VIRGINIA: State to be Scene for New PBS Civil War Drama
PBS appears to be discovering that drama happens on this side of the pond, too.
After being wedded for so long to British-centric scripted series, including the mega-hit “Downton Abbey,” America’s public-television giant has plans to do a Civil War drama shot in Virginia.
Ridley Scott.
The news was announced on Monday during the Television Critics Association Press Tour.
Based on true stories, the six-part series, which is yet to be titled, will follow two volunteer nurses on opposite sides of the conflict — one a staunch New England abolitionist and the other a young Confederate belle.
The series is being produced by Ridley Scott and David Zucker, and is scheduled to air this winter.
Critics for years have asked why PBS doesn’t present more home-grown dramas. This will be the first American-made drama the broadcasting service has made in about a decade.
“This is a really big deal for us,” said Paula Kerger, PBS president and CEO, said.
###
Kerger pointed out that the PBS mission in making dramas is different that other TV networks in that her organization not only wants “to entertain, but to educate and inspire.”
“We’re not interested in doing drama just for drama’s sake,” she told reporters. “We’re looking for drama that no one else is doing, and that ties into our goals.”
###
VIRGINIA: Danville Museum Exhibit Sparks Confederate Flag Debate
Danville, VA – While many celebrated King’s message of unity Monday, a new exhibit in the Danville Museum of Fine Arts and History is causing quite a divide. A new display which details the history of the Confederate flag is sparking a debate among residents.
A Confederate national flag flies in the afternoon breeze on the grounds of the Danville Museum of Fine Arts & History.
This is not the first flag controversy for the museum. Just last November the museum attracted attention over the Confederate flag which flies outside.
Last week, a new exhibit called “Divided Lines” was unveiled inside, but now it’s the community that stands divided.
While some say the display honors an important part of history, others say the flag is a symbol of hate.
“It means heritage, history, my ancestors, these guys fought,” said William Chaney, historian for the Pittsylvania County Sons of Confederate Veterans.
“It’s hurtful to the older generation and it’s hurtful to people today who see it used today with hate groups,” said Rev. William Avon Keen, president of the Danville Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Museum Executive Director Cara Burton says the museum went to great lengths to ensure the display was accurate and unbiased.
“We used a professional curator, Paris Designs, to help us vet the research,” said Burton.
While the two sides don’t debate the accuracy of the information, they do differ on its significance.
“The Civil War was over the issue of the slave,” said Keen.
“It doesn’t represent slavery. That flag was not on the ships that brought the slaves over here,” said Chaney.
Burton says she hopes the community, regardless of their feelings on the flag, will come see the exhibit and decide for themselves.
“This project is carrying out that wish that people would like to learn more about the Confederate flags and agree that it is part of history,” said Burton.
Keen says he’s not necessarily opposed to the educational display inside but won’t go see it until the flag outside is removed. Chaney says he hopes those who oppose the flag will come to realize it’s about history, not hate.
###
VIRGINIA: Robert E. Lee Author Answers Questions about “Appamattox”
FREDERICKSBURG, Va. — Dr. Elizabeth R. Varon has written what many say is one of the best books of the Civil War’s 150th anniversary.
This Friday evening, Varon will discuss that volume—“Appomattox: Victory, Defeat, and Freedom at the End of the Civil War”—in Fredericksburg for the fifth annual “Reading Lee” program hosted by Stratford Hall, Robert E. Lee’s birthplace in Virginia’s Northern Neck.
Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee issued his Farewell Address, also known as General Order No. 9, to his Army of Northern Virginia on April 10, 1865, the day after he surrendered the army to Union Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House. Illustrated prints of the address graced many a Southern parlor after the Civil War.
The public is invited to her free, 7 p.m. talk in Central Rappahannock Regional Library’s headquarter theater at 1201 Caroline St. Books will be available onsite for purchase and signing.
In “Appomattox,” Varon vividly describes the swirl of events when the Civil War ended, a moment that she says is not well understood.
She depicts the final battles in Virginia, Ulysses S. Grant’s troops’ encirclement of Lee’s half-starved Army of Northern Virginia, the commanders’ meeting in the McLean House at Appomattox Court House, and people’s shock as word of the surrender rippled across the country.
But the ink had scarcely dried on the surrender documents, she writes, before both sides began a bitter debate over the war’s meaning and the nation’s future.
Varon’s book has won the 2014 Library of Virginia Literary Award for Nonfiction, and the Dan and Marilyn Laney Prize of Texas’ Austin Civil War Round Table, is a History Book Club Main Selection and was a finalist for the Museum of the Confederacy’s Jefferson Davis Award.
A native of the commonwealth, Varon is the Langbourne M. Williams Professor of American History at the University of Virginia.
A noted Civil War historian, she is also the author of “We Mean to be Counted: White Women and Politics in Antebellum Virginia,” and “Southern Lady, Yankee Spy: The True Story of Elizabeth Van Lew, A Union Agent in the Heart of the Confederacy,” named one of the five best books on the “Civil War away from the battlefield” by The Wall Street Journal.
On Friday, Varon graciously engaged in an email Q&A about her latest work:
Why did the “gentlemen’s agreement” interpretation of Lee’s surrender of his army at Appomattox become so dominant?
The idea that the surrender was a moment of healing, a meeting of the minds between two selfless men who rose above their hatreds for the sake of the country they both loved, emerged immediately. It reflected Americans’ pride in the their exceptionalism. Civil wars had often ended in reprisals, mass punishments, executions—but Americans had chosen to end their civil war with unprecedented civility.
The gentlemen’s agreement myth was enshrined as dominant in the late 19th century, as a cult of sectional reconciliation took root among whites in the North and South.
