Ken Burns' Civil War: Epic Narrative and Public Moral Argument

As documentaries go, Ken Burns' The Civil War stands as a milestone. There have been some great documentary series since the advent of the historical film chronicle, but The Civil War stands as a masterpiece that captured the imagination of academics, film critics, and the public at large. True, its average 13-share in the Nielsen ratings hardly placed it in blockbuster status, but it exceeded by far the success of any documentary before it.1

The widespread critical acclaim that greeted The Civil War is a matter of public record.2 It was discussed on television; mulled over by scholars and academics; covered extensively by news magazines and newspapers; reviewed by film journals; and dissected by historical magazines. Even TV Guide and People Weekly devoted articles to it. This popular appeal of The Civil War is important for reasons I will elaborate later.

This paper will not address the film's technical aesthetics, though that would certainly be a rewarding study. Burns used many creative techniques to bring long buried facts and photos to life in an extraordinary manner. He, and those who worked with him, deserve credit for an admirable job of weaving together a convincing display of narratives and photos into a sweeping, epic-like, national story.

This paper also does not look at the particular circumstances which combined to make The Civil War a success. Much of that has already been evaluated, and I have nothing further to add. What I do wish to do here is to examine The Civil War as a rhetorical artifact. More specifically, I will attempt to classify the documentary first as a contribution to epic narrative and then as an example of public moral argument.

The Civil War and Epic Narrative
Narrative plays a crucial role in the restructuring and possible recapturing of history. Ken Burns has now told us the grand story of the American Civil War. "Grand" is to be taken in the sense of scope, not necessarily quality, though there are certain elements of the story that reach for the sublime. Yet it is important to remember, as Ken Burns did for most of his eleven-hour film, that any chunk of history as huge and complicated as the Civil War is bound to reflect a number of different, and often conflicting, stories. In using the powerful though limited medium of film, Burns had to choose his stories carefully.

Burns, however, did not dodge all the dangers of narrative choice with equal success. While the bulk of his epic tale represents a marvelous diversity of voices, viewpoints, and values, the beginning of the story represents a disappointing exception to the rule. Specifically, that section near the beginning describing the cause and significance of the war is truncated, one sided, and needlessly abstract in comparison to the rest of the film. Why? Of the two possible reasons presented in this essay, the first relates to the nature of epic narrative.3

Burns made a few comments in interviews relating to the nature of the masterpiece he had put together. To American Film, he said, "This is our great epic poem. This is the country's great narrative, like theMahabharata or Homer's Iliad" (30).

To American Heritage's Bernard Weisberger, Burns was more specific:

Film is not equipped to do what a book does, which is to attain profound levels of meaning and texture. But film has the power to reach profound levels of emotion.... It can be our Homeric form, and we've tried to tell this particular Iliad, our Civil War, in a Homeric way, not only from the aerial perspective of the gods and kings but from the level of the spear carriers as well. (99)

Not surprisingly, Aristotle sheds some light on epic narrative in the Poetics:

It should have for its subject a single action, whole and complete, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. It will differ in structure from historical compositions, which of necessity present, not a single action, but a single period, and all that happened within that period to one person or to many, little connected together as the events may be. Here again.... the transcendent excellence of Homer is manifest. He never attempts to make the whole war of Troy the subject of his poem, though that war had a beginning and an end. It would have been too vast a theme, and not easily embraced in a single view. As it is, he detaches a single portion and admits as episodes many events from the general story of the war ... thus diversifying the poem. (105-106, italics mine)

Other requirements include, "the plot manifestly ought ... to be constructed on dramatic principles," and it should be "ethical" or "pathetic" (105, 107).

At first glance, one would think Burns had missed the mark, at least according to Aristotle, when he called his film an epic narrative form. But a closer look may reveal that The Civil War can actually fit the Aristotelian mold.

