All language subtitles for American.Historys.Biggest.Fibs.with.Lucy.Worsley-S01E02-The.American.Civil.War.srt - 2

History is often presented
as a set of facts and dates,

of victories and defeats,

of monarchs and presidents,

all consigned to an unchanging past.

Good morning.
Morning to you as well, Lucy.

But it's not like that at all.

History is the knitting together
of rival interpretations,

deliberate manipulations
of the truth,

and, sometimes...

..alternative facts.

In this series,
I'll be lifting the lid

on three of American history's
greatest national stories.

The revolutionary
War Of Independence.

Is the story of the Founding
Fathers built on fibs?

United States supremacy
in the Cold War -

American dream...

..or nuclear nightmare?

EXPLOSION

And in this programme,
the American Civil War.

It's gone down in history
as a battle to liberate the slaves

in the South
and to reunite the nation.

But is that really true?

We like to think of Lincoln
as someone who starts the war

to free African-Americans
and the reality is quite different.

The story of this bloody conflict
has been told and retold,

shaping the culture and politics
of the nation

with epic tales
like Gone With The Wind.

Ashley!

I'm getting Scarlet O'Hara's waist
as we speak.

And it's still going on.

Conflicting accounts
of the Civil War

continue to divide the nation
to this day.

CHANT: You will not replace us!

You will not replace us!

But history is a murky business

and the story of the Civil War
is stuffed full

of some of American history's
biggest fibs.

The American Civil War broke out
in April 1861.

By the time it ended
four years later,

over 600,000 Americans
had been killed.

That's more than in World War I
and World War II combined.

The northern Union forces
had defeated southern Confederates.

President Abraham Lincoln
was the heroic victor...

..and this is his memorial.

I'd say that there's something extra
monumental about this monument.

It's got utter self-confidence,
hasn't it?

And every stone within it
tells a story.

There are 36 of those columns,

which represent the 36 states

that ended up being in the union
after the war.

And you can read all their names,
too, round the top.

"Arkansas, Michigan, Florida..." -
they're all there.

It's a real symbol of togetherness.

Lincoln has saved the union

and ended the divisions
of the Civil War.

The great unifier himself is made
of 175 tonnes of southern marble

from the state of Georgia.

Stone from the North and the South
is combined throughout this temple.

It's an image of the union
in masonry.

And presidents ever since have
celebrated Lincoln's achievement.

That's what Abraham Lincoln
understood.

He had his sceptics,
he had his setbacks,

but through his will and his words,

he moved a nation
and helped free a people.

With the exception of the late,
great Abraham Lincoln,

I can be more presidential
than any president

that's ever held this office,
that I can tell you.

The memorial is telling
a powerful version of the story.

The official version, if you like.

But history is made up of facts

and interpretations and distortions

and, sometimes, downright lies.

And the story
of the American Civil War

is one of the most contested
stories of all,

so I'm left wondering,
could the Lincoln Memorial itself

be telling one of American history's
biggest fibs?

To find out how the history
of the Civil War

has been shaped and manipulated,
I'm heading south to Georgia,

and I'll be asking
if Abraham Lincoln

really was a saintly emancipator

dedicated to ending slavery,

and whether his victory
in the Civil War

really did reunite the nation.

It all started in the mansions
of wealthy slave owners,

whose way of life was under threat.

Slavery is the thing that
the entire American economy

at this point really rests.

The number of slaves in the South
would grow

from approximately about 800,000
in 1790

up to four million
by the time of the Civil War.

Slaves themselves were worth
more than they had ever been.

A prime field hand male was worth
somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500,

so, if you do the math,
by today's numbers,

it's anywhere between
2 trillion and 9 trillion.

Slaves and slavery was worth more
than all of the factories,

all of the warehouses,
all of the railroads,

all of everything else
in the economy in America.

Slaves dwarfed that.

Today, the USA has 50 states,

but in 1861, there were only 34.

The Civil War began as a clash
between the 19 northern states

which had abolished slavery

and 11 southern states

whose economy was built
on slave labour.

At the same time, huge areas
of the American West

were just beginning to emerge
as new states.

Would they adopt the economic model
of the North

or the South?

Well, the issue in
the western territories

is whether or not slavery is going
to be allowed to exist in the West.

And the question then
for the United States is,

as this territory, which is
unorganised now, becomes states,

will we allow those states
to be free

or will we allow them to be slave?

The issue is not so much about
slavery where it exists

but slavery where people want
it to exist or not to exist,

depending on their perspective,

and there are people who can see
that this is going to be

the powder keg that's going to set
this whole sectional conflict off.

So, the war didn't start out
as Abraham Lincoln's crusade

to liberate enslaved people at all.

It was all about money.

Northerners feared they would be
unable to compete

if slavery was allowed to take root
in the new western states.

