User Reviews

There's really not much to say about this superb documentary that doesn't already apply to the other episodes. "Simply Murder" takes us through the Union debacle at Fredericksberg, through the Union debacle at Chancellorsville, and ends with Grant's siege of Vicksberg and Lee deciding that it was time to invade the North and threaten Philadelphia and perhaps Washington. While Robert E. Lee was destroying Burnside's army before Fredericksberg, he's said to have remarked, "It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it." I'm not at all sure the sentiment has penetrated every soul in this or any other nation.

It's difficult to imagine how the Union Army could have produced such a string of incompetent leaders: Scott, Halleck, McDowell, McClellan, Pope, McClellan, Burnside, and Hooker. Some of them seemed to lose battles almost willfully. The Confederates by this time were having trouble with men and supplies. Inflation was rampant in the South, and Union gold dollars were becoming the coin of the realm. Women caused "the bread riot" in Richmond and only dispersed when threatened with bullets. But the Army of the United States was hardly better off. Supply houses bulged with food and equipment but little of it was reaching the men. Hooker straightened that problem out, if nothing else. But the Union troops were thoroughly discouraged by the series of defeats. Desertions on both sides became more common.

It's too bad that the engagements themselves are presented in such brief form. A lot of interesting and sometimes gripping detail is left out. Nothing about Burnside's unlucky "mud march." Nothing about the "Confederate Angel" who risked his life to give water to dying Yankees at Fredericksberg. Nothing about the wounded in the Wilderness lying helpless and watching a forest fire approaching them before they burned to death. A considerable time is spent on the death of Stonewall Jackson, killed by his own sentries. The house in which he died still stands preserved, a short distance from Interstate 95. A highway sign warns you in advance that you are approaching the "Stonewall Jackson Shrine."

But, if such detail had been described, I suppose we would have had to miss the quotidian rituals -- how to make coffee when there is none; how to make "sloosh"; the improvised truces among combatants on either side of a small creek; a recipe for home-made booze that includes fermented meat.

There are contemporary film clips of the swamps in the vicinity of Vicksberg that Grant's men had to march through for twenty miles or more. There is a glimpse of a snake in the muddy water, head up and alert, before it swims from the camera. It's not a water moccasin. It's a harmless water snake of the genus Natrix. I just threw that in for the hell of it.