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.

Whats interesting to me are these claims of sovereignty made by the confederate states, when their wealth, honor and property was at stake. Yet these same slave powers rejected the concept of 'popular sovereignty' as it applied to the new territories like Kansas in the west.

Thanks for taking the trouble to type out the political cartoon's legends, which I couldn't read. Pretty good cartoon, for 1861.

"Popular sovereignty" got into trouble with the Free Soilers and northern Whigs first and foremost. Lincoln cut his teeth on the doctrine, debating Douglas for the first time on "popular sovereignty" and the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, as a sort of platform (for Lincoln) on which to run for the U.S. Senate. Lincoln argued against popular sovereignty, and for outright prohibition of slavery in the Territories, on the analogy of the Northwest Ordinance.

Omigod! Whoop! -- There it is! "No controlling legal authority!!!!

I have no idea how you managed to twist my comments into that, but few of the conclusions you come to really surprise me any more. On the contrary, there was a controlling authority in the United States in the form of a working Supreme Court. Many of Lincoln's actions were taken to the court for judgement. In many cases the court approved of the actions, in others it did not. I do believe that Lincoln's decision should have been taken to the full court, and had the emergency lasted more than a few weeks I'm sure it would have. But the suspension of habeas corpus by Lincoln only lasted a few weeks.

It was Jefferson Davis, as you well know, who would brook no possible interference in the actions he took. His contempt for the judicial system was well known, otherwise why would he have refused to establish a confederate supreme court to begin with, in spite of the fact that his constitution required one? Do you have an answer for that puzzle?

the ACTUAL number of persons killed was about ONE MILLION. almost 20% were innocent civilians, who were raped,assaulted,robbed,tortured & MURDERED by the damnyankee invaders.

Can you name one?

Here are the names of 40 loyal Texans, hanged at Gainesville, Tx, in 1862, --just because they were loyal to Old Glory.

Nathaniel Clark, Wernell, Richard Martin, Grandpaw Burch, H.J. Esmond, Ward, Evans, Clem Woods, Wolsey, Manon, Leffel, A. B. McNeice, Wash Moirris, Wesley Morris, Thomas Floyd (shot), John Crisp, James Powers, Rama Dye, J. Dawson, Wiley, K. Morris, Barnes, Milburn, W. Anderson, Gross, Ward,, Dr. Johnson, Childs, Senir, Childs, Junior, Hampton, Locke, Foster, Fields, D. Anderson, D. Taylor, R. Manton, Jones, carmichael, Henry Cochran.

Walt

Found this:

"The North had a potential manpower superiority of more than three to one (counting only white men) and Union armed forces had an actual superiority of two to one during most of the war. In economic resources and logistical capacity the northern advantage was even greater. Thus, in this explanation, the Confederacy fought against overwhelming odds; its defeat was inevitable. But this explanation has not satisfied a good many analysts. History is replete with examples of peoples who have won or defended their independence against greater odds: the Netherlands against the Spain of Philip II; Switzerland against the Hapsburg empire; the American rebels of 1776 against mighty Britain; North Vietnam against the United States of 1970. Given the advantages of fighting on the defensive in its own territory with interior lines in which stalemate would be victory against a foe who must invade, conquer, occupy, and destroy the capacity to resist, the odds faced by the South were not formidable.

Rather, as another category of interpretations has it, internal divisions fatally weakened the Confederacy: the state-rights conflict between certain govern on and the Richmond government; the disaffection of non-slaveholders from a rich man's war and poor man's fight; libertarian opposition to necessary measures such as conscription and the suspension of habeas corpus; the lukewarm commitment to the Confederacy by quondam Whigs and unionists; the disloyalty of slaves who defected to the enemy whenever they had a chance; growing doubts among slaveowners themselves about the justice of their peculiar institution and their cause. "So the Confed- eracy succumbed to internal rather than external causes," according to numerous historians. The South suffered from a "weakness in morale," a "loss of the will to fight." The Confederacy did not lack "the means to continue the struggle," but "the will to do so." --BCF, P. 855

His sources:

Richard E. Beringer, Herman Hattaway, Archer Jones, and William N. Stilll jr., Why the South Lost the Civil War (Athens, Ga., 1986), 439, 5S; Kenneth M. Stampp, The Imperiled Union: Essays on the Background of the Civil War (New York, 1980),255 Clement Eaton, A History of the Southern Confederacy (Collier Books ed., New York, 1961), 250

My emphasis

And this was interesting:

"At the commencement of the withdrawal of the army from the lines on the night of the 2nd [of April 1865], it began to disintegrate, and straggling from the ranks increased up to the surrender on the 9th. On that day, as previously reported, there were only seven thousand eight hundred and ninety-two (7892) effective infantry. During the night, when the surrender became known, more than ten thousand men came in, as reported to me by the Chief Commissary of the Army. During the succeeding days stragglers continued to give themselves up, so that on the 12th April, according to the rolls of those paroled, twenty six thousand and eighteen (26,018) officers and men had surrendered. Men who had left the ranks on the march, and crossed James River, returned and gave themselves up, and many have since come to Richmond and surrendered. I have given these details that your Excellency might know the state of feeling which existed in the army ......" Letter from Lee to Davis dated 20 April 1865, Document 1006, in Dowdy (ed.), THE WARTIME PAPERS OF ROBERT E. LEE (NY: Da Capo Press).

And how about this:

"The people lacked 'patriotic devotion to the South,' he [Pollard] complained. ' Only the utmost rigor of conscription,' he argued, 'forced a majority of it's troops in the field; . . . half of these were disposed to desert on the first opportunities; and . . . the demands for military service were cheated in a way and to an extent unexampled in the case of any brave and honorable nation engaged in a war for its own existence.' 'We have,' Pollard pointed out as proof, 'the remarkable fact that in one year the Confederate States Attorney in Richmond tried eighteen hundred cases in that city on writs of habeas corpus for relief from conscription!'" p. 43-44, Southern Rights, Neely

The secesh could have won the war; they just flubbed it.

Walt

how many of MY family do you want me to name?

all total there was at least 92 (nobody is SURE whether or not some of the victims may have escaped-92 bodies were recovered & buried by neighbors,after the WAR CRIMINALS left the family farm.) women, children & elderly men (who were too old to bear arms for the southland. ALL the men & boys over the age of 12,who were capable of military service, were in the CSA.), who were tortured,robbed,assaulted & finally murdered by a group of WI & IL cavalry during a 3-day drunken orgy in 1864.

evidently they were abused & murdered by the "filth that came down from the north" ONLY because they were poor, American Indians & because the perpertrators KNEW that they would NOT be punished for their WAR CRIMES. in point of fact, the crimes against my family members were not even investigated by the yankee provost marshal.

the commission of WAR CRIMES was a PLANNED part of the overall damnyankee war strategy. any SERIOUS reading of wartime provost marshal documents of the yankee army will confirm that fact.

free dixie,sw

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