The Civil War - A Film by Ken Burns (Boxed Set)

Burns, though, hews very, very closely to the traditional telling of the Civil War as a conflict that occurred mainly in Virginia, with some other, minor battles in Tennessee and Mississippi. The western campaigns matter only when Sherman comes on the stage, and for Burns they matter because Sherman is there. Historians abandoned this approach three decades before "The Civil War" debuted, and today it looks even more archaic.

Is this so bad? I think it is. It's a peculiarly myopic view, which "Lost Cause" historians happily parroted in the 20s and 30s: the gallant and brilliant Southerners, fighting north of Richmond, held off the stubborn and brutal Yankees until the most brutal Yankee (Grant) put down the flower of chivalry with unapologetic, disgraceful butchery. It gives Robert E. Lee a genius out of proportion to his abilities and downplays the military revolution in the Union Army, arguably the first fighting force of the modern era.

The Union's superb organizational techniques came to the fore in the Western theater, where generals like Grant, Sherman and George Thomas, out of the Virginia spotlight, were free to operate, and had much more success. With the exception of the Vicksburg campaign, Burns fails to convey this: he ignores the Army of Tennesee's invasion of Kentucky, he skips over the Tennesee campaigns (leaving Thomas, the war's best defensive general, a footnote in the process) and never adequately conveys the strategic manuevering of Sherman and Johnston north of Atlanta in the spring of 1864.

So, will anyone besides a Civil War geek like me complain? Probably not. If Burns' documentary was all tactics, it wouldn't be as powerful. But his approach here was repeated in "Baseball" and "Jazz": take a handful of colorful personalities to tell the story and trust them to tell it fully and completely. As critics have noted, this translates into one field or one idea getting the face time, at the expense of others. In "Baseball," the 50s are almost exclusively devoted to the Yankees, Dodgers and Giants, as if baseball did not exist outside the Big Apple; in "Jazz," Wynton Marsalis, a neo-traditionalist, gets to tell his version of Jazz, one reason the form's last 40 years get so little treatment.

So it is with "The Civil War:" it's all about Virginia and the east. Why? Because Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain is more telegenic than William Rosecrans, and his story had a happier ending. For a story-teller, it makes sense. For a historian, using one man or one woman to stand in place of an entire era limits our understanding of the time. Burns, unfortunately, lets his narrative get in the way of the history. And he would do it again and again.


Can I give it More than 5 stars?   October 31, 2002
Patrick A. Hayden (Arlington, VA United States)
47 out of 49 found this review helpful

I remember watching this documentary by Ken Burns when it first appeared on PBS in 1990. It started my lifelong interest in the Civil War. Countless books and trips to battlefields later, it still stands as the finest general work on the war ever made.

The story of the war is told through pictures, narratives, and the unobtrusive narration by David McCoulough, who's voice is pitch pefect for the job. Never before have photos had such a dramatic effect in telling a story. They say a picture says a thousand words, and this series prove that maxim correct. The five discs cover the 5 years of the war, and the 9 parts of teh series. The most effective are "1861: The Cause", "1863: The Universe of Battle", and "1865: The Better Angels of our Nature". They cover the events that led up to the war, the turining points at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, and the end and aftermath of the war. Each is suprememly emotional. One episode intersperses an old narrative from the daughter of a former slave as she remembers her father's stories. Shelby Foote, author of the most comprehensive book on the war, offers invaluable advice. High praise must also go to Sam Waterston, who voices Abraham Lincoln. In the final segment of the 1863 disc, Waterston recites the Gettysburg Address, and I must admit it brought me to tears.

The music is also a key factor to the success of the film. Burns went back and found the old music that was popular among the people and the soldiers, both North & South during the war. It is moving, from the haunting opening music, to the old spirituals that are found on disc 2's "1862: Forever Free". Add that to a stable of great voice actors, (besides Waterston, Morgan Freeman as Frederick Douglass and George Plimpton as George Tempelton Strong are standouts), and the film becomes almost magical, transporting the viewer to those 4 horrible years that changed the Nation forever.

The Civil War is the most important saga in American History, and this documentary gives the people who fought it and the effect the War had on the US as a people the proper historical weight and respect. It deserves a place on any amatuer historians shelf.


Good, but with one major fault   January 3, 2001
Chris Johnson (Webster Groves, Missouri United States)
40 out of 66 found this review helpful

This is as good a documentary as anyone has ever made. It is beautifully photographed and very dramatic. Its voiceover actors are almost perfect for their roles and its talking heads, particularly Shelby Foote, are interesting and informative, coming in at just the right time. Even though there isn't a battle recreation here, I got more of a feel of what the battles must have been like watching this than from any other Civil War documentary I've ever seen. The subjects covered here are rather cliched; one would like to heard much more about things like the inner wars in east Tennessee and Missouri or the New York draft riots. But this is still the best Civil War documentary available.

