Garry Adelman, a historian, rates nine American Civil War battles in movies.
He comments on the Civil War-era artillery and rifles on display in “Free State of Jones” (2016), starring Matthew McConaughey; and “Emancipation” (2022), starring Will Smith. He explains the use of dynamite and other explosives seen in “Cold Mountain” (2003), starring Jude Law, Nicole Kidman, and Renée Zellweger; “Sahara” (2005), starring Matthew McConaughey; and “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” (1967), starring Clint Eastwood. He breaks down the military strategy seen in the battle scenes in “Glory” (1989), starring Matthew Broderick, Morgan Freeman, and Denzel Washington; “Gettysburg” (1993), starring Jeff Daniels; and Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” (2012), starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Sally Field, and Tommy Lee Jones. And finally, he separates fact from fiction regarding Civil War-era surgeries as seen in “Dances with Wolves” (1990), starring Kevin Costner.
Adelman is the chief historian at the American Battlefield Trust. He has also been a licensed battlefield guide at Gettysburg National Military Park for 27 years.
You can find more information about the American Battlefield Trust at: https://www.battlefields.org/
https://www.youtube.com/@AmericanBattlefieldTrust
He comments on the Civil War-era artillery and rifles on display in “Free State of Jones” (2016), starring Matthew McConaughey; and “Emancipation” (2022), starring Will Smith. He explains the use of dynamite and other explosives seen in “Cold Mountain” (2003), starring Jude Law, Nicole Kidman, and Renée Zellweger; “Sahara” (2005), starring Matthew McConaughey; and “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” (1967), starring Clint Eastwood. He breaks down the military strategy seen in the battle scenes in “Glory” (1989), starring Matthew Broderick, Morgan Freeman, and Denzel Washington; “Gettysburg” (1993), starring Jeff Daniels; and Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” (2012), starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Sally Field, and Tommy Lee Jones. And finally, he separates fact from fiction regarding Civil War-era surgeries as seen in “Dances with Wolves” (1990), starring Kevin Costner.
Adelman is the chief historian at the American Battlefield Trust. He has also been a licensed battlefield guide at Gettysburg National Military Park for 27 years.
You can find more information about the American Battlefield Trust at: https://www.battlefields.org/
https://www.youtube.com/@AmericanBattlefieldTrust
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00 [men grunting]
00:02 In the Civil War, hand-to-hand combat is quite rare,
00:06 let alone a straight-up sort of wrestling melee
00:11 that's going on in the rain.
00:12 It just, it struck me as a little bit much.
00:14 I'm Gary Adelman, I'm the chief historian
00:16 at the American Battlefield Trust
00:18 and as a licensed battlefield guide at Gettysburg.
00:21 I give tours at more than 50 battlefields.
00:24 Today, we're going to be looking
00:25 at American Civil War battles in movies
00:28 and judging how real they are.
00:29 [computer beeping]
00:30 [airplane engine roaring]
00:34 Right away, what stands out is the Gatling gun.
00:39 The Gatling gun was around during the Civil War,
00:42 but it was not used in 1862.
00:45 It was also not used in New Mexico,
00:47 where this is really set.
00:49 You can count on two hands the number of Gatling guns
00:51 that were actually used in the Civil War,
00:54 and those used would have been barely at Petersburg
00:56 and occasionally on Union naval vessels.
01:00 [airplane engine roaring]
01:03 The idea that these positions are prepared
01:08 in a battle that in reality happened
01:10 with nobody expecting it.
01:12 They've got riveted walls and mortar guns and all this.
01:15 That stood out right away as something a little crazy.
01:17 [soldiers shouting]
01:20 It's pretty realistic in that scene
01:25 that you see a lot of artillery fire.
01:27 Not exactly the artillery fire I would expect.
01:30 They certainly weren't lugging those heavy mortar guns
01:33 with high arches all the way through the New Mexico desert
01:36 in order to get to this place.
01:38 But it's pretty realistic that they're shooting
01:40 with artillery at first,
01:41 'cause they're really outside of the 250 yard,
01:44 350 yard range that is the effective range
01:48 of the shoulder carried rifled muskets.
01:51 The idea of both sides charging pell-mell
01:54 as a melee into one another.
