by Brian Russell

Created on: December 20, 2006   Last Updated: May 08, 2007

Considering the 1989 film Glory:
Or, How A Previously Untold Story Helps Expose an Epic Myth

I set out to evaluate the merit, or lack thereof, of the 1989 Edward Zwick film, Glory. Along the way, I discovered a powerful and, frankly, breathtaking myth that was created in the aftermath of the Civil War. Never in my earlier education in grade school, high school, or at New York University had I run across the suggestion I found in Bruce Chadwick's book, The Reel Civil War: Mythmaking in American Film. In the introduction to his book, Chadwick asserts that in order for the country to heal and reunify in the wake of this tragic war, "the Civil War's political and cultural history almost had to be rewritten so that the Southerners would never again be seen as harsh slaveowners [sic] or as the people who started and lost the war" (10). It seems that the only way reunification of North and South could succeed was "for the war to be seen in the rearview mirror of history as a war not started by anyone, a conflict that had no winners or losers just a tragic war in which men on both sides fought gallantly" (Emphasis added, Chadwick 10).

The war wasn't started by anyone? There were no winners or losers? As I considered these thoughts, I also reflected on what led me to this discovery in the first place namely, my examination of the film Glory, which tells the previously untold story of African American soldiers fighting for the Union army in the Civil War. The contribution of African American soldiers to the Union victory is another piece of history with which I was completely unfamiliar until the first time I saw Glory. There was never any mention of black soldiers fighting for the North in any of my history classes. As I put these two pieces of information together the untold story of black soldiers in the Civil War and a myth created to help the country reunify I began to see how this epic myth of no winners or losers in the Civil War might have paved the way to Jim Crow laws and partially explain why it took until 1954 nearly 90 years after the end of the Civil War for the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision, and nearly 100 years for the historic civil rights acts of 1964. If there is, indeed, any connection between this epic myth and the plague of racism that still infects our country, then Glory not only tells a great and essential truth about African American soldiers and their contribution to the Union victory in the Civil War; but it also, perhaps

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