All language subtitles for Civil War, The, 09 (1990)

"Were these
things real?

"Did I see those brave and
noble countrymen of mine

"laid low in death and
weltering in their blood?

"Did I see our country
laid waste and in ruins?

"Did I see soldiers marching,
the earth trembling

"and jarring beneath
their measured tread?

"Did I see the ruins
of smoldering cities

"and deserted homes?

"Did I see the flag of my country,
that I had followed so long,

"furled to be no more
unfurled forever?

"Surely, they are
but the vagaries

"of mine own
imagination.

"But hush! I now hear
the approach of battle.

"That low, rumbling
sound in the west

"is the roar of cannon
in the distance."

Private Sam
Watkins, Company H,

First Tennessee
Regiment.

"Strange, is it not,

"that battles,
martyrs, blood,

"even assassination,

"should so condense
a nationality?"

Walt Whitman.

It is the event in
American history in that

it is the moment
that made

the United States
as a nation,

and I mean that
in different ways.

The United States
was obviously a nation

when it adopted
a constitution,

but it adopted a
constitution that

required a war
to be sorted out

and therefore required a
war to make a real nation

out of what was a
theoretical nation as...

as it was designed at the
Constitutional Convention.

Before the war, it was said,
"the United States are."

Grammatically, it was spoken
that way and thought of as a

collection of
independent states,

and after the war, it was always
"the United States is,"

as we say today without
being self-conscious at all.

And that sums up what
the war accomplished.

It made
us an "is."

The Confederate States of
America had once stretched

from the Rappahannock
to the Rio Grande.

Its leaders had once
dreamed of a tropical empire

reaching ever
southward

to Mexico, Guatemala,
Nicaragua,

Brazil.

By April 1865,
the dream was gone.

Richmond had fallen.

The Confederate government,
and Jefferson Davis with it,

had fled into the wilderness
of North Carolina.

The Confederate armies,
once the terror of the Union,

had been battered and starved
almost out of existence

and then forced to
surrender at Appomattox,

where Ulysses
S. Grant

had finally cornered
Robert E. Lee.

In April 1865, Elisha
Hunt Rhodes

would receive the
best news of the war

and then
the worst.

In the woods of
North Carolina,

two old adversaries,

William Tecumseh
Sherman

and Joseph
E. Johnston,

would meet on the field
of battle one last time.

By then, Confederate
Sam Watkins would write,

"the once proud
Army of Tennessee

"had degenerated
to a mob."

In April 1861,

Abraham Lincoln had
implored his countrymen

not to go
to war.

to listen to "the better
angels" of their nature.

Now in
April 1865,

the bloodshed was
finally coming to an end.

But in Washington,
John Wilkes Booth

could not accept that
the war was over.

In four years, more than
a million photographs

were made
of the war.

Now, no one seemed
to want them anymore.

Mathew Brady
went bankrupt.

Thousands of glass-plate
negatives were lost,

mislaid or forgotten.

Thousands more were
sold to gardeners,

not for the
images they held,

but for the
glass itself.

In the years that
followed Appomattox,

the sun slowly burned
the image of war

from thousands of
greenhouse glass panes.

"The Civil War," a Harvard
professor wrote at the time,

"opened a great gulf between what
happened before in our century

"and what has
happened since.

"It does not seem to
me as if I were living

"in the country in
which I was born."

The war was over,
and it was not over.

"My shoes
are gone.

"My clothes are gone. I'm
weary, I'm sick, I'm hungry.

"My family have all been
killed or scattered.

"and I have suffered
all this for my country.

"I love my country, but
if this war is ever over,

"I'll be damned if I ever
love another country."

"So Blackwood
and I left the army...

"our army...left them there
on the hill with their arms

"stacked in the
field, all in rows,

"never to see
it anymore.

"Telling Clarke and
Bell good-bye,

"we crossed the road into
the fields and thickets

"and in a little
while lost sight of

"all that told of the presence
of what was left of the army."

Barry Benson.

Monday, April 10th.

"Lee and his army

"have surrendered!
Gloria in excelsis deo.

"They can bother and perplex
none but historians henceforth,

"forever.

"There is no such army
anymore, God be praised."

George Templeton
Strong.

"Near Appomattox
Courthouse, Virginia.

"Glory to God
in the highest!

"Peace on earth,
good will to men!

"Thank God Lee has surrendered,
and the war will soon end.

"How can I record the
events of this day?

"Such a scene only
happens once in centuries.

"General Meade rode like mad down
the road with his hat off, shouting,

" 'The war is over, and
we are going home!'

"The men threw their knapsacks
and canteens into the air

"and howled
like mad.

"The rebels are
half-starved,

"and our men divided
their rations with them.

"I cried and
laughed by turns.

"I was never so
happy in my life.

"I thank God for all
his blessings to me

"and that my life has been
spared to see this glorious day."

Elisha Hunt Rhodes.

Word of Lee's
surrender spread fast.

A galloping rider
shouted the good news

to Sherman's army
in North Carolina,

and one gleeful soldier
bellowed back at him,

"You're the son of a bitch
we've been looking for

"all these
four years!"

Church bells rang out
in every northern town.

