Gettysburg
Written and directed by Ronald Maxwell
Turner Pictures
Starring Tom Berenger, Martin Sheen and Jeff Daniels
Pitt Centre, Sydney for two weeks from September 8
Astor Cinema, Melbourne for two weeks from October 9
Reviewed by Frank Noakes
Passing the Statue of Liberty in New York's Upper Bay on the way to the former immigration reception station on Ellis Island, Manhattan looms large. Welcome to the "new world". Even as a tourist, retracing the arrival route of millions of the world's dispossessed, displaced, persecuted — America's new citizens — one can imagine, almost feel their excitement. The promise of a new life. The land of milk and honey; but more importantly, a land of justice and equality — the American dream. Today, a short ride on New York's subway reveals the transcendence of the dream into the nightmare.
But the dream, the ideal, was tangible to those who fought in the war between the states: the Civil War of 1861-1865. On the eve of what was perhaps the defining moment of that war — the battle of Gettysburg — a Union army commander, Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, speaks to some of his troops:
"Some of us volunteered to fight for Union. Some came in mainly because we were bored at home and this looked like it might be fun. Some came because we were ashamed not to. Many of us came ... because it was the right thing to do. All of us have seen men die. Most of us never saw a black man back home. We think on that, too. But freedom ... is not just a word.
"This is a different kind of army. If you look at history you'll see men fight for pay, or women, or some other kind of loot. They fight for land, or because a king makes them, or just because they like killing. But we're here for something new. This hasn't happened much in the history of the world. We're an army going out to set other men free.
"This is free ground. All the way from here to the Pacific Ocean. No man has to bow. No man born to royalty. Here we judge you by what you do, not by what your father was. Here you can be something ... It isn't the land — there's always more land. It's the idea that we all have value, you and me, we're worth something more than the dirt. I never saw dirt I'd die for ... What we're all fighting for, in the end, is each other."
The following day, July 1, 1863, the battle that became the slaughter at the small Pennsylvanian farming town of Gettysburg began. Film maker Ronald Maxwell transforms Michael Shaara's Pulitzer prize-winning book The Killer Angels into an epic movie. There is no greater testimony to the triumph of Gettysburg than its ability to grip and keep the attention for four and a quarter hours, excluding the intermission (the credits alone run for a full ten minutes).
After a 40-hour bombardment the Confederates take Fort Sumter in South Carolina on April 13, 1861, marking the outbreak of the Civil War. Two days later, the newly elected president, Abraham Lincoln called for a militia to suppress the Confederate States of America formed by the secession from the Union of eleven southern states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia.
The Union could not abide a new nation facing it across an armed border to the south especially one aligned to the old enemy — England.
The Confederate rebel army crossed the Potomac River into the north in an attempt to draw the Union army into the open and destroy it. One hundred and fifty thousand soldiers met, by chance, at Gettysburg. Robert E. Lee's 70,000 Anglo-Saxon, Protestant rebel army faced a 80,000-strong Union army of strange accents and religions, many of whom could not speak English.
Lee himself had no slaves and was opposed to slavery, although he didn't believe blacks were equal to whites "in the present stage of [their] development". Indeed, Lee was offered by Lincoln the command of the Union army. In a letter Lee explained his position:
"With all my devotion to the Union and the feeling of loyalty and duty of an American citizen, I have not been able to raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home. I have therefore resigned my commission in the Army."
With less than 10% of white males throughout the Confederacy owning more than two slaves, it is clear that the motivation to take up arms for most southerners went beyond the issue of slavery. "States' rights" (including the right to determine law on slavery), the right to secede from the Union, who controls the community and country versus city were all at work on the southern psyche. This accorded with their vision of the American dream — a small farm, no taxes and minimal government. Despite this, their cause ultimately founded on the rock of reaction over the issue of slavery; history and morality were against them.
The federal side was fought primarily to maintain the Union; slave emancipation was a secondary issue. As late as August 1862, a full year into the war, Lincoln stated: "My paramount object is to save the Union, and not to save or destroy slavery". The image of Lincoln as the champion of slave emancipation is misleading. It was not until January 1, 1863 that slaves were declared free.
Gone with the Wind portrayed the lifestyle — endless rounds of garden parties and balls — of the wealthy southern land and slave-owners where honour and "dignity" went hand in hand with hide-bound conservatism. The declaration of war was made on a beautiful spring day in 1861 and Gone with the Wind shows the elation of the young southern gentlemen as they rushed to sign up for the adventure of a lifetime — it was to be all over in a month. At the battle of Gettysburg more than 20,000 Confederates would perish. The federal army is reputed to have lost 23,000 over those three days. The war dragged on for a further two years with mounting losses.
An English military observer of the war (England sided with the Confederacy), Arthur Fremantle relates to his hosts the sentiment which Shaara's book has him soliloquise: "The great experiment. In democracy. The equality of the rabble. In not much more than a generation that have come back to class. As the French have done. What a tragic thing, that revolution ... but no matter the experiment doesn't work. Give them 50 years, and all that equality rot is gone. Here they have that same love of the land and of tradition, of the right form, of breeding, in their horses, their women. Of course slavery is a bit embarrassing, but that, of course, will go. But the point is they do it all exactly as we do in Europe. And the North does not. That's what the war is really about.
"The North has those huge bloody cities and a thousand religions, and the only aristocracy is the aristocracy of wealth. The Northerner doesn't give a damn for tradition, or breeding, or the Old Country. He hates the Old Country. Odd. You very rarely hear a Southerner refer to 'the Old Country'. In that pained way a German does. Or an Italian. Well, of course, the South is the Old Country. They haven't left Europe. They've merely transplanted it. And that's what the war is about."
There are no Scarlett O'Hara's in this movie. In fact, there are only two women amongst the cast of 5000. They appear just long enough for one of them to utter one sentence. But this is forgivable under the circumstances. The film is based entirely around the three day battle.
In the 19th century American revolution, Hanna Snell dressed as a man and served in action for seven years; she toured the country recounting her story until her graphic descriptions of the brutal butchery of war became unacceptable to the authorities.
Rita Mae Brown in the foreword to her historical novel High Hearts relates how two northern women, Frances L. Clalin of the 4th Missouri Heavy Artillery and Dr Mary Walker of New York state, who posed as a male surgeon, revealed their roles after the war. Brown says that many more southern women fought surreptitiously.
In the south, women and slaves played crucial roles behind the lines, tending to the injured and keeping the economy afloat. Later in the war, as the Union army rolled southward liberating slaves along the way, some 200,000 blacks would join the federal cause to create an unstoppable and finally victorious force.
Gettysburg is not just for war buffs and historians; it is action packed. There is much violence, but it is not gratuitous. There are no love scenes, but the film deals sensitively with the relationships amongst and between the soldiers of the opposing sides.
Lincoln later visited Gettysburg and delivered his famous oration — the Gettysburg address — at the dedication of the Gettysburg cemetery. There he spoke of the birth of a new freedom coining the eulogy: "government of the people, by the people and for the people". That was the dream that thousands died for in the American Civil War. Unfortunately, it remains a dream.