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.
Not really.
Saddam's Iraq was seen as the cork on the bottle of Iranian militancy. That is why we supported him for eight years in his war with them.
You obviously don't know much about the subject.
Walt
That interpretation seems valid.
"We have the Executive with us, and the Senate & in all probability the H.R. too. Besides we have repealed the Missouri line & the Supreme Court in a decision of great power, has declared it, & all kindred measures on the part of the Federal Govt. unconstitutional null & void. So, that before our enemies can reach us, they must first break down the Supreme Court - change the Senate & seize the Executive & by an open appeal to Revolution, restore the Missouri line, repeal the Fugitive slave law & change the whole governt. As long as the Govt. is on our side I am for sustaining it, & using its power for our benefit, & placing the screws upon the throats of our opponents".
- Francis W. Pickens, Governor of South Carolina, June,1857
"No power in executive hands can be too great, no discretion too absolute, at such moments as these...we need a dictator. Let lawyers talk when the world has time to hear them. Now, let the sword do its work. Usurpations of power by the chief, for the preservation of the people from robbers and murderers, will be reckoned as genius and patriotism by all sensible men in the world now and by every historian that will judge the deed hereafter."-- Richmond Examiner, May 8, 1861.
Quoted from "The Coming Fury" p. 360 by Bruce Catton
"The unhappy fact was that it had become impossible to safeguard slavery without brutal violence to countless individuals; either the institution had to be given up, or the brutality committed.
The legislators of Louisiana and Arkansas, of Alabama and Georgia, with humane men like Ruffin and the Eastern Shore planters of Maryland, had faced this alternative. They had chosen the institution. The Richmond Examiner stated their choice in unflinching language:
It is all an hallucination to suppose that we are ever going to get rid of slavery, or that it will ever be desirable to do so. It is a thing that we cannot do without;that is righteous, profitable, and permanent, and that belongs to Southern society as inherently, intrinsically, and durably as the white race itself. Southern men should act as if the canopy of heaven were inscribed with a covenant, in letters of fire, that the negro is here, and here forever—is our property, and ours forever—is never to be emancipated—is to be kept hard at work and in rigid subjection all his days.
This has the ring of the Richmond publicist Fitzhugh, and would have been repudiated by many Southerners. But Jefferson Davis said, July 6, 1859, "There is not probably an intelligent mind among our own citizens who doubts either the moral or the legal right of the institution of African slavery." Senator A. G. ' Brown said September 4, 1858, that he wanted Cuban, Mexican, and Central American territory for slavery; "I would spread the blessings of slavery . . . to the uttermost ends of the earth." Such utterances treated slavery as permanent, and assumed that it must be defended at every point."
-- "The Coming Fury" by Bruce Catton
Walt
So you are no longer claiming secession is legal under U.S. law.
In any case, the United States Supreme Court ruled all acts and ordinances of secession null and void in law. So it is moot any way.
Walt
In the case of the United States during the ACW era, secession meant treason and unwarranted revolution.
Walt
Hmmm. And yet in the next post you quote the letter from Governor Pickens where he proudly stated that he demanded posession of the fort. No offer to pay, no negotiation.
As for the three men you claim were sent to pay for property seized, that is a misstatement. Their task, first and foremost, was for the purpose of negotiating friendly relations between the United States and the confederacy. In other words, to accept the confederate states as an independent country. Lincoln was not about to do that so the scheme was doomed from the start. Also, why should the United States government believe that the negotiations were in good faith? Having appropriated the property in the first place the confederates could have offered anything and the United States was in no position to complain. The time for negotiating the price of the facilities was before the confederates seized them.
Nonsense. Eminent domain implies a legal proceeding which was totally absent. The southern states seized the property, which was not theirs to begin with, at the point of a gun or through the rule of the mob. Nothing less.
"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."
Why not give the whole quote, stainless? Lincoln went on to add:
"But if the government, for instance, but simply insist on holding its own forts, or retaking those forts which belong to it, or the enforcement of the laws of the United States in the collection of duties upon foreign importations, or even the withdrawl of mails from those portions of the country where the mails themselves are habitually violated; would any or all of these things be coercion?...If they so, then it occurs to me that the means for the preservation of the Union they so greatly love, by their own estimation, is of a very thin and airy character."
Well, it's all ludicrous of course.
The so-called CSA had no assets to pay for the value of the real estate, facilities and equipment on federal property in the south. This begs the question of the value of the actual states themselves. Were the rebels going to pay for the value of the land made up in the Louisiana Purchase? Or replace the @ $100,000,000 spent to subdue the indians in Florida?
Perhaps the rebels planned to pay for the federal lands, etc. with the money raised from the act of the CSA congress (passed in May, 1861) that required --private-- debt owed to northern creditors be paid to the CSA treasury.
