Gee, I wonder where they got that idea?
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 issue always comes up and I think 4CJ, Bill, LG, and others have covered it pretty well.
Then you think wrongly. Let's take the thesis advanced by these above neo-confederate apologists, that the confederate rebellion states had legally dismembered the Union. They were taking possession of, by force, and ILLEGALLY stealing millions of dollars of U.S. federal property....forts, ammunition and stores in every single one of them. These blatant acts of war, would have entitled the declaration of the commencement of hostilities if these were instead, say, the actions of Canada, nationalizing U.S. investments north of the border. So you guys can humbug all you want, true Constitutional legal scholars can only laugh and marvel at the persistent display of willful ignorance by what borders on a religious cult by you guys.
"What is ``invasion''? Would the marching of an army into South California, for instance, without the consent of her people, and in hostility against them, be coercion or invasion? I very frankly say, I think it would be invasion, and it would be coercion too, if the people of that country were forced to submit."There you have it, Mr. Ross.Abraham Lincoln, "Speech from the Balcony of the Bates House at Indianapolis, Indiana", 11 Feb 1861, Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Roy P. Basler, ed., vol IV. p.195.
[Henry E. Hallam, The Constitutional History of England from Henry VII to George II, (1827)]
-F.W. Pickens, South Carolina
Journal of the Senate of South Carolina, 1861
Hoist by your own petard. The South's refusal to abide by losing a national election and its sore-loser 'secession' and larcenies made force necessary....
Perhaps this is where we part, Mr. Ross. The states are more powerful -ie. the people. I believe in soveriegnty, home-rule, and limited powers on the federal government (see ammendment X) just as the Founders intended.
Good e'vn
This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.
Consider this:
"As far as the Federal Constitution is concerned, then, the States can exercise all powers that the Constitution does not withhold from them. The Federal Government and the States thus face different default rules: where the Constitution is silent about the exercise of a particular power--that is, where the Constitution does not speak either expressly or by necessary implication--the Federal Government lacks that power and the States enjoy it."I'm signing off, have a pleasant evening, sir.- Justice Thomas, US Term Limits v Thornton, 514 U.S. 779 (1995).
Napoleon Bonaparte
Never met a tyrant you couldn't love, did you, Wlat? I never thought I'd see someone justifying Saddam in the threads of FreeRepublic.
Nonresponsive. Fallacy of distraction.
Walt
Rebellion and insurrection are not secession, and vice versa. Nullification was rebellion in the face of the Supremacy Clause, and even Jefferson Davis recognized it as rebellion in his inaugural speech in Montgomery.
Secession, however, was accomplished by sovereign acts of the People in convention assembled, by the same procedure which the People of each separate State had separately ratified the Constitution in 1787.
Hamiltonians and other Leviathan-government apologists have always shouted "Now we've got you!!" as if ratfication were an invincible bond of slavery to the Constitution. On the contrary, the government of the United States is "perpetual", which means not what most people would think, viz. permanent, but rather "continuous" and continuously assented to. The People have the power to dissolve their government. What the Federalists have argued without proving it (they can't) is that "the People" now means the entire mass of the citizenry of the United States. This is a utile fiction put about by e.g. John Jay, a notorious Federalist propagandist, and by Abraham Lincoln, who used it to argue that the Southern States couldn't leave the Union without some sort of consent of the other States in the Union. Which was false -- but he was committed to forcing them to stay by open warfare.
"The People" in the American system is the People of a State. There is no unitary, lumpen "People of the United States". The People met in conventions and burgesses in their States to decide whether to send delegates to the First and Second Continental Congresses, and likewise to consider the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution. When the People ratify amendments to the Constitution, they do so State by State, either by meeting in convention or by acts of their legislatures. The People do not meet for a nationwide plebiscite to amend the Constitution, they meet in their States, because each State is a People. And as a People, they have obligations under the Constitution, but they also have the power to resume their full measure of sovereignty and withdraw from the Union -- one would hope, only after careful deliberation, and only under severe provocation. As they did in 1860 and 1861.
So much for remedial political organization.
The significance of the identification of each People with a State lies in understanding that Lincoln meant to deny the legitimacy of the secession conventions, and so he resorted to the unified-People ploy and asserted that the Union antedated the Constitution and was therefore legally superior to it, and the sole vessel of Sovereignty. He made this argument out of political necessity, since he needed to preserve the Union by force of arms for other reasons, and he needed a theory that would justify waging war to forbid secession. But he was wrong, and the People met in Convention did resume the powers they'd delegated to the United States Government under the Constitution. They had, and they have, the right and power to do so. Nobody ever contested that right, until Lincoln decided to make the South his thrall.
Even taking your argument at face value, it falls of its own weight, as the President, as Commander in Chief, had every right to maintain the pre-existing properties of the Federal authority...such as Fort Sumter.
I'll defer to stainlessbanner on that point. But I will just point out that, absent eminent domain, there was still a question of the right of the U.S. Government to operate facilities in another country. Now, there may have been various conveyances, similar to the clauses in the Constitution providing for the creation of the District of Columbia (of which Virginia's portion has since been returned, the present District being all on the right bank of the Potomac now). Matters legally should have proceeded from that basis.
As for expropriation, we all know what happened when Mexico and then Cuba expropriated American oil leases and refineries in their countries -- nada, zip, zilch. But since the forts and arsenals were owned under government-to-government agreements, those should have continued in force and should have ruled.
[Don't tell me you have a revisionist wacko version of that too].
Well, thanks for the value judgement -- kinda sounds like you already have your mind made up, doesn't it?
Ordinarily your statement would be correct. The Supremacy Clause and Article I would govern, and States would be forbidden to lay taxes or claims on federal property.
However, we are talking about secession, in which case the Constitution and the Union lapse, the States cease to be parts of the Union bound by the Supremacy Clause, and their officers and citizens cease to be citizens of the United States, or to have any political intercourse with the remaining States.
That is what secession really means.
Oh, Walt, you're such a hoot! [Quoting you]
Okay, let's try:
[Wlat, trying to change the subject again on another poster] Why do you think after all this U.S. aid, did Saddam Hussein try and assassinate George Bush Sr. in 1993?
Because George Senior b*tch-slapped his sorry *ss all the way from Kuwait to Basra, and would have thrown his carcass to the Kurds if he'd had any sense. Because those few days were the closest Sod-boy has ever come to biting the Celestial Green Weenie since he murdered his way to power.
Which is relevant to this thread how?
</distraction>
Although some really wild figures have gone around -- one said as many as 100,000 Iraqi soldiers died in the Gulf war -- a later figure put Iraqi KIA at @ 1,800.
Right around 3,000 Americans died on 9/11.
If Saddam was involved in 9/11, as seems likely, who put a whipping on whom?
Walt
Gee, I wonder where they got that idea?
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.