I didn’t anticipate hitting the computer first thing in the morning to write another post about Gettysburg. Two is enough on any given week, including the week of the anniversary of the battle, but an op-ed published today in The New York Times demands a response.
Author Simon Barnicle visited the park in April and walked away clearly disturbed by what he saw:
But for all the learning one can do at Gettysburg, there is a remarkable dearth of education. The National Park Service has in recent years made attempts to better contextualize the park. In 2008, a new visitor center opened that includes a small privately owned and operated Civil War museum for an extra fee. More recently, the park has added a couple of interpretive markers near Confederate monuments, which acknowledge the extent to which they sidestep the root causes of the war. These efforts are halfhearted at best. The main attraction remains the experience of visiting the battlefield itself — absorbing battle facts while surrounded by tributes honoring both sides.
The park is notably lacking in historical context and moral valence. Why was the war fought? What did Gettysburg mean for the United States? Was slavery good or bad? The answers to these questions may seem so obvious that they don’t require explanation, but the décor at the park and in the town of Gettysburg suggests otherwise.
In gift shops lining the streets downtown, I saw Confederate flags emblazoned on hoodies, koozies, car tire covers and underwear. T-shirts for sale featured slogans like “If at first you don’t secede, try, try again,” and “Descendant of a Confederate Civil War soldier.” There were Confederate beanies, ball caps, cowboy hats and more.
Even the official park store is in on the fun. For just $29, you can get your own Gettysburg Cannon Snow Globe, complete with a Confederate flag mounted alongside the Union one in the center. It would be a scandal and an outrage if, at the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York, you could purchase a snow globe with an Al Qaeda flag. It shouldn’t be OK for Confederate paraphernalia.
Gettysburg is a complicated place. The park’s physical and interpretive landscape have been shaped by a number of factors beginning almost immediately following the bloody battle in July 1863. Any assessment of Gettysburg must be sensitive to this history. Historical context and change over time matter.
Unfortunately, this op-ed reflects the public’s recent obsession with the Lost Cause. There is no question that it looms large at Gettysburg, most notably in the large Confederate monuments located along Seminary Ridge. Interestingly, the author makes no mention of these monuments.
The quantity of Confederate imagery at Gettysburg is a testament to the enduring power of Lost Cause ideology — the revisionist, pseudohistorical thesis dreamed up by defeated Southerners who maintained that the Civil War was not primarily about slavery and that the antebellum South was unfairly maligned by opportunistic Northerners.
The park’s hyperfixation on battle details and hand-wavy approach to everything else are hallmarks of the Lost Cause. If tourists spend all their time focused on the who and the what of Gettysburg — the generals, the regiments and the tactical decisions — they might forget to ponder the why.
To reduce the park’s interpretation to the Lost Cause misses the important work that has gone into aligning the stories told with more recent scholarship on the Civil War era. The author should have spent much more time in the visitor center. The exhibit on the battle and the war is one of the best around.
The exhibit, which is organized into 12 sections beginning with the causes of the war and ending with battlefield preservation. Each room has a theme which is connected to a snippet from the “Gettysburg Address”. So, for instance, the room on the campaign into Pennsylvania is titled, “Testing whether that nation can long endure” and the room on the period between 1863-1865 is titled, “The great task remaining before us.” Beyond the history of the battle, the rooms also discuss the civilian experience of both black and white residents of Gettysburg as well as the aftermath of battle and how Gettysburg has been remembered and commemorated over the years.
Both the exhibit and the film make it clear that slavery was the cause of the war and the abolition of slavery and preservation of the Union were its most important results.
Visitors to the park also have the opportunity to walk the battlefield with NPS rangers and historians. The focus of these walks and presentations introduce visitors to a wide range of subjects beyond the movement of troops and fighting. Many park rangers are now graduates of programs at colleges like Gettysburg College, University of Virginia, Virginia Tech, Shepherd College and elsewhere that offer students internship opportunities at Civil War sites. Their classroom and on-site work is helping to push battlefield interpretation in new and exciting directions.
As I see it, the biggest challenge at Gettysburg is narrowing the gap between the experience of visitors, who begin at the visitor center and those who simply park and walk the battlefield on their own. This is a challenge at any number of historic sites.
It’s the lack of interpretation on the battlefield—a distinction that is obscured in Barnicle’s piece—that exposes visitors not as much to the Lost Cause, as he suggests, but to that other category of Civil War memory: reconciliation.
Visitors get caught up in the ebb and flow of battle without reflecting on why there was a battle at all, how it fit into the broader history of the war, and its legacy. The experiences of the rank-and-file are reduced to three days of battle as if the color of their uniforms were insignificant and the side on which they fought didn’t matter.
