Audiences flocked to cinemas to see the new art form and the epic story of America it told. Rather, former slaves were portrayed as black beasts, hell-bent on the violation of the white women, and politically empowered by the evil plan of the Radical Republicans to wreak vengeance on the war-torn South. It offered nothing positive for African Americans. The Birth of a Nation reflected the political exigencies of its age - a time when North and South were re-forging bonds sundered by the war, extended hands across a bloody chasm filled, unfortunately, with the bodies of African Americans lynched, segregated, or disfranchised by Jim Crow.

Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915), portrayed the Civil War as a tragic conflict between brothers, during which white men across regions recognized their shared masculinity by acknowledging each other's heroic deeds. The first feature-length American film, D.W. Popular culture, particularly film, has never coped well with this. From runaway 'contrabands,' to Congressional Confiscation Acts, to the Emancipation Proclamation, to the Confederacy's late-war dalliances with trading liberty for military service - slavery and its fate became a pressing concern for both Union and Confederate governments. What is indisputable, even by the most fire-eating Confederate apologists, is that slavery did become a facet of the war. Did slavery 'cause' the war by offering Northerners a righteous cause to fight and die for? (Almost certainly not.) Or did it spark the conflict by symbolizing the struggle between burgeoning industrial capitalism and an older agrarian tradition? (Probably not.) Was it slavery, and slavery's expansion, that broke the back of the second party system, leaving armed conflict the only alternative to a political system in shambles? (Probably so.) Or, as an older generation of southern historians posed it, was it the mere presence of the barbaric African in the midst of the civilized Anglo-Saxon that led to what novelist Thomas Dixon called the 'causeless conflict'? And then there are those who steadfastly, in the face of all evidence (even Confederate officials' own statements!), deny that slavery was somehow implicated in the start of the war. The same could have been said about Americans during the period depicted in 'G&G.' As Abraham Lincoln conceded in his second inaugural address in 1865, everyone knew that slavery was 'somehow' the cause of the war.Д«ut, oh, what a range of possibilities Lincoln's evasion permits. After all, wasn't the Civil War about slavery, or at least those with an interest in the 'peculiar institution'? Of course, no one is quite sure how slavery should be dealt with in these films, any more than there is popular consensus on the relationship between slavery and the Civil War. Of course there have to be slaves, in some fashion. It's all here: citizen soldiers, brother against brother, displaced families, meditations on war, inspiring speeches, officious bureaucrats, foolish generals, and remarkable generals. More to the point, though, 'G&G' has everything Hollywood requires of its Civil War epics. First of all, it is long, timing out at almost four hours (six hours for those with the stamina to make it through the DVD version). Gods and Generals, Ted Turner and Ron Maxwell's followup to 1993's Gettysburg, wants to be a quintessential Civil War epic.

Gods and generals