The people of
Deer Isle, Maine,

had followed the steady
march of Union victories

with the same joy felt by
towns all over the north,

and when news of Appomattox
got out to the islands,

shouting horsemen carried
it from house to house.

But the grieving
did not end.

Private William Toothaker
succumbed to disease

aboard a
transport ship,

leaving four small children
whose memories of him

would quickly fade.

And a letter came, informing
Private Albion Stinson's wife

that her husband had been killed
near Appomattox Courthouse

just five days before the
Confederate surrender.

When the news reached Clarksville,
Tennessee, the Union military governor

ordered a grand, city-
wide celebration.

"All the storehouses
were brilliantly lighted.

"These blue devils
desecrated our churches

"by ringing
the bells.

"They did all in their
power to a-rile us."

Nannie Haskins.

At Vicksburg, 2,000
liberated Union prisoners

crowded onto the decks
of the steamboat "Sultana,"

gleeful to be on their
way north at last.

Near Memphis,
a boiler exploded,

and she burst
into flames.

More than 1,200
men died,

still hundreds of
miles from home.

"We are scattered,

"stunned.

"The remnant of heart
left alive in us is

"filled with
brotherly hate.

"Whose fault?

"Everybody blamed
by somebody else.

"Only the dead heroes
left stiff and stark

"on the battlefield
escape."

Mary Chesnut.

When the news of the surrender
reached Edmund Ruffin,

the old Virginia secessionist
who had fired one of the

first shots at
Fort Sumter,

he draped a rebel flag over his
shoulders and shot himself

rather than live, he wrote,
"in a restored Union

"with members of
the Yankee race."

"You may forgive us," a
surrendering rebel officer

told Joshua
Lawrence Chamberlain

after the ceremony
at Appomattox,

"but we won't
be forgiven.

"There is a rancor in our hearts
which you little dream of.

"We hate you, sir."

April 14, 1865
was Good Friday.

It also marked
to the day

the fourth anniversary of the
surrender of Fort Sumter,

and within the fort's
pulverized walls that morning,

everything was being readied
for a noontime ceremony.

The fort's old Union commander,
Colonel Robert Anderson,

was to raise the same flag he
had been forced to haul down

in 1861.

An audience of northern
soldiers and dignitaries

and some 4,000
former slaves watched.

Few local whites
chose to attend.

"At first, I could not hear
Colonel Anderson,

"for his voice
came thickly,

"but in a moment,
he said clearly,

"I thank God that I have
lived to see this day.

"And after a few more words,
he began to hoist the flag.

"It went up slowly
and hung limp,

"a weather-beaten, frayed,
and shell-torn old flag

"not fit for much
more work,

"but when it had crept clear
of the shelter of the walls,

"a sudden breath of
wind caught it,

"and it shook
its folds

"and flew straight
out above us.

"I think we
stood up.

“Somebody started the
Star-Spangled Banner,

"and we sang
the first verse,

"which is all that
most people know.

"But it did not make much
difference, for a great gun

"was fired close to us
from the fort itself,

"followed, in obedience
to the president's order,

"by a national salute

"from every fort and battery
that fired upon Fort Sumter."

In Washington that same
day, John Wilkes Booth

dropped by Ford's Theatre
to pick up his mail.

A stagehand told him the
president and General Grant

were both expected
to attend that night

to see the actress
Laura Keene

in a British comedy called
"Our American Cousin."

Booth told his band of devoted
followers of a new plan:

he would shoot
Lincoln and Grant.

Lewis Paine was to kill
Secretary of State William Seward.

George Atzerodt was to
shoot the vice president,

Andrew Johnson.

Early that evening,
Booth led his horse

out of the livery stable
near Ford's Theatre.

A young boy was told to
hold it at the stage door.

At the last minute, General and
Mrs. Grant begged off the theater party

and left the city
for Philadelphia.

The Lincolns arrived and took
their seats in the presidential box.

With them were Major Henry
Rathbone and his fiancée,

Clara Harris.

What would you
advise, ma?

Just remember,
dear, he's rich.

Hush! Here
he comes.

Ah, Mr. Trenchard!

We were just saying how
you always seem sure of

hitting your mark.

The president seemed
to be enjoying the play.

His wife held
his hand.

Booth swallowed two
brandies at a nearby bar,

then returned
to the theater.

He waited for the
laughter to rise,

then slipped silently
into the president's box.

He held a dagger
in his left hand,

- a Derringer pistol in his right.
- The nasty beast!

Sir, your vulgarity

renders you intolerable
in polite society.

Maybe I don't know the
manners of polite society,

but I guess I know
enough to turn

you inside out,
old gal, you

sockdolagizing
old man-trap.

Booth fired, then vaulted
over the front of the box,

caught his right spur in the
draped flag, and landed on stage

breaking
his left leg.

He waved his dagger and shouted
something to the stunned audience.

Some thought he said,
"Sic semper tyrannis" --

"Thus be it ever to tyrants,"
Virginia's state motto.

Others heard it as
"The south is avenged!"

For a long moment,
the theater was still,

then Mary
Lincoln screamed.

The bullet from Booth's pistol had
entered the back of Lincoln's head,

torn through his brain, and
lodged behind his right eye.

A surgeon from the audience
pronounced the wound mortal.