And southerners worried
that slave Labour,

the bedrock of their economy,

might be abolished altogether
if it was outlawed in the West.

Abraham Lincoln was
a Kentucky-born Southerner,

but in 1860 he managed to win
the presidential election

without taking a single state
in the south.

Within two months,

11 southern states broke away
from the United States

and set out to create
the Confederacy.

As tensions rose, they installed
their own president,

Jefferson Davis,
in their own White House

in Montgomery, Alabama.

And at 4:30am

on the 12th of April, 1861,

the first shots were fired
by Confederate troops

at Fort Sumter.

The war escalated
into a brutal conflict.

At the battle of Gettysburg alone,

51,000 men lost their lives
in just three days.

The Confederate forces were fighting
for a new American nation.

So, this flag is what is called

the first national flag
of the Confederacy.

You have the original 11 stars
of the Confederacy

and you have these red and white
stripes or bars on it.

It looks really quite like the Stars
and Stripes. Is that deliberate?

That's part of the problem.
When you're on the battlefield,
it's very hard to tell

the difference between it
and an United States flag -

an American flag.

So you can't tell who's who?
You can't tell who's who.

That prompted the Confederate
government to create another flag,

a flag that would be used
in battles,

and we just happen to have
an example of that here as well.

So I can see that I've been thinking
of the Confederate flag wrongly.

What I'm actually thinking of
is the Confederate battle flag.

That's correct.
It is the battle flag.

This is a purely military flag

designed to be used by troops
in the field.

This particular flag
was in the battle of Gettysburg.

You will notice a lot of
the battle damage on it.

One of the other things that you
might notice is the number of stars.

So, that's one, two, three...

four, five, six, seven, eight,
nine, ten, 11, 12...

And one's gone missing at the end,
there, but that's 13.

There's 13 stars.
That's wrong, isn't it?

By the time this flag was created
in the fall of 1861,

the Confederate government
had admitted two other

slaveholding states that never
formally seceded from the union.

Kentucky and Missouri.

Isn't that clever, then? They were
trying to snap up any state

that showed a flicker of interest
in the cause of the Confederacy.

This is a real case of smoke
and mirrors, isn't it?

Even the flag itself,
there's more to it than you think.

It's not quite telling
the straightforward truth.

It feeds into, sort of, this myth
and how we understand

the Confederacy
and the Civil War to this day.

The bloody conflict dragged on,

year after year.

Many in the North began to question
whether it was all worth it.

Then, after three years of fighting,
Lincoln made a clever tactical move.

He turned the war into a crusade

to abolish slavery.

In January 1863,
Lincoln drafted a statement -

the Proclamation of Emancipation.

It used the promise of liberation
for the enslaved people of the South

to strike a decisive blow
against the Confederacy.

This is a copy of the actual
Proclamation of Emancipation.

It says that on the first day
of January 1863,

"All persons held as slaves
shall be then, thenceforth

"and forever free."

When it was read aloud
in Washington DC,

one witness reported
that men squealed,

women fainted and dogs barked.

Thousands of copies of it
were printed.

This one has rather beautiful
illustrations that tell the story.

Here's an angel releasing
a poor little boy from his chains.

Here are the bad old days -
an overseer beating a slave.

And then here are "the freed",
and they are saying,

"Give thanks all ye people,
give thanks to the Lord."

It rather looks in this image
like Lincoln himself is the Lord.

The message is clear - to all the
enslaved people here in Georgia

and across the South,
you are now free.

But Lincoln was only promising
the abolition of slavery

in rebel states.

Several slave-owning states
on the border of the Confederacy

had remained loyal to the union.

They were allowed to keep
their slaves.

So was Lincoln himself a real
supporter of emancipation?

There's a damning piece of evidence

that suggests that Lincoln's
attitude toward slavery

was much more morally ambivalent
than you might assume.

He actually wrote to a newspaper
in 1862,

saying that his paramount objective
was to save the union.

It wasn't either to save
or destroy slavery.

He said that, "If I could save
the union without freeing

"one single slave, then I would."

Lincoln was the ultimate pragmatist.

He saw emancipation as just a tactic
towards achieving his bigger goal.

And he also saw another practical
benefit of ending slavery.

He could see that it would destroy
the economy of the South.

And it worked.

Enslaved African Americans
left the plantations

and fled to the North.

180,000 black soldiers
came to serve in the Union Army.

And in November 1864,

the Northern General,
William Sherman,

set out to break the spirit
of the South.

With 60,000 union troops,

he made an audacious attack
behind Confederate lines.

Flying the flag of emancipation,

he marched 300 miles from Atlanta
to Savannah,

raiding farms, stealing livestock

and destroying everything
in his path.

In some places, the trail
of devastation was 60 miles wide.

