I've just finished watching the first six episodes of Manhunt on AppleTV and am looking forward to April 19th, when the seventh and final episode is scheduled to be shown. It's the story of the pursuit of John Wilkes Booth, the confederate sympathizer who shot Abraham Lincoln in the back of the head and killed him for his efforts in eliminating slavery and holding the Union together.
It took me a while to get into the drama. As with every TV serial, it suffers from unavoidable flaws: the characters become tiresome because they keep making the same mistakes over and over again, the plot line is padded with irrelevancies, the characters change from good guys to bad guys and back again, often without discernible motivation.
I had trouble getting into Manhunt the first two or three episodes. The writing is loaded with anachronisms, the dialogue is hard to follow in places, and mostly I wanted to break away from the darkness of the world the story portrayed and retreat to something more uplifting.
In time, though, I got drawn in by the awareness that I was getting huge gaps filled in my knowledge of American history. Good history can be as good as good fiction, especially when writers take liberties with it. I learned the name John Wilkes Booth in a high school history class, as most American kids do, but it has never been more than just a piece of information useful perhaps when doing crossword puzzles or playing trivial pursuit, and nothing of serious consequence. I knew that he was an actor, and that's about it. Manhunt turns him into flesh and blood, somebody who matters enough to make you want to join a posse and dash off and catch him before he crosses the Potomac into Virginia and makes it back to safe ground in Richmond. It turns out the writing wasn't so bad, after all. Nor were the characters at all bland and indistinguishable from one another as I had thought there for a while.
Suddenly I had to pause the series and go to Wikipedia to get at the list of those characters. I knew Andrew Johnson was Lincoln's successor and I think I remember that he had been impeached for some reason, but I didn't know a thing about William H. Seward, or George Sanders, or Edwin Stanton. Or David Herold, or Samuel Mudd, or John and Mary Surratt. In the end, Manhunt is more about Edwin Stanton than about John Wilkes Booth. Stanton was the historical character the writer of Manhunt took the greatest liberty with. In reality he was a political opponent of Lincoln's who ended up joining his cabinet and becoming one of Lincoln's most trusted colleagues when he took on the job of Secretary of War. The Manhunt version of the man hunts Booth down and that's apparently fiction. What is not made up, though, apparently, is the counterweight Stanton was to Andrew Johnson.
The two men, Stanton and Johnson, fought over two of America's most crucial post Civil War challenges: how to go about reintegrating the rebel states back into the Union and what to do with the newly freed African slaves. Johnson advocated pretty much a forgive-and-forget policy with the states which had formed the Confederacy, and he was unmoved by the argument that the slaves lacked the ability to handle the responsibilities of the freedom they had just been given. Stanton felt justice demanded that treason be punished and that forty acres and a mule was the least the country could do to give black men and women a leg up in the challenge they faced now that they would be living alongside whites as equals. It is one thing to remember that a hundred and sixty years since the Emancipation Proclamation we are still arguing over racism, segregation and the possibility of reparations. It's quite another to be taken back to a time when half the white men running the country barked orders at their black servants and called them by a name we today believe decent people should not even be allowed to say out loud in public.
The revulsion that rushes over you at the depiction in Manhunt of white Americans coming to terms with the freeing of slaves in their midst puts the drama, even if it is partly fictionalized, in the same category as other films of recent years depicting slavery and racism. I'm thinking particularly of Lincoln in 2012 and 12 Years a Slave in 2013, and am sobered by the fact that a full decade has passed since those two powerful treatments of slavery in America were capturing so much attention.
Manhunt is set in the historical period in which the Republican Party, led by Abraham Lincoln, was formed as the corrective to the failure of the founding fathers to pay more than lip service to the claim that "all men are created equal" in our founding documents. You can't watch it without reflecting on the irony that that same Republican Party is now in the hands of white supremacists who want to "Make America Great Again."
Does history have to repeat itself? Is America destined to wipe out the society generated by Lincoln Republicans and replace it with one more in tune with his impeached "bring back the good old days" successor, President Andrew Johnson?
At some point watching Manhunt, I conjured up a vision of a Martian doctoral student doing research in Washington, D.C. for a thesis making the case that, although it took them over a century and a half, it was actually the Confederate States of America that won the Civil War.
Manhunt, it turns out, is not a downer to run from. It's the pick-me-up in the end I was wanting to search for.
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