Soldiers are all equally brave when viewing the battle through the lens of reconciliation. No one shirked their duty or behaved cowardly. The pristine landscape itself shapes the viewer’s experience by smoothing over the horrors of battle.
New interpretive markers have gone up around the battlefield, the content of which the author ignores, but any NPS employee at Gettysburg will readily admit that it is far from sufficient.
Having finished reading Barnicle’s op-ed I have the feeling that he went to Gettysburg looking for the Lost Cause. Like I said, you can find it, but if visitors spend their time wisely they will experience a much more nuanced and exciting place.
Ultimately, if you want to see even more change at battlefields like Gettysburg, call your local representatives. More importantly, vote for people who believe that our historic sites are worth saving and interpreting for all Americans.
Thanks for reading. I hope you and your family have a safe and happy Fourth of July.
Yes, it's complicated.
However, I say: the only problem with Barnicle's article is that he was probably under a word count limit.
Barnicle's pedigree is great: young army reserve officer, former Dem Senator Tina Smith staffer. Harvard cum laude with a new Dem-Prog oriented law firm almost on K Street (nearby, on G St).
Schlock shops in/around G'burg are in business to first pay their rents and then make profits. If troglodytes from across the nation are going to pay you to buy what most of the country considers traitorous, nobody can stop any of them.
A federal agency responsible to all 50 states including the formerly traitorous ones, has to offend no one. The National Park Service at Gettysburg is in a perpetual hot seat. A major offense taken by an opportunistic Lost Causer raising a stink to a racist senator can cost someone their job.
Thus, historians who are also bureaucrats always need a team of eyes looking backwards.
In 1987, the Smithsonian Institution's American History Museum unveiled 'A More Perfect Union: Japanese Americans and the U.S. Constitution'. It departed from happy-talk exhibits (Dorothy's Ruby Slippers has been their top display) to show their mistreatment by FDR and his War Department. On one side, it featured a concentration camp barrack room and stories of life (but not death: my grandmother was an early victim of Camp Jerome, Arkansas) behind barbed wire fences and machine-gun watchtowers, ostensibly for their protection but the guns aimed inside; on the other side, the weapons and exploits of the 442nd army battalion, co-curated by the very veterans.
There was a TREMENDOUS backlash against the use of federal money to ripping (one of) the band-aid(s) off the webs of lies layered over that entire unconstitutional exercise. The curators stood tall against the protests with the SI's backing. (They were also very concerned about these displays being vandalized.) Within a year, President Reagan signed a bill apologizing for the curtailment of civil liberties and granting each survivor $20k. This was coincidental, but a nice touch. Maybe it helped SI:
the political backlash against AHM telling the truth didn't cost anyone their jobs.
From my community's eyes, we gave a raised finger to the protests: we were the underdogs who finally had our day. Now, African Americans are seeing the slow dawning of their day as their story in this invasion and battle are starting to be examined. The arc of history bends towards justice, at least in this century.
(Gratitude to KML for his scholarship debunking the total myth of enslaved CSA soldiers, Kent Masterson Brown for including the roles of enslaved teamsters in Lee's army, et al.)
(n.b.: 'A More Perfect Union' had a 17-year run, then went to permanent online status. It is temporarily offline to convert to a new format.)
Thanks, Kevin.
So taken was I with Simon Barnicle's NYT op-ed that even before I knew that Kevin had responded, I was hoping he would, and wishing also to see a response from Ty Seidule. I do take Kevin's point. But I wish that somehow Yale's David Blight would comment too.
Please skip this paragraph if you already know who Ty Seidule is. He's the Army combat officer who transitioned to historian with an Ohio State Ph.D., rose to chair the West Point history department, retired as a brigadier general, served as vice chairman of the commission that recommended new names for Confederate-named Army posts, and still comments publicly about these matters. His book _Robert E. Lee and Me_ tells of his evolution from youthful ambition to become a gentleman like Lee to realization that no, he does NOT want that. I'd like to hear what Gen. Seidule thinks.
The issue of conflating reconciliation with Lost Causery (yes, a made-up word) makes me think also of Professor Blight. I think Kevin has at least touched on this before.
This discussion calls to mind, at least for me, Blight's recent _Atlantic_ article "A Yankee Apology for Reconstruction: The creators of Yale’s Civil War Memorial were more concerned with honoring 'both sides' than with the true meaning of the war." Excerpts:
QUOTE
[By] 1915 ... [a] culture of reconciliation ... had come to dominate American society ... [with a] deliberate forgetting of the deepest meanings of the war. 'Both sides' became a clarion call. ... Yale in its official wisdom could not and would not create a memorial to Union _victory_ nor to the end of slavery. All causes and consequences ... had to be dissolved into misty sentiments about unity and the strained image of 'mingled dust.' Such sentimental deception in the interest of national unity was widespread in both the South and the North.
UNQUOTE