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Their "cause" is a nebulous one, steeped in euphemisms about "defending one's way of life." An uninformed viewer might reasonably conclude that the Civil War began because of Northern aggression — not the South's recalcitrant attempts to preserve a way of life based upon the enslavement of four million persons of African descent. In reality, both Abraham Lincoln and Congress went to great lengths to assure Southern states that there would be no federal attempt to outlaw slavery — even going so far as to propose the Crittendon Compromise, a Constitutional guarantee that slavery could not be abolished by federal authority. In reality, non-slaveholding whites like Inman fought for a cause which they believed in like a religion — which, you might argue, it was.
Yet it is inaccurate to lay the blame for this historical amnesia solely at the feet the novelist Charles Frazier or the screenwriter and filmmaker Anthony Minghella — the problem is deeper, broader and older than that. The saccharine racial politics of Cold Mountain parallel those of Mel Gibson's Revolutionary War flick The Patriot, in which we learn that the legions of black laborers working the fields of a South Carolina plantation are actually free — and Gibson's character, a wealthy South Carolina planter, pays them to grow his crops. (The next logical next step would be for him to duck into the nearest phone booth and don his cape before eliminating hordes or redcoats with his x-ray vision.) Nor, if history is any judge, should you hold your breath waiting for a realistic depiction of race and racism in The Alamo — scheduled for release in early 2004. The mythic bravery of the 185 American holdouts against 5000 Mexican troops is too compelling a theme to ruin it by talking about the American refusal to abide by Mexico's antislavery laws in Texas as a basis for the war.
Ultimately, this isn’t simply a Hollywood problem — in an era when statewide elections still turn on a candidate's support for the Confederate flag "as a symbol of Southern pride," and one still encounters the inane argument that the Civil War was fought over “state's rights,” not slavery, it's naïve to think that the movies will be any more honest than the daily news. What is at issue here is an American intolerance of its own history.
Any history of the United States is also a history of race — whether that’s stated explicitly or not. The Civil War was fought to protect a state's right to maintain slavery — a fact established by the Confederate states' own declarations of secession, which specifically cite the institution as the reason for the conflict. Ironically, the argument that the war was not about slavery has its roots among Northerners who felt compelled to downplay the Negro issue in favor of something their peers might actually think was worth fighting for — preservation of the Union.
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