This morning I read through an essay by Robert K. Sutton about the National Park Service’s Holding the High Ground initiative, which grew out of a meeting in 1998 addressing concerns about the scope of Civil War battlefield interpretation. NPS historians were already thinking carefully about what it means to interpret Civil War sites even before the controversial call to do so by Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. in 2000. In 2008 the Holding the High Ground plan for the sesquicentennial outlined a broader definition of Civil War sites and included ways to integrate voices from civilians on the home front, slaves as well as broader discussions of politics, social change, economics and the legacy of the war.
What struck me in the Sutton essay is the concern about how these interpretive revisions would be received by the general public as the nation moved into the sesquicentennial. This appeared to be especially acute regarding the issue of slavery. Sutton offers a few anecdotes from the period in which presentations and displays concerning slavery were criticized by visitors before concluding his essay with the following:
From letters and emails we receive, we know that many visitors like what we are doing, and that some do not. We have, however, started on a course from which we do not intend to deviate. Into the Sesquicentennial of the Civil War and beyond, we will continue to wrestle with issues, such as the causes of the Civil War, so that our visitors will contemplate and better understand who we are as a people. (p. 55)
The debate surrounding Holding the High Ground has always been framed around what primarily motivates people to visit Civil War battlefields. Those resisting the NPS’s revisions declared confidently that it’s about strictly military affairs while their opponents insisted that the story of battles and leaders can be successfully integrated into a broader narrative without being compromised. [Consider this public forum held at the University of Richmond back in 2002.]
With the sesquicentennial behind us and given the overall positive reception to the wonderful slate of programs carried out by the NPS, I think it is time to move beyond this .
The ‘high ground’ of interpretation no longer needs to be defended. Looking back we can now more clearly discern that the most vocal opponents of the NPS’s new vision of Civil War battlefields represent a generation shaped by very different expectations framed by available scholarship and the broader political and racial culture of decades past. Their numbers are in decline.
Apart from the continual financial constraints that the NPS works under, it is hard to deny that historians and rangers at Civil War sites across the country now enjoy a level of intellectual freedom unanticipated just a few short years ago by folks even within the NPS.
What we’ve seen over the past few years is the fruit of that creativity of thought: Meaningful stories that connect people to their past.