Sherman made it very clear

that he was waging psychological
warfare on the people of Atlanta.

He wrote them an open letter
that says,

"You cannot qualify war
in harsher terms than I will.

"War is cruelty.

"They who brought war into our
country deserve all the curses

"and maledictions
that people can pour on them."

Sherman said to another general,
"I will make Georgia howl."

Sherman's March is
the stuff of legend.

The South remembers it
as a brutal war crime.

To the North, it was
a military triumph,

celebrated in art and music.

Good morning. Good morning to you
as well, Lucy.

Now you are a musician.

What was the role of music
in the Civil War armies?

One of the chief reasons of
musicians is to inspire

the soldiers. So, if you had a
patriotic song

or even if you had a song that is
well known at home

that can put a spring in your step
if you're marching, say 20 miles,

in the swamps and marshes of
Georgia, that's mighty important.

Right, let's sing a marching song.

This song I actually know.

We used to sing this
at the girl guides.

Or a variation of it.

We didn't have quite these words.

But this is a civil
war version, isn't it?

Yes, indeed. John Brown.
Let's give it a go.

# John Brown was John the Baptist
of the Christ we are to see

# Christ who of the bondmen shall
the Liberator be

# And soon throughout the Sunny
South the slaves shall all be free

# For his soul is marching on

# Da-da-da-da-da

# Glory, glory, hallelujah!

# Glory, glory, hallelujah!

# Glory, glory, hallelujah!
and his soul is marching on! #

This song makes it
sound really simple.

The slaves shall all be freed,
that is what the troops

from the North are here to
do, right?

Well, according to some union
soldiers that is what they're here

to do, and perhaps that's even
why many of them joined

in the first place.

As the war intensified,
the union tried to justify

the bloodshed and destruction,
with the twin goals of abolishing

slavery and restoring
national unity.

But as Sherman's March
across the South continued,

the union songs of liberation took
on a very hollow ring.

This is Ebenezer Creek,
the waters are silent,

but they're very deep and murky
and there are alligators hiding

amongst these trees.

On December the 8th, 1864,
14,000 union soldiers,

under Brigadier General Davis
arrived at the creek,

accompanied by thousands of former
slaves who were seeking protection

from Lincoln's Army. Confederate
troops weren't far behind them.

As night fell, pontoon bridges
were constructed across the water,

but Davis saw the new
arrivals as a hindrance.

He called them, "useless Negroes",
trying to protect them,

he said, would be suicide.

He ordered that the African American
men, women and children be prevented

from crossing until the threat
of more Confederate troops ahead

had been dealt with.

Another commander, James Connolly,
heard what Davis was up to,

and he thought that it was wrong.

He wrote this, "I knew this must
result in all these Negroes

"being recaptured or
perhaps brutally shot.

"And I told his staff officers
what I thought of such

"an inhuman, barbarous proceeding."

But Davis didn't listen.

Davis' story turned out to be a lie.

There was no Confederate
force in front.

And once his soldiers
were across the creek,

he ordered the bridges
to be pulled up behind them.

600 men, women and children
were all trapped on that side.

The Confederate troops
were closing in on them.

They panicked.

In the early hours of the morning,
they tried to cross

these swampy waters.
Some of them put together rafts.

Others used the trunks of trees.
Many of them drowned.

And those that didn't were either
shot by the Confederates,

or sent back into slavery.

But Lincoln the liberator
had another surprise in store.

On April the 11, 1865,
one of the windows of

the White House was opened.

President Abraham Lincoln,
the hero of the hour,

leaned out of the window and he made
an impromptu speech to the crowds

gathered on the lawn.

He was on the verge of victory.

He was looking ahead to the future,
and he said that the country

really ought to think about giving
all these newly freed

African Americans the vote.

Of course, this was completely
against the values and attitudes

that the south had been built upon.

In the crowd that day was a man
with a deep commitment

to the Confederacy.

His name was John Wilkes Booth.

He was enraged by
the President's speech.

He said, and his words
carry a health warning,

"That means nigger citizenship.

"By God, that's the last
speech he will ever make."

Three days later, Lincoln came
here to Ford's Theatre

to see a show, and Booth made
good on his promise.

He got into the theatre and he shot
the President at close range,

in the head, shouting,
"Thus to all tyrants!"

Lincoln's bleeding body
was carried out of the theatre,

and across the road
and to that house over there.

He lingered on for 24
hours and then he died,

instantly becoming a martyr
to the cause of emancipation

and the Union.

Unionists descended into mourning.

Millions lined the streets as his
funeral train travelled 1,700 miles

across the country, finally
reaching his burial place,

in Springfield, Illinois.

Almost as soon as he was dead,
images like this one began to appear

in the press. "In memory of Abraham
Lincoln, the reward of the just."