01:56 There weren't 800 soldiers on each side
01:59 at the Battle of Gloria de Paz
02:00 going over a 300 yard sort of meeting in the middle.
02:04 That sounds more like medieval days than the Civil War.
02:08 We actually have solid accounts
02:14 of how Civil War soldiers wired bridges.
02:16 This was often done by engineer soldiers,
02:18 soldiers who understood explosives
02:20 and where to place them so that they could use
02:22 as little as possible to get the job done there.
02:24 And they seem to be doing a pretty good job in the movie,
02:27 wiring it along where the piers and the main supports were
02:30 in order to make this particular bridge collapse.
02:32 I'm not aware of soldiers on either side blowing up bridges
02:42 during the Battle of Gloria de Paz
02:43 to affect some sort of a victory.
02:45 Battles were often fought over transportation facilities.
02:48 It was so important to control rivers
02:51 and roads and railroads that bridges were natural targets
02:54 of both armies during the Civil War.
02:56 I would give this clip a two out of 10.
03:00 The fact is that this is so wrong
03:02 that it's hard to attribute to any one battle
03:05 in this campaign.
03:06 This Battle of Ellisville, sort of,
03:15 I would call it more of a skirmish.
03:16 Here you have a substantial number of people
03:18 in a rural county, sort of, rising up
03:21 to secede from the South to rejoin the Union
03:25 and capturing a county seat.
03:26 In the meantime, that's what we're seeing in this scene.
03:29 We do have examples of women joining Union regiments,
03:36 sometimes dressed as men,
03:37 sometimes just going into camp to be with their husbands,
03:41 sometimes actually getting into battle,
03:43 you know, as female combatants.
03:46 Both sides used whatever they could
03:48 given the time and the materials they had.
03:50 Sometimes it was simple as using a picket fence.
03:53 So an overturned wagon, that must have been a great way
03:56 to stop some particular bullets.
03:58 And if you had time to deal with sandbags
04:00 and digging up earthworks, all the better.
04:02 Cannons are designed to fire particular types of ordnance.
04:07 It might be solid, it might explode in the air
04:10 when it hits the ground in front of you,
04:11 or it might shoot something like grapeshot or canister.
04:14 And maybe lacking all that,
04:16 that's what they're showing in the movie,
04:17 is that in this battle or skirmish,
04:19 they put metal rods into their cannon.
04:22 And when you blow off a cannon,
04:23 it'll push out whatever is in there.
04:25 And at that range that they show in the scene,
04:30 those metal rods could have been devastating
04:32 to man and beast.
04:34 I'm not sure if they could have exactly blown up
04:36 the enemy ammunition chest that they are apparently showing.
04:39 I would rate this a seven.
04:41 - Ready, fire!
04:43 Let's go!
04:47 - I've been to Port Hudson several times,
04:49 and anybody who both goes there and sees the photographs
04:54 from this place during and after the siege
04:57 is impressed with the extensive nature
04:59 of the Confederate fortifications.
05:00 It's a very difficult place to try to conquer.
05:03 I would disagree about the terrain they used for the attack
05:06 because it's basically in a swamp.
05:07 Just absolutely even nastier terrain than you see there.
05:11 [soldiers grunting]
05:14 - Soldiers were starting to not only realize
05:18 that if you could put some dirt just two feet thick
05:21 and maybe a few feet tall that you're going to preserve life.
05:25 To that, why not revet that dirt with logs?
05:29 Why not put a head log on top so you could shoot under that
05:32 and have your head protected while you shot?
05:34 While you're at it, why don't you put pointy logs
05:37 out as freestanding obstacles out in front of your line?
05:41 Soldiers absolutely used what we call club muskets,
05:47 using their musket as a club.
05:48 First of all, if an enemy's coming at you
05:50 and you don't have time to take out your bayonet,
05:52 affix it to the front, and then thrust it at them,
05:55 you're simply going to club that particular musket.
05:58 I love that moment where there's a soldier
06:04 who is actually using his bayonet
06:07 against one of the other soldiers,
06:09 and then he turns around and a soldier in the back
06:11 hands him a preloaded gun.
06:13 It's all but impossible to load a gun
06:16 with the bayonet on the end.
