Of Parks and Excuses

Entertaining but misleading

Feb 01, 2025

Guides at the nation's Civil War battlefields have quietly begun to tell a politically correct version of the war.
“War and Remembrance”, Stephen Dinan, Insight magazine, 28 August 2000

This article was in response to a 1999 insertion by Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., then an Illinois Democrat, into the fiscal 2000 appropriations bill that requires the Park Service to “encourage” the battlefield parks to include information on the role slavery played in causing the war. Dinan’s article discusses how the National Park Service injects a discussion of slavery into battlefield tours. The article quotes historians, including the late Shelby Foote, the late Brian Pohanka, James McPherson, James I. Robertson, and Robert Lee Hodge. Insight's article presents a fairly balanced viewpoint. However, tucked away in an innocuous place is the rather peculiar line:

But as historical education [has] declined, many of the 11 million visitors to the parks lack a sense of context about the Civil War.

Are we to believe, then, that our education system has deteriorated so badly that adults, many hopefully schooled before political correctness and DEI took over, know nothing about the “peculiar institution” and its surrounding philosophies (keeping people in bondage was only part if it) or the war that ended it? The piece went on, quoting McPherson:

It’s not a zero-sum game. If you broaden your interpretation by adding nonmilitary context to the issues, that doesn’t mean reducing or diminishing the quality of interpretation...we expect Germans and Japanese to confront their own history...yet somehow we don’t always ask ourselves to do the same thing, that is, confront aspects of our past.

This seems to say that the American visitors to our parks are essentially ignorant of American history because of the failure of our schools (of which McPherson was once a part) to teach its fundamentals, which reflects our nation’s refusal to “confront aspects of our past.” To top all this off, the federal government has resorted to obligating a portion of the Department of the Interior to act as remedial educators. Even more unsettling is that the Congress had in mind the perpetuation of the idea that chattel slavery was a major cause, rather than a contributory cause, of the war. Most scholars (McPherson included, more than once) concede that, while the institution of slavery was an important issue in the conflict between the southern states and northern, it was not the only issue in the conflict. It wasn't even a central issue except as it fueled the fires of the rights of the states to allow slavery and the “peculiar institution’s” other iniquities.

The issue is not that we refuse to face our past (indeed, some revel in it).

All too many students and adults think that our nation’s past is just a bunch of names and dates, or, as is more common in the 21st Century, just about a bunch of dead white men. But we are talking about battlefield parks, not preserved plantations. For much of their post-battle existence, these places were graveyards, and the Army has used some for training. Once the Department of the Interior took them over, they expected to transform the places into makeshift classrooms, focusing on issues that a majority of the soldiers who fought, died, and are buried there cared little about.

I’m not sure what bothers me more.

That the national battlefield parks are teaching basic history to adults who should already know it, or that the Congress has mandated it, or that the Congress has mandated the wrong thing and in the wrong location and “context,” or that there are reputable historians who agree with it.

So I wonder…

Was a politician not well known for adherence to historical accuracy (jailed for fraud), trying to insert his own agenda—political, racial or otherwise—under the guise of an educational mandate, placing inappropriate topics in an inaccurate context? While a substantial part of the mission of the battlefield parks is educational, they should stress military history, not social and political affairs. Not that the issues surrounding the South’s “peculiar institution” are unimportant, they just don’t fit into the “context” of the screaming nightmare of war.

There are many places where one can learn about the horrors of the antebellum South.

Many organizations amply provide that information. But mandates from Washington—ostensibly to make up for deficiencies in education—and imposing those efforts upon incongruous venues like battlefield parks, is not the way to go about it.

The Devil’s Own Day: Shiloh and the American Civil War

I’ve never been to Shiloh (really!) and I’ve been to very few parks, so the veracity of this article is unclear. But, the parks are memorials to battle, not to abstract politics.

Available from your favorite bookseller or from me if you want an autograph.

Coming Up…

Don't Know Much About History
Choice or Destiny

And Finally...

On 1 February:

1524: The World ended, according to the astute calculations of London astrologers the previous June, seeing all the planets align in Pisces, a water sign. The winter before, people built arks, headed for high ground, and on and on. Well….

1917: Germany’s unrestricted submarine warfare began in the Atlantic Ocean. This event, far more than the 1524 event, came closer to ending the world for many, as it caused the United States to break diplomatic relations with the Central Powers, and was only two months ahead of the US entering the war in Europe.

And today is NATIONAL FREEDOM DAY, the day in 1865, that Abraham Lincoln signed the joint resolution that would become Amendment XIII to the Constitution. Harry Truman gave an executive order designating today in 1947.