Lessons to be Learned From the Civil War

For more than a century, The Museum of the Confederacy’s home was in Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy during the Civil War.
Housed downtown in the White House of the Confederacy, President Jefferson Davis’ home during the war, the museum, the institution has become the repository of all things relating to the Civil War. But its location in Richmond was also a problem, too: the nearby Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center kept growing and growing, literally engulfing the museum’s home.
And as time went on, fewer and fewer visitors made the trek to downtown Richmond to view the world’s premier collection of Civil War memorabilia. Last year, the museum’s board of directors approved a unique plan to take the institution into the 21st century: split up the collection over four sites in the state and create a “distributed museum,” in the jargon of the museum industry.
That was good news for Appomattox, the home of the Appomattox Court House National Historical Park where Gen. Robert E. Lee and the Confederacy’s Army of Northern Virginia surrendered to Gen. U.S. Grant and the Army of the Potomac in April 1865. Officials soon announced that Appomattox would be the site of one of the four museum, along with Fort Monroe in Tidewater, the White House of the Confederacy in Richmond and the Fredericksburg area.
The museum owns the world’s largest and most complete collection of Confederate artifacts, including 3,000 military items, 550 wartime flags (59 of them from the surrender at Appomattox), 250 uniform pieces and more than 100,000 manuscripts in its research library. More than 4,300 Virginia school students particated in the museum’s SOL-based programs last year; a teachers’ institute is held every summer; visitors come from across the country and from around the world.
Museum president Waite Rawls and two of his top staffers were in the area last week to update folks on the progress of the relocation process, and they are more than excited about the future.
The museum is now in the “silent phase” of its multimillion dollar fund drive, according to Rawls, who expects a public drive to begin sometime in the near future. Their goal is to have the three new sites, in addition to the Richmond headquarters, up and running in time for the 150th anniversary of the start of the war in 2011.
Anyone who thinks The Museum of the Confederacy is just one giant memorial to “The Lost Cause,” the “War of Northern Aggression” or whatever hagiographic term you wish to use, would be woefully mistaken.
According to Rawls, the museum’s purpose is simple and straightforward: to tell the story of the Civil War and its aftermath and to discern lessons current and future generations can learn from conflict.
One of those lessons — how a nation split asunder by war can reunite peacefully after hostilities — is what made Appomattox a “no-duh” site for a museum branch, Rawls said. Officials from countries all over the world that have undergone civil wars have journeyed to Richmond to try to glean lessons to take home about how America reunited in a small house in Appomattox.
When the Appomattox museum and the other three branches open, they’ll be sites of learning and research, not sacred repositories of Confederate relics. They won’t be telling the “Gone With the Wind” version of Southern history, but the truth, warts and all.
And every person — black and white — will feel welcome in the museum that celebrates the creation of the modern America.