06:17 So that soldier would have already shot his bullet,
06:20 then put the bayonet on there,
06:22 and confronted by a new enemy
06:24 that the guy behind him couldn't shoot at,
06:25 he simply handed that rifle forward.
06:28 During the Civil War,
06:29 sometimes the best shooters were up front
06:30 and they had loaders behind them.
06:32 In the Battle of Fredericksburg,
06:33 soldiers would have guns lined up next to them, preloaded,
06:36 that they could just pop off against their enemies.
06:39 Will Smith's character is an amalgamation
06:46 of a black soldier named Gordon, who self-emancipates,
06:50 and this other soldier named Whip Peter.
06:54 And it is a true story.
06:55 I would rate this clip a six out of 10.
07:03 The stakes are high at the Battle of Antietam.
07:05 For the South, they're coming off of a string of victories.
07:08 It's possible that if they win again,
07:10 maybe the European powers
07:11 will start recognizing the Confederacy.
07:13 For the North, they're on the losing streak.
07:16 They really need to turn back
07:18 Robert E. Lee's powerful Confederate Army
07:20 while they have the chance,
07:21 and give Abraham Lincoln the opportunity
07:23 to issue his Emancipation Proclamation,
07:26 changing, changing the purpose and direction of the war.
07:30 - Fire!
07:30 - Artillerists, to be sure, were cognizant of the horror
07:40 that tree limbs raining down onto troops
07:43 could cause among the morale
07:44 and the health of the troops attacking them.
07:46 So absolutely, they would sometimes shoot into the trees
07:49 with that deliberate idea
07:50 of wounding and demoralizing the enemy.
07:52 - Fire!
07:56 - Fire!
07:57 (explosion booms)
07:59 - The most seasoned commanders
08:01 are going to try to get their troops
08:03 as close to the enemy as possible before returning fire,
08:07 closing up their line and shrinking their line
08:09 so that they continue to be shoulder to shoulder
08:11 amidst the chaos of a battle,
08:12 and wait until you got to the enemy
08:15 to deliver a killing blow.
08:16 In an infantry line, everybody has to be a righty,
08:24 'cause if you shoot in two ranks,
08:26 you've got two heads in front of you,
08:27 and if you're right behind somebody,
08:29 if you're a righty,
08:30 you're gonna shoot between the two heads in front of you.
08:31 If you're a lefty, that gun's gonna go straight
08:33 into the head of the person in front of you,
08:35 and butt up against the gun to the person to your right.
08:38 And the other thing you needed was a trigger finger,
08:40 and you needed two front teeth
08:41 in order to tear off the cartridge
08:43 to pour the powder into your gun.
08:45 - Charge!
08:46 - Night fighting in the Civil War is a pretty rare thing.
08:52 The whole tactical setup of the Civil War
08:54 is to be able to see things,
08:56 to be able to see your enemy,
08:58 for your troops to be able to see your flag.
09:01 It was hard to issue bugle commands
09:03 among the din of battle.
09:04 So line of sight was very important,
09:06 but they fought at night when they needed to.
09:09 And some of the Battle of Fort Wagner
09:10 was indeed fought in the evening.
09:12 And if I'm an attacking force,
09:14 I would love to have, as Colonel Shaw says,
09:17 "We will advance under cover of darkness."
09:20 That's exactly what I would do.
09:21 [dramatic music]
09:24 [gunshot]
09:27 In the Battle of Fort Wagner,
09:28 you have the most notable combat
09:32 with black soldiers up to that time.
09:34 The 54th Massachusetts made it into Fort Wagner,
09:38 but as many Civil War soldiers found out,
09:41 getting into a place and holding and controlling a place
09:43 are two very different things.
09:45 I'm going to rate them a nine.
09:47 This one brought in a lot of the elements you needed
09:50 to understand the scene, to show what combat was like
09:53 in the Civil War.
09:54 Is it perfect?
09:55 No.
09:56 Is it perfect enough?
09:57 Yes.
09:58 [dramatic music]
10:00 There is a battle called
10:05 the Battle of Jenkins Ferry in Arkansas.
10:07 It was fought in the rain in a field
10:10 that had begun to flood.
