Before Ken Burns. Before Glory. Before Gettysburg. John Leekley brought the American Civil War to television in its fullest human dimension not as ideology, but as family. Leekley wrote the original story, using historical events contained in a Civil War manuscript by two time Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Bruce Catton. The Blue and the Gray follows one family, with one branch being Southern and one Northern, whose bonds of blood and friendship are tested, broken, and transformed by six years of war. The drams is seen through the eyes of family member John Geyser, an artist and war correspondent, whose hand drawings capture the harrowing daily life and death struggles of the common soldier, including his own brothers and cousins on both sides. Geyser is drawn into the whirlwind around Lincoln and this tragic crucible of history unfolds from John Brown’s raid at Harper’s Ferry to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
The landmark CBS miniseries drew one of television’s most celebrated casts, with Gregory Peck’s first television role as President Lincoln, Stacy Keach, Lloyd Bridges, Rip Torn, Colleen Dewhurst, Geraldine Page, Robert Vaughn, Warren Oates, and Paul Winfield. John Leekley also authored the companion novel, The Blue and the Gray, published in 1982.