What a joke. The rebels were no better than common theives.
Walt
I'm glad you've finally accepted the fact that the southern states were still states in the Union. Having settled that, the President does indeed have the right to call up the militia and to take steps necessary to put down rebellion, which is what the southern states were engaged in.
As you know, the Supreme Court said just the opposite.
"....By the Constitution, Congress alone has the power to declare a national or foreign war. It cannot declare war against a State, or any number of States, by virtue of any clause in the Constitution. The Constitution confers on the President the whole Executive power. He is bound to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. He is Commander-in-chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several States when called into the actual service of the United States. He has no power to initiate or declare a war either against a foreign nation or a domestic State. But, by the Acts of Congress of February 28th, 1795, and 3d of March, 1807, he is authorized to called out the militia and use the military and naval forces of the United States in case of invasion by foreign nations and to suppress insurrection against the government of a State or of the United States."
Walt
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.
But you don't quote the founders.
James Madison:
"The essential difference between a free Government and Governments not free, is that the former is founded in compact, the parties to which are mutually and equally bound by it. Neither of them can have a greater right to break off from the bargain, then the other or others have to hold them to it. And certainly there is nothing in the Virginia resolutions of --98, adverse to this principle, which is that of common sense and common justice. The fallacy which draws a different conclusion from them lies in confounding a single party, with the parties to the Constitutional compact of the United States. The latter having made the compact may do what they will with it. The former as one only of the parties, owes fidelity to it, till released by consent, or absolved by an intolerable abuse of the power created....
"It is high time that the claim to secede at will should be put down by the public opinion; and I shall be glad to see the task commenced by someone who understands the subject."
12/23/32
Oh, check this out:
...in 1842 a group of prominent southern slaveholding members of the House of Representatives crafted the following statement to condemn the idea that the Union was not permanent:
"Whereas, the Federal Constitution is a permanent form of Government and of perpetual obligation... and the dissolution of the Union necessarily implies the destruction of that instrument, the overthrow of the American Republic, and the extinction of our national existance... [To advocate breaking up the Union is thus] a high breach of privilege, a contempt offered to this House, ... and involves necessarily, in its execution and its consequences, the destruction of our country and the crime of high treason." [Source: Congressional Globe, Jan. 1842, pp. 169-170.]
You don't quote the record, because the record will not support your position.
Walt
Nothing like a good civil war to sell a few newspapers, or fisticuffs and violence in the Capitol.
Good cartoon, though. Notice how the cartoonist amplifies the reader's sense of outrage by piling on his own, through the device of conspicuously refusing to show Brooks's face. Notice also the wild, barbarian hair and the posture of extreme aggression, contrasted to Sumner's gracefully fainting thespian. Notice also the deliberate juxtaposition of pen and cane, which is depicted as heavy and bloody. Depending on who you talk to, Brooks's cane was anything from a hollow, lightweight gutta-percha number to something approaching a shillelagh or knobkerry.
You obviously like to deal in insult and abuse. What is "obvious" to you, isn't anything you should take pride in. Just a hint.
You compare the caning of Senator Sumner with an abusive post on FR, and I shouldn't post the open record?
Walt
Such homering statements by enthusiasts among, or toadies for, the upper planting classes of Virginia and South Carolina may represent the authentic opinions of the "fire-eaters", but don't necessarily represent the views of the entire South, which were neither monolithic nor permanent. Don't paint the entire society with the same brush, as if Lenin spoke for all the people of all the Russias.
You bring up the subject of Unionist sentiment in the mountain counties of Virginia and Tennessee to portray the secession conventions as the work of cabals, just as did John G. Nicolay, Lincoln's private secretary who wrote a book on the Civil War years later.
And yet you seek, when vilifying the South for its opinions about slavery, to show that the entire Southern populace was uno animo on the slavery question, when it wasn't.
You are inconsistent in your use of information in your polemic, and consistent only in the tendentious, belligerent, and abusive delivery of it. All of which makes you the interlocutory equivalent of a Holiday Inn lounge act.
Codeword alert: "the record" = Wlat's Marxist quote-box.
You fellers don't have a "record", so you don't know jack, and you aren't a Union triumphalist, neo-Marxist, or Lincolnian corporatist, so you don't have the character to comment on subjects beyond your purview. In other words, shut up, "boah", the Webmaster is talking.
Yeah, right. Keep raving, Wlat.
LOL -- sure did! Damn that Abe Lincoln and his unwarranted revolution!
Don't know if I'd call it "treason", though, because "treason never prospers -- what's the reason?" You know that ditty, Wlat. Don't you? Quote the rest of it. Reach into your quote-box and quote the rest of it.
