The Better Angels (Cover Story)
U.S. News & World Report, 09/30/2002, 133(12) p. 56-63, 3734 words.

Highlight: Why we are still fighting over who was right and who was wrong in the Civil War
Section: Culture & Ideas

Full Text: Who won the Civil War? You'd have a hard time finding out at Gettysburg. Sure, there are plenty of artifacts in the dilapidated vistor center: cases full of gray and blue uniforms, fading regimental flags, and rows of shining rifles. Step outside, and you'll learn about the flanking movements and angles of fire, the storied charges and tactical gambits that decided the momentous three-day battle. The 1,320 monuments, markers, and memorials that dot the fields of Gettysburg National Military Park pay special attention to troop movements and casualty lists, emphasizing the valor and courage of those who fought. Only a few mention the preservation of the Union; none celebrate the end of slavery.

For almost 2 million visitors each year, the Pennsylvania battlefield confirms everything they know from documentaries, Hollywood, and popular fiction: that the war was America's epic, a heroic conflict both sides fought for freedom. The same tale is told at battlefields across the country. And it's wrong.

In trying to honor the soldiers who died, Civil War battlefields have historically avoided referring to what the two armies were actually fighting about. As a result, say scholars and park service officials alike, the message of most Civil War parks is subtly pro-Confederate, alienating many people who should find the parks compelling. What's missing, they say, is a moral element, what Abraham Lincoln referred to as "the better angels of our nature." The Civil War was a fight over slavery. The South was for it, the North against it. Not talking about slavery, they say, erases right and wrong from history--not only in the parks but in the national memory itself.

Gettysburg is the fight's most prominent battlefield, traditionally described there as "the high-water mark of the Confederacy," with the spotlight on Robert E. Lee's audacious generalship and the bravery of the Confederate charges. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, and its "new birth of freedom," are relegated to a small monument across the street from the visitor center. That part of the story was "almost ignored . . . because it didn't agree with the older version of the battle" as a morally neutral conflict between two equally honorable foes, says Columbia University historian Eric Foner.

Visitors leave with the impression that Gettysburg was significant as a failed Confederate struggle, rather than as a Union victory and the site of the Gettysburg Address. "Not only does it perpetuate ignorance, it creates bias," says George Washington University history professor James Oliver Horton. "People who come with incomplete or incorrect ideas leave without having that bias challenged." The story is the same elsewhere; Foner says even Ken Burns's acclaimed documentary The Civil War, which is being rebroadcast this week for the first time since 1997, contributes by glossing over the conflict's messy aftermath.

But from Fort Sumter to Appomattox, parks that once confined their interpretation to military maneuvers and strategy are now beginning to talk about the causes and consequences of the war. "We're not being responsible public servants if we don't explain the history that underpins these battles," says park service Chief Historian Dwight Pitcaithley. "You can't possibly understand Gettysburg without understanding why these armies were at each other's throats."

Not everyone's ready to hear this version of the story. "This new interpretation is going to put the war in the context of slavery, and that's going to challenge a lot of people," says Princeton University historian James McPherson. "Some southerners will tell you that to put it in that context will reflect poorly on their ancestors. I would respond that like the Germans and the Japanese after World War II, they need to face up to the historical reality, if only to come to terms with the problems of their own society." In this fight over how we remember America's most divisive conflict, national parks may be the final battlegrounds.

The Civil War was America's defining moment. As McPherson has pointed out, it changed the idea of America from a plural Union to a singular nation. Before 1861, people said "the United States are." But after 1865, the admittedly ungrammatical usage "the United States is" symbolized a fundamental shift in how Americans saw themselves and each other.

As the still young nation expanded west in the 1840s and 1850s, a long-simmering moral debate over slavery came to a boil. Lincoln's presidential victory in 1860 brought the political conflict to what many consider its unavoidable conclusion: the secession of 11 southern states. Suddenly the fight over slavery became a fight for the future of the United States, a violent struggle to see if the vision put on paper by the Founding Fathers could overcome its fundamental contradictions. "The Civil War is our only `felt' history," wrote Robert Penn Warren in his 1961 meditation The Legacy of the Civil War. "Before the Civil War we had no history in the deepest and most inward sense."