While there is no reason to force Bum's work into Aristotle's definition with a shoehorn, it comes close enough in my view to merit a nod from the philosopher. If Aristotle's model for epic narrative can be applied to Burns' film, it would stress the necessity, for the sake of form if for nothing else, for Burns to have chosen a specific, central action, or story. The central action would be magnified and stripped of undue complications. Near the outset of his film, Burns frames his story with a comment by Barbara Fields, a historian at Columbia:

For me, the picture of the Civil War as a historic phenomenon is not on the battlefield. It's not about weapons; it's not about soldiers, except to the extent that weapons and soldiers, at that crucial moment, joined in the discussion about something higher-about humanity, about human dignity, about human freedom.

It is clear immediately thereafter that "the crucial moment" of which Fields spoke was the emancipation of the slaves. The balance of the narrative was devoted to the actions surrounding that principal theme. The central action was therefore clear-cut and limited in scope, by choice. That choice made it possible to present the whole epic with a more fluid and effective narrative structure without a host of factual or semi-factual complications getting in the way. It also made it possible for Burns to return repeatedly to the central action to discuss its expansion and development as cause and effect of the other, more background events.

Before I go on, it is necessary to say how Burns "limited" the scope of his central theme. In the first half-hour of the film, Burns establishes the vital importance of his central action. The whole is set up by Fields' comment quoted earlier, and by Shelby Foote's establishment of the "myth," or the ultimate explanation of historic meaning: "The Civil War defines us as what we are and it opened us to being what we became- -good and bad things." From that point, the entire narrative is introduced with a lingering shot of an old, battered slave with the acted voice of Abraham Lincoln, in anguished tones, decrying the sad state of affairs.

From there, the title appears, "The Cause," and we are treated to a literal singular definition by Barbara Fields: "If there was a single event that caused the war, it was the establishment of the United States in independence from Great Britain with slavery still a part of its heritage." Following this statement is a unidimensional presentation of slavery as an institution.

While there is no real "positive" view of slavery, Burns chose to present worst case scenarios. The effect is to add misery to moral wrong as a reason for emancipation, thus bringing Aristotle's pathos into play. "For the slave, it is all night," says one freed slave. "I would rather be dead than be a nigger on one of those big plantations," says a Mississippi newspaperman. Burns' statistics are often misleading, playing on modern ignorance.4 Burns also chooses not to mention any of the host of other "causes" to which the Civil War has been attributed: states' rights, tariffs, power politics, complete sectional alienation, ideological polarization, bungling national leaders.5 Foote makes one comment about the inability of the nation's leaders to compromise, but no elaboration follows.

Burns adds to the formula the ethos of New England abolitionist heavyweights. Ganison, Tubman, Phillips, and Frederick Douglas are quoted in rapid succession. One Southern voice is given to explain the entire Southern viewpoint, that of John C. Calhoun, considered an extremist in his own right.6 Abraham Lincoln's passionate opposition to slavery comes next. The widespread effect of Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin is introduced. Charles Sumner's beating is mentioned, no reason given for it other than that a proslavery Southerner felt like it. An account of John Brown's activities comes next, followed by a half dozen New England abolitionist eulogies. Then, suddenly, the South is mobilizing for war.

A great deal is missing from Burns' introduction to the war. Northern sentiment is represented by abolitionists and Southern sentiment is represented by an extreme states' rights man from South Carolina. The incredible diversity of opinions and ideologies bubbling under the surface on both sides is not touched. The rampant racism both North and South, even in people as sacrosanct as Lincoln, is not mentioned, either.7

All of this is to say that Burns chose his story carefully for form and effect. His pared-down statement of the cause of the war is supported by events and statements which support that story exclusively. The end product meets Aristotle's criteria for the epic narrative form. Let us now move on to its effect.

Epic Narrative and Public Moral Argument
Walter Fisher distinguishes public moral argument from the reasoned discourse (specialized debate, as in the courtroom). Public moral argument is (1) publicly disseminated; (2) aimed at "untrained thinkers;" (3) oriented toward "what ought to be;" and (4) founded on "ultimate questions- - of life and death, of how persons should be defined and treated, of preferred patterns of living" (71, 72).

