Interpreting Civil War Battlefields in the Trump Era

Donald Trump and Steve Bannon on the Gettysburg battlefield (Source: The Boston Globe)

Twenty-five years ago the most controversial question surrounding the interpretation of Civil War battlefields was whether to broaden the focus to include civilians, a clear understanding that slavery caused the war and that emancipation and the end of slavery was the war’s most important result. There actually were people who believed that visitors should learn little more than what took place on the battlefield, including the strategic and tactical decisions that shaped the battle’s outcome and the experience of the common soldier.

Anything more was viewed as politically inspired or an attempt to turn to inject Civil War battlefields with “political correctness.”

Visit any Civil War battlefield today and you will see museum exhibits and wayside markers that explore this larger narrative for the benefit of visitors. National Park Service rangers offer programs and walking tours that focus specifically on the subject of slavery, civilians, and other topics that allow visitors to make sense of the fighting within a larger historical context.

Today there is nothing controversial about this broader focus. It’s simply good history.

In a piece published in Civil War Times magazine in 2009 titled “Go To Gettysburg!” and recently reprinted in his book, The Enduring Civil War, historian Gary Gallagher wrote:

There has never been a better time to visit Gettysburg. Both the historical landscape and the National Park Service’s interpretation affords visitors a perfect opportunity to understand what brought the armies to Pennsylvania, how the battle unfolded, what Union victory meant in the broader sweep of the war, and how Americans have remembered what the soldiers—and Abraham Lincoln—did there in 1863.

Gallagher perfectly encapsulates the broader historical focus introduced at battlefield parks, including Gettysburg, by the eve of the Civil War sesquicentennial, which began in 2011 and ran through 2015.

While Gallagher has argued for an expanded interpretation of Gettysburg to include how the battle has been remembered, he appears to believe that a visit to a Civil War battlefield is a dive into its history and the broader events that took place roughly between 1861 and 1865.

The point seems so obvious that you might wonder why I even bother to point it out.

A visitor should always expect when visiting a historic site that its history will occupy center stage, but over the past ten years it has become increasingly difficult to draw a sharp line between the history of sites like Civil War battlefields and the present.

Of course, our historic sites have always been situated in the culture and politics of the present. This is especially true of Civil War-related sites. In 1925 the Ku Klux Klan held a rally on the Gettysburg battlefield. In July of last year the National Park Service published a report on the history of segregation in Virginia’s parks. [I highly recommend the chapter focusing on African Americans, who worked at the Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park as part of the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s.]

You can’t understand the commemorative events on Civil War battlefields during the 100th anniversary of the war apart from the Cold War and Civil Rights Movement. Fifty-years later the election of the nation’s first Black president helped to frame the next major anniversary.

But something has shifted since 2015 that I am still trying to get my head around. I recently attempted to explore this in terms of our current language of Civil War memory.

We Need a New Language of Civil War Memory

It is now much more difficult to ignore the present when looking for the past at Civil War battlefields. My short list of current/recent events includes: Dylann Roof, Black Lives Matter, Civil War/Confederate monuments, White Nationalists, George Floyd, President Donald Trump, calls for secession, and predictions of another civil war.

Visitors have never traveled to Civil War battlefields as blank slates, even if they know little about the actual history of the site. What they learn on site is filtered through their cultural and political world view. Some people come looking for a reconciliationist-inspired account of brave soldiers making war or one another. Others come looking for the Lost Cause stories they heard as children while, more recently, others are on the lookout for stories of emancipation and freedom.

I am noticing in the history tours that I have recently led that the questions and comments from participants are now, more than ever, more explicitly informed by recent events. Many visitors are traveling to Civil War sites with questions about symbols of the Confederacy, the language of secession coming from certain elected leaders. They may be traveling from states that have passed or are considering legislation limiting the teaching of certain aspects of our past.

Educators and guides need to be prepared to respond to these questions and manage the tense discussions that have and will likely continue to take place for the foreseeable future. They need to be prepared when a visitor, who is disatisfied or suspicious of a tour or specific interpretive point, accuses their guide of engaging in Critical Race Theory or encouraging visitors to ‘hate America.’

How should a guide at Gettysburg, for example, respond when an individual inquires about the current controversy surrounding Confederate monuments while walking along Seminary Ridge in sight of the state monuments honoring the Confederacy? Can or should a guide engage her audience about their appropriateness on a battlefield?

However difficult, these are opportunities to learn about the past and for people from different backgrounds to listen and learn from one another. I think we are passed the point where we can expect visitors to historic sites to set aside their understanding of current controversies and concerns.

Perhaps our Civil War battlefields are the perfect places to address them head on.

What do you think?