And he has been carried
off to Heaven by an angel.

It is almost as if he has become
a religious figure,

and, like Christ himself,
he died at Easter.

The fatal shot was
fired on Good Friday.

Soon after Lincoln's death,
Charlotte Scott, a former slave

from Virginia, gave 5 from her pay
packet to begin fundraising

for a statue of Lincoln.

In April, 1876, this photograph
of Charlotte was sold to visitors

at the grand unveiling of the
emancipation memorial in Washington.

The main speaker at the ceremony
was another former slave,

now a politician and reformer,
Frederick Douglass.

And he began a reassessment
of Lincoln's memory.

Frederick Douglass was, at the time,
arguably the most important

black man in the country and he
didn't disappoint.

He very quickly launches into,
almost a tirade

about Lincoln's shortcomings.

He talks about the fact that Lincoln
was pre-eminently

the white man's President, that even
though he had helped to free

enslaved people, Lincoln always
did what was in the best interests

of his race.

But, this man was President
when we got our freedom

and this is what he did to help
us get our freedom,

so he's balancing it.

Do you think people
were surprised at the time,

to hear words of criticism
being spoken at all?

Lincoln was an anti-slavery man,
but he was no abolitionist

before the Civil War.

He's someone who believed that
slavery was a legitimate

institution, a constitutionally
protected institution,

and because of that, the federal
government could not touch that

institution where it
already existed.

He believed, that if you contain it,
it would die a natural death.

It might take 200 years, mind you,
but it would eventually die out.

Did Lincoln believe
in racial equality?

It depends upon what time
in his life we're talking about.

In 1858, he was engaged in a series
of debates and Lincoln

was in an environment where he had
to show the local people

that he was just as anti-black as
they were. To get the votes?

To get their votes. Absolutely.
And so this is what he says to them.

"I will say then that I am not, nor
never have been, in favour

"of bringing about in any way
the social and political equality

"of the white and black races.

"And I, as much as any other man,
is in favour of having the superior

"position assigned
to the white race." Whoa.

And so in 1858, Lincoln is decidedly
not for racial equality.

Not in this statement,
but not in reality, either.

On the 9th of April, 1865,
the Confederate general

Robert E Lee surrendered.

The war was over.

But the shaping of its place
in history was just getting started.

Lincoln's moral and political
shortcomings were largely forgotten.

The north celebrated
the prospect of unity restored.

Rebels and traitors had
been crushed,

and slavery would now be abolished
in every state of the union.

Whatever the truth really was,
the legend of Lincoln

the great emancipator
who had consigned slavery

to the history books
was very powerful.

Surely, this promise of freedom to
the enslaved would now be delivered?

Wouldn't it?

It was a very limited
kind of freedom.

Many states quickly instituted
racial segregation laws.

Mixed marriages were illegal
in most southern states.

Black people were banned
from sharing the same schools,

restaurants and transport as whites.

"Separate, but equal," was the
phrase used to justify

all these racist laws, which were
introduced by a growing number

of states after the Civil War.

It was completely within
their rights to do this.

The laws were just rubber-stamped
by the US Supreme Court.

So, millions of African Americans
may have been freed from slavery,

but they were still denied
basic civil rights.

And it was when they were at work
that this fib of freedom

was most cruelly exposed.

Sharecropping was one example.

Former slaves had no money
to buy land or tools,

so they often had to borrow
from former slave owners,

to supply these essentials
and basic housing.

They were charged punitive interest
on the loans

and forced to give up a large
share of the crop.

This is an account of an anonymous
victim of the system

which was published in 1904.

He signed a contract
with a landlord.

He got a cabin, like this,
and in return he was supposed

to work to pay back this debt.

After ten years, though,
the debt had mysteriously got

bigger, not smaller.

He really wanted to leave
and the landowner said,

well, you can, as long
as you sign this paper saying

that you acknowledge
that you are still in debt to me.

This is what he says,

"We would have signed anything,
just to get away.

"We stepped up, we did,
and made our marks.

"That same night, we were rounded
up by a constable and ten or 12

"white men who aided him
and we were locked up.

"Everyone of us."

The next morning, they were told
the papers they'd signed

had bound them to hard labour until
all the debts were paid.

He describes the next three
years as hell on earth.

The workers were kept in pens,
rather like animal pens.

In the daytime, they had to go out
to work to pay their debts

and at night, they were locked up.

The conditions were appalling.

He describes the pens as,
"the filthiest places in the world.

"They were cesspools of nastiness."

And there was another
betrayal to come.

The Emancipation
proclamation became law,

as the 13th Amendment.

But it confirmed that the end
of slavery was a lie.

Slavery had been abolished, it said,
except as a punishment for crime.

Which meant that anyone
who had been convicted of wrongdoing

could be held in captivity
and made to work.