But the myth of a healing moment co-existed from the start with heated debates over the surrender’s meaning—debates that took shape in the McLean House on April 9, 1865. My book tries to recover the raw emotions, the palpable tension, the high stakes, and the profound uncertainty of the moment of surrender. No one yet knew what the peace meant or whether it would take.
As the news of the surrender went out over the wires, Northerners and Southerners immediately began to “spin” the news for political advantage.
How did the Appomattox campaign’s “overwhelming numbers” idea, seen from a Confederate perspective, deny the legitimacy of the North’s military victory—and hence the North’s right to work its political will after the war?
Lee in his Farewell Address of April 10, 1865 insisted that Confederates succumbed to the “overwhelming numbers and resources” of the North. This argument was a salve to his soldiers, as it emphasized their heroism and blamelessness.
But the Address was also an inherently political document: it argued implicitly that the Yankee victory was one of might over right. While Confederates embraced the Farewell Address, many Northerners, Grant included, resented and rejected its message. These Northerners believed that their victory was one of right over wrong, and that Yankee skill, courage and virtue had won the day.
The Farewell Address is an artifact of a postwar battle for the moral high ground. In Northern eyes, Grant’s triumph at Appomattox connoted the moral superiority of free labor society over a slave labor regime. In Confederate eyes, the victory was an emblem of Yankee ruthlessness and rapaciousness.
Grant hoped his magnanimous terms would induce Confederates to atone for their sins and to embrace Northern ideas of progress. Confederates, following Lee, denied that they had anything to atone for, and they interpreted Grant’s terms as a promise that honorable men would not be treated dishonorably.
Some northern commentators saw the Address as evidence that Lee was unrepentant in defeat. As one New York newspaper put it, that Lee dared to congratulate the rebels at the moment of surrender was nothing less than a “slap in the face” to Union soldiers.
You have said that after the war, Lee was a symbol of defiance as well as a savvy political actor. And that he denied anti-black violence in the South. Please elaborate, with evidence.
Lee has a reputation in the modern day for having counseled resignation in defeat, and for asking Southerners to “accept the situation.” But that is not how Confederates in the war’s immediate aftermath saw him. They saw him as unbowed and unrepentant.
Lee avoided any overt politicking after the war but he nonetheless made his views known. For example, in an April 24, 1865, interview with the New York Herald, Lee offered up professions of good will, but also issued a warning to northerners: if “extermination, confiscation and general annihilation” were the North’s policy, Southerners would renew the fight, and “give their lives as dearly as possible.” Lee, in effect, proposed that Grant’s magnanimous Appomattox terms were a contract by which the North must abide.
Lee also staked out this position in his Feb. 17, 1866, testimony before Congress. He was summoned by the Republican-dominated Joint Committee on Reconstruction, convened to investigate conditions in the South. He told his congressional questioners that the North should be magnanimous in its policies because it was the best way of regaining the “good opinion” of the South.
And when asked about race relations, he insisted that the freedpeople were being well treated in the postwar South by their former masters. Lee’s testimony ran counter to that of scores of Unionist Southerners, white and black, who offered to the committee hundreds of pages of testimony describing the suffering and vulnerability of the freedpeople.
What prompted you to examine the book’s topics?
I grew up in Northern Virginia as an avid Civil War buff, so I have always been fascinated by Lee and Grant. But I came to Appomattox through a different channel.
I was asked to give a paper commemorating Juneteenth (June 19, 1865, emancipation day in Texas) and in the course of researching that topic, I kept running across references in African-American sources to April 9, 1865 as a freedom day—a date black communities commemorated as an important milestone in the freedom struggle. For many slaves, April 9–and not Jan. 1, 1863—was the de facto date of emancipation.
In the Civil War, freedom followed the Union army. So it was not until the defeat of the Confederacy’s most powerful army that freedom was within reach. I found evidence of African-American communities holding annual commemorations of April 9 not only in Virginia but in Chicago and Philadelphia, well into the 20th century. What gave this moment such lasting resonance was that on April 9, 1865, blacks were liberators as well as the liberated. Seven regiments of the United States Colored Troops participated in the final campaign that brought Lee to heel.
The crucial role of black soldiers in effecting Lee’s surrender long remained a point of pride. We can see this especially in the landmark works of black history by George Washington Williams, who was the pre-eminent African American historian of the late 19th century, and a USCT veteran of the Appomattox campaign.
Dr. Paul Reber, the executive director of Stratford Hall, suggests in a blog post that, via your book, “what we are really debating is the legacy of the American Revolution.” What’s your response?
In a sense the Civil War generation was still debating the Revolution. For Confederates, the core principle of the Revolution was the right of rebellion. Men from Lee’s social milieu were steeped in a nostalgia for the founding era, a time when Americans seemed to take it for granted that Virginians would lead the nation. For Lee, an honorable peace was synonymous with “restoration”: reversing the Civil War’s “grievous effects” and turning back the clock to the halcyon days of the early Republic.
For Grant and most Northerners, the core principle of the Revolution was the principle of representative government and of majority rule–a principle Southerners rejected by seceding. Grant was committed to an ethos of progress, and he wanted to consolidate and extend the changes the war had brought. He hoped that with the slaveholding aristocracy dethroned, true democracy could take root, making the Union stronger than ever.
Lee and Grant represented two positions in a perennial debate in American political life: Did the nation’s best days lie in its past or in its future?
What didn’t I ask you that I should have? Or that you’d like to note for readers?
I would like to urge readers to visit the historical sites associated with the war’s closing chapters here in Virginia—magnificent historical parks and museums at Petersburg, Pamplin, Sailor’s Creek and Appomattox. The staffs of these sites are peerless in their knowledge and generous with their time. I hope to see you there this spring!
###
