Ken Burns: The Civil War Mini

"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, 1st 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.

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 10.

"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 citywide 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