After the devastation of the war,
the South was rebuilding its cities

and its economy. This is the site of
the Chattahoochee Brick company

in Atlanta. In its heyday, it turned
out 30 million bricks a year.

After companies like this one
had spotted this loophole

in the 13th Amendment,
they exploited it ruthlessly.

They went to the local prisons
and hired convicts

and then worked them, and worked
them to the bone.

Lincoln's emancipation
had been transformed

into slavery of a new kind.

They called it convict leasing.

And between 1870 and 1920,
90% of the prisoners

sold into labour were
African Americans.

If you were found guilty
of vagrancy, fare avoidance,

even talking to white women, you
could end up as a slave again.

The city of Atlanta was rebuilt
with the bricks prisoners made here.

Conditions were so bad
that hundreds,

maybe thousands of them, died.

Their bodies still buried
beneath the ruins.

In 1935, a book called
Black Reconstruction in America

was published by the
historian WEB Du Bois.

After the Civil War, he said,
the slave went free,

stood for a brief moment in the sun,
and then moved back towards slavery.

In December, 1934,
convict leasing was rebranded

as Federal Prisons
Industries Incorporated.

The 13th Amendment is still
in force to this day.

Starbucks, Microsoft and IBM have
all made use of prison labourers.

In 1867, a Virginia journalist,
Edward A Pollard created

the powerful Southern alternative
to the northern version of history.

He called it The Lost Cause.

The title of the book inspired
a revival of Southern resistance

against the North.

Believers in the lost cause
portrayed the old South

as a vanished civilisation
where plantation owners

and happy slaves lived in harmony.

Rebels and traitors were rebranded
as heroes or freedom fighters

and Southern mothers, wives and
daughters seized the opportunity

to find pride in the defeat
of the fallen soldiers.

Women really become the face
of the lost cause in the late 19th

and early 20th century. Southern
women formed this organisation

called the United Daughters of
the Confederacy.

They grew from 30 women
at the original meeting

of the United Daughters
to 30,000 women in ten years,

to 100,000 women by World War I.

They were everywhere.

The United Daughters put up hundreds
of memorials

to fallen Confederate heroes.

They also set out to ensure
that the next generation would learn

the Southern version of history.

They even appointed
their own historian general,

Mildred Lewis Rutherford.

This is how she dressed
when she would give

her presentations, her addresses.

We are in the early 20th century
here, aren't we? Correct.

She is forever locked in 1860.

She was sort of a one-woman
propaganda machine.

She made it her mission
to ensure that young children

were going to learn the true
history of the South,

which is always a pro-Southern,
pro-Confederate history

of the South. What tools did she
develop to do that, then?

She created something called
a measuring rod for textbooks.

You know, you used a sort
of a litmus test to say,

does this book have
these things in it?

If it does, you need to reject it,
you need to deface it,

if it's in your school library.

So, how did she determine
if the book was right or not?

There's so many reasons
to get rid of a book,

it is hard to imagine
there are any books left.

For example, "Reject a book
that calls the Confederate soldier

"a traitor or rebel,
and the war a rebellion.

"Reject a book that speaks
of the slave holder

"of the South as cruel and unjust
to his slaves."

"And reject a textbook that
glorifies Abraham Lincoln

"and vilifies Jefferson Davis."

It is so unsubtle.

It is very unsubtle and she's not
a subtle woman at all.

This is fairly clever historical
propaganda machine they have got

working here then, isn't it? Yes.

They don't miss a beat.
They cover all the bases.

Mildred Rutherford also taught
a version of history that said

that the Confederacy's noble
cause was to stand up

for individual states' rights.

Against the tyrannical
and interfering big government

from the north.

Southerners considered
themselves the inheritors

of the revolutionary generation.

That they were being patriotic
because they were abiding

by the tenth Amendment
to the constitution,

which defended States' rights.

That they needed to be able
to make their own decisions

about their State.

The thing that is always
left out of that,

even to this day, while the South
fought the war for States' rights,

they never say the States' rights
to maintain slavery.

That's what they mean
though, isn't it?

They wouldn't say so, but that's
exactly what it boils down to.

The Lost Cause buried
this inconvenient truth,

but in the 1860s, they were a bit
more honest about it.

Motivation of a secessionist
is pretty simple.

All we need to do is look
at their words and what they said.

They all, to a State, said
this is about defending

the institution of slavery.
Mississippi said it right up front.

Mississippi's Ordinance
of Secession, the very first

sentence, "They said our cause
is inextricably linked

"to the institution of slavery,

"the greatest material interest
in the world."

In 1915, 50 years
after Lincoln's victory,

a new movie was about to reawaken
the lingering prejudice and hatred

of the Civil War.

The title of the film made
it sound like a rousing,

patriotic story. It was called
The Birth Of A Nation.

