In explaining why the South fought, The Birth of a Nation adopted the same approach as the advocates of the Lost Cause. The film begins to sketch out the states’ rights argument for war with an intertitle insisting that “The power of the sovereign states, established when Lord Cornwallis surrendered to the individual colonies in 1781, is threatened by the new administration.” Dr. Cameron is subsequently shown reading a newspaper with the headline “If the North carries the election, the South will secede” (shots 107, 109). No attempt is made to provide a political context by explaining why Lincoln’s election in 1860 is such a threat to the South. When Lincoln calls for troops, he is said to be using “the Presidential office for the first time in history to call for volunteers to enforce the rule of the coming nation over the individual states” (shot 146). Later, the South Carolina state flag is referred to as “the spirit of the South.” The flag carries the motto “CONQUER WE MUST—VICTORY OR DEATH—FOR OUR CAUSE IS JUST.” Once the war ends, Lee’s surrender to Grant is depicted as “The end of state sovereignty” (shots 196, 198, 507).
Like the Lost Cause, The Birth of a Nation depicted the South as clearly the underdog: hence the treatment of time in the first part of the film which, as Pierre Sorlin has noted, is “confused.”49 It seems primarily designed to ensure that the South is seen as victim and to suggest that the North was eventually bound to win the Civil War. The first overt mention of the war comes with the first tableau in the film: a facsimile of Lincoln signing the first call for 75,000 volunteers, allegedly taken from the biography of Lincoln by Nicolay and Hay. In reality, of course, the first act in the conflict had been the Confederate firing on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861. To have mentioned this, however, would have made it clear that the South, far from being a victim, was the real aggressor in the conflict.
The farewell ball for the men of Piedmont who are going off to fight is also a celebration of the Confederate victory at the first battle of Bull Run (July 21, 1861). After the shots of the men of Piedmont marching off and a much more low-key reference to Northern Congressman Stoneman’s learning, indirectly, from Elsie of his two sons’ departure for the front, there is a strange hiatus (suggested by an intertitle) of “two and a half years” (shots 160, 174, 181–222). Clearly, much has gone wrong for the South during this period. The Southern economy has collapsed and standards of living have fallen: Flora Cameron “wears her last good dress” to give a touch of ceremony to the reading of one of Ben’s letter from the front. Northern forces appear to be roaming the South almost at will: a group of mostly black guerrillas attacks Piedmont and General Sherman begins to march and burn his way to the sea, taking Atlanta in the process. In the meantime, the Camerons sell the “last of their dearest possessions … for the failing cause.” Finally, in the “last grey days of the Confederacy,” Southern soldiers in besieged Petersburg, Virginia, are reduced to eating nothing but “parched corn” (shots 226, 232–91, 317–38, 313, 339).