Indeed, the war touched America like no other event before or since. More than 620,000 died; if the same proportion of the country's population were lost today, a memorial would need space for 5.5 million names. Colossal battles like Gettysburg combined increasingly modern weaponry, including highly accurate rifles, powerful cannon, and even early machine guns, with traditional battle tactics. The result? Suicidal displays of bravery like Gettysburg's legendary Pickett's Charge, where as many as 14,000 Confederates drove across a mile of open fields toward well-defended Union positions. Catastrophic casualties--including half the men who fought with Pickett--and massive campaigns touched every corner of the country. The South paid the highest price: A quarter of its white men ages 18-45 were killed or wounded. No family was spared the pain of the war.

After the surrender at Appomattox in April 1865, southern veterans returned to a world turned upside down. The southern economy was devastated, its social order wiped away almost overnight with the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments. Four million slaves became citizens. But while the immediate aftermath of the war promised a new age for blacks--at least at first--it left many whites on both sides bitter. For decades, Union veterans refused to return captured Rebel battle flags or share the war's hallowed fields with their foes. "No God-knows-who-was-right bosh must be tolerated at Gettysburg," wrote one Unionist on the 25th anniversary of the battle. "The men who won the victory there were eternally right, and the men who were defeated were eternally wrong."

As the country moved toward industrialization and began to exercise its power beyond its borders, such talk gave way to a national push to reconcile North and South. Reunion meant the end of Reconstruction, the dramatic, traumatic postwar effort to give black Americans equality. For whites North and South, giving blacks the vote had been a massive step, unthinkable even in the early years of the war. (After all, women wouldn't be trusted with the ballot until 1920.) Whites on both sides agreed that the years from 1865 to 1877 had been a cruel mistake, a deliberate attempt by northern radicals to humiliate and punish the already battered South. Jim Crow laws were set up to prevent black Americans from voting. Segregation reminded them of their place at the bottom of the social order. And lynchings reminded them of the consequences of forgetting.

It was in this environment that the first "revisionist" history of the war emerged, based on key themes repeated in southern memoirs, novels, school textbooks, and histories. The goal was clear. "If we cannot justify the South in the act of Secession, we will go down in History solely as a brave, impulsive but rash people who attempted in an illegal manner to overthrow the Union of our Country," wrote a United Confederate Veterans commander. The new movement took its name from an 1867 history of the Confederacy: The Lost Cause.

"Incident." Former Confederates rallied to the call. President Jefferson Davis's 1,279-page The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government is typical. Writing in 1881, Davis blames the war entirely on the North, arguing that "slavery was in no wise the cause of the conflict, but only an incident." The Lost Cause was based on the idea that slave and master had been members of a mutually beneficial order. "Never was there happier dependence of labor and capital on each other," Davis wrote. "The tempter came, like the serpent of Eden, and decoyed [slaves] with the magic word of `freedom' . . . . He put arms in their hands, and trained their humble but emotional natures to deeds of violence and bloodshed, and sent them out to devastate their benefactors."

Not all former Confederates bought into the rhetoric. "We went to war on account of the thing we quarrelled with the North about. I never heard of any other cause of quarrel than slavery," wrote Confederate guerrilla John Mosby, the famous "Gray Ghost." "Men fight from sentiment. After the fight is over they invent some fanciful theory on which they imagine that they fought."

But for most, the Lost Cause was more appealing than the realities of war and Reconstruction. Advocates pushed for their version of history, erecting memorials to Confederate heroes and faithful slaves across the South. Sanctifying battlefields was part of this push toward national reunion. Gettysburg was set aside by Congress in 1895, and the Pennsylvania battlefield and others like it had no place for stories that might sully the Blue and Gray. "How better to reunify the country than through this expression of mutual sacrifice and adventure?" says David Blight, author of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. But the road to reconciliation had a cost. "By forging sacred ground around mutual sacrifice, any narrative about broader consequences and causes vanished." Nostalgic northerners, increasingly uncomfortable with the direction the industrial age was taking them, bought into this romantic image of a past that never was.

The Lost Cause could also be called the Gone With the Wind school of American history: By the time Margaret Mitchell's plantation epic premiered in a segregated Atlanta in 1939, the Lost Cause was firmly embedded in the American consciousness. Loyal slaves, greedy carpetbaggers, crass Union soldiers, moonlight and magnolias: All had become accepted truth, North and South. "It's no coincidence Gone With the Wind made such a huge impact," McPherson says. "It tended to coincide with the interpretation of Civil War history in the first part of the century." The North had won the war, but by the turn of the century it was apparent that the South had won the peace.