It's director, DW Griffith,
was the son of a Confederate veteran

and he was determined to make
the first great Civil War movie.

But the film's name masked
the nasty source material

that it was based upon, which was a
novel called The Clansman,

a historical romance
of the Ku Klux Klan.

The Ku Klux Klan was a white
supremacist movement

that emerged in the 19th century.

Set during the Civil War
and its aftermath,

The Birth Of A Nation
portrays the Klan

as the White Knights of the South.

It showed African Americans,
often played by white actors

in blackface, as violent criminals,
eager to molest white women.

In this scene, the Klan
takes its revenge.

The Birth Of A Nation smashed
all box office records,

taking today's equivalent
of nearly 2 billion.

A week before the premiere
in Atlanta a former preacher,

William Simmons, got together 15
of his friends at a local landmark,

Stone Mountain.

They climbed to the summit,
lashed together two planks of wood,

and set them alight,
for the whole of Georgia to see.

Simmons was relaunching
the Ku Klux Klan.

This was a very interesting
use of history.

The Klan had existed
in the 19th century,

it was a thing, but it
had sort of fizzled out.

When Simmons revived it, he was
reopening a chapter of history

that had been consigned to the past.

The film and the novel would help
Simmons bring the Klan back to life.

On the night of the premiere,
Simmons and the other Klansmen

decided to hold a recruitment drive,
so they came in procession

along this street.

It's Peachtree Street, it's the
main street of Atlanta.

They were riding horses, and they
were firing rifles into the air,

to salute the new film. And all over
the country, he had organised

for other Klansmen to dress up in
their Klan robes and hoods,

and to parade outside cinemas.

And in a local newspaper,
Simmons placed a recruitment advert.

He'd drawn it himself.

It was printed alongside adverts
for the film.

Within ten years, it has been
estimated that 4 million people

had joined the Klan.

But the revival was based on fibs.

The historic Klan never burned
crosses, that idea was invented

by the novel, and the original Klan
costumes weren't all white.

The ones we know today were created
for the film,

as the director put it,

"Solely from the viewpoint
of theatrical effectiveness."

Between them, they were reinventing
the terrifying iconography

of the Ku Klux Klan.

They were playing with history
to suit their purposes,

by making the Klan sound old,

they also made it sound
somehow authentic.

They were trying to give
it a veneer of respectability,

to cover up their
murderous intentions.

The revival of the Klan unleashed
a new reign of terror.

The trademark hoods and crosses
would now accompany lynchings

across America.

Thousands of black Americans were
kidnapped, tortured and murdered.

Nearly 25 years after
The Birth Of A Nation,

the American Civil War went
to the movies again in 1939.

Based on the novel
by Margaret Mitchell,

Gone With The Wind would put the
unity back into the United States.

It's one of the most
successful films ever made.

The film had everything
a girl could want -

elegant Southern Belles,
ravishing landscapes,

a swooping score, and devastating
Southern gentlemen.

The film opens on the eve
of the Civil War.

It tells the story of Scarlett
O'Hara, the wealthy daughter

of a cotton plantation
owner in Georgia.

And it follows her struggle
to survive the devastation of war.

It's an epic romance
with sumptuous costumes.

Ashley!

We will now put on your hoop skirt.
Oh, yeah.

Let's get it over your head.
Fantastic. And work my way in.

Bit of a Barbie theme going on here.

Am I going to fit in? Yes, you will.

If not, we'll just have to suck
your corset in some more.

I'm getting Scarlett O'Hara's
waist as we speak.

Just so you know, getting
out of it is a lot easier

than getting into it. And for
the final touch...

You will look like a princess.

There you go.

You are darling, darlin'!

Scarlett is the flawed
but irresistible mistress

of an estate called Tara and this
house is said to have inspired it.

Today it's a museum, celebrating the
spirit of Gone With The Wind.

Can you tell me, what is your
relationship with

Gone With The Wind?

Well, it just happens
to be my most favourite movie

in the whole wide world.

Your most favourite movie
in the whole wide world!

And that I have watched
it probably 30 or 40 times.

I enjoy the clothing from the movie,
I enjoy the time period,

I enjoy the romance of that period,
and the genteelness of that period.

By the 1930s, when Gone
With The Wind is a huge sensation,

it is a massive commercial success,
there must have been people

in the North who were as much
in love with that as people

from the south. Is that right?
Absolutely. America went crazy.

The whole of America?

The whole of America went crazy
over Gone With The Wind.

The film transcended the divisions
of the Civil War,

and spoke to a generation who had
gone without

during the great depression.

As God is my witness,
as God as my witness,

they're not going to lick me.

I'm going to live through
this and when it is all over,

I'll never be hungry again.