In reality, as historians have shown in the last thirty years, none of the principal “Lost Cause” myths enshrined in the film was true. To say that the South was the victim of a war forced on it by abolitionists ignores both the fact that the abolitionists were correct in identifying slavery as a major evil and the aggressive, expansionist ambitions of many Southerners between the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and secession in 1860–61.50 To see the South as victim means setting aside Southern attempts to expand slavery into central America and the Caribbean and the attitudes of Southerners and their politicians to such major 1850s issues as popular sovereignty and “Bleeding Kansas.” The so-called superiority of the Southern whites depends on ignoring both the appallingly low educational standards throughout the South as a whole and the fact that the planter class, properly defined, was only a minuscule proportion of Southern society. If white masters were so benevolent and slaves so happy, it becomes very difficult to explain why so many ran away or ended up fighting for the Union forces. In reality, slavery was a brutal system of labor. The states’ rights case for Southern secession depends on a highly dubious assumption of constitutional rights: Lincoln, who asserted that the union was perpetual and, in any case, could be dissolved only with the consent of all the contracting parties, had distinctly the better of the argument here. Finally, although the South certainly had fewer men than the North, it managed to keep its armies supplied with sufficient arms and munitions until the end of the conflict. It only had to keep protecting its own territory until the North became tired and, at least in the view of a number of recent historians, could have won the war at several points until the late summer of 1864.51
The devastating march through Georgia of General Sherman—a burning house in the background. (Epoch/The Kobal Collection)
The Birth of a Nation—despite, or perhaps partly because of, the campaign waged against it by the NAACP and other pro-black organizations—was an enormous popular success. It spread the myth of the “Lost Cause” to a mass, popular national audience and in the process helped ensure that it would remain the way most Americans would think of the Civil War era for decades to come. In terms of national memory, it became a popular substitute for the history of the war.52 But as the editors of Cahiers du cinéma argued more than thirty years ago, even films that seem to articulate the most hegemonic collections of myths and ideas at times contain contradictions that undermine the myths they ostensibly express.53 Whatever Griffith’s broader intentions, The Birth of a Nation has sequences that draw attention to the inaccuracies and contradictions that made up the myth of the Lost Cause. One of the most obvious is that while Griffith emphasizes in intertitles how poor and ill-equipped Southern soldiers are by the end of the war, as a showman he cannot resist showing Confederate artillery endlessly bombarding enemy lines. The idea that the Civil War was mainly a conflict between heroic and gallant white men is undercut by the scenes of hand-to-hand combat in the trenches at Petersburg (shots 402, 404) and in particular by the scene in which Tod and Duke Cameron meet on the battlefield. Tod is about to bayonet Duke, who is already lying wounded on the ground, when he recognizes him and lowers his gun; he is then shot in the back by a Confederate soldier hiding in the bushes behind, leaving the two to die embracing each other (shots 299–308). Finally, the myth of the benevolent master and loyal slaves is exploded in the second part of the film when Dr. Cameron is brought, chained, before his former slaves and taunted and abused by two African American women (shots 1231–32). Ironically, this part of the film revolves around the apparent threat posed by black men to white women. Under slavery, however, the reality of miscegenation—as this scene possibly suggests—had been white slave owners, together with their sons and overseers, preying on black female slaves.
Lincoln as a Symbol of Reconciliation
To many people today, Abraham Lincoln—the so-called Great Emancipator, immortalized since 1922 in Daniel Chester French’s giant sculpture in Washington’s Lincoln Memorial, and one of the four presidents whose features are carved on Mount Rushmore—is perhaps the greatest of all American presidents. The reputation of the martyred fourteenth president, however, is in many ways a construction, created by different people in different ways at different times.54 The portrayal of Lincoln in The Birth of a Nation both reflected and influenced that process of construction.
In contrast to his twentieth-century successor John F. Kennedy, Lincoln did not experience an immediate apotheosis after his assassination. “Although the subject [at the time of his death] of a great deal of immediate sentimentality,” remarked Eric F. Goldman, “[he] did not become the unassailable Abraham Lincoln of the schoolbooks until two decades after his murder.”55 The first major architects of Lincoln’s reputation were John Nicolay, formerly Lincoln’s secretary, and John Hay. The Century magazine published their biography of Lincoln over two and a half years at the end of the 1880s, and, in 1890 with the serial ended, as a book in ten volumes.56 Not only was the Nicolay and Hay study of monumental size but it encapsulated a particular view of
Lincoln as an ideal hero and semi-mythical character. In contrast to the Nicolay and Hay study, the three-volume life of Lincoln by his friend and former law partner William Henry Herndon, published in 1889, took a determinedly critical view of Lincoln as heroic legend to focus on his personal qualities as a characteristic Westerner.57 But Herndon’s debunking of the now-expanding Lincoln myth did not attract many readers, and his book was either reviled, or, perhaps worse, ignored.
