Confederate's Role In The Civil War

Out of all the “Lost Cause” films covered in Jones’ article, The General appears to be the tamest. It doesn’t seem to glorify the Confederacy and besmirch the Union, unlike films such as Birth of a Nation, mainly because it wasn’t focused on either side. The focus of the film was on Johnnie (the protagonist) and his quest to reclaim his train and rescue Annabelle (the love interest). He happens to be a Confederate civilian, but the film never shows him actively supporting Confederate ideals, such as slavery. In addition, he doesn’t try to enlist in the army until Annabelle asks him if he’s going to or not, suggesting that he’s primarily enlisting to please her, rather than to join the cause. Therefore, the reasons that Johnnie supports the Confederacy are most likely that Annabelle’s family support it, and that Johnnie himself is a Southerner. He’s essentially just rooting for his home team, making this character vastly different from the

Although the antagonists are Union spies, they’re not really shown to be villainous. They’re just doing their job in order to win the war, and they only take Anabelle hostage because she was still on the train when they stole it. Rather than kill her or do any other despicable things to her, they bring her into Union territory and place her in a guarded bedroom (when they could’ve locked her up in jail cell). In short, The General does not represent these people as monsters “stealing food out of the mouths of the poor…and possibly rape the Southern belle” (Jones 3). Instead, the Union army appears to be as professional as the Confederate army (which doesn’t appear that often in the film). They’re not villains, but rather antagonistic figures. In fact, if the story was changed to be about a Union engineer saving his train from Confederate spies, the only difference would be that both sides were switched. The story itself wouldn’t