U.S. Corrects 'Southern Bias' at Civil War Sites

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.

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.

Prisoner totals have varied a lot over the years, depending on who did them. According to US Secretary of War Stanton's report of July 19, 1866, in the Official Records, there were 270,000 Federals in Confederate prison camps and 220,000 Confederates in Federal prison camps. (Source: Point Lookout Prison Camp for Confederates, by Edwin W. Beitzel. I bought this book at the bookstore at Appomattox Court House National Historic Park.)

An Andersonville park pamphlet says 194,732 Federal soldiers were held in Confederate prisons, not the 270,000 listed by Stanton. Perhaps Stanton counted soldiers captured by Confederates who were released from captivity into parole before being sent to one of the prisons.

Similarly, the numbers of Federal prisoners who died in Confederate prisons was listed as 22,576 by Secretary Stanton in 1866 but is carried by the Park Service now as 30,000.

Then again, the figures currently acknowledged by the Park Service for Federal prisoners at Andersonville are thousands short of the figures tabulated by the prisoners themselves and posted on a carved stone tablet at Providence Spring. I guess it is hard when revisionist history runs into a carved stone monument that says otherwise. Next thing you know, the monument will have to come down.

Incidentally, my wife's great-grandfather was among the many Confederate prisoners known to have died at Point Lookout, but whose name is not recorded among the death records.

G. W. Nichols, has provided some dry figures in his "Story of the Great March" (published 1865, London). On its march Sherman's army confiscated 100 million dollars worth of grain and cattle. The troops used 20 million dollars worth for themselves and the remainder was destroyed. This figure includes only the food supplies; the destroyed houses, roads and equipment have never been calculated This "wonderful success" Simulated the outer generals. Sheridan, one of Grant's cavalry general destroyed 100,000 bushels of wheat, 50,000 bushels of maize, 6,200 tons of hay and 11,000 head of cattle in Rockingham County alone.

From Covington the Fourteenth Corps (Davis's), with which I was travelling, turned to the right for Milledgeville, via Shady Dale. General Slocum was ahead at Madison, with the Twentieth Corps, having torn up the railroad as far as that place, and thence had sent Geary's division on to the Oconee, to burn the bridges across that stream, when this corps turned south by Eatonton, for Milledgeville, the common "objective" for the first stage of the "march." We found abundance of corn, molasses, meal, bacon, and sweet potatoes. We also took a good many cows and oxen, and a large number of mules. In all these the country was quite rich, never before having been visited by a hostile army; the recent crop had been excellent, had been just gathered and laid by for the winter. As a rule, we destroyed none, but kept our wagons full, and fed our teams bountifully.

The skill and success of the men in collecting forage was one of the features of this march. Each brigade commander had authority to detail a company of foragers, usually about fifty men, with one or two commissioned officers selected for their boldness and enterprise. This party would be despatched before daylight with a knowledge of the intended day's march and camp, would proceed on foot five or six miles from the route travelled by their brigade, and then visit every plantation and farm within range. They would usually procure a wagon or family carriage, load it with bacon, corn-meal, turkeys, chickens, ducks, and everything that could be used as food or forage, and would then regain the main road, usually in advance of the train. When this came up, they would deliver to the brigade commissary the supplies thus gathered by the way. Often would I pass these foraging-parties at the roadside, waiting for their wagons to come up, and was amused at their strange collections,--mules, horses, even cattle, packed with old saddles and loaded with hams, bacon, bags of cornmeal, and poultry of every character and description. Although this foraging was attended with great danger and hard work, there seemed to be a charm about it that attracted the soldiers, and it was a privilege to be detailed on such a party.

