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
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!
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."
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 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!
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!
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.
And atomic tourism.