So I visited the new Gettysburg visitor center a few weeks back. I had planned to write an in-depth review, but I’m still overwhelmed with other things so you’ll get this instead. Let’s discuss the primary exhibit, A New Birth of Freedom. It is large, handsomely designed, and divided into three parts covering the war to 1863, the Battle of Gettysburg, and the war to 1865. The battle is rhetorically shaped by the words of the Gettysburg Address; represented as a sacred moment on which the meaning of the war turned. The exhibit suggests this grand notion, but altogether fails to identify actual examples of officers and men expressing this dynamic on the campaign or after the battle. The content is more expansive than A New Birth’s predecessor, but remains un-provocative. Freeman Tilden would not approve. For instance, no mention at all is made of large scale Confederate efforts, once in Pennsylvania, to capture and send south escaped slaves and free blacks. Perhaps nothing more in July 1863 expressed the meaning of the war than that.
Indulge me some exhibit design criticism for a moment. A New Birth has some computer consoles and one or two environments, but the bulk of this exhibit is based around a tedious set of cases. Now, to show artifacts, and lots of them, is a good thing. But each case is introduced by (very well written) secondary labels that absolutely disappear into a murky, graphics dense, background. Further, the artifacts in those cases are neat, but uniformly uncompelling, often being dull objects and documents meant to illustrate rather than illuminate. Little in the case structure is designed to draw the eye or otherwise command and direct your attention.
Anyhow, I do have a main point I want to make. This exhibit conforms well to the National Park Service initiative described in Rally on the High Ground and it’s Sesquicentennial strategic plan, to firmly place slavery at the center of causes of the war. This is good because it is true and because most Americans tend to ignore or deny the centrality of slavery to the Civil War experience. It needs reinforcing. And the introductory section of A New Birth rather bluntly rams this message home in the film that defines American history to 1861 as the tension between slavery and the Revolutionary inheritance of freedom, and in exhibit cases, text, and images that speak of nothing but slavery in America. I applaud this, but am beginning to see the shortcomings of this straightforward approach. Slavery, and white-black interaction, stood at the center of America’s self-consciousness in myriad ways, the description of which is not well served by the steady repetition of the word “slavery”. Further, by unimaginatively repeating slavery was the cause, slavery was the cause, while true, permits modern audiences to conceive of the Civil War story as a deterministic moral question, an example of the inevitable triumph of liberty more clear to us than to those who lived then. The American Civil War, like all wars, was defined by moral ambivalence, uncertainty, and bitterness. And the visitor shouldn’t be encouraged to think of it otherwise.
I’d like to develop these thoughts further, but I’m tired, and have an early day tomorrow.
This post was inspired by an exhilarating roundtable discussion on Michael Fellman’s book, Inside War.
