Here’s John Sergeant Wise (Luke Benward) in the opening voiceover of Sean McNamara’s new Civil War drama Field Of Lost Shoes, describing how his father took him to a slave auction in 1858 to teach him a lesson about the evils of slavery:
My father’s heart had long since changed on the topic, and one night, he took me to a place that would forever change my own.
Here’s the actual John Sergeant Wise describing the same incident, in his 1899 memoir The End Of An Era:
Among my Northern kinsfolk was a young uncle, a handsome, witty fellow, much younger than my mother… He asked if I had ever seen a slave sale.
That uncle, erased from the film to make John Sergeant Wise’s father look more enlightened than he was, died fighting for the Union.
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There are as many examples of this sort of bullshit in the film as the screenplay has words. Its subject is the Battle Of New Market, in which Confederate general John C. Breckinridge fed a battalion of Virginia Military Institute cadets—children, really—into the thresher, killing 10 of them and wounding 45 more. Just like kindly old abolitionist Henry A. Wise, the film’s cadets were a remarkably progressive bunch for the children of elite Virginians of the 1860s. For example, there’s a sequence in which they save VMI’s slave cook “Old Judge” (Keith David) from hanging by volunteering to be hung in his place. There’s also a scene in which they stop their march to save an African-American trapped under a wagon, so she can flee the approaching Union forces for some reason. And the racial harmony goes both ways; at the end, Old Judge weeps on the battlefield over the corpses of men who died to keep him in chains. The film is adequately directed, well-photographed, and competently acted. But it’s rotten at its core.
