Ken Burns | New England’s Gifts
For five nights in September 1990, Americans watched, transfixed, Ken Burns’s PBS series The Civil War. We had never seen the conflict through eyes as compassionate and as cinematic as the film Burns had created from his Walpole, New Hampshire, studio. His war was about not just battles, but also ordinary people swept up in […]
For five nights in September 1990, Americans watched, transfixed, Ken Burns’s PBS series The Civil War. We had never seen the conflict through eyes as compassionate and as cinematic as the film Burns had created from his Walpole, New Hampshire, studio. His war was about not just battles, but also ordinary people swept up in causes beyond themselves. Burns shot more than 150 hours of film, but none more memorable or more enduring than the narrated words of a letter written by Sullivan Ballou, a Rhode Island captain, to his wife, Sarah, just before he would die at Bull Run:
Sarah, my love for you is deathless … and yet my love of Country comes over me like a strong wind and bears me unresistibly on with all these chains to the battlefield … But, O Sarah! If the dead can come back to this earth and flit unseen around those they loved, I shall always be near you; in the garish day and darkest night … and if there be a soft breeze upon your cheek, it shall be my breath, or the cool air fans your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by. Sarah, do not mourn me dead; think I am gone and wait for thee, for we shall meet again …
“I carry [a copy of] Sullivan Ballou’s letter around in my wallet,” Burns told Yankee’s Tim Clarkjust before the series began. “When people ask me why the Civil War happened, I pull it out and read it to them. We begin to appreciate a special quality of the people who lived in the 19th century, their attitude toward things like duty and honor and bravery.” —Eds.
