The Gray House - thoughts on the Civil War Series

This Civil War series has just opened on March 5th and 6th, 2026, on amazon prime. Last night I watched two episodes. I wasn't sure if I was going to continue because I am too emotionally shaky for various reasons and I didn't know if I could take watching the brutality and intimidation and cruelty that goes with any depiction of the South before the Civil War.

In one mob scene that is taking place in the middle of the town as an African American woman is being beaten and chased, the faces of the mob, the rage and insanity reminded me of the January 6 insurrection. "It is the same men" I thought to myself, roughly a hundred and fifty years later and it is the same men - intoxicated with the urge to violence, devoid of sensibilty or sensitivy of any kind, just a madness of desire to hurt others. Insanity is the only word that desribes it to me - the frenzy, the lack of any kind of control or reason.

The main plot involves a mother and daughter who are alone on their plantation (for reasons I have not yet discerned, maybe widowhood?) with their serants, yes, slaves. They also own a farm. The plantation estate is in Richmond, Virginia and the setting is the summer when Virginia votes to secede from the Union. The mother and her adult daughter have been engaged in running a station on the underground railroad helping enslaved people escape to the North.

They run a dangerous gauntlet as the intoxication of violence emboldens the worst of the bullies to new heights of intimidation and cruelty. They gloat on threatening, especially women. >p/> What made me decide I would watch again tonight, however, is that I became interested in comparing this series with GONE WITH THE WIND. I have written about GWTW before as I have watched it almost every summer of my life. Along with watching the film, over the years I read every bok I could find relating to it - the biography of the author of the book, Margaret MItchell, the book itself several times (It is a good read) and books that inspired her. I had an entire 9 feet long shelf of Civil War history of books. I was thinking of one yesterday, This REpublic of Suffering. That book is about the recovery of the bodies of the soldiers and the development of funerary services and processes. Of course, Clara Barton figure in here: she began the department that collected the identification of the often mass buried soldiers and notified their families. Anyone who has lost a loved one knows the enormous difference between grieving over a loved one who is, with the proper religious ceremony mourned and buried versus the loss of a loved one whose body is never found. Right now, in the news a woman, a tv personality, is suffering over the abduction of her 84 year old mother, presumed dead, but no one knows for sure what happened to her.

There are some character and plot siilarities. We have our feisty and adored daughter of the South, in this case, Elizabeth, comparable to Scarlet O'Hara only in wealth and beauty and her central role in the plot. Our heroine is anti-slavery. Scarlet was entirely oblivious to it as she was to the furniture and the landscape of her environs. We also have a dashing and desirable young hero, Hamton who hails from Louisiana and wishes to marry Elizabeth, but her life is too complicated.

The series is from several historical accounts of the spy network operated by the Van Lew women and a freed woman living with them.

As I am only on episode 2, the set up with the threats and the desperation of the situation of the time, I can't say much more about the series, but I will check back in.

I always loved Gone With the Wind and although I understand the criticisms lodged against it for the portrayal of the the enslaved people, it was a work of ficture created by an author who was of her time and the work itself is, I think, an unforgettable masterpiece. I am not alone in this as it was a huge success worldwide and remains to this day an enormously well known work of literature in America.

I also have watched The Young Sherlock Holmes and I have thoughts about that and about the history of detectives, but I will have them for another blog post.

Happy Trails - wrightj45@yahoo.com