Posted on 12/22/2002 7:56:45 AM PST by GeneD
GETTYSBURG, Pa. (Reuters) - The U.S. National Park Service has embarked on an effort to change its interpretive materials at major Civil War battlefields to get rid of a Southern bias and emphasize the horrors of slavery.
Nowhere is the project more striking than at Gettysburg, site of the largest battle ever fought on American soil, where plans are going ahead to build a new visitors center and museum at a cost of $95 million that will completely change the way the conflict is presented to visitors.
"For the past 100 years, we've been presenting this battlefield as the high watermark of the Confederacy and focusing on the personal valor of the soldiers who fought here," said Gettysburg Park Superintendent John Latschar.
"We want to change the perception so that Gettysburg becomes known internationally as the place of a 'new rebirth of freedom,"' he said, quoting President Abraham Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address" made on Nov. 19, 1863, five months after the battle.
"We want to get away from the traditional descriptions of who shot whom, where and into discussions of why they were shooting one another," Latschar said.
The project seems particularly relevant following the furor over Republican Sen. Trent Lott's recent remarks seeming to endorse racial segregation, which forced many Americans to revisit one of the uglier chapters of the nation's history.
When it opens in 2006, the new museum will offer visitors a narrative of the entire Civil War, putting the battle into its larger historical context. Latschar said he was inspired by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C., which sets out to tell a story rather than to display historical artifacts behind glass cases.
"Our current museum is absolutely abysmal. It tells no story. It's a curator's museum with no rhyme or reason," Latschar said.
It is also failing to preserve the 700,000 items in its collection, including 350,000 maps, documents and photographs, many of which were rotting away or crumbling into dust until they were put into temporary storage.
FEW BLACKS VISIT
Around 1.8 million people visit Gettysburg every year. Latschar said a disproportionate number were men and the park attracts very few black visitors.
In 1998, he invited three prominent historians to examine the site. Their conclusion: that Gettysburg's interpretive programs had a "pervasive southern sympathy."
The same was true at most if not all of the 28 Civil War sites operated by the National Parks Service. A report to Congress delivered in March 2000 found that only nine did an adequate job of addressing slavery in their exhibits.
Another six, including Gettysburg, gave it a cursory mention. The rest did not mention it at all. Most parks are now trying to correct the situation.
Park rangers and licensed guides at Gettysburg and other sites have already changed their presentations in line with the new policy. Now, park authorities are taking a look at brochures, handouts and roadside signs.
According to Dwight Pitcaithley, chief historian of the National Park Service, the South had tremendous success in promoting its "lost cause" theory.
The theory rested on three propositions: that the war was fought over "states' rights" and not over slavery; that there was no dishonor in defeat since the Confederacy lost only because it was overwhelmed by the richer north; and that slavery was a benign institution and most slaves were content with their lot and faithful to their masters.
"Much of the public conversation today about the Civil War and its meaning for contemporary society is shaped by structured forgetting and wishful thinking" he said.
Now that's a matter of personal preference on his ability as president. I tend to favor Jefferson, Coolidge, and Reagan. But yes, Lincoln is no god. Unfortunately there are some out there who seem to think he is, and that is what I take issue with.
Isn't that a private park?
I believe so, and I didn't mean to imply that it was under the NPS - I was just going from one subject to another in my post. Rambling, in other words.
That is true. Pay close attention to that clause's role in the document though. It is a claus of Article I, which begins "All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States"
The suspension of the writ of habeas corpus is accordingly a power of the legislature, not the president. This is in congruence with historical common law and the reading of the U.S. Constitution given by the nation's early jurists and founders.
John Marshall affirmed this view writing for the majority in Ex Parte Bollman and Swartwout in 1807 - "The decision that the individual shall be imprisoned must always precede the application for a writ of habeas corpus, and this writ must always be for the purpose of revision that decision, and therefore appellate in its nature. But this point also is decided in Hamilton's case and in Burford's case. If at any time the public safety should require the suspension of the powers vested by this act in the courts of the United States, it is for the legislature to say so. That question depends on political considerations, on which the legislature is to decide."
While Taney tried to say that Lincoln couldn't do this, only Congress could, Lincoln disagreed and challenged Taney to enforce it.
The case arose in 1861 before the U.S. Circuit Court in Maryland on the petition of Merryman, who was imprisoned under the suspension of habeas corpus. Taney, the sitting judge on that circuit at the time, responded by following the legal procedure for habeas corpus petitions and served a writ to Merryman's imprisoner, General Cadwalader, ordering them to appear in court to state the cause. Cadwalader responded to the writ with a refusal to appear, asserting that the president had suspended the writ of habeas corpus, permitting him to hold Merryman and others.
Taney responded by again ordering Cadwalader to appear in court before him on the issue of suspending habeas corpus and the order was refused, leaving the case before his court unanswered. Taney responded by issuing a ruling in which he struck down the president's unilateral suspension of habeas corpus. The ruling was made citing Marshall's Supreme Court ruling in Bollman as its precedent. Taney had it delivered to Lincoln, who was then obliged to either accept the ruling or file an appeal from the circuit court to the United States Supreme Court.
