MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

The Cause That Dare Not Speak Its Name: Confederate Guerillas On Film

Many major films on The Civil War, such as The Red Badge of Courage, Glory, and Gettysburg, have focused on the war as most people imagine it—an epic conflict of blue and gray armies fighting for control of a battlefield. Smaller-scale representations of the war throughout the 20th century, however, were also common, films that examined, with varying degrees of success, different or more regional aspects of the war, or that used the war as a vehicle to deploy well-worn adventure or western stories. This presentation will examine some of these minor films, often forgotten in the annals of film history, in particular the films that focus on the brutal guerilla wars that raged in the territories, the South, the West, and the border states.

I argue that many of these films, produced from 1915 to the mid-1960s, overtly glorify the Confederacy’s core—and wholly mythic—“cavalier” values of honor, sacrifice, skill in battle, and the “noble cause” of freedom for the South from Northern tyranny. This is developed through a two-pronged narrative approach: a focus on a guerilla protagonist who embodies those values without question, and an antagonist—often also a Confederate—who fights and kills only for material gain and plunder. What these films often suppress, however, are the political implications of the Southern cause: a continuation of the brutal institutions of chattel slavery and white supremacy. These films celebrate the “noble cause” –and their heroes’ faith to it—by actively erasing slavery and African Americans from their narratives, transforming a war and cause with deep human consequences into mere abstraction. In these films, the “Confederacy” is worth fighting for, but the horrors that the Confederacy stood for is all but ignored.