For an alternative view of Lincoln to emerge required a major change in American cultural formations. The Century, the magazine that had published the biography by Nicolay and Hay, was one of the four most important magazines of the Gilded Age (the others being Harper’s Monthly, Atlantic Monthly, and Scribners). The members of this “sedate quartet,” as Cornelius Regier once described them, were primarily literary magazines.58 Patrician in tone, belle-lettristic in character, they sold for either twenty-five or thirty-five cents and reached an audience largely drawn from the American upper-middle class. The decade of the 1890s, however, saw the emergence of a group of new, cheap, popular “monthlies.” While some of these, including Munsey’s and Cosmopolitan, had first been published in the late ’80s or early ’90s, they had not immediately caught on. This situation altered with the first publication of McClure’s Magazine in June 1893. The appearance of McClure’s, which was initially sold for just fifteen cents, provoked a price war among the newer magazines that finally resulted in the emergence of the ten-cent magazine. With the arrival of the cheap “monthly,” the United States acquired its first truly national media and took a crucial step toward the popularization of culture in general. Vast numbers of people now began to buy and read magazines; Frank Munsey, one of the founders of the new medium, estimated that between 1893 and 1899 “the ten-cent magazine increased the magazine-buying public from 250,000 to 750,000.”59
One of the most crucial reasons for the success of the new magazines, McClure’s in particular, was the importance they accorded biography. A biography of Napoleon by Ida M. Tarbell ran as an illustrated serial in McClure’s from November 1894 to April 1895, and during this period, circulation of the magazine doubled. Sam McClure, flying in the face of the conventional wisdom that the publication of the Nicolay and Hay biography had exhausted popular interest in Lincoln, then assigned Tarbell to write a new and more popular life of him. Within ten days of the first installment of Tarbell’s Lincoln biography, McClure’s Magazine added 40,000 fresh subscribers; within three months, the figure had reached 100,000.60
Tarbell’s work on Lincoln, which started publication in November 1897, took an approach to its subject that was very different to that of Nicolay and Hay. Like Herndon, in some respects, Tarbell’s life focused on Lincoln as a Westerner. But whereas Herndon had projected a realistic image of a man who was plain, frank, and at times crude, Tarbell presented him as a great man not so much despite his background as because of it. In essence, Tarbell created a folk myth of Lincoln as the conscious descendant of generations of pioneers. This representation of him as an illustration of “indigenous greatness” obviously caught the imagination of large numbers of Americans of the late 1890s. Buffeted by the economic depression of 1893–97 and highly conscious of the changes in their society as a result of industrialization, urbanization, and immigration, many native-born Americans saw the character of Lincoln (as constructed by Ida Tarbell) as a reaffirmation of the values of an older America at a time when those values seemed very much under attack.
The popular view of Lincoln advanced, especially by Tarbell, in the popular magazines was echoed in another form of mass media to emerge in the 1890s: the movies. Motion pictures often presented to mass audiences a perception of the martyred president that emphasized his democratic and accessible qualities. He was usually represented as a homely and compassionate figure, happy to make time to see ordinary citizens and discuss their concerns. In many of these early motion pictures, including The Reprieve (1908), Abraham Lincoln’s Clemency (1910), One Flag at Last (1911), The Seventh Son (1912), When Lincoln Was President (1913), and The Songbird of the North (1913), the on-screen Lincoln saved the life of a sentry who had fallen asleep at his post or a convicted spy by issuing a presidential pardon. Maybe the most fanciful of all these films was The Toll of War (1913), in which Lincoln freed a Southern girl sentenced to death for spying against the North. After her release, she saw the assassination of Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre. The president was carried to her nearby room and died in her bed while she knelt beside him in prayer.61 The Man Who Knew Lincoln (1914), with Ralph Ince, Thomas H. Ince’s brother, playing Lincoln, was directly based on Ida Tarbell’s story, “He Knew Lincoln.”62