Soldiers carried the unconscious
president from the theater

into a boarding house
across 10th Street.

"We put him on the first floor
and laid him on the bed.

"When we took him into the
room, we had to get out.

"They wouldn't let anybody in
without it was a doctor or something."

Private Jacob Soles.

"The giant sufferer lay extended
diagonally across the bed,

"which was not long
enough for him.

"He had been stripped
of his clothes.

"His slow,
full respiration

"lifted the covers with
each breath he took.

"His features were
calm and striking."

Gideon Welles.

The doctors could
do nothing.

Mary implored her
husband to speak to her

and wept so
inconsolably,

she was finally taken
into the front parlor.

Cabinet officers stood
by helpless all night,

doubly shocked to hear that
Booth's accomplice, Lewis Paine,

had stabbed Secretary
of State Seward,

then run out into
the street crying,

"I'm mad! I'm mad!"

George Atzerodt had been too
frightened to carry out Booth's order

to kill the
vice president.

Around 6:00
the morning,

Navy Secretary Welles
stepped outside

and found the streets filled
with silent, anxious people.

"A little before 7:00,
I went back into the room.

"The death struggle
had begun.

"Robert, his son, stood
at the head of the bed.

"He bore himself well,
but on two occasions,

"gave way

"and sobbed aloud,

"leaning on the shoulder
of Senator Sumner."

At 7:22 on the morning
of April 15th, 1865,

Abraham Lincoln died.

He was fifty-
six-years-old.

Secretary of War
Edwin Stanton said,

"Now he belongs
to the ages."

His pockets contained two pairs
of spectacles, a pocketknife,

a linen handkerchief,
and a wallet.

In it were nine
newspaper clippings

and a Confederate
$5.00 bill.

"Mother prepared
breakfast

"and other
meals as usual,

"but not a mouthful was
eaten all day by either of us.

"We each drank half a cup
of coffee, that was all.

"Little was said.

"We got every newspaper,
morning and evening,

"and passed them
silently to each other."

Walt Whitman.

The telegraph carried the news
across the country in minutes.

No president had
ever been murdered.

People would remember
for the rest of their lives

where they were
and what they felt

and what the
weather was like

when they heard
what had happened.

"Near Appomattox
Courthouse, Virginia,

"Saturday, April 15.

"Bad news has
just arrived.

"Corporal Thomas Parker has
just said President Lincoln

"is dead, murdered.

"We cannot realize that
our president is dead.

"May God help his family
and our distracted country."

Elisha Hunt Rhodes.

"I have been
expecting this.

"I am stunned,

"as by a fearful
personal calamity,

"though I can see that this thing
occurring just at this time

"may be overruled
to our great good.

"We shall appreciate
him at last."

George Templeton
Strong.

"On the Avenue in front
of the White House

"were several hundred
colored people,

"mostly women
and children,

"weeping and
wailing their loss.

"This crowd did
not diminish

"through the whole
of that cold, wet day.

"They seemed not to know
what was to be their fate

"since their great
benefactor was dead,

"and though strong and brave
men wept when I met them,

"the hopeless grief of
those poor colored people

"affected me more than
almost anything else."

Gideon Welles.

Lincoln's casket
lay in state,

first in the East Room
of the White House,

then in the Rotunda
of the Capitol.

He was to be buried
in Springfield, Illinois,

his adopted home.

The small coffin of his son Willy,
who had died in Washington,

was disinterred to make
the journey with him.

Mary Lincoln was too
overcome with grief to go.

The funeral train
took twelve days

and traveled
1,662 miles

through the soft
spring landscape.

retracing the route
Lincoln had taken

to Washington
four years earlier.

In Philadelphia, Lincoln's
coffin lay in Independence Hall,

where he had declared he would
"rather be assassinated"

than surrender the principles embodied
in the Declaration of Independence.

In New York, the
procession took four hours.

Scalpers sold choice window
positions along the route

for $4.00 and up.

From his grandfather's
window,

a young Theodore Roosevelt
watched the procession pass.

At Cleveland,
10,000 mourners

passed through a specially
built outdoor pavilion

every hour, all day,

despite a
driving rain.

It ended in Springfield
on May 4th.

The coffin rode to the
Illinois State House

in a magnificent black and silver
hearse borrowed from St. Louis,

and lay open in the chamber of
the House of Representatives

where Lincoln had warned that
a house divided against itself

"cannot stand."

Among the thousands of people
who shuffled past his coffin

were many who had known
him in the old days--

farmers from
New Salem,

law clients and
rival attorneys,

neighbors who had nodded
to him each morning

on his way
to work.

Sarah, the president's
stepmother, had had a premonition

when Lincoln left for
Washington four years before.

"I felt it in my heart that something
would happen to him," she said,

"and that I should
see him no more."

General Joseph
Hooker

led the final, slow march
to Oak Ridge Cemetery

through a gentle
spring rain.

"You white people

"are the children of
Abraham Lincoln.

"We are at best only
his stepchildren.

"Viewed from the genuine
abolition ground,

"Mr. Lincoln seemed
tardy, cold,

"dull, indifferent.

