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.
The question is whether Kansas-Nebraska was Washington blundering from above, or whether it reflected Southern efforts to make more of the Louisiana territory slave. If it was the former, chances of preventing war would have been greater. If the latter, Southern demands would eventually have come out in the open and created irreconcilable differences.
This is why Pierce so desperately wanted Cuba. It would allow for more slave states without repealing or modifying the compromise of 1820. Most Northerners would probably have accepted the admission of Cuba as a slave state. Some wouldn't, and there would have been increased agitation against annexation, but it wouldn't have been as divisive an issue as "Bleeding Kansas."
But the country would one day have more free states than slave states, thus opening the door to eventual abolition and the predominance of the free states over the slave. Would anything reconcile militant slaveowners to this? And if the country granted all their demands, it could only produce discontent in the North, and not just among abolitionists.
Canada has what Lincoln offered to the South in 1860, a guarantee that they werea "distinct society" with great autonomy in determining their internal affairs. But the moral debate over slavery couldn't be avoided. A French speaking Canadian can take his family anywhere in the country and speak French and even get a subsidy for it. Most products have to have labels printed in both French and English. English-speaking Canadians are restricted in how they can use English on signs and other printed matter in Quebec. There's certainly an inequality there -- indeed, an injustice. But using a language at home is solely a private matter. Keeping slaves at home in a free state or territory means opening up those territories or states to slavery.
Language, like religion has been a divisive factor in many countries, and may be one in the US soon enough. Local conditions in Canada -- the federal system, population stability, modest but real economic growth, Americanized culture -- have helped prevent language from becoming a cause for separation. Threats by the federal government and fear of lost benefits among the Quebecois have kept separatism in check.
Quebec won't become all English or Ontario all French. With slavery the dynamics were quite different. To be sure there were gradations. The border states combined features of free and slave society, and climate helped to limit slavery's growth in many areas, but if New York had retained slavery or Virginia abolished it, they would have developed very different societies, just as our coutnry would start looking very diffrent very quickly if slavery were legalized today.
Who today? Let's start with me. Bobby Lee on the worst day of his life was a better man than any backstabbing little scalawag with a keyboard, who spends his life spewing out his antipathy for his neighbors. So far as I've known you, you have made one hell of a case for removing your sorry carcass to the Canadian Maritimes, or maybe Europe, where you will obviously be happier about your surroundings. You don't like the South, you hate -- that is the right word -- Southerners, you can't find anything good in them or about them and have said so repeatedly, and you are miserable in their presence unless you are maiming or disfiguring the things they esteem the most, and the history of their beloved South. Considering that that is about all that some of them have to be proud of, your enmity would be breathtaking if it weren't so vanishingly small.
Take a boat ride, pal. Try five years in West Africa or Timor, and then come back and tell us how they do it in morally invigorating countries.
Getting a little agitated, aren't you? I'm as southern as anybody. I just don't buy off on this nonsense neo-reb rant.
I was born and grew up in Chattanooga, Tennessee. I've lived in the south all my life, except when I was overseas in the Marine Corps.
It's not southerners I take issue with, it's liars.
Robert E. Lee was a traitor and he supported slavery. I can't help that.
I'm sorry if you take issue with my citing the clear record. That seems the only solid complaint with me you have.
Walt
What Grant helped to show was what Europeans most wanted to see: that government of the people, by the Army, and for the Republicans was feasible if the Army had enough materiel and manpower.
Some dream. Sounds like Orwell's vision of the future: a boot stamping on a human face forever.
No he wasn't.
This is the oath Robert E. Lee trashed:
"I, Robert E. Lee, appointed a Lieutenant Colonel of the Second Regt. of Cavalry in the Army of the United States, do solemnly swear, or affirm, that I will bear true allegiance to the United States of America, and that I will serve them honestly and faithfully against all their enemies or opposers whatsoever; and observe and obey the orders of the President of the United States, and the orders of the Officers appointed over me, according to the Rules and Articles for the government of the Armies of the United States."
Now before you beat up your keyboard saying that Lee had resigned his commission (as if that were an excuse), the record shows he took pay from the United States after he took up arms against the United States.
You better hope that the military officers today take their oaths a lot more seriously than ol' Marse Bobby did, or you may have Al Qaeda cutting your throat.
Walt
that was 3/4/65.
When he was winning, in other words, he wrote a victory paean to God, and announced that God had ordained the victory he was on the verge of winning. That is called teleology, and triumphalism. Though I'm not sure if teleology is still teleology, if it is ascribed to divine ordinance rather than self-summoning outcomes.
When you do it, it's called a weasel dance. Woo, hoo, waah, haah, watch Walt dance his weasel dance.
Take your hate on down the road, little man.
"The framers of our Constitution never exhausted so much labor, wisdom and forebearance in its formation, and surrounded it with so many guards and securities, if it was to be broken by every member of the Confederacy at will. It was intended for 'perpetual union' so expressed in the preamble, and for the establishment of a government, not a compact, which can only be dissolved by revolution, or the consent of all the people in convention assembled. It is idle to talk of secession." January 23, 1861
"All the South has ever desired is that the union, as formed by our founding fathers, should be preserved." Jan 5. 1866
Guess who wrote both of them?
