Jacobin: “After Birth of a Nation, it was no longer acceptable in American films to feature the heroic Ku Klux Klan riding to the rescue of nobly suffering Southern whites, but filmmakers found it easy enough to substitute a heroic Southern vigilante whose violent acts are justified by his suffering under the barbarism of invading Northerners.
That scenario is the catalyst for innumerable American films, from the first of many celebrations of Jesse James, Lost Cause hero and ex-Quantrill Raider-turned-bank-robber, in the 1908 film The James Boys in Missouri through the 1976 Clint Eastwood film The Outlaw Josey Wales to 1999’s Ride with the Devil. Thousands of romanticized Southerners ride through the Western genre wearing their lost honor culture like invisible suits of knightly armor: stoic heroes (Gary Cooper as The Virginian), gentleman reprobates seeking redemption (John Carradine as Hatfield in Stagecoach), and perpetually angry, tragi-comic sidekicks (Elisha Cook Jr as Stonewall in Shane).
So it’s no use imagining that, after Gone With the Wind, Americans films shifted sides dramatically at some point, providing us with a spate of pro-abolitionist, pro-Emancipation, pro-Union films. Maybe in the early Civil Rights era of the 1950s, for example — or surely at the height of 1960s counterculture? But no.
It’s shocking how few unambiguously pro-Union films have ever been made. Outside of Glory (1989) and Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012), few come to mind. Film buffs might know Anthony Mann’s The Tall Target, a magnificent 1951 film about the struggle to thwart an assassination attempt on Abraham Lincoln right before his inauguration, which adopts a resolutely pro-Union, antislavery position.
Then there’s John Huston’s The Red Badge of Courage (1951), unquestionably centered on Union soldiers, even if its focus is the subjectively terrifying experience of fighting in a war rather than the cause being fought for. You can even make an argument to include Johnny Shiloh, a 1963 Disney “movie” that was really two TV episodes of The Wonderful World of Disney, about Johnny Clem, a real-life drummer boy who in his zeal to fight for the Union worked his way up to the rank of youngest non-commissioned officer in American military history.
But after that it may actually be possible to count pro-Union films on one hand. As Civil War scholarGary W. Gallagher puts it, the Union “is Hollywood’s real lost cause.””