PBS film plumbs Civil War's staggering toll

This July 1863 photo provided byt he Library of Congress shows unfinished Confederate graves near the center of the battlefield in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

AP Photo



As the title suggests, death is the central theme of this moving, extraordinarily graphic film based on Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust's acclaimed book "This Republic of Suffering."


"No one thought that this was going to go on this long. No one thought there would be deaths on this scale," Faust said in an interview with The Associated Press. "I think the South was stunned that the North didn't just let them go."






"Dear Father, this is my last letter to you," Montgomery writes. "I am very weak but I write to you because I know you would be delighted to read a word from your dying son."


"So in a sense, the subject of this book was right before my eyes," she said.


"As I was reading letters from these Civil War women, they were just writing about death all the time," Faust said. "They were either anticipating it or mourning their dead or trying to recover and continue to their lives, so I thought this is something that needs to be looked at specifically."

"Death and the Civil War" does that in detail, presenting photograph after photograph of the dead on battlefields from the Deep South to Gettysburg.

"What did they do with all those bodies?" Faust wondered. "What did that mean for families? How did people mourn and how did that change."


Burns, who produced the seminal series "The Civil War" with his brother Ken, has pored through hundreds of thousands of historic images from the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, the Library of Congress and other sources through the years. He said every "government institution in place to deal with death was shattered and transformed" by the unprecedented deaths of the Civil War.

"How profoundly unprepared we were," he said. "No one thought a war could mean mayhem on that scale. We were always one step behind when it came to death in the Civil War."

"Death and the Civil War" does much more than catalog the death. It also tells the often heroic and inspiring stories of people who were appalled by the carnage and were inspired to act. Their actions were transformative and live on today.




"One of the aspects of doing this project that was most meaningful to me," Faust said, "was seeing how individuals wanted to resist the inhumanity that was introduced into the world in which they lived and how they really wanted to affirm what it meant to be human — how you treat the dead, how you remember the dead."

In the end, she said, "I thought it was a really affirmative story."

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