Daily they returned mounted on all sorts of beasts, which were at once taken from them and appropriated to the general use; but the next day they would start out again on foot, only to repeat the experience of the day before. No doubt many acts of pillage, robbery, and violence were committed by these parties of foragers, usually called "bummers;" for I have since heard of jewelry taken from women, and the plunder of articles that never reached the commissary; but these acts were exceptional and incidental. I never heard of any cases of murder or rape; and no army could have carried along sufficient food and forage for a march of three hundred miles: so that foraging in some shape was necessary. The country was sparsely settled, with no magistrates or civil authorities who could respond to requisitions, as is done in all the wars of Europe: so that this system of foraging was simply indispensable to our success. By it our men were well supplied with all the essentials of life and health, while the wagons retained enough in case of unexpected delay, and our animals were well fed.

Indeed, when we reached Savannah the trains were pronounced by experts to be the finest in flesh and appearance ever seen with any army.

Habitually each corps followed some main road, and the foragers, being kept out on the exposed flank, served all the military uses of flankers. The main columns gathered, by the roads travelled, much forage and food, chiefly meat, corn, and sweet potatoes, and it was the duty of each division and brigade quartermaster to fill his wagons as fast as the contents were issued to the troops. The wagon-trains had the right to the road always, but each wagon was required to keep closed up, so as to leave no gaps in the column. If for any purpose any wagon or group of wagons dropped out of place, they had to wait for the rear. And this was always dreaded, for each brigade commander wanted his train up at camp as soon after reaching it with his men as possible. I have seen much skill and industry displayed by these quartermasters on the march, in trying to load their wagons with corn and fodder by the way without losing their place in column. They would, while marching, shift the loads of wagons, so as to have six or ten of them empty. Then, riding well ahead, they would secure possession of certain stacks of fodder near the road, or cribs of corn, leave some men in charge, then open fences and a road back for a couple of miles, return to their trains, divert the empty wagons out of column, and conduct them rapidly to their forage, load up and regain their place in column without losing distance. On one occasion I remember to have seen ten or a dozen wagons thus loaded with corn from two or three full cribs, almost without halting. These cribs were built of logs, and roofed. The train-guard, by a lever, had raised the whole side of the crib a foot or two; the wagons drove close alongside, and the men in the cribs, lying on their backs, kicked out a wagon-load of corn in the time I have taken to describe it. In a well-ordered and well-disciplined army these things might be deemed irregular, but I am convinced that the ingenuity of these younger officers accomplished many things far better than I could have ordered, and the marches were thus made, and the distances were accomplished, in the most admirable way. Habitually we started from camp at the earliest break of dawn, and usually reached camp soon after noon... [On the 20th of November, Sherman stopped at a plantation mansion which, by chance, he discovered to be that of Howell Cobb, Secretary of the Treasury in Buchanan's Cabinet, and at that time a general in the Confederate army. Here, contrary to his usual custom, he ordered that nothing should be spared: the fence-rails were destroyed for camp-fires, and an immense quantity of corn and provisions of all sorts was carried off. While the left wing was marching in this direction, General Howard, with the right wing, was advancing towards Macon, which he reached on the 22d, driving before him the Confederate forces that endeavored to hold the town.] By the 23d I was in Milledgeville with the left wing, and was in full communication with the right wing at Gordon...

Ineptitude, cruelty and a desire to force the federals to reinstitutute the exchange cartels are the reasons for the mistreatment of US POWs -- those that were not simply shot out of hand.

Walt

Ineptitude, cruelty and a desire to force the federals to reinstitutute the exchange cartels are the reasons for the mistreatment of US POWs -- those that were not simply shot out of hand.

Read the following, Walt, and tell me where the ineptitude was.

On January 24, 1864, long before the bulk of men died at Andersonville, Judge Robert Ould, Confederate Agent of Prisoner Exchange, sent the following letter:

Major General E. A. Hitchcock [US], Agent of Exchange:
Sir -- In view of the present difficulties attending the exchange and release of prisoners, I propose that all such on each side shall be attended by a proper number of their own surgeons, who under rules to be established, shall be permitted to take charge of their health and comfort. I also propose that these surgeons shall act as commissaries, with power to receive and distribute such contributions of money, food, clothing and medicines as may be forwarded for the relief of prisoners. I further propose that these surgeons be selected by their own Governments, and that they shall have full liberty at any and all times, through the agents of exchange, to make reports not only of their own acts but also of any matters relating to the Welfare of prisoners.
Respectfully, your obedient servant,
Ro. Ould, Agent of Exchange.