Later Fisher notes that, "narrative as a mode of discourse is more universal and probably more efficacious than argument for nontechnical forms of communication" (74). With regard to moral argument in narrative, William Lewis writes, "Narrative form shapes interpretation by emphasizing the moral dimension of understanding" (253). Hayden White elaborates:

It seems possible to conclude that every historical narrative has as its latent or manifest purpose the desire to moralize the events of which it treats. Narrativity, certainly in factual storytelling.... is intimately related to, if not a function of, the impulse to moralize reality, that is, to identify it with the social system that is the source of any reality we can imagine. (14)

Much of the moral weight of a narrative depends on its treatment of "truth." To construct truth, narrative must often depend on selectivity and subjective judgment. "When narrative dominates, epistemological standards move away from empiricism," writes Lewis (251). Lewis further argues that subjective judgment plays a larger role especially if faces or evidences are open to competing interpretations (252). In this context, the meaning or the effect of the story becomes more important than simple factual representation.

A tendency to lean on the nonrational for what might be called a higher effect is one of the things that Fisher says distinguishes the narrative paradigm from the rational, or empirical (74). This, too, is a function of epic narrative. Aristotle had this to say:

The irrational, on which the wonderful depends for its chief effects, has wider scope in Epic poetry. Now the wonderful is pleasing, as may be inferred from the fact that everyone tells a story with some addition of his own .... It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skillfully. Once the irrational has been introduced and an air of likelihood imparted to it, we must accept it in spite of the absurdity. As it is, the absurdity is veiled by the poetic charm with which the poet invests it. (109-110)

A lie, Aristotle was saying, is a false syllogism. The "absurd" refers to nonrational subjective invention by the poet for the sake of effecting "the wonderful." The "wonderful" serves as a non-rational argument of sorts that makes its point while short-circuiting the logical syllogism.

The Civil War and Public Moral Argument
When confronted by the dilemma of historic fact as opposed to artistic and moral effect, Ken Burns told Bernard Weisberger:

Let me answer you with a quote from ... Francis Parkman: "Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than research ... into special facts. Such facts may be detailed with the most minute exactness, and yet the narrative, taken as a whole, may be unmeaning or untrue. The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time." Too much good factual history seems untrue because it doesn't resonate, and all we've tried to do filmically is to be true to the spirit of Parkman's plea. (100)

We've seen how Burns' film amply fills the description of an epic narrative, but what of its status as "public moral argument?" What is the moral argument of Burns' film? Does it show a selective nonrational argument that serves to strengthen his artistic interpretation? We see in the above quote that Burns was reaching for a kind of "truth." What was this truth? It is expressed most vividly in Barbara Fields' statement of the significance of the Civil War:

Without emancipation, the war was nothing but meaningless carnage. It required a war to make the Constitution that of a real, united nation. And it's still being fought. The Civil War is not over as long as some are living in houses and others on the street.

In his somewhat loose interpretation of Parkman, Burns said he wanted the Civil War on film to "resonate." I assume that by "resonate" he means it should have current social and moral relevance. But there is no reason to speculate on something about which Burns himself was quite vocal in interviews. Talking to Charlie McDowell (the voice of Sam Watkins, the Confederate soldier featured in the film), Burns said that Fields' comments quoted above were his favorite part of the film. The issues she raised were the ones which had

animated the pursuit of the film. Barbara Fields covered the initial reason we fought--to extend to all men the promise that all men are created equal. The history of our country is one of tension between growth and civil rights. The Civil War murdered hundreds of thousands of people to extend [equality] to black men, and now we've extended it to women, and to black women, and immigrants, and now we're struggling with the handicapped and the homosexuals and how we try to expand and invigorate the American democracy.

