The cause of the Civil War is one of the most enduring arguments of American history. Academics began reaching a consensus half a century ago that the political, economic and social divisions of the 1860s inevitably led back to "the peculiar institution," as slavery was called.
But there remains deep attachment to the idea -- historians flatly call it myth -- that the South, overwhelmed by Northern might, waged a heroic contest for states' rights in what's known as "The Lost Cause."
From the 1890s to the 1990s, a tacit agreement on the battlefields held firm: There would be no talk of what had set brother against brother, only recounting of the military strategies and tactics played out in places like Devil's Den at Gettysburg and Chattanooga's Missionary Ridge.
Veterans of the Blue and Gray first forged this contract, allowing generations to come together in peace. But the battlefield superintendents concluded in 1998 that the price was too high, and Congress concurred. Keeping silent, as Gettysburg Superintendent John Latschar put it, meant that "surely these men would have struggled and died in vain."
Tens of millions of dollars is being spent to bring the battlefields in line by the war's 150th anniversary.
What may have quelled controversy are the unequivocal voices of the past. An army of first-person accounts and original documents has been deployed in new exhibits and interpretive materials, allowing the drama's actors to explain themselves. They speak plainly to the present, breaching the long silence on the single most contentious question of the war.
At Corinth, Miss., for instance, next summer's visitors to the southern gateway of the Shiloh battlefield will view Mississippi's declaration of secession in its entirety. "Our position is throughly identified with the institution of slavery," the second paragraph reads, " ... and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization."
| Newhouse News Service's Delia M. Rios considers how "In Park Service's Civil War Reinterpretation, the Past Speaks for Itself"
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