"but measuring him by the
sentiment of his country,

"a sentiment he was bound
as a statesman to consult,

"he was swift,
zealous, radical,

"and determined.

"Taking him
all-in-all,

"measuring the

"tremendous magnitude
of the work before him,

"considering the
necessary means to ends,

"infinite wisdom has
seldom sent any man

"into the world better
fitted for his mission

"than Abraham Lincoln."

Frederick Douglass.

On April 26th, Union cavalry
trapped John Wilkes Booth

in a Virginia tobacco
barn and set it afire.

His accomplice, David
Herold, surrendered.

Booth preferred death.

A soldier shot
him in the neck.

At the end, he asked to
have his hands raised,

looked at them,
and said,

"useless, useless."

That day, in a farmhouse near
Durham Station, North Carolina,

Confederate General
Joseph Johnston

surrendered what
was left of his army

to William
Tecumseh Sherman.

Jefferson Davis,
exhausted but still defiant,

fled southward,
hoping somehow

to rally the Confederacy
from Texas.

"It may be that with a
devoted band of cavalry,

"I can force my way
across the Mississippi,

"and if nothing
can be done there,

"then I can
go to Mexico

"and have the world from
which to choose a location."

On May 10th at
Irwinville, Georgia,

Union cavalry
caught up with him.

With the arrest of its president, the
Confederate government ceased to exist.

Davis was sent north to
Virginia under heavy guard.

Northern newspapers
spread the false rumor

that Davis had been apprehended
wearing women's clothes.

North and south,

he was reviled as
the villain of the war.

These misconceptions
about Davis are so strange,

that it's as if a gigantic
conspiracy was launched.

It was partly launched
by southerners,

who, having lost the war, did not
want to blame it on their generals,

so they blamed it on the politicians, and,
of course, Davis was the chief politician, so,

it was the southerners more than the
northerners who vilified Jefferson Davis.

The northerners wanted
to hang him from a sour

apple tree, but,

the southerners really tore
him down after the war.

Davis was imprisoned
at Fortress Monroe

in a cell kept
perpetually lit

and was made to wear
chains, though he protested

that "those are
orders for a slave,

"and no man with a soul in him
would obey such orders."

"Dear Varina,

"This is not the fate to
which I invited you

"when the future was
rose-colored for us both,

"but I know you will bear it
even better than myself,

"and that,
of us two,

"I alone will ever look back
reproachfully on my career."

Scattered fighting
stuttered on in Louisiana,

Alabama, and
Mississippi,

and even further west,
where on May 13th, 1865,

Private John J. Williams
of the 34th Indiana

became the last man
killed in the Civil War,

in a battle at
Palmitto Ranch, Texas.

The final skirmish was
a Confederate victory.

On the morning of
May 23rd, 1865,

the American flag
flew at full staff

above the White House for the
first time since Lincoln's death.

U. S. Grant and the new
president, Andrew Johnson,

stood side-
by-side

to watch the grand
armies of the Republic

pass in review down Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol.

"And so it came, this glorious
old Army of the Potomac,

"for six hours
marching past,

"eighteen or
twenty miles long,

"their colors telling
their sad history.

"It was a
strange feeling

"to be so intensely
happy and triumphant,

"and yet to feel
like crying."

The great procession
took two days.

General George Armstrong Custer
stole the show the first day,

galloping past the dignitaries
far ahead of his men,

brandishing
his saber,

his long yellow hair
whipping in the wind.

But the crowds cheered
loudest the next morning

as William Tecumseh
Sherman rode past

at the head of the great
army he had led to the sea.

By May, most of the
Yankees had withdrawn

from Clarksville,
Tennessee.

What remained of the 49th
and 14th Tennessee Regiments

came home.

Private John J. Denny of
Company K was not among them.

He had died
at Chancellorsville.

Of the 29 Stewart College
seniors who went to war,

sixteen had been
killed in battle.

Seven more had died
of wounds and disease.

In September, railway
service to Clarksville

was resumed.

Deer Isle, Maine, was an
indirect casualty of the war.

When its men came home,
they found fishing had fallen off.

There was new money to be made in other industries in nearby towns.

The old families
moved away.

Some of the houses
they left behind

became summer
homes for vacationers,

most of whom were unaware
of what had happened there.

John Wilkes Booth's
accomplices

were swiftly tried before
a military commission.

All eight were
found guilty.

Four were sentenced to be
hanged, including Mary Surratt,

whose only crime may have been
that she owned the boarding house

in which the
conspirators met.

The executions took
place in the courtyard

of the old penitentiary
building on July 7th.

The prisoners climbed the
thirteen steps and sat in chairs

while the charges
were read aloud.

Two priests comforted Mrs. Surratt
and shielded her from the sun.

White hoods were
slipped over their heads.

General Winfield Scott Hancock,
the hero of Gettysburg,

clapped his
hands three times,

and soldiers knocked the
front part of the platform

out from under
the condemned.

It took them more than
five minutes to die.

A northern
newspaper said,

"We want to know
their names no more."

"Somewhere, they
crawled to die

"alone in bushes,
low gullies,

"or on the
sides of hills.

"There, in
secluded spots,

"their skeletons,
bleached bones,

"tufts of hair, buttons,
fragments of clothing

"are occasionally
found yet.