With the release of The Birth of a Nation in 1915, the popular view of Lincoln reached a much wider audience. In some respects, Birth offered the by-then conventional view of a humane and merciful Lincoln. After he signs the call for volunteers to subdue the South’s rebellion, for example, he is shown wiping away tears with a handkerchief (shots 144–45, 147). When Colonel Cameron is unjustly condemned to be hanged, as a guerrilla, his mother and Elsie Stone-man visit Lincoln to plead for a presidential pardon. After some hesitation, the compassionate Lincoln—described as “Great Heart” in an intertitle—agrees. Mrs. Cameron, resisting with some difficulty the urge to embrace the president, returns to the hospital and tells Ben that “Mr. Lincoln has given back your life to me” (shots 476–95, 497). One curious feature of Griffith’s Lincoln, however, as Robert Lang notes, is his strangely “androgynous” quality. He combines masculine and feminine qualities. He is a bearded man, but is sensitive to his own feelings and those of others. He is ready to make war on the South, but he cries after signing the proclamation calling for volunteers. He angrily dismisses the man speaking to him before his meeting with Elsie and Mrs. Cameron, but finally gives in to the emotional persuasions of the Little Colonel’s mother to save her son’s life. In the last moments before he is shot, Lincoln draws a shawl around his shoulders, perhaps symbolizing his awareness of the chill of impending death (shots 586, 588). As a gesture, however, Lang points out, it is “coded culturally as feminine.”63 In The Birth of a Nation, Lincoln is both a father and mother to his people.
The film also depicts Lincoln as a Moses figure: he will never reach the promised land of the “coming nation” he has done so much to create. That nation will be born only after Reconstruction has ended and Southern whites have succeeded in subordinating all blacks and excluding them from power.64 Birth of a Nation encouraged the perception that if Lincoln had lived, this new (white) American nation would have been born much sooner. Though a Southerner, Griffith (like Dixon) admired Lincoln for his magnanimity and believed that if he had not been murdered, Reconstruction generally (and the radical Reconstruction after 1867 in particular) would not have happened.65 With the war over, Griffith depicts a confrontation between Lincoln and Austin Stoneman, the leader of the radicals. Stoneman protests Lincoln’s policy of clemency for the South, insisting that “their leaders must be hanged and their states treated as conquered provinces.” (The “conquered provinces” phrase was actually used by Thaddeus Stevens, the radical congressional leader on whom Stoneman’s fictional character was based.) But Lincoln lives up to the spirit of his second inaugural on March 4, 1865 (“with malice toward none; with charity for all”) and tells Stoneman he will deal with the seceded states “as though they had never been away.” Encouraged by this liberal attitude on the part of the president, the South begins rebuilding itself (shots 529–35), but this process is interrupted by Lincoln’s death.
The treatment of Lincoln’s assassination at Ford’s Theatre—including 55 shots and 9 intertitles, and lasting almost five minutes—is one of the longest sequences in The Birth of a Nation. It also ties the film’s fictional story line effectively to a major historical event (both Phil and Elsie Stoneman are in the audience and enthusiastically applaud Lincoln when he arrives to take his seat. Later, Elsie is the first person to notice, and point with her
fan at, assassin John Wilkes Booth [shots 545–46, 559, 578–84]).66 The intertitles emphasize the essential truthfulness of the reconstruction by giving a series of historical details: the play being presented is Our American Cousin, starring Laura Keene; the presidential party arrives at 8:30; Lincoln’s bodyguard deserts his post outside the presidential box to have a better view; the shooting takes places at 10:13, during Act III, Scene 2; and Booth, having fired the fatal shot, leaps onto the stage shouting “Sic semper tyrannis!” (shots 547, 554, 570–71, 576, 596–98). Lincoln’s assassination is important for the narrative development of Birth of a Nation: it sets the scene for the second half of the film. On hearing the news, Stoneman’s mistress Lydia informs him that he is “now the greatest power in America” (shot 611). The path is open to a much more radical kind of postwar Reconstruction than Lincoln would ever have countenanced.
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