10:11 And if you're planning to attack that enemy,
10:13 and maybe you are met with a freak,
10:15 ridiculously heavy rainstorm,
10:18 maybe it's to your advantage to attack them that way.
10:21 Maybe they're not using guns
10:22 because you can't use a gun when your powder is all wet.
10:25 [men yelling]
10:28 I don't think I've heard of an account
10:31 of somebody actually grabbing the bayonet.
10:33 These things are pretty sharp,
10:35 taking it off and immediately using it,
10:37 but it's pretty cool for the movies.
10:39 In the Civil War, hand-to-hand combat is quite rare.
10:46 With the artillery, you're going to fight at a distance,
10:48 and usually when an enemy is 10 yards from you,
10:51 you're going to try to run away.
10:53 So hand-to-hand combat, it did happen, to be sure.
10:56 Club muskets, bayonets, sabers, punching and kicking,
11:00 but it's pretty rare to have it,
11:02 let alone a straight-up sort of wrestling melee
11:06 that's going on in the rain.
11:08 It just, it struck me as a little bit much.
11:10 I'm going to rate this clip a four out of 10.
11:12 I adore this movie,
11:13 but the battle scene is pretty ridiculous.
11:17 [soldiers shouting]
11:20 If I'm in an open field, I would be tickled pink
11:28 to have half my body covered by some slats and a fence.
11:32 I would prefer a big boulder, don't get me wrong,
11:34 but I'm going to be happy for anything I can use
11:37 that gives me more chance to live
11:40 and gives my troops a better chance to repel the enemy.
11:47 Once you've got the range of your weapon,
11:49 they could be extraordinarily accurate,
11:51 but hitting a moving target laterally
11:54 is probably not easy for anybody except the best shooters.
11:57 Certainly it's possible.
11:58 Is it unlikely, you know,
12:00 that he could make it through such a hailstorm of bullets?
12:02 Yeah, it seems pretty unlikely to me.
12:04 They could have hit him while he was resting.
12:06 He was definitely within easy musket range at that point,
12:10 but the Civil War produces hundreds of examples
12:13 of "that man is too brave, don't shoot him."
12:15 So there was a gentlemanliness and an honor.
12:19 Is this the last one?
12:20 I don't know.
12:22 There's no ether either.
12:23 One of the greatest myths of the Civil War
12:26 is that Civil War surgeons
12:28 are sort of sawing through people's bones
12:31 without any sort of painkiller in no preparation
12:33 while they scream to their surgeries,
12:35 only biting on a bullet or a stick or something like this.
12:38 And it's just not true.
12:39 Most of those amputations were conducted
12:41 with the use of morphine or ether,
12:43 a substantial painkiller that would allow surgeons
12:46 to actually carefully prepare for the actual amputation
12:50 by cutting away the muscle, leaving a skin flap,
12:52 and then sawing through the bone with a saw so sharp
12:55 that it wouldn't take that long.
12:57 Amputation was the most common surgery
13:00 employed during the Civil War for good reason.
13:02 Surgeons of the time could not deal with the complexities
13:05 of internal injuries on the torso,
13:07 but you could turn a wound to your extremities
13:11 into something they could treat by amputating it.
13:14 - At least there's no gangrene.
13:16 - Well, there will be if it doesn't come off soon.
13:19 - The dreaded infection, gangrene,
13:20 for which the Civil War would start
13:22 to produce a cure, actually.
13:24 Medical advancements were made very often
13:28 with great frequency during the Civil War,
13:31 but surgeons understood the idea of infection,
13:34 but they didn't have an understanding of microbiology yet.
13:37 I'll rate this clip a six out of 10.
13:40 - You ready, boys?
13:41 - Gettysburg has sort of emerged
13:47 as the greatest battle of the Civil War,
13:49 and we have a lot of good accounts
13:51 about what happened on Little Round Top.
13:53 The Little Round Top set in the movie
13:54 is extraordinarily accurate.
13:56 It lacked the larger boulders
13:58 that are actually on the hill today,
14:00 and the soldiers really didn't have time
14:01 to build a stone wall until after the fighting,
14:04 but other than that, the open woods and the slope
14:06 were very close to what you could see today.