But to achieve that process
of healing and reconciliation

between North and South,
the old fibs and distortions

were dusted down once again.

Gone With The Wind was an elegant
airbrushing of history.

Let go of my horse!

Hollywood also suppressed some
of the sinister politics

of Margaret Mitchell's novel.

After Scarlett O'Hara is attacked,
the men plan to go off that night

to seek revenge.

Thank you. Scarlett.

Change your dress and go over to
Miss Melly's for the evening.

I've got to go to a
political meeting.

A political meeting?

But in the novel, that political
meeting is revealed to be

at the Ku Klux Klan.

Both book and film peddled one
enduring and dangerous

lost cause misrepresentation -

that the slaves in the old South
were cheerful, contented

and faithful to their owners.

Mammy is a kind-hearted,
matriarchal figure,

just like one of the family.

Ms Scarlet! Where are you going
without your shawl,

and the night air fixing to set in?

And how come you didn't ask them
gentleman to stay...

But the fact remains
that Mammy was enslaved.

There's no escaping it, Gone With
The Wind is a romanticised version

of a dark period of history.

I'm always one for dressing up,
but when you bear that in mind,

I don't feel entirely
comfortable dressed like this.

The film may have tried
to prettify the past,

but with the character of Mammy,

there was no escaping the barefaced
racism of the present.

The role was played
by Hattie McDaniel.

She was herself the daughter
of enslaved African Americans

and she was recognised
for the part with an Oscar.

The first black actor to get one.

But, when it came to the film's
fancy premiere, just down the road

in Atlanta, there were segregation
laws in place

that prevented black and white
people from sitting down together.

So Hattie wasn't invited.

The producers thought about it,
decided it would be awkward,

and asked her to stay away.

A children's choir, dressed as
plantation workers,

had been booked to perform
that evening.

And one of the choir boys
was a ten-year-old

called Martin Luther King.

24 years later, a growing
Civil Rights movement

was campaigning for change.

In 1963, a massive march
on Washington was planned.

By this time, the choir
boy had grown up.

He was now a Baptist minister
and activist,

and the march was going to be
addressed by Dr Martin Luther King.

Right here, black voices were
creating a new version of history.

# We shall not

# We shall not we shall not be
moved. #

August 28, 1963, 100 years after
Lincoln's Emancipation proclamation,

more than 200,000 people gathered
at the Lincoln memorial

to challenge the legacy of
the Civil War.

The nation was celebrating 100 years
since the Emancipation proclamation

and civil rights organisations knew
this was a time to think

about how far we haven't
come as a nation.

There's something really powerful
about a mass of people facing

Abraham Lincoln, who is considered
one of the greatest presidents

outside of the founding era,

to challenge the idea of inequality
among the citizenry and what does

it mean to have masses of people
looking at this symbol,

and asking for the nation to finally
deliver on its promises?

The phrase that people remember
from this speech is,

"I have a dream," but there's
another phrase

that particularly interests you,
isn't there?

Yes, it is the idea
of the promissory note.

When King opens his speech, he talks
about the fact

that African Americans have
essentially been written

a bad cheque, and that the cheque
was first written by Lincoln

and his promises of emancipation,

and the country was unable to fulfil
the promise of that note.

King is really making critical
the point of the march,

that it's not just about
the declaration of freedom,

but that there are economic
responsibilities, economic goals

that the march also
was advocating for.

Jobs, better schools,
the right to vote,

King is really showing us his most
revolutionary

and his most expansive vision of
what Civil Rights actually meant.

The story had been that Lincoln
had healed the wounds of the battle

between the North and the south,
but King was saying,

no, there's more to the story
than that, what's not being healed

are the wounds left by slavery.

He was using history,
he was using all of this to put

Civil Rights onto the agenda.

I think this march will go
down as one of the greatest,

if not the greatest, demonstrations
for freedom and human dignity

ever held in the United States.

It was powerful.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended
racial discrimination at work

and prohibited segregation
in public spaces.

The divisive legacy of slavery
and the Civil War was finally

beginning to be confronted.

Another of the resonant phrases
from King's epic speech was,

"Let freedom ring from the stone
mountain of Georgia."

By that he was trying to bury
the memory of the Klan,

but, in fact, the echoes of the Lost
Cause would continue to resonate

throughout the country.

In 1972, a huge Civil War memorial
was completed

on the side of stone mountain.

Three Confederate leaders
were carved into the rock,

Jefferson Davis, Robert E Lee
and Stonewall Jackson.

As recently as August, 2017,
a member of the Ku Klux Klan

sought permission to burn another
cross at Stone mountain.

The application was turned down.

150 years after the end
of the Civil War there are hundreds

of Confederate memorials
across the South.

One of them is the centrepiece
of a little park

in Charlottesville, Virginia.