"Our young men,

"once so handsome,
and so joyous,

"taken from us--

"the son from
the mother,

"the husband
from the wife,

"the dear friend from
the dear friend."

Walt Whitman.

Three-and-a-half-
million men went to war.

Six-hundred-twenty-
thousand men died in it,

as many as in all the
rest of America's wars

combined.

One-quarter
of the South's

white men of military
age were dead.

In Iowa, half the
men eligible to fight

served in the
Union army,

filling forty-six
regiments in all.

Thirteen-thousand-one
Iowans died--

3,540 in battle,

515 while
prisoners of war,

and 8,498

of disease.

Those figures
were typical.

The 5th New Hampshire Regiment
started out from Concord

in 1861 with
1,200 men.

When they returned to New
Hampshire after Gettysburg,

there were
only 380 left.

In Mississippi
in 1866,

one-fifth of the
state's entire budget

was spent on
artificial limbs.

Millions were left with
vivid memories of men

who should have
still been living

but were not.

The survivors
went home

and got on with the
business of living.

"The morning after
my arrival home,

"I doffed my uniform
of first lieutenant,

"put on some of my
father's old clothes, and

"proceeded to wage war
on the standing corn.

"The feeling I had
was sort of queer.

"It almost seemed, sometimes,
as if I had been away

"only a day or two

"and had just taken
up the farm work

"where I
had left off."

Leander Stillwell,

formerly 61st
Illinois.

The boys who had gone off
to war were old men, now.

They walked over the old
battlefields with their families,

pointing out the places where
they had once done things

that now seemed
impossible, even to them.

They had a theoretical
notion of having a country,

but when the
war was over,

on both sides, they knew they had a country. They'd been there.

They had walked its hills
and tramped its roads.

They... they saw
the country,

and they knew they had
a country, and they knew

the...the effort that
they had expended

and their dead friends had
expended to preserve it.

It did that.

It made their country
an actuality.

By the turn of the century, monuments
and memorials and statues

stood in city parks and courthouse
squares from Maine to Mississippi.

"Number 220--statue
of American soldier.

"Price, $450.

"When used as a
family monument

"and photos of the deceased
soldier can be furnished,

"we will model a new
head in a true likeness.

"The extra cost
will be but $150."

The Monumental Bronze Company,
Bridgeport, Connecticut.

"Hall's Hill, Virginia,

July 4, 1865.

"Another Independence
Day in the army,

"and this has
been my fifth.

"The first we passed at
Camp Clark near Washington,

"the second at
Harrison's Landing,

"the third at Gettysburg,
Pennsylvania,

"the fourth at
Petersburg,

"and today we are back in
Washington with our work finished.

"The day has
been fun."

Elisha Hunt Rhodes.

The war made
Elisha Hunt Rhodes.

Having risen from private
to colonel during the war,

he was promoted to
brigadier general after it,

then went into the cotton and
wool business in Providence.

He devoted nearly every
idle hour to veterans' affairs

and never missed a
regimental reunion.

"America has no
north, no south,

"no east,
no west.

"The sun rises over the hills
and sets over the mountains.

"The compass just
points up and down,

"and we can laugh now
at the absurd notion

"of there being a
north and a south.

"We are one
and undivided."

Sam Watkins.

Sam Watkins returned
to Columbia, Tennessee,

ran the
family farm,

and in the evenings worked on
his memoirs, "Company Aytch,"

despite, he said,

"a house full of young rebels
clustering around my knees

"and bumping
my elbows."

But for the
war, these

men were like any
other possible friends.

You can,
remember the...

Thomas Hardy's poem,
"Had he and I but met,

"some old ancient inn,
we might sit down to wet

"right many a nipperkin,"
you know, but

"ranged as infantry,
standing face to face,

"I shot at him as he at me,
and killed him in his place.

"Strange and
curious, a war is.

You shoot a fellow down,
you treat where any bar is, or

"help to half-
a-crown."

Isn't that it?
Especially in our own...

our own society,
where these men

shared a common history,
men and women,

shared a common
love of liberty,

gave it slightly
different English

as...as it spun
through their lives,

but at the
same time,

when death came
and there was

no more to
fight about,

the sort of ocean of...of
love and respect and...

closed over them again,
and they were together.

"I think we understand
what military fame is...

"to be killed on
the field of battle

"and have our names spelled
wrong in the newspapers."

William Tecumseh
Sherman.

William Tecumseh
Sherman remained a soldier,

fighting Indians and
shunning politics

until his retirement
in 1883.

"If nominated, I will not run,"
he told a Republican delegation

urging him to run
for president.

"If elected,
I will not serve."

He died in New York City
in the winter of 1891.

Among the honorary
pallbearers

who stood bear-headed in the
cold wind outside the church

was 82-year-old
Joe Johnston,

who had fought Sherman in
Georgia and the Carolinas.

When a friend warned
him he might fall ill,

Johnston told him,
"if I were in Sherman's place

"and he were standing
here in mine,

"he would not
put on his hat."

Johnston died ten days
later of pneumonia.

"April 1866.

"There are nights here
with the moonlight,

"cold and ghastly,
and the whippoorwills

"and screech owls alone
disturbing the silence,

"when I could tear my
hair and cry alone

"for all that is past
and gone."

