I had actually toyed with the idea of watching this massive documentary before the 150th Anniversary Celebrations got me all aflutter at the thought of the Civil War- after that happened, it became practically appointment viewing- and what an amazing appointment it was.
You hear things about 'Ken Burns' and 'The Civil War' everyone raves about it and what an amazing, engrossing documentary it is and blah, blah, blah- there's enough hype out there about this thing to make your average cynic roll his eyes- but guess what: this amazing, 9 episode, engrossing documentary on The Civil War lives up to every single bit of its hype and more.
Burns is brilliant: he takes what can be- and usually is, in many high school history classes across the country, a dry and dusty subject and he brings it to life, using a treasure trove of primary sources ranging from interviews to letters to the speeches of the people of that time. It has a powerful effect on you, listening to a gaggle of respected actors put those words in front of you and helping to bring them to life. It also helped to illustrate just how bloody the war really was at the end of it all- which again, is something you know, numbers wise, but you really don't get a sense of just how brutal it was until you sit through the sequence about Gettysburg or learn about battles like Cold Harbor and The Crater and how terrible the loss of human life was.
At Cold Harbor, Grant lost 7,000 men in 20 minutes. Think about that. Wrap your head around that- it's damn near impossible to do. We've been in Afghanistan for a decade now and we've still got a ways to go before we get anywhere close to numbers like that. At the Battle of The Crater, during the siege of Petersburg, Union forces blew a huge hole in the Confederate Defenses and rushed into the huge crater that resulted, intending to throw back the Confederates and break the siege- but didn't bring ladders and failed to take advantage of the surprise of the explosion and were pretty much slaughtered. It sounded terrible.
Burns is also careful to place every year of the war into its historical context: what was going on elsewhere in the world and the like- and talk about the influence of things like photography on the war and how technological change and advancement was going on, even throughout the bloody carnage of the Civil War itself.
No stone is left unturned and a, at least to my eye feels like a balanced, unbiased look at the conflict is promoted. Slavery isn't avoided, it's dealt with head on- and for all the moralizing you usually see about how wonderful the North was and how the war was clad in some shining noble purpose, Burns does not hide the fact that Lincoln never wanted this to be about slavery and took political heat in the North for the Emancipation Proclamation- but did it anyway.
The end of the series is especially poignant: between the tragic assassination of Lincoln so soon after the final victory and the dignified, quiet surrenders of Robert E. Lee and Joseph Johnson- the last two Confederate Generals left standing by 1865, there's a sense of melancholy that permeates the series- the South is in ruins and what had they been fighting for? This sense of melancholy becomes downright haunting when Burns interweaves footage from the 1913 Anniversary Commemorations at Gettysburg and you see grizzled, aging veterans of the war shaking hands, coming together and setting aside their differences to recognize that old aphorism that politicians love to quote: that which unites us is greater than that which divides us. In no small part thanks to the last full measure of devotion given by the Blue and the Gray during that awful war, that can no be seen to be fundamentally true.
And Ken Burns brings it all to life.
Overall: This documentary deserves all the awards it won and more. Brings dry and dusty history alive and you'll learn more about the Civil War and really experience the war in a whole new way.
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