The very first scene of Gods and Generals irked me. Robert E. Lee (Robert Duvall) is in a carriage en route to D.C. to be offered command of the Army of the Potomac; he looks exactly the same as the classical image of Lee except that he’s in a blue Federal uniform.
In reality Lee would have looked morelike this. He didn’t grow the beard until 1862 and his hair turned from salt and pepper to gray-white within a few months. (It’s believed by some biographers he had a heart attack not long before Gettysburg which hastened his aging and clouded his judgment; evidence for this includes some erratic actions and comments in his letters, such as telling his daughter-in-law in a letter to kiss his grandson- the first and only grandchild he had- for him [Lee evidently having forgotten that the baby had died a few weeks before, though he had written a condolence letter when it happened]).
Anyway, I recognize that Lee having a gray beard instead of a salt and pepper mustache may seem trivial, but it makes you immediately discount anything in the movie as having been fact checked well. Add to this that they soon show Stonewall sitting down at dinner- blasphemy! Jackson was an extremely eccentric man, probably what we’d today call OCD, and one of his many eccentricities was he didn’t sit down when he ate. If you go to his house in Lexington today they’ll show you the high sideboard he took his meals from. (He was also a clean freak by the standards of his day who started most mornings by standing naked in a tub while a slave poured buckets of cold water over him.) Again, the fact he was sitting down while eating is a trivial goof, but combined with Lee’s appearance it let’s you know they’re not that concerned with characterization.