Mary Chesnut.

When James and Mary Chesnut
returned to Mulberry Plantation,

they found the old house
stripped by Union men,

the cotton burned.

Mary managed to make a little
money selling butter and eggs

in partnership with
her former slave,

and she continued
to write.

But she never completed
the mammoth task

of reworking
her war diary.

Jefferson Davis was
never tried for treason,

nor could he ever bring
himself to ask for a pardon.

After two years
in prison,

he was released on bond
and spent the rest of his life

living off the charity
of a wealthy widow

and working on a
massive memoir,

"The Rise and Fall of the
Confederate Government."

He died, still persuaded
of the justice of his cause,

at the age of
eighty-one.

Hiram Revels of Mississippi
became the first black man

ever elected to the
United States Senate,

filling the seat last held
by Jefferson Davis.

Vice President Alexander Stephens
was imprisoned briefly,

and then re-elected to his old
congressional seat from Georgia

as if there had never
been a Confederacy.

Mary Todd Lincoln never recovered
from her husband's murder.

Her son Tad
died in 1871.

Five years later,

her eldest son, Robert, had her
committed to a mental institution.

She spent her last
years in Springfield,

rarely leaving a room whose
curtains were never raised.

For Clara Barton, the
angel of the battlefield,

the grim work
continued.

After the war, she went
down to Andersonville

and helped arrange
dignified burial

for thousands of the Union
prisoners who had died there,

then went on to found
the American Red Cross.

On November
10th, 1865,

Henry Wirz, Commandant
at Andersonville prison,

was hanged in the yard of the
Old Capitol Prison in Washington

for war crimes.

He pleaded he had
only followed orders.

Walt Whitman published
"Drum Taps,"

a book of Civil War poems
he thought his finest,

then turned
largely to prose.

His writings revolutionized
American literature.

Phil Sheridan went out west
to take on a new enemy,

declaring that the only good
Indian was a dead Indian.

George Armstrong Custer
went west, too,

carrying with him his belief
in his own invincibility.

In 1876, the Sioux
and Cheyenne

proved him wrong.

George McClellan stayed
abroad for three years

after losing the
election to Lincoln.

He heard no slander about
himself there, he said.

Then he
came home

and got himself elected
Governor of New Jersey.

The conqueror
of Fort Sumter,

Pierre Gustave
Toutant-Beauregard,

promoted railroads, managed
the Louisiana state lottery,

and got rich.

Nathan Bedford Forrest
promoted railroads, too,

but failed.

In 1867, he became
the first Imperial Wizard

of the Ku
Klux Klan,

but quit

when the Klan grew too
violent even for him.

General Dan Sickles somehow
escaped court-martial

for his blunder
at Gettysburg.

He had the leg he lost
in the Peach Orchard

mounted in a
miniature casket

and gave it to the army medical
museum in Washington,

where he visited it
regularly for fifty years.

John Bell Hood, who had survived
some of the fiercest fighting of the war,

died with his wife and daughter in the
New Orleans yellow fever epidemic

of 1878.

leaving ten
orphaned children.

George Pickett never
overcame his bitterness

over the destruction of his
division at Gettysburg.

Suffering from
severe depression,

he turned down offers of
command from the ruler of Egypt

and the President
of the United States,

and ended up in the
insurance business.

Confederate General James Longstreet
joined the Republican party,

served as Grant's
Minister to Turkey,

dared to criticize Lee's
strategy at Gettysburg,

and for all
these things

was considered a
traitor to the south

by his former
comrades-in-arms.

Frederick Douglass continued
to fight as hard for civil rights

as he had
against slavery

and became the most powerful
black politician in America.

A young visitor once asked him
what he should do with his life.

"Agitate!" The old
man answered.

"Agitate! Agitate!"

Julia Ward Howe

helped lead the American
Woman's Suffrage Association

for fifty-
five years.

At her funeral
in 1910,

4,000 mourners
joined in singing

"The Battle Hymn
of the Republic."

Colonel Washington Roebling
left the army corps of engineers,

finished his father's
bridge at Cincinnati,

and went on to build the greatest
suspension bridge in the world

in Brooklyn.

"I have fought against
the people of the north

"because I believed they were
seeking to wrest from the south

"its dearest rights,

"but I have never cherished
toward them bitter

"or vindictive
feelings,

"and I have never seen the day
when I did not pray for them."

Robert E. Lee swore renewed
allegiance to the United States

and by so doing persuaded
thousands of his former soldiers

to do
the same.

He was weary, ailing,
and without work

in the summer
of 1865

when an insurance firm
offered him $50,000

just for the use
of his name.

He turned
it down.

"I cannot consent
to receive pay

"for services I
do not render."

He ended up in
the noble way you

might have expected after
you'd learned to expect it.

He was...didn't know what to
do with himself after the war.

His profession was gone,
even his country was gone.

And he was approached,
with a good deal of hesitation,

by these people from a little school
called Washington College,

and he accepted the Presidency
of Washington College.

He had an annual
salary of $1,500

and a house
to live in,

and he spent the rest of his life at what after
his death was called Washington and Lee.

"The greatest mistake
of my life," he said,

"was taking a
military education."