But some don't want to celebrate
what this statue stands for.

Mario, what is the story
of your relationship to this park?

This is the park where my
wife and I got married,

roughly eight years ago.

And what did your father say
to you at the wedding?

My dad, he told the photographer
he did not want that statue

in our wedding pictures.

Can you remember what
he said about the statue?

You know, it represented the
oppression of the African-American

people by individuals like Robert
E Lee, Stonewall Jackson, etc.

And your father, he is from Georgia,
is he? Yes, ma'am.

And so that statue to him, it had
real horrible meaning. It does.

It does.

I'm sorry that the American Civil
War turned up to your wedding.

Yeah. Unreal.

Under mounting pressure,
in February, 2017,

the City Council of Charlottesville
voted to change the name

of Lee Park.

Then they said they wanted
to remove Lee's statue.

Many were against this.

Jock, what's the case for keeping
the statue of General Lee,

just as it is?

Well, it is a magnificent piece
of art, it represents our culture

and our history and it is a good
talking point for talking

about all the things that happened
during the Civil War,

and after the Civil War.

If you can imagine the park without
it, what's left to talk about?

One of the complaints
about the statue is that it

celebrates just one side,
and the other side needs

to get its own chance to speak.

I would agree completely with
putting more signs around it,

or using other educational materials
to tell both sides of the story.

The problem is that those who want
to remove the monument

don't want to tell both
sides of the story.

They want to, as they put it,
change the narrative,

so it is just one side of the story.

They have a view of the matter
that the Confederates and Lee

were just evil people, and we
shouldn't have any statues of them.

I am afraid I disagree with that.

There is a kind of modern-day
Civil War stand-off.

The name that was chosen
for the park was Emancipation Park.

But standing right in the middle
of it was the statue of General Lee.

It was like he was still
in the heat of battle.

This is a really strange moment
when two different versions

of history were colliding.

There is the unionist story,
Emancipation Park,

and the Confederate story,
General Lee.

And then things turned ugly.

On the 11th of August, 2017,
an organisation

called Unite The Right gathered
in Charlottesville for a rally.

Hundreds of white supremacists
marched to protest

against the removal of General Lee's
statue in Emancipation Park.

On the other side, Civil Rights
protesters mobilised.

You will not replace us!

You will not replace us!

There were Confederate flags
everywhere and people were shouting,

"Blood and soil" and,
"You will not replace us!"

The past was at the heart
of this very 21st-century conflict.

The organiser of the Unite The Right
rally said that they were doing

it to stand up for our history.

You will not replace us!

You will not replace us!

But the history the statue
represented has hidden layers.

Well, the statue is very
interesting, in that

though Lee was a Confederate general
who lived in the 19th century,

it wasn't commissioned until 1917
and actually erected in 1924.

And it was erected during a time
of heightened racial violence

against African Americans,
particularly the lynchings.

And it is part of that moment
in history as well as the Civil War.

Yes, it is. And, make no mistake,
that these monuments,

these figures were meant to,
in some way, both directly

and indirectly, instil fear.

The confrontation continued
into the 12th of August.

Just like the Blind Boys
of Alabama, look at them.

That day, one of the supporters
of Unite The Right drove his car

into a crowd of counter protesters.

33 people were injured,
and a Civil Rights activist,

Heather Heyer, was killed.

SHOUTING INCOMPREHENSIBLY

Not too far from where we are,
perhaps a 30 second walk,

the violent clashes claimed the life
of one of the counter protesters,

Heather Heyer, and it's still shakes
the city of Charlottesville,

the University of Virginia
community, to its core.

It seems to me that the woman
who was killed, Heather Heyer,

the counter protester,
in a way she was a victim

of the Civil War. Is that fair?
I think so. And perhaps a victim

of a new Civil War,
one that is re-emerging,

and one that did not really conclude
in the middle of the 19th century.

We are still, in many ways,
fighting similar battles

about what it means to be American,
about what it means to be white,

or perhaps black Americans,
and what it means to have

this shared history,
in a really complex way.

In the 1850s,
it was North versus South.

Black America didn't have a voice.

Now it does, and the new fault lines
are just as dangerous and violent.

History is never fixed,

it's a cultural and
political battle ground.

And national mythologies are usually
a combination of conflicting

versions, full of distortions,
legends, myths and lies.

Abraham Lincoln set up a story
about the Civil War that promised

a happy ending of unity,
freedom and equality.

That's the message
of the Lincoln memorial.

It's set in stone.

But, perhaps, that message
of permanence

is the biggest fib of all.

Next time...

Post-war supremacy.

We have liftoff.

Liftoff has happened, it has gone.

And the fibs lurking beneath the
surface of the American dream.

Witch-hunts.

Have you ever been a member
of the Communist Party?

What's that? What's that?

UFOs.