Media supplement: The Civil War

THE CIVIL WAR. A film by Ken Burns (PBS America)

Life has been put on hold in our house over the last three days as we immersed ourselves in Ken Burns' epic (12 hour) documentary on America's greatest tragedy.

We Brits don't know much about the American Civil War. It isn't taught in schools, and who the heck cares? some might say. Yet we should empathise with our American friends, having fought our own vicious conflict setting brother against brother only a couple of hundred years earlier. Drawing deeply on contemporary letters, diaries and memoirs, Burns, in his slow, deceptively relaxed style, builds a truly compelling picture of life and death in the America of 1861-65

The Civil War was massive by any standards. Over 600,000 young men died in the four years of fighting; more than the combined losses of all the other wars America has fought. At Gettysburg alone, the "victorious" North lost 23,000 men, the South 28,000. At war's end, the South had lost 1 in 4 of its adult male population. Yet as the war began, things looked good for the secessionists. Time and again they won victories against a much larger and better equipped Union army, to the severe embarrassment of President Lincoln. His avowed aim was to bring the secessionists back into the fold of the United States, and this, it turns out, was even more important to him than the abolition of slavery. "If I could win them back without freeing the slaves I would willingly do so" he once said. But he couldn't, and there was no option but to crush the intransigent plantation owners of the South.

And crush them he did, a fact with which we should not be surprised, considering the North's infinitely larger industrial base and manpower. The wonder is why it took so long. In large part it was down to the brilliantly imaginative leadership of men like Robert E Lee and "Stonewall" Jackson, and to a correspondingly lamentable leadership offered by the Union, exemplified by the hesitant, fearful role of the North's principle general, George C McClellan, whose repeated failure to make the most of natural advantages gave a new meaning to the word "procrastination".

Of course the major achievement of the War was the emancipation of the slaves, although as several observers pointed out, the Blacks had to wait another hundred years before that emancipation became a true liberation for them. But, as the historian Shelby Foote pointed out at the close of this epic film, the biggest change brought about by the war could be summed up as follows:

"...Before the War, everyone used to say: 'The United States are..." After the War, and to this day, everyone says: 'The United States is...'"

Such a tiny change in a verb, you might think, but such huge significance for a nation. And the terrible suffering that had to be endured to achieve it...