And whenever his students
and those of the neighboring

Virginia Military Institute
marched together,

Lee made a point of
staying out of step.

He never returned
to Arlington again.

Once, on his way
to Washington,

he glimpsed his old home
from a passing train.

He died
in 1870.

In his last moments, he
went back to the war,

ordering A. P. Hill to
bring up his troops,

just as Stonewall
Jackson had

on his deathbed at
Chancellorsville.

Then Lee called out,
"Strike the tent."

"For he
will smile

"and give you with
unflinching courtesy,

"prayers, trappings, letters,
uniforms and orders,

"photographs, kindness,
valor and advice,

"and do it with such
grace and gentleness

"that you will know you have the whole
of him pinned down, mapped out,

“easy to
understand--

"and so
you have...

"all things except
the heart.

"The heart he kept
a secret to the end

"from all the picklocks
of biographers."

"I feel that we
are on the eve

"of a new era, when there
is to be a great harmony

"between the Federal
and the Confederate.

"I cannot stay to
be a living witness

"to the correctness
of this prophecy,

"but I feel it
within me

"that it is
to be so.

The qualities that served
Ulysses S. Grant

so well in war--

stubbornness, independence,
aversion to politics--

deserted him
in peacetime.

He entered the White
House pledged to peace,

honesty, and
civil rights,

but corruption tainted
his two terms.

After the presidency,
he settled in Manhattan,

where he lent his name to a
Wall Street brokerage firm.

Another partner
in the firm

stole millions from the
shareholders in 1884

and bankrupted
the Grant family.

Once again, U. S. Grant
was penniless.

At almost the same moment,
he was found to be suffering

from inoperable
cancer of the throat.

Determined to provide for
his family before he died,

he set to work
writing his memoirs.

In the summer of 1885, he moved
to a cottage at Mount McGregor

in the
Adirondacks.

Unable now to
eat or speak,

he sat on the front
porch in the afternoons,

laboring over
his manuscript.

He finished
it on July 16th

and died one
week later.

Grant's memoirs sold
half-a-million copies,

and restored
family's fortune.

In 1913, the
government held a

50th anniversary
reunion at Gettysburg.

It lasted
three days.

Thousands of survivors
bivouacked on the old battlefield,

swapping stories,
looking up old comrades.

The climax was to be a re-
enactment of Pickett's Charge.

As the rebel
yell rang out

and the old Confederates started
forward again across the fields,

a moan, "a gigantic
gasp of unbelief,"

rose from the Union men
on Cemetery Ridge.

"It was then,"
one onlooker said,

"that the Yankees, unable
to restrain themselves longer,

"burst from behind
the stone wall

"and flung themselves
upon their former enemies,

"not in mortal combat,
but embracing them

"in brotherly love
and affection."

"Pageant has
passed.

"The day
is over,

"but we linger, loathe to think we
shall see them no more together--

"these men,
these horses,

"these colors afield."

Joshua Lawrence
Chamberlain.

Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain
was at the Gettysburg reunion,

still imposing
at eighty-three,

despite almost
constant pain

from the unhealed
internal damage

done him by a Confederate
Minie ball at Petersburg.

The reunion
was, he said,

a transcendental
experience,

"a radiant fellowship
of the fallen."

He had received the Medal of Honor
for his courage at Little Round Top,

served four terms as
Governor of Maine,

then became President
of Bowdoin College,

where he managed to teach
every subject in the curriculum

except mathematics.

He died of his
ancient wound

in 1914.

The war
was over.

Who won
the war?

The Union army
obviously won the war

in the sense that they
were the army left

standing and holding their
weapons when it was all over.

So the soldiers who fought
in the Union army,

the generals who directed it, the
president who led the country

during it won
the war.

If we're not talking just
about the series of battles

that finished up with the
surrender at Appomattox,

but talking
instead about

the struggle to
make something

higher and better
out of the country,

then the question gets
more complicated.

The slaves won the war,
and they lost the war,

because they
won freedom,

that is, the
removal of slavery,

but they did not
win freedom

as they understood
freedom.

I suppose
that slavery is

merely the...

the horrible
statutory expression

of a deeper...
of a deeper

rift between
people based on

race, and
that is

what we
struggle still

to...to heal.

And, I think the...

the significance
of Lincoln's life

and his victory
was that...that

we will never
again enshrine

these concepts
into law,

but now let's see what we can
do to erase them from the

hearts and minds
of...of people.

The Civil War is not only the central
event of American history,

but it's a central event in large
ways for the world itself.

If we believe, today, in the twentieth
century, as surely we must, that

popular government
is the way to go,

it is the way for the emancipation
of the human spirit,

then the Civil War
established the fact that

a popular government
could survive,

that it could overcome an internal
secession movement that could destroy it.

So the war becomes...in essence,
it becomes a testament

for the liberation of the
human spirit for all time.

Four million Americans
had been freed

after four
years of agony,

but the meaning of freedom in
American life remained unresolved.

"Emancipated
slaves own nothing,"

one Tennessee
planter wrote,

"because nothing but freedom
has been given them."

Thousands of blacks
wandered southern roads

searching for relatives or
looking for work or food.

