Sunday, June 03, 2007
Editorial: Civil War sites have stories to tell
Hurrah for efforts to preserve a Civil War battlefield. The nation can't escape the horrors of its history -- nor should it want to.
From the RoundTable blog
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Appomattox town officials are considering a plan to preserve the battlefield at Appomattox Station, where Union and Confederate armies fought the day before the Confederacy met its end.
That historic ground should be saved.
Miraculously, the site in the middle of the town is deemed in excellent condition more than 140 years after the Civil War, a signal event that solidified the nation and redefined the very concept of what it means to be an American.
The war's outcome set the United States on a course, at last, to honor the soaring promise of its founding principles of freedom and equality, and end black slavery as a legal institution.
As with so much of American history, a large part of the nation's Civil War story is the story of Virginia. The commonwealth's capital of Richmond was the capital of the Confederate States of America. Appropriately, the National Parks Service is helping Appomattox keep its chapter of the story alive for this and future generations.
As the heavily visited Gettysburg National Military Park in Pennsylvania shows, the land still can bear witness to the historic events played out on it, and speak of what occurred to people who can see only with the mind's eye.
Of course, Gettysburg was the bloodiest battle of the Civil War and, with the North's victory, a turning point -- not to mention the site of President Abraham Lincoln's famous address.
The Battle of Appomattox Station, far less grand in scale, hardly looms as large in the national imagination.
Still, the penultimate battle before Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered his Confederate forces played its part in the nation's history. Preserving the site will maintain a link that helps to tell the story of the Confederacy's final, desperate days.
Americans need an accurate historical record to understand who we are, how we have come to be the nation we comprise: what ideas and principles, what battles fought, what sacrifices and compromises have brought us to this point.
By no means does this require Virginia to declare a "Confederate History Month," that racially divisive bow of obeisance to the extinct Confederacy that tried to rip the nation in half.
It does require an embrace of all of the nation's history, from every perspective -- as much as we can gather, anyway, from an imperfect understanding of the past. Where it is painful, let us acknowledge the pain and reconcile the different histories of one people: Americans.