To this, no reply of any kind was made. In addition to these offers Ould also offered in the summer of 1864 to release 10,000 to 15,000 Union prisoners in return for no Confederate prisoners in exchange. The Union finally sent ships to pick up the prisoners, many of them from Andersonville in late November or December of 1864. 5,000 well Union men were included in this release.

Ould said the following in the National Intelligencer of August 20, 1868:

In the summer of 1864, in consequence of certain information communicated to me by the Surgeon General of the Confederate States as to the deficiency of medicines, I offered to make purchases of medicine from the United States authorities, to be used exclusively for the relief of Federal prisoners. I offered to pay gold, cotton, or tobacco for them, and even two or three prices if required. At the same time I gave assurances that the medicines would be used exclusively in the treatment of Federal prisoners; and moreover agreed, on behalf of the Confederate States, if it was insisted on, that such medicines might be brought into the Confederate lines by United States surgeons and dispensed by them. To this offer I never received any reply. Incredible as this appears, this is strictly true.

...no army could have carried along sufficient food and forage for a march of three hundred miles: so that foraging in some shape was necessary. The country was sparsely settled, with no magistrates or civil authorities who could respond to requisitions, as is done in all the wars of Europe: so that this system of foraging was simply indispensable to our success. By it our men were well supplied with all the essentials of life and health, while the wagons retained enough in case of unexpected delay, and our animals were well fed.

Indeed. According to the Augusta Chronicle these benign Yankee soldiers who only foraged what they needed to survive, did the following:

In their route they destoyed, so far as possible, all mills, cribs, and carried off all stock, provisions, and negroes, and when their horses gave out they shot them.
At Canton, they killed 100 [horses]. ... Along their route the road was strewn with dead horses. Farmers having devoted a large share of their attention to syrup making, there is a large quantity of cotton ungathered in the field, which was left by the Federals, but there is not a horse or ox in the country, hence the saving of corn will be a difficult matter. At Madison, they broke into Oglesby's office, and carried off all his medicines, including several jars of arsenic and corrosive sublimate, which had no labels on them.
...
They ravaged the country below there to the Oconee River. The roads were strewn with the debris of their progress. Dead horses, cows, sheep, hogs, chickens, corn, wheat, cotton, books, paper, broken vessels, coffee mills, and fragments of nearly every species of property strewed the countryside.

Quite a happy little band of foragers.

"What happened?"

You sue opened yourself up for that one Walt. (He said in a Wlat-style gloat.)

What happened was the the slave power lost a revolution they could easily won. But their plans were not quite adequate.

Bruce Catton calls the south "almost helpless."

"To buy at home or abroad the the goods the army needed was one thing; to move them to the places where the army wanted them was quite another. Lacking a financial and industrial system equal to the demands of a large war, the South lacked also a proper transportation system. It had many railroads but no real railroad network, because hardly any of its railroads had been built with through traffic in mind.

Most of them had been conceived of as feeder lines, to move cotton to the wharves at river towns or at seaports...this handicap, to be sure, existed also in the north, but there it was not so serious. It had been recognized earlier, and it was being removed; and the significant point was that in the North it -could- be removed, and in the South, it could not.

The South was almost helpless in this respect. Nearly all its locomotives, spikes, car wheels, car bodies annd other items of equipment had come from the north...

