Gettysburg’s Lost Cause Problem

Amid a sea of stone plaques and obelisks at Gettysburg National Military Park in Pennsylvania sits a modest monument to the First Minnesota Infantry Regiment. Inscribed on its side is one of the most astonishing accounts of heroism in American history.

The inscription recalls how on July 2, 1863, the badly outnumbered men of the First Minnesota charged headlong into an overwhelming Confederate advance. Most were killed or wounded in the ensuing clash, but their sacrifice bought Union troops enough time to reinforce a precarious position and ultimately secure a decisive victory. With the war hanging in the balance and Washington, Philadelphia and New York essentially undefended, it is no exaggeration to surmise that the Union itself was saved by those men in a few minutes.

For these reasons and more, Gettysburg is hallowed ground — a powerful tribute to the democratic experiment and those who died to preserve it. Yet the site and the surrounding area are littered with Confederate propaganda.

Along the same road as the monument to the First Minnesota lie similar tributes to Confederate regiments, some adorned by visitors with flowers and fresh-out-of-the-wrapper Confederate flags. Each implicitly gives permission to tourists to revere with equal measure those who fought for the United States and those who committed treason against it. Taken together, they are emblematic of the pervasive problem of both-sides-ism at the park and in Civil War education more broadly.

The National Park Service’s curatorial choices are not the root cause of America’s continued tolerance of Confederate imagery. But the sanitized version of history presented at Gettysburg contributes to it by focusing almost entirely on battlefield details while neglecting essential historical context.

It is not enough to teach visitors what happened at Gettysburg. They need to know what the battle meant — and what it still means.