The Civil War in Popular Culture: Memory and Meaning

4. The Graying of Gettysburg National Military Park: Race, Erasure, Ideology, and Iconography

61 61 4 The Graying of Gettysburg National Military Park Race, Erasure, Ideology, and Iconography Robert E. Weir Modern-day Americans remember the Civil War in many ways, most of them historically inaccurate. Humorist Austin O’Malley (1858–1932) once quipped, “Memory is a crazy woman that hoards colored rags and throws away food.” Frederick Douglass agreed. In his 1871 Memorial Day address at Arlington National Cemetery, Douglass lambasted those seeking to rewrite the meaning of the Civil War: “May my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I forget the difference between the parties to that bloody conflict. . . . If this war is to be forgotten, I ask in the name of all things sacred what shall men remember?”1 What indeed? Until recently, Gettysburg and other former Civil War battlefields were largely collections of “colored rags”—repositories of moldering uniforms, rusty muskets, frayed regimental banners, and spent ammunition. The material culture of conflict was stripped of specificity, as if the only causes for which men died on the battlefield were abstractions such as glory, honor, and union. Starkly missing amid the rifles, banners, and uniforms was the mention of slavery or emancipation. Alas, as this essay argues, this was by design. It would take more than a century before the sort of memory Douglass referenced made its way into the narrative at Gettysburg National Military Park. Gettysburg, a small town of just 7,620 residents located in southern 62 Robert E. Weir Pennsylvania, has profited handsomely from displaying colored rags. Since the National Park Service (NPS) began gathering attendance figures in 1934, there have been more than 123.5 million visitors to Gettysburg. These numbers dwarf those of its closest competitor for tourists, Chickamauga in northern Georgia.2 For many Americans, a trip to Gettysburg is their most in-depth exposure to the Civil War. Historian James Horton notes that 80 percent of all Americans receive no formal training in history beyond high school. For good or ill, historical tourism shapes what is remembered.3 When President Abraham Lincoln dedicated a cemetery at Gettysburg just four months after the terrible events of July 1–3, 1863, he proclaimed that the “unfinished work” of the war was to bring forth “a new birth of freedom.”4 During his second inaugural speech, Lincoln reiterated the view that human bondage lay at the heart of secession: “One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war.”5 Yet until Gettysburg National Military Park (GNMP) unveiled its new visitor center on April 14, 2008, visitors would have been hard-pressed to find evidence of Lincoln’s thesis. The battlefield’s 1,328 monuments honor the sacrifice of white soldiers, but one gets little sense of the “difference between the parties” that clashed there. A single representation of nonwhite Americans exists: the Forty-Second New York Infantry memorial is topped with Native Americans, but only because they were the mascots of the Tammany Regiment. Historians have documented the quickness with which the Civil War’s emancipation themes gave way to reconciliation narratives that were thinly veiled bastions of what Canada’s National Post labeled “southern bias.”6 Even as Reconstruction unfolded, Gettysburg was burying its rich black past. No black regiments fought at Gettysburg, but African Americans were visible before, during, and after the battle. Of the town’s 2,400 residents in 1863, about 8 percent (189) were black.7 The all-black St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Zion Church hosted the Slave Refugee Society and was a stop on the Underground Railroad.8 Local residents resisted the Fugitive Slave Act and were outraged when Confederate raiders carried off 250 African Americans in the weeks preceding Lee’s entry into Gettysburg. They applauded black volunteers who repulsed Major General Jubal Early’s attempt The Graying of Gettysburg National Military Park 63 to cross the Susquehanna River and attack Harrisburg days before the clash at Gettysburg.9 However one parses the war’s initial causes, the conflict was about slavery by the time armies met at Gettysburg. As James McPherson, a nationally recognized historian, asserts, the Emancipation Proclamation “changed the war from one to restore the Union into one to destroy the old Union and a...