Thousands more

stayed on their plantations as
hired hands or sharecroppers.

The 13th Amendment was
followed by a 14th and a 15th,

promising full
citizenship

and due process for
all American men,

white and black.

But the promises were
soon overlooked

in the scramble for
a new prosperity,

and white supremacy
was brutally re-imposed

throughout the
old Confederacy.

The white south won
that war of attrition.

It would take another century before blacks gained back the ground

for which so many
had given their lives.

I think what we need to
remember most of all

is that

the Civil War
is not over

until we, today,

have done our
part in fighting it,

as well as understanding
what happened

when the Civil War
generation fought it.

William Faulkner,
said once that

history is
not "was,"

it's "is."

and what we need to remember
about the Civil War is that

the Civil War is

in the present as
well as in the past.

The generation that fought
the war, the generation that

argued over the
definition of the war,

the generation that had
to pay the price in blood,

that had to pay the price in
blasted hopes and a lost future,

also established

a standard

that will not mean anything until
we have finished the work.

You can say

there's no such thing as slavery
anymore. We're all citizens.

But if we're all
citizens, then,

we have a task to do to make
sure that that, too, is not a joke.

If some citizens

live in houses and others
live on the street,

the Civil War is
still going on.

It's still to
be fought,

and regrettably,
it can still be lost.

Gettysburg's
guns are still,

and the dead
sleep on.

America's most famous
battleground is a camp again

with a road dividing
the blue and gray.

There is no other
dividing line now

as 2,500 veterans gather
from north and south

to mark the seventy-
fifth anniversary

of America's
Armageddon.

- Hello.
- Hello. How are you?

- Glad to see you.
- Glad to see you, too.

Ha ha ha!
You're all right.

Woo! Woo!
Woo!

Woo! Woo!
Woo!

That's the
rebel yell.

Woo! Woo! Woo!

We think
that we are

a wholly
superior people.

If we'd been anything like
superior as we think we are,

we would not have
fought that war,

but since we did fight it, we have to
make it the greatest war of all times

and our generals were the
greatest generals of all time.

It's very American
to do that.

In time, even death itself
might be abolished.

Sergeant Barry Benson, a South Carolina
veteran from McGowen's Brigade,

Wilcox's Division, A. P. Hill's Corp,
Army of Northern Virginia,

he had enlisted three months
before Sumter, aged eighteen,

and served through
Appomattox--

saw it so, when he got around to composing
the reminiscences he hoped would

"go down amongst my
descendants for a long time."

Reliving the
war in words,

he began to wish he
could relive it in fact.

And he came to believe that he and
his fellow soldiers, gray and blue,

might one day be
able to do just that,

if not here on earth, then
afterwards in Valhalla.

"Who knows," he asked, as his
narrative drew toward its close,

"but it may be given
to us, after this life,

"to meet again in
the old quarters,

"to play chess
and draughts,

"to get up soon to answer
the morning roll call,

"to fall in at the tap of the drum
for drill and dress parade,

"and again to hastily
don our war gear

"while the monotonous patter of
the long roll summons to battle.

"Who knows, but
again the old flags,

"ragged and torn,
snapping in the wind

"may face each other and
flutter, pursuing and pursued,

"while the cries of victory
fill a summer day.

"And after
the battle,

"then the slain and
wounded will arise

"and all meet together under the
two flags, all sound and well.

"There will be talking
and laughter and cheers,

"and all will say,
'Did it not seem real?'

" 'Was it not as
in the old days?' "

We are (we are)

Climbing (climbing)

Jacob's (Jacob's)

Ladder (ladder)

We are (we are)

Climbing (climbing)

Jacob's (Jacob's)

Ladder (ladder)

We are (we are)

Climbing (climbing)

Jacob's

Ladder

Soldiers

Of the

Cross

Every (every)

Rung goes (rung goes)

Higher (rung goes higher)

Every (every)

Rung goes (rung goes)

Higher (yes, well every)
(Higher)

Every (every)

Rung goes (rung goes)

Higher (higher)

Soldiers (soldiers)

Of the

Cross

Do you (do you)

Thank our (thank our)

Maker? (Maker?)

Since when, soldier?

Do you (do you)

Thank our (thank our)

Maker? (Maker?)

Since when, soldier?

Do you (do you)

Thank our (thank our)

Maker? (soldier)

Soldiers (soldiers)

Of the

Cross

Rise (rise)

Shine (shine)

Give God (give God)

Your glory (your glory)

Rise (rise)

Shine (shine)

Give God (your glory)

Your glory (your glory)

Rise (rise)

Shine (shine)

Give God (your glory)

Soldiers

Of the

Cross

Keep on (keep on)

Climbing (climbing)

We will (we will)

Surely make it (make it)

Keep on (keep on)

Climbing (climbing)

We will (we will)

Surely make it

Keep on (keep on)

Climbing (climbing)

We will (we will make it)

Soldiers

Of the

Cross

Children (children)

Do you (do you)

Want your (do you)

Freedom? (freedom?)

Children (tell me)

Do you (do you)

Want your (do you)

Freedom?

Do you (do you)

Do you (do you)

Want your

Freedom

Soldiers

Of the

Cross?

Soldiers

Of the

Cross