Lincoln refused to do either and instead ignored the ruling. His action violated the constitutional judiciary system of the United States and, under other circumstances could have easily been grounds for his impeachment.
Arguably yes. The issue though is the extent of his authority to act and the Constitution indicates that one major action he claimed for himself, suspending habeas corpus, was outside of his authority.
If this was such a craven theft of Congress' powers,why didn't Congress act upon Taney's ruling?
Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus and Taney's ruling on that suspension occurred while Congress was out of session. The Constitution gives the president the power to call Congress into session, which would have been the proper course of action had Lincoln wanted habeas corpus suspended. He did not do so and instead acted on his own by asserting a power he did not constitutionally have.
I'm just saying that in a situation where if Maryland had seceeded, DC would have been surrounded by enemy territory, Lincoln did what he had to and Congress was grateful for his prompt action in those circumstances.
Even so, acting to address the situation in Maryland is NOT the same as suspending habeas corpus as a means to address that situation. The latter was the issue that came before Taney's court and Taney ruled appropriately on it. Lincoln could have easily addressed the situation in a constitutional way by either (a) calling Congress into session to suspend the writ, or (b) stating cause for arrest in the case of Merryman and the others. In fact when Merryman's petition was recieved by the court, Taney instructed his captors that they could state cause for his arrest and legally retain him in prison.
Which is why both the Executive and Legislative branches were all to happy to ignore Taney's ruling.
The legislative branch was out of session during the ruling and therefore could not weigh in until several months after it. The executive branch on the other hand, being the party that had committed the unconstitutional act, was bound by the processes of the judicial system, themselves set up under the Constitution, to either abide by the ruling or appeal it. Lincoln did neither, and accordingly violated the judicial system's constitutional authority in addition to the initial constitutional violation itself.
I had a similar experience at Andersonville. The film there repeatedly juxtaposed Nazi treatment of prisoners with Confederate treatment of prisoners, as though they were comparable.
The film was purportedly about prisoners of war in general, not just about Andersonville prisoners. However, it did not point out that the North withheld food and supplies from Confederate prisoners in Northern prisons, even though the North had the food and supplies to give them. By any standards, the North's actions in that regard were a war crime.
At Andersonville, the Confederate guards and the prisoners ate similar rations, and a large number of the guards died.
That was not something that they needed to fight for. If you think that you have no historical understanding. But then, we already knew that you have no historical understanding, didn't we?
There was secession, and secession lasted until it was put down by the Federal government which was able to do so because they had available more young men whom they could exploit as cannon fodder to achieve their ends.
No it didn't.
Wlat the fool
Let's see here. When Lincoln was elected President, the southern states started their ill-advised attempt to leave the United States. In another ill-advised incident, they launched an attack on the United States. And this is referred to as northern aggression? That's Million Man Revisionism right there. God forbid the President of the United States to preserve the Union.
Actually it goes back to 1863:
...We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate. . .we cannot consecrate. . . we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.
-- From Lincoln's Gettysburg Address
Really? Cause the only attack I know of is one on a little fort occupied by hostile forces sitting in the middle of their own harbor. The Lincoln, on the other hand, marched an army into the south for the sole reason of coercing its obediance to the north.
There was secession, and secession lasted until it was put down by the Federal government which was able to do so because they had available more young men whom they could exploit as cannon fodder to achieve their ends.
The Supreme Court said there was no secession, even referring to the "so-called Confederate states."
To your second point; did you know that the insurgent area was 10% bigger than the loyal area? Did you know that the available manpower in the north was only 3:2 bigger than the south?
Did you know that a general rule of military operations is that it takes 3 attackers to dislodge one defender?
On paper, the rebel states couldn't lose. This was said in Europe right up into 1865.
What happened?
What happened is that supposed rebel superiority in both the operational art and morale/motivation was inferior in the rebel area to that of the loyal area.
"Three hundred thousand Yankees are stiff in southern dust."
Isn't that how the song goes? But the Union kept coming -- the rebels folded and went home.
Walt
Only if you believe that Lincoln was acting in the wrong. If you believe that the southern rebellion was illegal, that the southern acts of unilateral secession were unconstitutional, and that Lincoln was in the right in opposing the southern rebellion then that doesn't make the Northern cause right just because they won. And it wouldn't make the Northern cause any less right if they had lost.
The Southern armies might have won a guerilla war, but marching en masse to battlefields against an opponent with three times your population is a sure way to lose.
But the southern leadership started the war firm in their belief that one good old southern boy could whip ten of those miserable, immigrant Yankees. They badly underestimated the resolve of the Union and overestimated their support for their cause.
The neo-rebs throw up their hands in alarm at the most reasonable actions by the government. It's all straight from "1984".
Walt
What do you base this on?
What I am starting to see in the record now is that the rebel government deliberately mistreated US POW's because they wanted a return to the exchange cartels. They wanted that so they could abuse the cartel system and continue to use exchanged soldiers who had given their paroles not to fight any more.
There is no good side to the confederate story.
Walt
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.