The Civil War, a four-year conflict that preserved the nation as one country and ended slavery—the system that had shaped the South’s economic life from its inception—cost more American lives than any other war in the nation’s history. It also transformed the country, turning a decentralized republic into a centralized government that taxed people directly, drafted men into military service, created an internal revenue bureau and national bank, established a federal court system, confiscated billions of dollars in personal property (by emancipating slaves), and consolidated power at the top by confirming cabinet secretaries and a Supreme Court justice.
The war began with Nat Turner’s bloody slave revolt in Virginia in 1831, the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery bestseller “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in 1852, and John Brown’s raid on a federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry in 1859. Abolitionists convinced many Northerners that slavery was morally wrong, but they were unable to change the nation’s political structure so that the Constitution could be amended to ban slavery in the United States.
Starring Kirsten Dunst and featuring performances from Narcos’ Wagner Moura, Lady Bird’s Stephen McKinley Henderson, Priscilla’s Cailee Spaeny, and Nick Offerman as a tyrannical President, Alex Garland’s Civil War depicts a near-future United States ravaged by secessionist violence. The film follows Lee, a jaded photojournalist who travels with two younger colleagues, a Southern journalist and a rookie photographer, to Washington, D.C., where they hope to interview a President who hasn’t spoken to the press in more than a year.