In AP US History, "Ride with the Devil" was viewed by the class. Ang Lee directed the movie while Anne Carey, associate producer, Robert F. Colesberry, producer, Ted Hope, producer, David Linde, executive producer, and James Schamus, producer all produced it in 1999. Starring in it was Tobey Maguire, Skeet Ulrich, Jeffrey Wright, Simon Baker, and Jonathon Rhys Meyers. The purpose for viewing the movie was to compare it with what the class was reading in their textbook.
It was 1862 and the pro-Confederate Bushwhackers are engaging in guerilla warfare along the Kansas/Missouri border against Union forces. Jack Bull Chiles and Jake Roedel are childhood friends who supported the Bushwhackers, despite Jake being a German immigrant whose father was decidedly pro-Union. Nonetheless, after Jayhawkers murdered Chiles" father, the two young men joined a band of such guerilla fighters. Led by Black John, Roedel and Chiles, along with fellow Bushwhackers Pitt Mackeson, Turner Rawls, George Clyde, and his former slave, Daniel Holt, set out to disrupt the Union activities and consequently get into several lethal encounters with them. As winter sets in, the Bushwhackers disbanded into smaller groups, with Roedel, Chiles, George and Holt setting up a primitive camp on the outskirts of property owned by Mr. Evans. There, and only when there are no signs of feds in the area, did Brown's widowed daughter-in-law, Sue Lee Shelley, bring food to the men. While George goes off to stay with a lady friend of his, Chiles and Sue Lee began a brief romance. Yet with the arrival of spring and more fighting that whittled down their numbers, the Bushwhackers continued on their quest to insure the freedom of their way of life. After both Roedel and Holt's subsequent injuries lay them up at the home of Orton Brown, the men determined their stake in the war while dealing not only with Sue Lee whom they earlier dropped off there, but as well as with Mackeson who has had a personal vendetta against Roedel for earlier preventing more war-related atrocities.
