Losers peddle Lost Cause memorabilia

Before The Gettysburg Address

In today's New York Times:

To the Editor:

Re Gettysburg’s Lost Cause Problem by Simon Barnicle (Opinion guest essay, July 5), claiming a lack of “historical context and moral valence” at the military park:

This essay happened to appear online just a few hours before we took the stage with the novelist Jeff Shaara at the Gettysburg National Military Park Museum and Visitor Center to perform a program on Civil War memory and the 1863 battle here. Our reaction: We couldn’t possibly be talking about the same place.

Even a cursory look at the exhibits at this museum reveals an unrelentingly frank, historically accurate emphasis on slavery as the cause of the Civil War; insurrection and treason as the root of the rebellion; and the displacement of free Black families as a horrific consequence of the Confederate invasion.

Yes, some private vendors around town still sell Confederate memorabilia to unreconstructed Lost Cause apologists, but to confuse their presence with any official sanitization of secession and rebellion is like saying the Gettysburg Address was politically incorrect because Lincoln failed to mention slavery by name.

As to an overemphasis on things military here, surely it is “altogether fitting and proper,” to quote Lincoln, for visitors to consider the extraordinary landscape here and speculate whether a slightly different alignment of troops on one or another spot, or a spared life at any crucial moment, might have changed the outcome of the battle, the war or the future of our country.

Gettysburg is hallowed ground precisely because freedom and democracy prevailed here — not because its combatants have been, or should be, erased.

Stephen Lang

Harold Holzer

Gettysburg, Pa.

Mr. Lang is a stage and film actor, and Mr. Holzer is a Lincoln historian.