Walt
He said something very similar the previous year.
"I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel...
In telling this tale I attempt no compliment to my own sagacity. I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me. Now, at the end of three years struggle the Nation's condition is not what either party, or any man devised, or expected. God alone can claim it. Whither it is tending seems plain. If God now wills the removal of a great wrong, and wills also that we of the North as well as you of the South, shall pay for our complicity in that wrong, impartial history will find therein new cause to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God."
4/4/64
That's very similar to what he said on 3/4/65.
And this is something he wrote privately in 1862:
"The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God's purpose is something different from the purpose of either party; and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect his purpose. I am almost ready to say this is probably true; that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. By his mere great power on the minds of the now contestants, he could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began. And, having begun, he could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds."
Lincoln was a deep thinker -- unlike some people.
Walt
The People, acting through their representatives sustained the Lincoln administration with money. They sustained the administration with their blood and they sustained the administration with their prayers.
Our government just happens to be the best government yet devised.
Sorry that doesn't suit you.
Walt
Maybe it was something as simple as scrupling at levying bloody war on one's neighbors, at the behest of a distant and uncaring Government.
Certainly, it was easier for a Navy man like Farragut or Samuel Phillips Lee, away from home for long stretches to be responsive to the national idea.
Weak human attachments make for better government service. Same thing is true of company service. That's why, IMHO, some corporations (like Exxon, 20 years ago) have had policies requiring frequent relocation of employees, lest they strike roots. Corporatism public and private shares the value of elevating loyalty to the entity above human loyalties, which is why I think it is morally cancerous.
The same elites would retain rule over the Southern states and the color line would be marked by legal segregation.
The Southerners in any outcome would have been horrified by the possibility of a "second Haiti", in which they'd be submerged in a sea of machete-swinging ex-slaves. That has always been their animating fear, and the reason, at the end of the day, for all the forms of apartheid, segregation, lynch law, and personal meanness.
Careless of the public weal and desiring only personal enlargement, private interests had imported and raised up an entire nation of strangers in chains, united to one another by no particular tie save of consanguinity to those closest to them, and more widely only of strangeness to the people in their new home.
That is not a scenario for domestic tranquillity in any society in the world. Englishmen sojourned in the West Indies, and went home richer if they survived the climate. But they came to America to live, and to raise families; but the planters imported vast numbers of slaves anyway, apparently without thinking about the future. Remarkable. But then, that's "movers and shakers" for you -- they do as they please, and insist fiercely that everyone else live with their consequences.
We'd still have "Lost Cause" romanticization of the Confederacy.
Why do you call it "romanticization", when the dire effects of losing a war fought on one's own ground, the world's first total war, make looking back to any period anterior to it seem so appealing to the people who live with the outcome?
Is it "romanticism" when people regret losing their ability to govern themselves, and wish they had it back? I don't think so. I don't think any conquered people can be accused of "romanticism" for regretting their lost freedom.
The Justice Department allows Southern states to hold elections. They cannot hold elections, by public law, without the consent of the United States. There is no clearer hallmark than that, that they are subordinate and unfree, and that their governments serve at the pleasure of the President. Chief Justice Rehnquist has handed down some Supreme Court decisions in recent years intended to rehabilitate the Tenth Amendment, but that only shows that he is aware of what is broken in the American republic; and the same forces that perpetrated a fraud at the very outset of the republic and waged the bloodiest war in American history to take its keeping into receivership, will never allow him to complete his task.
.... but wounds wouldn't be as deep or resentments and the sense of victimization so bitter.
"Sense" of victimization? What do you mean by that, as opposed to the real thing? But then, you haven't had a federal satrap in your state recently, running your school system and telling school board members they can neither fail to comply completely and wholeheartedly, nor resign their posts, without going to prison. That really happened in Louisiana, and the satrap's name was Leon Panetta, and it was in 1967. Lyndon Johnson sent Leon Panetta to be the overlord without title of the Louisiana education system, and that is what Panetta did. And believe me, Louisiana didn't have a republican form of government in Lyndon Johnson and Leon Panetta.
Unlike you, for instance, who have to quote him constantly.
Thank you for corroborating my point. Lincoln laid his responsibility for opening the war in the lap of the Almighty, and at the end claimed the mandate of the Almighty as the cause of the victory.
What your posts show is more that Lincoln was a politician, who knew what to do with responsibility for a vast slaughter -- hand it off to someone the People couldn't reach, and couldn't punish.
It still has winners and losers. Of course it won't suit the losers as well as it suits millionaires on Park Avenue who've been winning every day since 1861.
Of course, dancing the weasel dance and toadying for the winners doesn't make you a winner, little man. But keep thinking about it, maybe you'll figure it all out eventually.
But the war wasn't about slavery, was it?
