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.
Phony cavil, Wlat.
Now answer the objection. The President had no authority to wage war against States that were no longer in the Union, were no longer "domestic States" within the meaning of your (uncited) passage from an (apparent) Supreme Court ruling, and were no longer in the territory of the United States of America.
Therefore, the President exceeded his powers by sending troops into Virginia to campaign there under arms, there being at that time no hostilities between Virginia and the United States, and no declaration of war by the United States Congress on alienated Virginia, nor by Virginia on the United States.
That song and dance doesn't play. The Militia Act of 1792 requires that United States law operate in all the states. It doesn't admit of any of your qualifications.
"The Constitution provides, and all the States have accepted the provision, that "The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a republican form of government." But, if a State may lawfully go out of the Union, having done so, it may also discard the republican form of government; so that to prevent it's going out, is an indispensable means, to the end, of maintaining the guaranty mentioned; and when an end is lawful and obligatory, the indispensable means to it, are also lawful, and obligatory."
--A. Lincoln 7/4/61.
You want something that flies in the face of common sense.
Walt
What you appear to be discounting is that the rebel armies were defeated. They went home, deserted, refused parole, gave up the ghost, hid out, skedaddled.
No law has power without force, and the insurgents couldn't bring it.
Walt
That's not what happened. No federal troops "campaigned" in Virginia until after Virginia's secession convention. President Lincoln proposed sending federal troops -through- Virginia to get to the insurgent area, which was the seven so-called seceded states that had, at that time, attempted to overthrow the legal government.
Walt
No, I'm saying that the People thought there was an honorable man to run the government in the time of a national emergency. That is certainly what the framers intended. If we don't have honorable men to run the government now, that is not the fault of the Constitution, or the people of the ACW era.
Walt
Operative phrase, "in this Union". Lincoln wasn't responsible for the status of States no longer in the Union, none of which had proposed to reconstitute themselves as monarchies etc., and so his argument about needing to kill 600,000 people in order to drag the Southern States back into the Union to save them from the horror of non-Republican government (which he provided anyway, in the form of military governments) is revealed as utterly specious pol-speak. Eyewash, in other words.
In the Union, Walt.
No state has ever been out of the Union once it came in.
You can wail and cry about it all you like, but there it is.
Walt
You can't be missing the import of what Lincoln said.
The Constitution --guarantees-- that each state will have a republican government. IF a state could go out of the Union, it -might- establish a monarchy, a fascist state, or whatever. That would violate the constitutional guarantee against such.
All you -could- say is that the federal government retained the right to intervene against states that had left the Union -if- they adopted some non-republican government.
In fact, you could argue that this is what happened, any way.
Walt
Sure they did. Lincoln just had more immigrant cannon-fodder. More cannon, too.
But thank you for your concise statement of your touchstone principle, "Might makes right."
Forgetting that without that 'might', Al Qaeda would cut your throat in a heart beat is for parlor pinks and dreamers. Maybe you are the conservative form of a parlor pink.
I say do them all -- all the Al Qaeda. You don't even want to use force on them, apparently.
Walt
Nice parry between you and the Walt.
I agree....that last line about sums it all up.
Regards.
Sure it has, just as I explained it to you. You don't like it, sue me.
You like that "suitors of Penelope" stuff, don't you, Walt? The story about how Odysseus came home, locked the doors, and killed everyone in the room? That your theory of the Union, Walt? Once they're in, I can do with them as I please? That was Hamilton's idea. Suck 'em in, chew 'em up, take all their money and send them home to their mamas. He was from New York, and that's how they wanted it.
So what is your theory of the "government that governs best", Wlat? How about wings off flies? Maximum misery for the maximum number of people? Is 600,000 dead not enough for you?
And what has Al-Q'aeda got to do with Civil War revisionism? Are you trying to assert that, without an illegitimate government, we'd be bereft of the means of defending ourselves?
You trying to articulate a need for Leviathan again, Wlat? How very Federalist of you.
Sure they did. Lincoln just had more immigrant cannon-fodder. More cannon, too.
More cannon, more railroads -- there was not a single place in the whole insurgent area to make a locomotive engine or driving wheel. Of course the only place in the south that could nake cannons was stolen from the federal government. And even though the south had the ability to make 300 rifles a day (the federal government was producing 5,000 per day), there were only enough skilled mechanics to employ 1/3 of the machines.
Seven out of eight immigrants went to the north - didn't have to compete with slave labor, don't you know.
It's like Bruce Catton said -- the south was almost helpless when it came to making war.
Walt
Wlat seems to think that if he can just annoy everyone into leaving the thread, he can go back to his ACW / AOL buddies and claim that he's cleaned up Free Republic and made the 'Net safe for Declarationists everywhere.
LOL.
I was right about you -- you like that wings off flies stuff.
Why do you pull the wings off flies, Wlat? To get their lunches?
"Helpless"......like at Chickamauga, and Chancellorsville. Yeah, the Confederacy was "helpless", all right. Tell me another.
Try again. Didn't have to put up with high mortality rates from cholera, malaria, and yellowjack, is more like it.
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