This is the public moral argument of Burns' epic. Of interest here is that the argument roots its meaning in current social values rather than in those of the time frame covered by Burns' film. Hayden White's anchoring "social system in which the [subject] is enjoined to achieve a full humanity" (14) is not the social system of a bygone era, but that of our own, in which we are struggling with inequalities of the homeless and the homosexuals. As such, the argument achieves two things: it remains faithful to the epic form, and it fulfills Aristotle's truncated syllogism of the "wonderful."

E.M.W. Tillyard classified epic in this way:

The first epic requirement is the simple one of high quality and of high seriousness. The second ... can be roughed out by vague words like amplitude, breadth, inclusiveness, and so on. The third ... [is] rigorous control and predetermination ... [or] the control of a large material and the exercise of a conscious will [to preserve unity]. The fourth requirement can be called choric. The epic writer must express the feelings of a large group of people living in or near his own time. Epic... should express the "accepted unconscious metaphysic" of its age.... (5-13)

It is not difficult to see how Burns' film fills all of Tillyard's requirements: high quality, high seriousness, breadth of scope, effective control of a large body of material, and the choric "metaphysic of the age" to round it all out. The "metaphysic of the age," expressed with appropriate pathos and grandeur, becomes Aristotle's truncated syllogism bringing the story to the level of "the wonderful" for Burns. The social values of the Civil War era: primarily strident progressivism plagued by shameless racism and nativism8, receive little or no attention in this scheme. Burns' argument reaches out to his own public, not to one dead and gone decades ago.

Conclusion
Burns' Civil War film serves what may be a ground-breaking function as the new epic form. In this artful narrative, emancipation of the slaves serves two primary functions: as the "central act" around which the epic narrative is constructed, and as the anchor for the specific moral argument which Ken Burns sought to present. As epic, the film fulfills Tillyard's and Aristotle's requirements. As public moral argument, The Civil War was publicly disseminated, shown twice on the Public Broadcasting System, advertised heavily, and is now available on video. Burns' ultimate purpose was to achieve a degree of "resonance" with the modern, untrained mind, and bring the Civil War, as a totality, to a place where it could fit into modem social and moral thought (what "ought to be.") It concerned itself with ultimate questions of life and death, of how persons should be defined and treated, and of preferred patterns of living. Burns' epic represents a remarkable coincidence, perhaps, of artful and moral choices.

The dangers inherent in such an approach should be obvious, the threat to historical accuracy being but one. Happily, that is not the subject of this paper. It would be well, however, for historians and public both to be aware that certain sacrifices are made in the creation of such an epic narrative as Ken Burns' Civil War. It remains for other analysts and critics to decide whether the sacrifices are entirely worth the result.

Notes

1. See Steven Beschloss, "Local vs. Central: Civil War at PBS." in the Channels Field Guide 1991, 52-53.

2. Some of the articles are: "The Civil War, Unvarnished," U.S. News and World Report, September 20,1990:74-75; "The Civil War: Ken Burns Charts a Nation's Birth," American Film, September, 1990:58; "History Composed With Film," Film Comment, Sept./Oct. 1990:12-16; "Revising the Civil War," Newsweek, 8 Oct. 1990:58-64; "Docutrauma," The New Republic, October 22,1990:4; "The Terrible Remedy," Time, September 24,1990: 73; "The Civil War Comes Home," Time, October 8,1990:78; "Of Many Things," America, September 22,1990: 1. "An American Mosaic," Newsweek, September 17,1990:68-70; "The Crossroads of Our Being, "The Nation, 3 Dec. 1990:695-696. See Bibliography for more.

3. While discussing the ugly topic of intentionality with someone who has also completed a paper on Burns' Civil War, I was asked pointedly if I had interviewed Ken Burns. The answer is no. As far as Burns' personal motives were concerned, I was satisfied with the public comments he had made, fairly consistently, in numerous interviews.