Sure would like to see the rest of that last sentence, Walt.
One of Madison's preoccupations in his later career was factionalism and the problem of avoiding a triumph of faction, which would introduce absolutism to government policy, and presumably the "intolerable abuse of ...power..." which he referred to in the bolded portion of the quote. Madison and the other Federalists had the cozy illusion -- I don't call it that lightly -- that the best men of the republic could always find a way to deflect their ambitious and unscrupulous inferiors. There are plenty of examples of the latter type who grasped for money or power, or both: Aaron Burr, Colonel House, Roscoe Conkling, Lyndon Johnson, and Huey Long. In the model contemplated by the framers, the best men -- men like John Quincy Adams, Webster and Calhoun, Sam Rayburn, and Mike Mansfield -- would continuously and effectively overmaster the plotting and scheming of the less scrupulous, so that their influence on policy would be minimized. Mind that in that era, policy flowed from Congress, rather than from the Executive and the Judiciary as it does now for the most part.
Your quote is a good one, but it doesn't explain everything that was on Madison's mind. Contextually, his reference to the Virginia Resolutions (which IIRC he co-authored) refers also to the nullification idea, which is exactly the opposition of a single State and its own interpretation of the Constitution to the interpretation all the other states have of it, and of the Supremacy Clause, and of the laws and policies flowing from the operation of the Constitution.
The last line you quote is a bridge to Madison's thinking about revolution in the face of an intolerable state of affairs. No Founder, as far as I know, ever posited that the States gave up the right to revolutionize their affairs, and I think you have insisted that you don't make that claim either.
Secession was revolution. That is the key. To you, it was just insurrection, whereas I think any fair person would conclude, from the power, strength, tenacity, and sheer valor of the resistance, that the South was indeed engaged in revolution. It wasn't just some rumpus over a tax on stills and whiskey.
[Resuming] "It is high time that the claim to secede at will should be put down by the public opinion; and I shall be glad to see the task commenced by someone who understands the subject."
"Secession at will" is a formulary, and would have described e.g. South Carolina's seceding in 1832 over nullification, or New England's seceding over tax policy after the War of 1812 (they threatened to).
"Seceding at will", if I understand Madison's intended use of it correctly, is just taking a walk on the Constitution, and it is not the same thing as what happened in 1860 and 1861. It is still a very serious Constitutional crisis, and "secession at will" would, if it followed the pattern of Virginia's and Texas's in 1861 (they both had constitutional conventions, and ratifying plebiscites), be sovereign acts of the People that would have to be taken very seriously, and which would still be binding on their Peoples.
Madison offers no guide about what should be done in a case of "secession at will", and I don't know, either, because sovereignty is involved. Legally the People who had seceded would have the right to leave the Union by resuming their powers, although Madison apparently didn't think so, or at least he said so in circumstances of a debate about nullification, which as the date on your quote shows, was in full cry. (And nullification, as I've stipulated before, did not rise to the level of secession, and failed constitutionally.)
Keep in mind, too, that Madison left the door open even in the case of "secession at will", in which he considered, in the highlighted text, that a State "seceding at will", so to speak, could be "absolved by an intolerable abuse of...power". Therefore, not even Madison considered all cases of "secession at will" to be invalid.
As to the level of provocation to test whether the South was under an "intolerable abuse of power" sufficient to justify secession at will, that is another discussion. But the question here is whether Madison's quote addresses the circumstances and secessions of 1860 and 1861, and it seems that it would not. The Civil War was very much more serious than "secession at will", and was in fact revolution.
"Whereas, the Federal Constitution is a permanent form of Government and of perpetual obligation... [To advocate breaking up the Union is thus] a high breach of privilege, a contempt offered to this House, ... and involves necessarily, in its execution and its consequences, the destruction of our country and the crime of high treason." [Source: Congressional Globe, Jan. 1842, pp. 169-170.]
Interesting quote, but who made this statement and why? Context, please. You say the people offering the statement were Southern congressmen.
You don't quote the record, because the record will not support your position.
They don't quote "the record", because it's all on your computer by definition.
" The admission of Kansas into the Union as a slave state is now a point of honor." If Kansas becomes a hireling (free) state, slave property will decline to half its present value in Missouri...and abolitionism will become the prevailing sentiment. So with Arkanas; so with upper Texas." -Congressman Preston Brooks, SC March 1856
So much for the fiction that disunion wasn't all about slavery...
There you go again, Walt, quoting the court as "proof" of your position. It's truly amazing how quickly that tone changes when Ex Parte Bollman and Swartwout comes up. There the court said that the suspension power was with the legislature, but since that means The Lincoln committed an unconstitutional act when he unilaterally suspended habeas corpus, you arbitrarily dismiss that little ruling. Go figure.
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