Which isn't the compliment you'd think. Because if you want to understand why the war happened, you won't find that out here. Burns dedicates about half of one episode to the causes of the war, nowhere near enough time. It took Allan Nevins 2,000 pages to get from 1848 to 1861. Entire books have been written on the causes of the war, a topic Burns barely discusses. There is next-to nothing here about the split in the Democratic party in the 1840's, the political controversy over Oregon and Texas, the battles over internal improvements which alienated the West, or even the Kansas- Nebraska Act, which led to the formation of the Republican Party.

Burns' Civil War just kind of begins. It would have been nice to know what brought it on. If you want to know about Civil War battles, this is a good place to do it. If you want to understand the war, keep looking.


Best Civil War documentary TELEVISION has done, but...   September 13, 2000
Roy Wells (San Ramon, CA - United States)
39 out of 59 found this review helpful

While Ken Burns did a MUCH better job than most Television documentaries on the Civil War, it is far from perfect. It has a bias -- that the war was almost entirely about slavery. While slavery was a Key Issue, Burns elevates it.

There are other problems. The Myth that Robert E. Lee never referred to the Union as "the enemy" is perpetuated. Yet even in one section of the documentary Lee is quoted as saying "the enemy is there..." which begs the question.

There are numerous factual errors. The film states that over 100,000 Union soldiers were under the age of 16 (it was closer to 1,000) and even gets the age of Lincoln at his death wrong. Nitpicking? Perhaps, but these are easily checked facts.

Burns also seems to have used as one of his principle guides to the period the writer Shelby Foote. Foote is a good writer (and looks every bit the perfect figure on TV) but is NOT a historian.

In short, don't use this as your only reference point.


The birth of the modern television documentary   November 13, 2003
Robert Moore (Chicago, IL USA)
34 out of 37 found this review helpful

Ken Burn's THE CIVIL WAR was a watershed moment in the history of television documentary. The influence of this series can hardly be overstated, with a horde of documentaries on PBS and The History Channel adopting many of the techniques that Burn's mastered here. When the series was first broadcast on PBS in 1990, I was utterly enchanted--along with millions of others--with the unique blend of narration by David McCullough, archival photographs combined with contemporary location shots, lines from famous individuals read by professional actors and other celebrities, sound effects, commentary by professional historians, and beautiful music that contained just a touch of melancholy. I had never seen anything like it, and the only things I have seen like it since have shamelessly imitated it.

The DVDs not only provide a superior copy of the original series, but also contain a number of excellent features, including additional interviews and a wealth of other goodies. I had rewatched much of the series on video, but I found the color somewhat off. The DVD is a great improvement.

There are so many things to praise about this series. It isn't perfect, and not all will agree with the emphases. The interpretation follows fairly consistently that of James McPherson and Shelby Foote who saw slavery as the root cause of the war, unlike previous generations of historians who out of a respect to Southerners (I'm a Southerner, for the record, though I now live in Chicago) de-emphasized slavery and identified the cause of the war more with states's rights than slavery. But what can't be argued is the brilliantly vivid way that Burns and his collaborators manage to bring back to life a time long past. There are countless photographs and not just those by "Matthew Brady" (most of the photographs attributed to Brady where taken by his assistants, primarily Alexander Gardner, who deserves the reputation that Brady has), but from all over the United States. All the disparate elements are blended seamlessly to produce a nearly unblemished surface.

The quality of the voice-overs was, at the time of this series release, utterly unprecedented. A host of well-known individuals were used in the readings, but the principle ones were Sam Waterson as Abraham Lincoln, Julie Harris as Mary Chestnut, Jason Robards as Ulysses S. Grant, Morgan Freeman as Frederick Douglas, Garrison Keillor as Walt Whitman, journalist Charley McDowell as Private Sam Watkins, George Plimpton as George Templeton Strong, and a host of others. My favorite may be playwright Arthur Miller, who marvelously provides the gruff voice for the remarkable statements by William Tecumseh Sherman.

But despite all this excellence, one person managed to steal the whole show: Shelby Foote. It is simply shocking that amidst all these riches that many of the greatest moments of the show consisted of a lone Southern historian reflecting on the meaning of the war. Foote, although well known for his monumental narrative history of the war, was more or less an unknown. But the series made him a media star, a role that he refused to take on or exploit. Of the ten greatest moments on the series, perhaps seven of them involve Foote, whether explaining that the Civil War was the central event of American history, that it made us a nation (before the war people would say "the United States are" but afterwards they say "the United States is"), or eloquently talking of the brilliance of Nathan Bedford Forrest, or stating that Gettysburg was the cost the South had to pay for having Robert E. Lee lead the Army of Northern Virginia. He was partly his Southern drawl, partly his remarkable ability to distilling a point to its essence, and partly his mastery of words.

The great thing about this series is that even if you have read such classics as Douglas Southall Freeman's LEE'S LIEUTENANTS and his four-volume biography of Lee, McPherson's BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM, and Foote's THE CIVIL WAR, Burn's documentary will make the war come alive in a completely new and exciting way. This set will therefore be essential viewing for all serious students of the Civil War, as well as nearly anyone even remotely curious about American history, or, for that matter, great television.