4. Burns generalizes about the conditions under which slaves were born, choosing not to qualify his statements by representing slaves who were not born under horrible conditions. Burns lists diseases common to the slave without indicating that many of the diseases in his catalog ravaged white populations just as savagely. The statistic that only four out of a hundred slaves would live to be sixty is not quite as astounding when one realizes that the average life expectancy for a white in those days was only fifty-six. Slaves also were spared labor that was potentially life-threatening due to the owner's considerable financial investment; the heaviest labor was reserved for hired gangs of Irish immigrants. Burns made much of the fourteen to sixteen- hour workdays, something he could get away with in our urban society. Any modem-day farmer knows that such long hauls can still be common on a large farm. They were certainly the rule on just about any farm in the 19th century. See Ulrich Phillips, American Negro Slavery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969) 228-453.

5. For a thorough look at the various causes of the Civil War by serious academic researchers see Edwin C. Rozwenc, ed., The Causes of the American Civil War (Lexington: D.C. Heath, 1972).

6. Most histories of the Civil War place Calhoun outside the pale of common Southern thought, but for interesting insights into some of the strange implications of his polemics, see James Oakes, Slavery and Freedom (New York: Knopf, 1990) 176-179.

7. A startling run-down of the widespread influence of racism in the United States as a whole is in Kenneth Stampp, America in 1857 (New York: Oxford UP, 1990) 102,106,114-119,127,132-133,192-198,256, and 270-27.

8. Ibid.

Bibliography

Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. S.H. Butcher. New York: Hill and Wang, 1961.

Beschloss, Steven. "Local vs. Central: Civil War at PBS." Channels Field Guide 1991, 52-53.

Burns, Ken. The Civil War. Narr. David McCullough. Writ. and prod. Ken Burns. PBS Special. Florentine Films. Sept. 1990.

Burns, Ken. Interview with Charles McDowell. PBS. Sept. 1990. "The Civil War: Ken Burns Charts a Nation's Birth." American Film. September 1990, 5 8.

Cole, Lewis. "The Crossroads of Our Being." The Nation. 3 Dec. 1990: 695-696.

Fields, Barbara, in The Civil War. Narr. David McCullough. Writ. and prod. Ken Burns. PBS Special. Florentine Films. September 1990.

Fisher, Walter R. Human Communication as Narration. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1989.

Foote, Shelby, in The Civil War. Narr. David McCullough. Writ. and prod. Ken Burns. PBS Special. Florentine Films. September 1990.

Hunt, George W. "Of Many Things." America, Sept. 22, 1990, 1.

Kinsley, Michael. "Docutrauma." The New Republic, October 22, 1990, 4.

Lewis, William F. "Telling America's Story: Narrative Form and the Reagan Presidency." In Rhetorical Criticism. Ed. Sonja K. Foss. Prospect Heights: Waveland, 1989. (242-268).

Lord, Lewis. "The Civil War, Unvamished." U.S. News & World Report. September 24, 1990, 74-75.

Oakes, James. Slavery and Freedom. New York: Knopf, 1990.

Phillips, Ulrich. American Negro Slavery. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969.

"Revisiting the Civil War." Newsweek. 8 Oct. 1990: 58-64.

Rozwenc, Edwin C. ed. The Causes of the American Civil War. Lexington: D.C. Heath, 1972.

Stampp, Kenneth. America in 1857. New York: Oxford UP, 1990.

Thomson, David. "History Composed With Film." Film Comment. September/October 1990, 12-16.

Tillyard, E.M.W. The English Epic and Its Background. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966.

Waters, Harry F. "An American Mosaic." Newsweek. September 17, 1990, 68-70.

Weisberger, Bernard A. "The Great Arrogance of the Present Is to Forget the Intelligence of the Past." American Heritage September/October 1990: 97-102.

White, Hayden. "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality." In On Narrative. Ed. W.J.T. Mitchell. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1981. (1-24).

Zoglin, R. "The Terrible Remedy." Time, September 24, 1990, 73.

- - - -. "The Civil War Comes Home." Time, October 8, 1990, 78.

Back to Sync: Vol 1, Number 2