Union and States' Rights: 150 Years After Sumter, A Legal History of Interposition, Nullification, and Secession

11 Remembering Our Second Revolution

260 11Remembering Our Second Revolution Sesquicentennial Reflections on Civil War Historiography NormanW.Spaulding,StanfordUniversityLawSchool “We do not repeat because we repress, we repress because we repeat.” —Gilles Deluze, Difference and Repetition i. the sesquicentennial at fort sumter national monument S laveryandsecessionrestinuneasyunionattheFortSumterNationalMonument .Thisremainstrueevenafteranelaborate‘interpretive’renovation bytheNationalParkService(NPS)inpreparationforthesesquicentennial commemoration of the Civil War in 2011. The alterations were made to meet Congress’s demand that Civil War battlefields “recognize and include in all of theirpublicdisplaysandmultimediaeducationalpresentationstheuniquerole thattheinstitutionofslaveryplayedincausingtheCivilWar.”1 Theexplicitinclusionofslaveryrepresentedasubstantialdeviationfrompastpractice .Whenthe NPS published its first master plan for Fort Sumter before the centennial of the war,“thefort’sinterpretiveprogramwasbasedonthe1860 electionofPresident Abraham Lincoln, the secession of South Carolina, and the subsequent movement of Major Robert Anderson from Fort Moultrie to Fort Sumter. The major norman w. spaulding 261 focuswasontheinitialConfederateattackof1861andthefederalbombardments of 1863 and 1864, known as the siege of Charleston.”2 The relationship between slavery, secession, and the war appeared nowhere until 1995 when a “small exhibit” was installed inside the fort.3 TheabsenceofattentiontoslaveryatFortSumterandotherCivilWarbattlefields had been quite intentional up to that point. As the NPS’s chief historian describes: [T]he NPS recognized early the sensitivity among southerners of a federal agencyinterpretingtheCivilWarintheSouth.Inthe1930s,theNationalPark Service created an outside review process so that all interpretive scripts for Civil War battlefields in Virginia were reviewed by Virginia’s state historian, H. J. Eckenrode, and Douglas Southall Freeman, Robert E. Lee’s reverential biographer....NPS managers wanted to ensure that the causes of the war, especially issues related to slavery, remained outside battlefield interpretive programs....Between1933,whenFranklinD.RoosevelttransferredtheCivil WarbattlefieldsfromtheWarDepartmenttotheDepartmentoftheInterior, and the late 1990s, the NPS avoided all mention of the causes of the war in its exhibits, films, and publications. Eighty years after the 50th reunion at Gettysburg in 1913, the agency still adhered to Governor William Mann’s admonition that “we came here, I say, not to discuss what caused the war of 1861– 1865, but to talk over the events of the battle here as man to man.”4 The effect of this approach to interpretive programs, Michael Kammen has observed, was “to extract a mythic Confederate moral victory from the facts of defeat, with histrionics and warped history as minor costs.”5 Attachmenttotheuseofbattlefieldmemorialstopromptbothnostalgiafor SouthernresistanceandwhatNinaSilberhascalled“patrioticreflection”onthe war as a sentimental foundation for the “romance of reunion,” still runs deep.6 Aslateas2000,newsoftheinterpretiverenovationsprovoked“incendiary”accusations that the NPS planned to “‘demoniz[e] and slander[]’ the South with its ‘new’interpretationofthewar.”7 TheNPSneverthelesstransitionedfroma“slice oftimecommemorativeexperience”showcasingmartialvalortoa“holisticinterpretation ”thatmadeslaveryapartofthe“compellingstory”ofeachmemorial.8 ButasavisittoFortSumtertodaymakespainfullyclear,attemptingtodraw slaveryintoa‘holistic’narrativeofsecessionandwarhasprovednearlyasvexing as past efforts to leave it out. The bronze marker at the entrance to Liberty Square—thenewgardenandvisitoreducationcentererectedatthedockforthe ferry from Charleston to Fort Sumter—rather ambiguously reassures visitors that “‘We are not accountable for decisions made by those who came before.’”9 262 Remembering Our Second Revolution The marker gives no indication whether it is the decisions of Abraham Lincoln, Charles Sumner, Jefferson Davis, John Calhoun, or Charles Pinckney for which we are not accountable. But if we are not accountable for any of their decisions, what is there to commemorate at Fort Sumter? Like all national memorials, the site is a drawing to account before the bar of collective memory. National Parks tend to seduce more than menace visitors with the past,10 but sites marking the conjunctionofslaveryindemocraticsocietyandfratricidalviolenceonthescale of the Civil War can scarcely avoid either effect. Perhapsparkhistorianswantedvisitorstobeatlibertytoidentifyforthemselvesthedecisionsanddecisionmakersforwhomtheyrefusetofeelaccountable as they enter the place where the war began. Hence the name Liberty Square. Additional bronze markers in the gardens of the square leading to the visitor education center offer inspiring quotations from people who have made “significant contributions to expanding the cause of liberty” (including Benjamin Franklin,SojournerTruth,HarrietTubman,W.E.B.DuBois,PearlS.Buck,and Albert Einstein). “Each marker,” we are instructed, “invites the visitor to reflect onthemeaningsofliberty.”11 Andeach,initsownway,testifiesratherseductively totheeventualsuccessofwhattheintroductorymarkerstatesisthe“greatexperiment ”uponwhich“thisnationembarked...basedontheself-evidenttruththat ‘all men are created equal.’”12 But the markers and the reflections of none too few visitors are surely shadowedbytheobviouslymissingdefendersofalternativeideasoflibertythatflour ished in South Carolina—figures such as Robert Barnwell Rhett (owner of the Charleston Mercury,lawyer,UnitedStatesSenator,and“incessantdrummajor[] of secession”13 who helped split the Democratic party along sectional lines and draft the Constitution of the Confederate States of America), Edmund Ruffin (a farmer, slaveholder, and notorious Virginia Fire-Eater who aided the initial attack on Fort Sumter and committed suicide when the South lost the war),14 ChristopherMemminger(thewealthyCharlestonlawyer,slaveholder,drafterof the “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union...