Southern battlefields rage again in the forth-coming Civil War film Gods and Generals. Guy Martin ponders our national obsession

Each war has its combatants and the place in which it was fought. Virginia was fated to become the Civil War's bloodiest killing ground simply because it meant so much to both sides. The rogue state, looming on one side of the capital, posed an obvious proximal threat. Confederate president Jefferson Davis, a former U.S. secretary of war, sat in Richmond, 114 miles south of the White House fence. His biggest, best forces swarmed about within a few days" march of Lincoln's bedroom.

But the danger cut deeper than that. To be a Virginian of an old family in the 1860s was to be tied by blood or marriage to the founding of the country. This kind of Rebel threat found its sharpest expression in Robert E. Lee, who refused Lincoln's offer to command the Union armies in April 1861. Lee's father, Light Horse Harry Lee, had been a cavalry commander under Washington. Lee's home, Arlington House, lay just across the Potomac, overlooking the capital. It had been the plantation of George Washington Parke Custis, Lee's father-in-law and the grandson of Martha Washington. Lee and his wife inherited the house and lived there for 30 years, raising seven children.

On the evening after Lincoln's offer, Lee sat in Arlington House and decided to resign his U.S. Army commission. A few days later, he left for Richmond to take command of the army in gray. Here, the Lee home, because of its provenance and its unassailable Southern place, meets a fate that rises almost to comedy. Lincoln's commanders made a point of taking Arlington House early. As the war dragged on, a Union quartermaster general got the idea to insult Lee irreversibly by burying thousands of Northern casualties around the plantation—a macabre Civil War "screw you." It worked. The burial ground became Arlington National Cemetery.

"Virginia was the old country," explains director Ron Maxwell, whose Civil War film Gods and Generals is slated for release in early 2003. "There were a million reasons for the war, but at bottom, the Confederates fought as hard and as long as they did because they were defending their homes. Virginia was the cradle of the Confederacy. By the time of the war, some of these families had been there for two hundred years. So, to understand the fighting, we must see the Shenandoah Valley, the Blue Ridge Mountains, Lexington, and Harpers Ferry as home."

Maxwell adapted Gods and Generals from Jeff Shaara's historical novel of the same name. In Hollywood code, this film is a prequel to the staggeringly popular 1992 Maxwell film Gettysburg, which has become one of those rare Wizard of Oz–like perennials. In the tradition of Gettysburg, Gods and Generals is a big production ($55 million), financed by Ted Turner Pictures. It even includes a cameo by the rambunctious billionaire as a mustachioed Confederate colonel named Patton, an ancestor of the famed World War II general. Turner played the same role in Gettysburg. (Perhaps he knew he would finance Gods and Generals, or maybe it was just plain fun to have a Confederate colonel's uniform around the house for siege-of-Atlanta dress-up evenings; either way, Turner had kept his Gettysburg costume and wore it again in the current production.) Director Maxwell found another wellspring of authentic Southern accents—coupled with the right sort of bloody yet Socratic decorum—by raiding the U.S. Senate for a few supporting roles on General Lee's staff: senators Robert Byrd of West Virginia, Phil Gramm of Texas, and George Allen of Virginia.