{"id":29866,"date":"2016-05-10T01:00:38","date_gmt":"2016-05-10T05:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=29866"},"modified":"2016-04-30T08:22:05","modified_gmt":"2016-04-30T12:22:05","slug":"qotd-a-misleading-half-truth-in-the-movie-glory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/05\/10\/qotd-a-misleading-half-truth-in-the-movie-glory\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: A misleading half-truth in the movie Glory<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

[The movie] Glory<\/em>, concerning the raising, training, and early combat actions of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment, one of the state\u2019s two free<\/em> \u2013 that\u2019s important \u2013 black regiments raised for the Civil War. It\u2019s a good movie, in most respects. But it fosters a couple of half truths which, like most half truths, are wholly misleading.<\/p>\n

In the first place, the 54th was not a regiment of runaway slaves. Oh, there are some; men who escaped \u2013 self-selecting, like William Carney, as they did \u2013 at a time when escape was quite difficult and very<\/em> dangerous. Most of the men of the 54th, however, were born free. Some, indeed, were born free in Canada. Company G, for example, was recruited in Toronto and came south to fight.<\/p>\n

What difference does that make? It makes a vast difference. If one were to peruse the accomplishments of the black regiments in the Civil War, one wouldn\u2019t find much to commend or condemn among the regiments composed of freedmen. Oh, they were important to the war effort, but not for fighting so much as for labor, and to guard behind the lines. The couple of occasions they were given the chance to shine, notably at the Petersburg Crater, circumstances, to include some incredibly stupid decisions, tended to screw them.<\/p>\n

So the best we can say of the freedmen regiments is that we don\u2019t know. That said, it would be a very surprising thing \u2013 an unconscionable defense of slavery, really \u2013 to suggest that having been enslaved didn\u2019t do bad things to one\u2019s character, didn\u2019t set one in the mind of being inferior, didn\u2019t strike at one\u2019s self confidence and morale at the very core.<\/p>\n

The good<\/em> regiments, conversely, 54th and 55th Massachusetts, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Louisiana Native Guard, 1st and 2nd Kansas Colored, 20th USCT … some few others … were by and large free born. They did well, fought well, and, in disproportionately large numbers, died well. But they had never, in the main, been subjected to the literal degradation and decay of slavery while, for that fraction which had, they had either self-selected for sheer obstinate courage or could draw considerable moral support from those who had or who had been born free.<\/p>\n

And then there\u2019s the other thing that annoyed me about the movie, that scene where the men of the 54th \u2013 explicitly, if wrongly, portrayed as runaway slaves \u2013 are issued their first uniforms and everything changes in an instant<\/em> from disorder, indiscipline, and general raggedness to precision, as if the mere symbol could change the reality.<\/p>\n

The very idea is nonsense. One doesn\u2019t overcome a lifetime\u2019s conditioning with a symbol. No, not even if you desperately want to. No, not even if you can convince a court and legislature that your fantasy must be given wing. It just doesn\u2019t work like that.<\/p>\n

Tom Kratman, “The Amazon\u2019s Right Breast”, Baen Books<\/em><\/a>, 2011.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[The movie] Glory, concerning the raising, training, and early combat actions of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment, one of the state\u2019s two free \u2013 that\u2019s important \u2013 black regiments raised for the Civil War. It\u2019s a good movie, in most respects. But it fosters a couple of half truths which, like most half truths, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,7,28,41,13],"tags":[31,650,122,605],"class_list":["post-29866","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-history","category-media","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-army","tag-civilwar","tag-movies","tag-slavery"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7LI","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29866","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29866"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29866\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29868,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29866\/revisions\/29868"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}