For the 161st Anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg the New York Times published an opinion piece today on Gettysburg and the Lost Cause. Simon Barnicle, an officer in the Army Reserve, recounted a recent trip to Gettysburg. He writes:
…Gettysburg is hallowed ground — a powerful tribute to the democratic experiment and those who died to preserve it. Yet the site and the surrounding area are littered with Confederate propaganda.
Along the same road as the monument to the First Minnesota lie similar tributes to Confederate regiments, some adorned by visitors with flowers and fresh-out-of-the-wrapper Confederate flags. Each implicitly gives permission to tourists to revere with equal measure those who fought for the United States and those who committed treason against it. Taken together, they are emblematic of the pervasive problem of both-sides-ism at the park and in Civil War education more broadly.
The National Park Service’s curatorial choices are not the root cause of America’s continued tolerance of Confederate imagery. But the sanitized version of history presented at Gettysburg contributes to it by focusing almost entirely on battlefield details while neglecting essential historical context.
It is not enough to teach visitors what happened at Gettysburg. They need to know what the battle meant — and what it still means.
To appreciate what’s missing from Gettysburg, it’s worth comparing the park with other American war memorials. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, for example, rely on simple architecture to provoke an emotional reaction without inundating visitors with historical information. You don’t learn many facts at either, but in a deeper sense you absorb what matters.
Gettysburg is not like that. It is a real place, where war is not an architectural abstraction — with fields where cannon shot flew, farmhouses where munitions were stored and orchards where men died. It brings back to life a war fought by real people.
Visitors at the National Park site can easily spend days learning the hour-by-hour rundown of the battle. Was the Union’s defense of Little Round Top actually essential? Was the man who invented baseball present? Just how many cannons were there at Gettysburg, the deadliest battle fought in the Western Hemisphere?
Go to Gettysburg, and you will learn.
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.
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.
If the Civil War was just a regrettable sectional rivalry, or a dispute with complicated and contested origins, the most interesting thing about the Battle of Gettysburg is just that it happened. Sapped of its moral context, it is simply a place to learn trivia and get good deals on Confederate merchandise.
But, of course, it was also the turning point in a war that nearly split the country in two, led to a rewrite of the Constitution and determined whether Black people would be citizens or property. The site of what was arguably the war’s most important battle cannot shy away from its stakes: preservation of the Union and abolition of chattel slavery.
There is nothing wrong with teaching granular details of military history — it is part of what makes Gettysburg special. But it is essential that visitors leave knowing what the battle meant for the country, and that they feel the meaning of it. Like the story of the founding of the United States, which many of us honor on Independence Day, the story of the Civil War is an inspiring and patriotic one. Even with its dark chapters and catastrophic costs, it is fundamentally a story about the triumph of freedom and democracy over tyranny and oppression.
That teenagers from Minnesota would travel far from home to lay down their lives for their country is a testament to the power of that country’s values and cause. That thousands of Black Americans would do the same — for a nation that had thus far done so little to secure their dignity — is as profound an example of faith in America as any.
The monument to the First Minnesota Infantry Regiment is moving not simply because it regales battlefield heroics but also because of what those heroics meant: When slaveholders sought to tear the country apart, Americans gave their lives to stop them.
That is the story of Gettysburg, and it’s a story worth telling.
Kevin Levin offers a critique of Barnicle’s OpEd saying:
If you go to Gettysburg with a bias toward what you already have decided the place is about you can certainly find evidence to support that bias. I have been to Gettysburg over 100 times in my life, studied and became a finalist to become a battlefield tour guide. America fought America at Gettysburg. Brother against brother. States rights and slavery were the main issues and if you didn’t know that before you arrived, I question where you’ve been for much of your learning years. Gettysburg is a military national park. It was designed initially for the purpose of military education. When you begin to understand what happened there, you are opened to a realization that the events that took place, tragic and horrific were about the human condition at the time. Slavery was ending all over the world. America, right or wrong, had to fight a war to end it, but we need to understand that the confederacy was part of that landscape. Vilifying it doesn’t make it less real. The men who fought and died there are American veterans, like it or not. If you understand that concept a little better, worrying about Confederate battle flags, monuments, tributes to fallen soldiers, blue or grey, you might understand 19 th century America better. Then, maybe you can enjoy your next visit there without placing contemporary values on a time you obviously don’t understand.