More than a century later, the pendulum is swinging the other way. In a 1995 speech commemorating the 100th anniversary of the park, Gettysburg Superintendent John Latschar attacked the Lost Cause mythology head-on. "We have bent over backwards to avoid any notion of fixing blame for the war," he said. "We are extremely reluctant to tackle that issue, partially due to our sense of `fairness'--which only extends to our white constituency--and partially, I would suggest, due to the still lingering affects of the `myth of the Lost Cause.' " By neglecting the causes of the war, Latschar argued, the park had failed to make itself relevant to all Americans.

His remarks sparked a furor in some quarters. The secretary of the interior received more than 1,100 postcards from the Sons of Confederate Veterans accusing Latschar of trying to "modify and alter historical events to make them more `palatable' to a greater number of park visitors." They insisted the park "return to its unaligned and apolitical policies of the past, presenting history, not opinions."

But whose history? A 1994 survey showed Gettysburg's visitors are mostly older: More than half graduated from high school before the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Park officials say blacks--whose freedom the war was ostensibly fought over--represent a tiny fraction of visitors.

For decades, Civil War battlefields saw a steady stream of Civil War buffs who demanded little more than military history. Limited funding and fear of controversy discouraged change. "In the '80s all we did was interpret what happened in the boundaries of the park. There was an aversion to controversial issues," says Scott Hartwig, Gettysburg's supervisory historian and a 23-year park veteran. The past decade has seen a dramatic revival of interest in the war, spurred by documentaries like The Civil War and films like Glory and Gettysburg, and pressure for change. Says Hartwig: "In the '90s, parks were encouraged to go beyond their boundaries and given the green light to forge ahead and interpret history."

At Gettysburg, the traditional "who shot whom, where" approach came under fire just as planning for a new visitor center got underway. Parts of the center are almost a century old and deteriorating fast. Architects say the facility, once a private home, can reasonably handle 400,000 visitors a year; in 2001 it saw 1,121,039. Many of the museum's collections have been damaged by years of improper storage. The magnificent Gettysburg cyclorama painting, 356 feet long, is falling apart.

The new center, which will be almost entirely funded by private donations, has been the source of controversy for years. For one thing, its budget has more than doubled, to $95 million. But planners say the museum, scheduled to open in 2006, is going to put more of the park's collections on display and provide much more context than ever before. Preliminary exhibit plans show it to be inspired more by the organized narrative and primary-source-rich approach of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., than by the traditional "books on walls" format. Since soldiers and civilians kept diaries and wrote uncensored letters, designers will rely heavily on quotes to tell the story. "We want to let the participants speak for themselves and not tell visitors how they should think," says Hartwig, and "let the people who lived through it explain themselves in the context of the time in which they lived."

Real people. Exhibits will call attention to the impact of the war on civilians, especially the role of women in the war effort. Civilian diaries would show how losing a husband or son shattered families North and South or the effects of armies on those whose homes were plundered. And, of course, slavery will take a featured role: In a section labeled "Causes of War," artifacts might include slave manacles and a copy of Uncle Tom's Cabin along with text explaining the centrality of slavery to the southern economy and social structure. To make the interpretation as specific to Gettysburg as possible, curators hope to tell the story of free black farmers who lived on the battlefield but fled as the Confederate Army rounded up "contrabands" and freedmen alike.

In part, this new tack is an outgrowth of changes in the way history is written. "Historians have become much more attuned to what soldiers felt and the impact on civilians," says David Goldfield, author of Still Fighting the Civil War: The American South and Southern History. "The education of historians in the '60s and '70s led to a greater realization that there were lots of invisible people whose stories had not been told: common soldiers, common men and women." Starting in 1994, the park service enlisted the Organization of American Historians to review parks around the country. In the years since, National Park Service Civil War battlefield superintendents have unanimously agreed that their educational efforts had to present battles in context. In 1999, Congress went further, in a directive introduced by Illinois Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., ordering the park service "to encourage Civil War battle sites to recognize and include in all of their public displays . . . the unique role that the institution of slavery played in causing the Civil War."