Unfortunately for your thesis, men like Scott, Farragut and S.P. Lee were certainly more capable of human attachments and mental stability than many of the radical "fire eaters." Nor is it clear that loyal officers would be more detached from human relationships than ambitious and power-hungry politicians and propagandists who attach themselves to high-sounding causes. There is often a cost to achievement in broken human relationships, but I certainly don't see it as any stronger on one side than the other. Running after political slogans and banners like secession or Southern rights can be as much a derogation of personal responsibilities as anything else, so I don't think your criticism is fair or supported by evidence.
Why do you call it "romanticization", when the dire effects of losing a war fought on one's own ground, the world's first total war, make looking back to any period anterior to it seem so appealing to the people who live with the outcome?
Is it "romanticism" when people regret losing their ability to govern themselves, and wish they had it back? I don't think so. I don't think any conquered people can be accused of "romanticism" for regretting their lost freedom.
This "first total war" is one of those things that get thrown around, but it isn't true. Was the American Civil War "total" in a way that the Napoleonic campaigns in Spain and Russia, or the Thirty Years War, or the Wars of Religion, or the Crusades, or the crushing of heresies and peasant revolts were? I doubt it. Was it as total as the World Wars of the Twentieth Century? I doubt that, too when so many men were able to avoid military service. The American Civil War was the first extended modern war, the first war in which railroads were a major part of the war and key targets of destruction. It was a harsh and violent struggle, crueler and more total than the formal wars of the 18th century, but it's not true that cruelty or total war were invented here in the 1860s.
What makes so much of the lost cause "romantic" was the myth of pure, suffering, victimized Southern nobility set upon by evil Yankees. And it's particularly romantic and unrealistic to talk of "lost freedom" in the context of the Confederacy. We've all lost freedom to the growing power of government, but the Confederacy was not a league of freemen or society of autonomous individualists. It was a government like other governments, and a very elite-ridden one. South Carolinians couldn't even cast direct votes for Presidential electors, the legislature did it for them.
Certainly any people who have lost their independence will look back on lost freedom with regret and anger, but it's not really clear that freedom is what was lost when the Confederacy was defeated. Lost freedom has to be weighed against lost subjugation. Observers will differ about which way the balance goes, but throwing everything negative that has happened since 1860 onto the scales as the freedom we lost in the Civil War is a way of skewing the result. One has to take into account areas in which we may have greater freedom today, and also the restrictions on freedom that a Confederate government would have imposed.
The Southerners in any outcome would have been horrified by the possibility of a "second Haiti", in which they'd be submerged in a sea of machete-swinging ex-slaves. That has always been their animating fear, and the reason, at the end of the day, for all the forms of apartheid, segregation, lynch law, and personal meanness.
Careless of the public weal and desiring only personal enlargement, private interests had imported and raised up an entire nation of strangers in chains, united to one another by no particular tie save of consanguinity to those closest to them, and more widely only of strangeness to the people in their new home.
Very true, and well said.
Near as I can tell, your latest tirade against me came about after this other poster asked me something about Robert E. Lee. I happened to point out that Lee was clearly a supporter of slavery. I didn't say anything to you at all.
I am sorry if the fact that Lee was a supporter of slavery offends you. I guess you'd rather not be made aware of unpleasant facts or have them made available to others.
But people can't make reasoned judgments unless they have the facts. Maybe you don't want people to have facts that show the rebels in a bad light. Maybe that is what set you off, but I can't help that.
Walt
My take on it is that there were many contentious issues between North and South, but that slavery was the key occasion of the war. Without slavery, I don't know that North and South would have come to blows.
Certainly the South had been upset about tariffs from time to time, but tariffs by themselves had not been enough to cause secession. The South did say some scathing things about the protectionist Morrill tariff of 1861, whom some have called the centerpiece of the 1860 Republican platform. "The South was to be fleeced that the North might be enriched" was the way the New Orleans paper put it.
Other differences such as nationalism vs states rights were also involved between North and South from the earliest days of the republic.
I suspect the North ignored the Confederate offer to let Northern doctors come through Confederate lines to treat and feed Federal prisoners so that the South would have to stretch their own limited resources. In other words, the North treated their own soldiers as disposable pawns. Maybe it was the better strategy for winning the war in an 'ends justifies the means' sort of way.
LOL. Another of your simply unbelievable assertions.
There were atrocities on both sides. Both sides also exhibited decency and honor. Here's what a Union soldier had to say:
I was orderly of Captain Fogler's company, Nineteenth Maine; was made prisoner at Petersburg in June, 1864, and was at Andersonville eleven months, or until the war ended. There was suffering among the men who were sick, from the lack of medicines and delicacies, but all had their rations as fully and regularly as did the Confederate guard. There were times of scarcity, when supply trains were cut off by the Federal forces; and at such times I have known the guard to offer to buy the prisoners' rations, being very short themselves. On these occasions the guards would take a portion of their scanty supplies from the people of the country to feed the prisoners.
You can no doubt find negative comments about Confederate treatment of Federal prisoners, just as I can find negative comments about Federal treatment of Confederate prisoners.
You have yet to explain why the North didn't take the South up on its humanitarian offer to have Federal doctors treat and feed Federal prisoners in Confederate prisons.
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