14:08 - Send out word to take ammunition from the wounded.
14:11 Make every round count.
14:12 - Here they come again!
14:13 - Ammunition is heavy,
14:14 and both armies have a limited supply of it.
14:16 If an enemy attacks you four, five, six times,
14:19 as the Confederates did on Little Round Top,
14:22 the Union would be naturally running out of ammunition.
14:24 There's no big reserve train of ammunition anywhere.
14:28 They'd already looked in the cartridge boxes
14:30 of their dead and wounded comrades.
14:32 They were at the absolute end at that point,
14:35 and there were no troops on Little Round Top
14:37 until just a few minutes
14:38 before the actual fighting took place.
14:40 No one had time to build the impressive stone walls.
14:42 No one had time to really scout out the position
14:45 and figure out who's gonna go where.
14:47 It was one brigade, you know,
14:49 sort of placing soldiers rather quickly
14:51 before the Confederates attack.
14:53 These huge armies end up meeting upon their flanks
14:56 at Little Round Top with basically equal numbers.
14:59 It's something they showed pretty well in the movie
15:01 in terms of numbers.
15:02 - Hey, I did it!
15:03 [gunshots]
15:05 [crowd cheering]
15:07 - The Union had already repulsed five attacks,
15:10 and they saw the Southerners forming for one more.
15:12 They were really out of options,
15:14 and in a desperate moment,
15:15 their Colonel Chamberlain,
15:16 you see him order the bayonet,
15:18 "We don't have bullets, so let's use the pointy spears
15:21 "on the front of our guns and charge down into them."
15:24 - Left wing, right wheel.
15:25 - Right wheel!
15:26 Charge!
15:28 - They did a simple military maneuver
15:33 that the movie spells out well for us.
15:36 The Union line, the 20th Main Regiment,
15:38 was sort of straight,
15:39 but then when the Confederates came from this side,
15:41 they sort of formed into almost a V at some point.
15:45 As they wanted to fall upon the Confederates,
15:47 they wanted to do this and then this.
15:49 So in other words, the left wing of the regiment,
15:51 this is my left,
15:52 is going to do a wheel
15:54 so that they come on line with the rest of them,
15:56 at which time the whole regiment would wheel
15:59 down the hill into the enemy, and it worked.
16:01 I would rate this clip a nine.
16:03 - Close it up.
16:09 - You see them sort of lighting the fuse
16:11 and then putting sandbags up
16:13 'cause they didn't want the explosion coming back their way.
16:16 This actually happened,
16:17 but one thing I really wish they could have included
16:19 was that they lit the fuse and waited five, 10 minutes
16:22 and nothing happened.
16:23 And then they had to remove the sandbags
16:24 and the bravest man in the world had to go into that shaft
16:28 and find out where it had broken
16:30 and splice it and light that thing again
16:32 and run back out, and it worked.
16:34 The unit had made careful plans for this attack.
16:40 And part of that plan is of course,
16:42 to get the Union soldiers as close
16:46 to the coming crater as possible
16:47 so that they're going to cross the least amount
16:49 of ground as possible before they were on top of the enemy.
16:58 - The ferocity of the blast, ripping clothes off of people,
17:01 so many would have been just absolutely disintegrated
17:04 in the initial blast.
17:05 I think it's something like 300 South Carolinians just gone.
17:09 - It's a Turkey shoot.
17:10 They've run themselves through a hole.
17:12 - This idea of the Turkey shoot,
17:16 they've got themselves trapped in their own hole is true,
17:19 but not like you see it in the movie.
17:21 First of all, the attack into the crater
17:24 was part of a much larger attack
17:25 with Union soldiers really exploiting some of their gains.
17:28 Over the course of an hour or so,
17:30 the Confederates are able to muster soldiers
17:32 from another part of the battlefield
17:34 that were able to come and then sort of push
17:36 the Union soldiers back and shoot down
17:39 upon those Union soldiers at the same time.
17:41 So they weren't exactly surrounding the Union soldiers
17:44 who were hapless inside the crater.
17:46 Some were in there to be sure,
17:48 but other soldiers are on both sides of the crater as well.
