The centennial observance of the Civil War, back in 1961, was an almost complete disaster. Slavery, emancipation, and the 200,000 African American soldiers and sailors who served in the Union army and navy were written out of the story altogether. This naturally suited the southern agenda of resistance to civil rights going on at the time, but it also reflected the triumph of the concerted ex-Confederate campaign, begun while the smoldering ashes of Richmond were still warm, to rewrite the story of the war altogether as one of southern valor in a noble lost cause.
The national commission created to encourage the commemoration tiptoed around anything that might upset the southern states. The director of the Commission, Karl S. Betts, warned that any mention of John Brown's raid at Harper's Ferry—or even slavery—“might have the effect of antagonizing the entire South to the great damage of the proposed Civil War Centennial observances.”
Obviously much has changed in society and historical knowledge in the last fifty years, and one of the best things has been the emergence of grassroots groups like the African American Historical Alliance, which have been working in a low-key but very effective way, in anticipation of next year's sesquicentennial, to bring attention to the stories of African American soldiers and lawmakers who played a valiant role in the Civil War and Reconstruction.
One thing that hasn't changed are the historical markers assiduously erected by Confederate veterans groups that perpetuate the "lost cause" mythology. I've written about the egregious marker at Hamburg, South Carolina, that celebrates the one white man killed during the massacre of black state militia members by an armed-to-the-teeth white mob in 1876. (The white victim, the monument declares, died to assure the "supremacy" of "Anglo Saxon civilization.") There's the grotesque Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery, which retroactively incorporates Kentucky, Missouri, and Maryland into the Confederacy and depicts the South as a fallen woman grasping the Constitution. Sprinkled throughout the South are also "loyal slave" and "mammy" statues erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as part of a campaign to tell the touching stories of "faithful slaves." The UDC actually succeeded in 1923 in getting the Senate to approve a $200,000 appropriation for a national mammy monument to be placed in Sheridan Circle in Washington, D.C., which would have been a sight to behold, but the bill died in the House.
But the worst of the southern lies set in stone are the markers the state of Georgia erected near the notorious Andersonville prison, which repeat the Southern exculpatory myths that it was simply wartime shortages (for which the North was to blame) that caused 13,000 Union prisoners to die there and that deaths among the prison guards "were as high as among the prisoners." These contentions are constantly invoked by Confederate partisans to this day, as is the claim that the North was to blame as well for halting prisoner exchanges.
In fact, death rates among the prisoners at Andersonville were 5 to 6 times greater than among guards, and the reason prisoner exchanges were halted was simple and unequivocal: the South declared its intention to execute white officers of black Union troops (for "inciting servile insurrection") and to return captured black soldiers to slavery. In 1863 and 1864 the Union offered to resume exchanges provided all Union soldiers were treated the same; as historian James McPherson recounts in his excellent book on Lincoln as commander-in-chief, Tried By War, the Confederate exchange commissioner replied that the South "would die in the last ditch" before "giving up the right to send slaves back as property recaptured." Robert E. Lee similarly rebuffed a later offer by Ulysses S. Grant saying, "negroes belonging to our citizens are not considered subjects of exchange."
It's probably impossible to remove any Civil War monuments today, no matter how historically distorted they are. In some places the National Park Service has erected new markers next to the old which offer context and explanation. A great project for the sesquicentennial would be a systematic cataloging of the lies and distortions that remain literally etched in stone across the country.
