User Reviews

The war was basically over when Lee surrendered the remnants of the Army of Northern Virginia to Grant's Union Army at Appomatox Court House in Virginia. The South could no longer win.

Yet some of the fighting went on. There was a Confederate victory in a minor battle in Texas. And Johnston's army engaged Sherman's at Bentonville and elsewhere in North Carolina before finally surrendering. Confederate President Jefferson Davis was captured and imprisoned for two years.

That ended the Civil War but not the conflict. John Wilkes Booth, of course, assassinated Abraham Lincoln while he was attending a play at Ford's Theater in Washington. Booth himself was later shot and killed. The incident is still extremely moving, not just because Lincoln may have been the greatest president we've had but because it reminds us of more recent assassinations of exceedingly popular and good men who have occupied the same office.

The film doesn't say so but General Lee, in his surrender, urged his men not to carry on guerrilla warfare in the mountains, as some of them wanted to do, or to fight on out of Mexico, as Jefferson Davis intended. Lee asked them to stack their arms and go home.

Some habits are harder to break than others and a violent moral nihilism seems sometimes more than usually addictive. Jesse James and others had ridden with Morgan and Quantrell in the West and continued their lawless careers, only this time as bandits rather than military raiders.

I'm only adding these little notes because the film doesn't, but it's not a weakness in the series, which is superb both as history and art. It's one of those instances in which such a presentation in the mass media has absolutely nothing to be ashamed of.