17:52 This idea of using a gun as a spear at the right moment,
17:56 absolutely documented during the Civil War.
17:58 There's a real health concern
18:03 about leaving man and beast rotting
18:06 on the lines you're supposed to occupy.
18:08 They showed a Confederate soldier grabbing a belt buckle
18:11 off of a dead Union soldier
18:13 because this is something that would happen regularly.
18:15 One thing the Union had was more of almost everything
18:19 the South needed, and that also went for textiles.
18:22 So after a battle, either side would have rooted
18:24 through the enemy dead or wounded.
18:27 Others saw the need of the moment,
18:28 like I need to keep my pants up
18:30 and I need a new belt buckle.
18:32 And I think that's what we're seeing there in that scene.
18:33 I would give it a five.
18:35 Some of it's so overdone.
18:37 It's such a dramatic scene,
18:38 but it's very effective outside of its accuracy.
18:40 The blockade is sort of the unsung hero
18:50 for the Union of the Civil War.
18:51 They would blockade all the Southern ports,
18:53 preventing them from getting the things they needed
18:55 to wage the war.
18:56 It took a while, but eventually the blockade worked
18:59 and the South had real trouble getting things
19:02 from Europe or from anywhere as the war went on
19:05 and they couldn't produce it all themselves.
19:07 But that blockade wouldn't have been
19:08 on the outskirts of Richmond, Virginia.
19:10 These were on the North Atlantic Ocean
19:12 and in the Gulf of Mexico,
19:14 really blocking places like Wilmington, North Carolina
19:17 and Mobile, Alabama.
19:20 But all those places had fallen by then anyway.
19:22 So the blockade was almost a non-issue.
19:24 The emergence of ironclad vessels
19:33 changed the face of warfare forever.
19:35 The days of the wooden ship were quickly ending
19:37 after March of 1862,
19:39 when iron ships started fighting against each other.
19:42 This is something the clip did pretty well.
19:44 It showed pretty accurately a Confederate ironclad vessel
19:48 that would have had thick plates of iron
19:51 in this fashion on the outside
19:52 and they correctly showed the way that it was designed
19:55 to ricochet projectiles coming toward it.
19:58 Artillery on a ship is often on a track
20:04 so that it could handle the substantial recoil necessary
20:08 from such a large charge of powder,
20:10 but you would load it, tamp it down
20:12 and then move the gun back out through the well.
20:15 Ironclad vessel had a good number of cannons,
20:17 you know, sticking out of the ports.
20:19 So you have a few vulnerabilities on the ship.
20:26 I mean, if you hit that rudder,
20:28 suddenly this ship can't steer anymore.
20:30 Secondly, you have these ports where the guns stick out,
20:33 which could be opened or closed as necessary.
20:35 If you get a projectile in there,
20:37 especially an exploding projectile,
20:39 you're going to do some substantial damage inside the ship.
20:42 Third, if you can hit the pilot house,
20:44 you can't see from inside those ships.
20:47 Except out of that pilot house.
20:49 This battle is being fought in Richmond, Virginia,
20:56 as Richmond is burning.
20:57 The Confederate army is fleeing at this point
21:00 and it's not till the next day and the day after
21:02 that the Union really started occupying these areas
21:05 and capturing the cities.
21:06 The Union has just cannon after cannon
21:09 and regiments of men on the shoreline
21:11 ready to batter this Confederate cannon.
21:13 I mean, this is absolutely ridiculous,
21:16 at least that close to Richmond,
21:18 that they would be set up for such an engagement.
21:20 If anything, the Union controlled the rivers,
21:23 you know, further downstream.
21:26 So if anything, the Union would have had
21:27 naval vessels going against them.
21:29 I would rate this clip a four.
21:32 I guess I would call this clip cool and a lot of fun,
21:35 but not a whole lot of accurate history there.
21:38 My favorite Civil War battle scene that I watched today
21:41 was definitely "Glory."
21:43 It barely edges out Gettysburg.
21:45 "Glory" just has all the drama.
21:47 You've got the attack, you've got the charge,
21:49 you've got some historical accuracy.
21:51 It's just so well done.
21:53 And although I've seen it 50 times already,
21:55 it was enjoyable to watch again.
21:56 [no audio]