Manhunt Will Make a Civil War Buff Out of You

I t is a truth universally acknowledged that, at some point in their descent into middle age, every middle-aged, middle-class American man becomes a little too interested in the history of one of two all-encompassing wars. Invariably, those wars are World War II and the American Civil War, and I am unashamed to relate that, at the tender age of 39, this transformation has begun to happen to me, too.

Perhaps because I am originally British — and because both my father and his father served in the Royal Air Force — it had thus far been World War II that had attracted the lion’s share of my attention. This fascination started, as it so often does, with Winston Churchill, and then morphed swiftly into other areas. My grandfather fought in North Africa, and then up into Italy, including at Monte Cassino. My other grandfather served aboard ships in the North Atlantic. At first, I ranged into the details out of a desire to know what that was like, but then one thing led to another and I became swept up in the whole thing, from the Sudetenland to Singapore. I apologetically told my wife that I’d become one of those guys, and that, on balance, I suspected that my war would be the more recent one of the pair.

Perhaps, though, I spoke too soon. I’ve just finished the Apple TV+ show Manhunt, which is about the search for John Wilkes Booth and his co-conspirators after their assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and it’s safe to say that I’m now hooked on the Civil War. I’d seen Ken Burns’s PBS documentary, The Civil War, of course, and I’d concluded, like many other others, that it is probably the greatest within its genre. But, while that piece of work managed to convey the drama of the history and the gravity of the stakes, I remained unable at its conclusion to imagine with any conviction what it must have been like to live through that extraordinary moment.

Manhunt changed that. Certainly, I cannot imagine its setting in any visceral way. While the show does a good job of hinting at the horrors of slavery, its depictions are ultimately just that: hints. (There is one moment in which a former slave, Mary Simms, tries to show her scars in a courtroom but is told quickly that those present trust that they are there.) What I can imagine, though, are the divisions, the politics, the controversies, the resentments — the quotidian rhythm of life. In this sense, the show reminded me of HBO’s John Adams, which revolved around the life of one man but used that revolution as a means by which to convey the great questions of the time. In the case of Manhunt, the one man is Lincoln’s secretary of war, Edwin Stanton — played to great effect by the British actor Tobias Menzies (albeit without the beard!) — around whom the key events of the period are cast. We see Stanton at the outset of his tenure; Stanton during the war; Stanton in the immediate aftermath of Lincoln’s murder; Stanton as a champion of Reconstruction; and Stanton as the ornery, obsessive, vengeful leader of the search for the perpetrators of the crime. Had the show been titled Stanton, no one would have had any room for complaint.

There are, of course, some inaccuracies, some departures, and some concessions to dramatic license. Inexplicably, Stanton greets the doctor’s declaration that Lincoln has died with the line, “Now, he belongs to the angels,” rather than with what he actually said, which was “to the ages.” While Mary Simms existed — and testified — her character’s life story is a composite. And the show gives a firm answer to two historically unresolved questions: whether Stanton pulled the missing pages from John Wilkes Booth’s diary, and the degree to which Samuel Mudd was innocent or guilty. But, in the grand scheme of things, this doesn’t matter. At the heart of the show is the question of whether America will live up to its promise, and Manhunt excels in depicting those who believe that it will, those who believe that it will not, and those who have no interest in that promise in the first instance. Refreshingly for a modern TV show, there is a healthy lack of cynicism in its implications. We see Booth talk disparagingly to Simms simply because she is black, but we also see Stanton tell her that she has just as much right to America as anyone else, and her tell him in turn that, despite what the country has done to her, she still believes in its ideals. The 1619 Project this is most decidedly not.

And beyond that, it’s just excellent TV! The cast is good (Anthony Boyle, it turns out, plays one hell of a villain). The writing is good. The sets are beautiful. It’s worthy of your time and attention. Maybe, just maybe, it’ll make a Civil War buff of you yet.