YMMV / The Civil War

• Awesome Music: The use of Civil War era songs, as well as the modern "Ashokan Farewell", is brilliant. Bernice Johnson Reagon's a cappella arrangement of the spiritual "We Are Climbing Jacob's Ladder", used in several episodes, is spine-tingling.
• And You Thought It Would Fail: Ken Burns' own father reacted to his intent to make a documentary about the entire Civil War with disbelief. Needless to say, he pulled it off.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • In a day and age where the Confederacy is constantly denounced as white supremacist, it can be a bit difficult to watch this documentary after Shelby Foote, the commentator with the most screen-time given amongst all the interviewees, expressed Confederate sympathies before he died. In the series itself, he even refers to Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest as a hero. It's a bit easier as he was extremely objective in his commentary in the series, however, being complimentary of figures on the Union side like Lincoln and Grant and of the resolve of the Union soldiers over the flash of the Confederates. For what it's worth, Foote was an early advocate for integration and would ultimately come to admit that the slavery-era South was "perhaps the most racist society in the United States", though his Lost Cause sympathies remained throughout his life along with views on Jews that have been criticized as anti-Semitic.
  • The Sullivan Ballou letter, with its talk of bravery in the face of impending death, is this considering it was read by Paul Roebling, who took his own life in 1994.
• Nightmare Fuel: The series does not skimp on very graphic photographs of dead soldiers and descriptions of the various ways in which combatants met their untimely ends. And that's despite the fact that photography was a new technology at the time and video technology obviously did not exist. It's mentioned that Northern audiences were particularly unsettled when photographer Mathew Brady opened his exhibition of photos of dead soldiers at Antietam/Sharpsburg, as the American public had never seen anything like it before.
  • Particularly unsettling is the tale of a private from Massachusetts who, after being wounded at the battle of Cold Harbor, managed to write, "I was killed," in his diary before he died, soaking the pages with his blood. UK broadcasts of the series edited this out. The entire segment on Confederate guerrilla "Bloody" Bill Anderson, which included a photo of the man's corpse after he himself was killed, also was cut from UK broadcasts.
• Tear Jerker:
  • The Sullivan Ballou letter, full stop. Ken Burns read it out to the other members of his filmmaking team after first receiving a copy and could barely finish. Those around him were overcome too.
  • It wasn't just on the Union side either. Particularly eerie is the story of Benjamin Franklin Jackson, a soldier from Alabama. When his wife Martha awoke and saw a mourning dove on her windowsill, she felt it was a sign her husband had been killed and began to weep silently. Her instincts turned out to be correct.

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