The Civil War Institute did breakout sessions and one that I went to had National Park Service personnel and the director of a site in New Jersey talked about how their sites interpreting race and slavery.
Chris Gwinn described Gettysburg National Military Park’s efforts to overcome its historic neglect of the impact of the battle on local African Americans. When I came to Gettysburg in 1969, there was mention of slavery in terms of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, but almost nowhere else did I hear of Black people.
Gwinn said that “the new museum and visitors center, which was opened in 2008. It was opened fifteen years ago but we still refer to it as ‘the new museum,’ which is very Park Service. My guess is that many of you went to the old museum, across the street from the National Cemetery. The primary purpose of the old museum was to house the Cyclorama. That building was a kind of Frankenstein building that the Park Service inherited. It was similar to going up to your grandparents attic. Kind’a dank, with all kinds of stuff in there, but it was stuff for stuff sake. You could walk through that old museum and read every label on every exhibit, and you would leave that building not knowing what the battle was fought over, or what the American Civil War was about, you might not even know who won the Battle of Gettysburg.” That building, he says. “was an abject failure.”
Some visitors today tell the staff that they long for that old building. But, “it wasn’t doing a good job at telling what was at stake during the American Civil War,” said Gwinn. Now, when you walk into the museum today, “you are confronted with the issue of slavery.”
While the museum now takes on the issue of slavery, Gwinn says that it is harder to look at the issue on the battlefield. “A museum is dynamic. It is a blank slate. The battlefield is fairly static. How can you contextualize, for visitors, out on the battlefield akin to what we did in the museum? The battlefield, even today, is largely confined to the military…Visitors need that spacial understanding of the battle. However, there are perspective on the battle and campaign that are largely missing. ”
“If you are going down Seminary Avenue, where most of Confederate monuments are located, those are heroic depictions of the Confederacy. They don’t address the issue of slavery, they are silent on that.” Gwinn said that the rehabilitation of the James Warfield House at the intersection of West Confederate Avenue and the Millerstown Road is an ongoing project. James Warfield and his family were African Americans. He was a blacksmith. “This site has the potential to give visitors a very different perspective on the Gettysburg Campaign. This “new” building on the Confederate side of the battlefield offers visitors a very different perspective on the Gettysburg Campaign and that, in a certain sense, is a counterpoint to what they might have seen at the Virginia Memorial.”
Gwinn said that the National Park Service tends to move at a “glacial speed” because it “takes us a long time to get funded, get contracts and work done.” Gwinn said that “we were trying to bring the story of James Warfield back to the battlefield. To accompany that we have added interpretive markers to that site that talk about the Underground Railroad, and the impact of the Confederate invasion on the African American community of Adams County. The Confederate Army was actively rounding up the Free Blacks population and sending them South in chains. This is very different perspective on the Gettysburg Campaign.” Gwinn says that it should be a formal tour stop on the Gettysburg map so that buses and tour guides take people there. This will allow them to talk about the civilian and African American experiences during the battle.
Warfield’s daughter lived until the Eisenhower Administration in the 1950s. “The Eisenhower site is on the other side of Warfield Ridge and we can thematically connect those two stories,” said Gwinn.
Chris Young spoke next on efforts at the Chickamauga National Park, where he works for the National Park Service. When he arrived to work at the park, it only had one panel on the causes of the Civil War, which was erected in the 21st Century, that discussed slavery. For the Sesquicentennial there was a series of programs explaining the context of slavery near Chickamauga. These included the debates over slavery during the Lincoln election, the freeing of slaves, and the recruitment of United States Colored Troops. They also depicted the U.S.C.T. looking for the bodies of men killed during the battles at the site.
The staff replaced the old film shown at the visitor’s center which was made in the 1990s and “was hopelessly out of date,” according to Chris Young.
Isabela Morales works at the Sourland African American Museum in New Jersey. The house she interprets belonged to a U.S.C.T. soldier. She says that they tell stories that relate to local families that carry broader significance, even back to the Civil War. “We don’t have people coming to the site that have a narrow focus on Civil War history. We can give visitors a broader context right from the beginning. We are reaching out to local schools for visitors. We have events at the house that encourage people to come.”
She says that the site came out of the work of two community members. “Two African American women did the research that led to the founding of the site. They learned through their research about how it speaks to the Revolution, how it speaks to the Civil War. It was African American owned land from an early period.”
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