As the nation's need for an adequate transportation increased, the system wuld grow weaker and weaker, and there was no earthly help for it....these problems , indeed, were so grave and pointed so surely towards final defeat that one is faced to wonder how the founding fathers of the Confederacy could possibly have overlooked them. The answer perhaps is that the problems were not so much unseen as uncomprehended. At bottom they were Yankee problems; concerns of the broker, the money changer, the trader, the mechanic, the grasping man of business; they were matters that such people would think of, not matters that would command the attention of aristocrats who who were familiar with valor, the classics and heroric atttitudes. Secession itself had involved a flight from reality rather than an approach to it....Essentially, this was the reliance of a group that knew little of the modern world but which did not know nearly enough and could never understand that it did not know enough. It ran exactly parallel to Mr. Davis's magnificent statement that the duration of the war could be left up to the enemy--the war would go on until the enemy gave up, and it did not matter how far off that day might be.

The trouble was it did matter. It mattered enormously.

--The Coming Fury, p. 438-439, by Rruce Catton

In other words, as Rhett Butler said: "it's going to make a great deal of difference to a great many gentlemen."

Also:

"The most succinct, compelling and balanced picture of the antebellum political economy is contained in McPherson's "Battle Cry of Freedom." The statistical portrait describes more than regional differences. The direction and momentum of those statistics show a fragile and severely distorted slave-based economy that is crusing towards an implosion, with or without the impetus of the ACW and reconstruction.

Population? "Three times as many people born in slave states had migrated to free states as vice versa...seven-eighths of the immigrants from abroad settled in the North, where jobs were plentiful and cometition from slave-based labor nonexistant. " McPherson, P. 91

Infrastructure? "In 1840, the South had possessed 44 percent of the country's railroad mileage, but by 1850 the more rapid pace of Northern construction had droppped the South's share to 26 percent." McPherson, p. 91.

Industrial capacity? By 1850, "With 42 percent of the population, slave states possessed only 18 percent of the country's manufacturing capacity, a decline of twenty percent from 1840. Most alarming, nearly half this industrial capacity was located in four border states, whose commitment to southern rights was shaky." McPherson p. 91

The world's second ranking industrial power, didnt someone say? Hardly. That sort of leaves out Great Britain, doesn't it? "Using three per capita indices--railroad mileage, cotton textile production and pig iron production [two econometric historians] found that the south ranked just behind the north in railroads, but ahead of every other country. In textile production the South ranked sxth and in pig iron eighth. But the railroad index...is specious, for railroads connect places as well as people. By an index that combines population and square miles of territory, the South's railroad capacity was not only less than half the North's, but also less than that of several European countries in 1860. Combining the two measures of industrial capacity [textiles and pig iron]...the South produced only one-nineteenth as much per capita as Britain, one-seventh as much as Belgium, one-fifth as much as the North and one-fourth as much as Sweden..."

An industrial Eden whose slave economy should have been exported to the plains states?

"The per capita output of the principal southern food crops actually declined in the 1850's, and this agricultural society was headed toward the status of a food deficit region." McPherson p. 100

McPherson's summary of the statistics: "...like Alice in Wonderland, the faster the South ran, the farther behind it seemed to fall." The South's decades--long struggle to recover from its colonial economic status as an exported of commodity raw materials and an importer of capital manufactured goods is a consequence of the severe distortions of a slave based economy and society."

Just got this:

"Alone in the south, Baltimore had the capital, expertise, and tooling to remake the southern rails as fast as they wore out (or were blown up). So too, alone in the South, Baltimore had the resources to create ironclad vessels up to Yankee standards. Instead, this pivotal slave-hoding city boosted the Union's powerful advantage....In contrast, under the crushing Civil War tasks of moving gigantic quantities of food, troops and military equipment, Confederate railroads succumed faster than Confederate troops. By midwar, an aid to he Confederacy's western commander lamented that, "locomotives had not been repaired for six months, and many of them lay disabled." The colonel knew "not one place in the South where a driving-wheel can be made, and not one where a whole locomotive can be constructed."

--The South vs. The South, p. 63-64 by William W. Freehling

Walt

Sir -- In view of the present difficulties attending the exchange and release of prisoners, I propose that all such on each side shall be attended by a proper number of their own surgeons, who under rules to be established, shall be permitted to take charge of their health and comfort. I also propose that these surgeons shall act as commissaries, with power to receive and distribute such contributions of money, food, clothing and medicines as may be forwarded for the relief of prisoners. I further propose that these surgeons be selected by their own Governments, and that they shall have full liberty at any and all times, through the agents of exchange, to make reports not only of their own acts but also of any matters relating to the Welfare of prisoners.
Respectfully, your obedient servant, Ro. Ould, Agent of Exchange.

