Long Shadows: The Legacy of the American Civil War (review)

Film Reviews Long Shadows: The Legacy of the American Civil War. Produced, narrated, written, and directed by Ross Spears. 1987. Available from the James Agee Film Project, 316 E. Main Street, Johnson City, TN 37601. "We cannot escape history," Abraham Lincoln once said. The shadow of Lincoln and the paroxysm of the Civil War extend from his century into our own, a shadow that is not diminished after 125 years. The memory of the Civil War still dominates our consciousness. Princeton historian James McPherson's The Battle Cry ofFreedom became a best-seller and then went on to win the Pulitzer Prize this year. In fact, over a hundred new books are published each year dealing with the Civil War. The battlefield at Gettysburg attracts two millions visitors a year. Mock battles are staged by pretend soldiers, some of whom may believe themselves to be the reincarnated ghosts of the Union and the Confederacy. The memory of the Civil War stimulates the imagination and has taken on a metaphysical significance. The best recent film to have treated the Civil War is Ross Spears's Long Shadows: The Legacy of the American Civil War. The film is a perceptive documentary that takes a clear position on the Civil War. Spears himself has centered filmmaking operations in Tennessee, and his orientation is Southern. A number of quick interviews with ordinary people from Northern and Southern cities suggests that Southerners are better informed on the issue. Though his thesis is that the Civil War was instrumental in shaping our national identity, people from the South are more knowledgeable. The film is also instructive and could be used in any number of college courses—American literature courses dealing with the Southern Renaissance, for example, as well as courses dealing with the history of the South. The film would also be useful for a survey course in American history so long as the instructor prepared the class by first discussing the problems of American historiography. In fact, the film could be very useful in leading students to a discussion of those problems, since it clearly demonstrates that the Civil War has a far different significance for the South in comparison to the North. Ross Spears is an interesting director and independent filmmaker. Though he works in the genre of the documentary, his films are not so "dry" as 19 some people may expect documentaries to be. In fact, Long Shadows is often entertaining in the way it contrasts Northern and Southern impressions about the Civil War, showing the tatty artifacts that help keep the War Between the States (as some latter-day Rebels may prefer to call it) alive in the popular imaginationpigeon -splattered monuments to the fading gentility of Civil War heroes, for examples, and motels that have seen better days dedicated to the likes of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Long Shadows, then, which was funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and in part by a number of state Humanities groups, examines not only the events of the war but also the way those past events have shaped the American present. Spears makes direct connections between the Civil War and America's current racial problems, the development of corporate enterprise in the Sunbelt and the Southland (fulfilling, perhaps, the Rebel desire that the South would rise again) and, a little surprisingly (though logically), America's military intervention in Vietnam and the way that Americans tend to resort quickly to the use of military force to resolve political disputes, at home during the 1860s, and in Southeast Asia during the 1960s. Spears makes the point in this filmed essay that just as the South was humbled and disoriented by defeat after the Civil War, that experience served as a psychological paradigm for what the nation at large lived through after the American withdrawal from Saigon. Long Shadows begins as an historic account of Civil War battles and the consequent destruction of Atlanta and other cities as General Sherman "marched to the sea" (to use the historic Northern euphemism for a brutal, destructive policy specifically designed to break the spirit of the South), but it ends at the Vietnam memorial...