So far, exhibit plans for the new visitor center have attracted widespread support from academics--and derision from some in the preservation community and groups like the Sons of Confederate Veterans. "The danger is the park service might develop a party line. We can't judge these people by 2002 standards," says former park service Chief Historian Edwin Bearss, a park ranger since 1955 who still leads battlefield tours around the country. "How the park service and the government meet that challenge causes concerns--will they meet it as Big Brother or in a fair and balanced way?"

As far as some are concerned, the scale of the new Gettysburg museum is a sign it's already too late. "People go to the battlefield to learn about the battle. They're not there to learn about the economy, or women, or about slavery," says HeritagePAC Director Jerry Russell, a prominent preservationist and outspoken critic of the planned center. By trying to cram more background info into a visit, Russell argues, site-specific interpretation will be crowded out, turning battlefields into cookie-cutter museums with nothing unique to offer. "The park service has decided what people need to know, rather than telling visitors what they want to know."

Others fear contextual interpretation will end up placing blame for the war on their ancestors. "Most people have very skimpy knowledge," says Allen Sullivant, chief of heritage defense for the Sons of Confederate Veterans. The Tennessee-based organization, which has over 30,000 members, mounted a letter-writing campaign this year to protest the changes at Gettysburg and other battlefield parks. "We don't need to give visitors an entire history of the antebellum South so they come away with the idea that one side was the villain. . . . That involves yet another reconstruction of southern history."

Historians bristle at that accusation. "Every history is revisionist history. That's what the job of a historian is," says Columbia's Foner. Good history sheds light on the past without assigning blame, a lesson ex-Confederate Mosby grasped long ago: "I am not ashamed that my family were slaveholders. It was our inheritance. Neither am I ashamed that my ancestors were pirates and cattle thieves," he wrote in 1907. "People must be judged by the standard of their own age."

Of course, context is a two-way street. Popular memory helped the North avoid uncomfortable truths. While accepting the Lost Cause's image of southerners as victims, northerners adopted an idealized vision of their own role in the war, a self-righteous conviction that Warren called the "Treasury of Virtue." Northerners fought to free the slaves, a cause so noble any subsequent failures--the abandonment of Reconstruction, racism in the North, ongoing inequality--could be forgiven. "When one is happy in forgetfulness, facts get forgotten," Warren wrote.

Part of explaining the war, park service officials say, is showing complexities on both sides. Though slavery was the primary cause of the war, after Secession states' rights preoccupied North and South. The idea of fighting to end slavery evolved gradually. The Emancipation Proclamation, issued 140 years ago this week, was a tentative gesture that freed slaves only in states that were "in rebellion against the United States." Where the proclamation was most influential was in the capitals of Britain and France: As McPherson explains in his new bestseller, Crossroads of Freedom, framing the conflict in terms of slavery--along with a decisive Confederate defeat at Antietam--crushed the South's hopes for diplomatic recognition.

Though the war ended slavery, there was plenty of racism to go around. "There is not a soldier in the army but would give three nigers [sic] for one sheep," a Michigan private wrote his family before Gettysburg. His letter shocks high schoolers who read it as part of a park educational program. "We want visitors to walk out understanding there's a lot of complex attitudes. People like to be challenged and intellectually stimulated," says Barbara Sanders, Gettysburg's education specialist. "Even people who leave angry, we've at least started them thinking."

Shots elsewhere. This new presentation of the Civil War has already shown up at smaller parks. Fort Sumter, where the first shots of the war were fired, used to tell visitors the war was the result of "decades of sectional conflict"--and nothing more. An expanded visitor center that opened this spring talks for the first time about South Carolina's role as the first state to secede and Charleston's central role as a slave trade depot. "We're on the point of the sword for the park service in regard to the way we now interpret more holistically the causes of the Civil War," says Fort Sumter Superintendent John Tucker. "People in the parks are learning that visitors want to know why." The trend isn't limited to battlefields. Plantation museums in Mississippi and Louisiana are focusing on the lives of the slaves who made the big houses run. Even sites dealing with other eras are widening their scope.

For the park service, visitor reaction will be crucial. Is the average American ready for the complications and contradictions at the heart of the Civil War? More important, are visitors able to understand their ancestors in the context of their times? If not, more information may only muddy the waters--or, worse, end up alienating those who feel they are being blamed for the actions of their great-great-grandfathers. In that light, the new approach to telling our nation's story is a leap of faith. "People understand the contradictions," says Ken Burns. "What will undoubtedly not drive them away is further complicating the war. To soft-pedal history is doing a disservice to people."