To this, no reply of any kind was made.

That is not true.

"There is a report in the OR [official records] from Gen. Hitchcock to Stanton from the fall of 1863 [OR, Ser. II, vol. 6, pp. 607ff], referring to the stoppage of the POW exchange the previous summer, citing as reason the CS policy of not exchanging black troops and the irregularities with the Vicksburg/Port Hudson paroles. In March of 1864, the CS Commissioner for Exchange, Judge Robert Ould, writes to Ben Butler about re-opening the exchange cartel. Butler refers the matter to Stanton, who sends it to Grant. Grant writes Butler a letter (4/17/64) in which Grant says that there should be no more exchanges until the Confederates (1) agree to exchange all black troops equally with white; (2) agree to compensate for the unilateral exchange of some of the Vicksburg/Port Hudson prisoners.

That is the entire substance of the letter, which I have posted here in the past. Ould refuses these terms. In August things get interesting. First, Ould approaches Butler again asking about re-opening the exchange system. Butler asks Grant for guidance, and it is at this point that Grant begins to talk about stopping all exchanges in order to prevent the released Confederate troops from being an immediate reinforcement to the CS armies. Grant's concern is entirely with the extra manpower pool which exchange would make available to the Confederates, not with any kind of logistic burden. It is in this time frame (I think to Butler) that he says it might be cruel on the US soldiers in the camps not to exchange, but it would be crueller to the men in the field to re-open the exchanges. Butler's response to Ould is interesting. He does not refuse to exchange. He says, directly, that his government is perfectly willing to exchange if the CS will agree to treat all black troops equally with white in this regard. This letter is in the OR, it was published in the New York Times, and it was printed as a pamphlet during the fall.

Confederate sources (during the war and postwar, including Ould's various writings and Davis's memoirs) treat this response of Butler's as though it did not exist. I think it is in THE ANNALS OF WAR that Ould says he received no reply to his request to re-open the exchange, and I think that Davis says much the same thing in RISE AND FALL OF THE CONFEDERATE GOV'T. I have not figured out if they actually never got the reply (odd, since it was published in the New York Times), or if this was their way of saying they didn't like dealing with Butler. In any event, if they had at that point in time agreed to exchange blacks equally with whites then they either would have succeeded in re-opening the exchange or have forced the Federal government to come up with another excuse. Their refusal to do this is very compelling to me. The CS government had their chance to re-open the exchange and essentially chose not to do so. Later, in October of 1864, General Lee wrote to Grant about exchanging men captured in some recent fighting. Grant's response was that he would be willing to do so if the Confederates would be willing to exchange blacks equally for whites, and Lee at that point declined to do so. This correspondence is in OR, Ser. II, vol. 7, pp. 906-914. So, here we have three opportunities during 1864 when the exchange question came up between the two sides. Each time the US position was, essentially, "exchange black troops equally and we will agree," (in April there was another issue on the table -- the Vicksburg parole violations -- but it probably could have been finessed, IMO, as it eventually disappears from US concerns) and each time the CS refused. Now, we can weave all kinds of theories about ulterior motives and undocumented intent, but if the CS government had been willing to exchange black troops equally with white in August of 1864 they either would have gotten the exchange re-opened or made the Lincoln Administration look real bad, and done so at a very crucial time in the political season. They had the chance, they didn't take it, they therefore cannot pass the blame off to the other side."

-- from the ACW moderated newsgroup.

What needs to be explored now is how much the so-called CSA deliberately mistreated US POW's in an attempt to pressure the US government. It's clear that there was plenty of food in Georgia.

In any case, it was the so-called CSA that took the lead always, in execution, in barbarism and in horror.

Walt

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