belgium. ChaPter 8 sherman in film T sherman in film 127 one of the more bitter and poetic denunciations of Sherman as being even worse than the Germans was written by dr. henry e. Shepard, the former superintendent of public instruction for Baltimore public schools and one of the founding members of the modern language association.2 Shepard’s comparison is more fitting than he realized. German war crimes in Belgium were as much a creation of British propaganda as Sherman’s were the creation of lost Cause mythology.3 in the year william t. Sherman died, Thomas edison patented the moving picture camera. The film industry would take the mythology created by nineteenth-century Southerners and cement it in the mind of the public, north and South. By 1910 there were over ten thousand movie theaters in the united States. By 1924 that number had swollen to more than twenty-two thousand. The uS film industry has produced over seven hundred movies about the Civil war, the majority of these during the silent era.4 The first Civil war films had decidedly pro-union story lines. The first Civil war–era film was Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1903. The thirteen-minute film adaptation of the famous harriet Beecher Stowe novel was extremely successful at the box office. That pro-union movies were making money must have convinced the filmmakers, who were mostly from new york and new Jersey, to continue on that course. They also assumed that southerners would not want to be reminded of their loss and so there would not be a southern market for Civil war films. in this they could not have been more wrong. not only did southerners want Civil war movies, they wanted the Confederacy to win. in 1909 a florida reader wrote Moving Picture World, the official organ of the moving Picture exhibitors association, and asked, “why do all the Civil war movies have the northern army come out ahead?”5 The purveyors of lost Cause mythology had been successful; a generation of southerners wanted to know why the movies did not agree with what they had been taught in school. The leaders of the movie industry at that time were strong believers in giving the customer what they wanted. So, starting in 1909, Civil war movies were predominately pro-Confederate. These films were naturally popular in the South and, surprisingly, they were also well received in the north. The underdog story has always been popular in movies and plays, and most movies had a reconciliation theme. even d. w. Griffith’s famous lost Cause epic, The Birth of a Nation, had former union soldiers fighting side by side with former Confederates against...

Share