2 virginia museums perpetuate debate over u.s. civil war

For Northerners in the United States, the history of the Civil War seems jolly much settled. We know that from the state's initiation, economic and cultural differences - peculiarly those surrounding slavery - created tensions betwixt the North and the South; that the riddance of bondage only fitfully became a Union goal during the war; and that it finally took a century for black Americans to glance the equality guaranteed by the state's ideals.

But for all its blood, we see the Civil War as necessity and Ibrahim Lincoln as its visionary hero; it was a preamble to the United States becoming what it ever should have been.

Things are interpreted more equivocally here in what once was the working capital of the Confederate States of United States. Forty-three battles took place inside 30 miles, or 48 kilometers, of the "White House of the Confederate States," the sign of the zodiac where this self-declared nation housed its only president, Jefferson Davis, from 1861 to 1865. And while history may be typically written by the master, here it seems to shape a looking-glass world in which position are shifted and accent altered, jarring emotions and premise.

In many ways the Civil War still seems to rage. In 2003, when a statue of Abraham Lincoln was donated for show outside the Civil War visitant Center of the subject Park Service, in business district Richmond, immediate protests erupted - not over its maudlin character, but over the very idea of observance an oppressor. The dedication ceremony was buzzed by a plane tracking a streamer proclaiming, "Sic semper tyrannis," which is not only Old Dominion's motto (significance "Thus, ever, to autocrat"), but also what John John Wilkes Booth is said to have called out while assassinating Abraham Lincoln.

Is such ugliness, then, what is meant by the "other side" of Civil War history? At times, surely, but institutions here - the Museum of the Confederacy and the American Civil War Center - argue that the war should be seen, at least in part, from the perspective of the losing side, and that such understanding need not be completely derailed by the moral outrage of slavery.

The Museum of the Confederacy may be facing the limitations of that position. Annual attendance, from a 1991 peak of 91,000, has been dropping, to about 48,000 in the last year. Its 1976 building, like the adjacent White House, is also hemmed in by a growing hospital complex. So the institution has put together an ambitious $15 million plan to create a system of four museums in historic Virginia areas, increasing display space for its extensive collection.

The American Civil War Center, which raised $13.6 million before opening in 2006 to much praise, has fewer apparent problems, though attendance is still low (about 25,000 in the past year). It creates a broader panorama, offering not one perspective but three: those of the Union, the Confederacy and the African-Americans.

An empathetic exposition of the Confederate perspective poses some knotty problems. Confederate symbols are more than mere artifacts. The flag was the badge of segregationists in the civil rights era; it retains that resonance. Sensitivities to such allusions are high: A controversy erupted recently over the American Civil War Center's acceptance of a statue of Davis donated by the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

The Museum of the Confederacy, then, has a daunting task. It was founded in the 1890s by the daughters of Lee and Davis and other women, who solicited memorabilia from Confederate families to create a nostalgic shrine to what was then called the Lost Cause. During the last two decades the museum has been delicately redefining itself. It has an extraordinary collection of 15,000 artifacts and 100,000 manuscripts. It has become a scholarly resource and has published valuable books like "Before Freedom Came: African-American Life in the Antebellum South."

But whiffs of the Old South still emerge here and there, particularly in its main exhibition, "The Confederate Years." For example, in describing the war's opening battle at Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, the wall text oddly states that because Lincoln was determined not to begin the war against the seceding South, he "succeeded in maneuvering the Confederacy into firing the first shot of the war."

There is also little discussion of slavery before or during the Confederacy. Instead there is a short display titled "Confederate Preparation for War: Mobilizing the African-American Population." This mobilization called up "tens of thousands of African-American laborers" described as both "enslaved and free." This is so peculiar a reference to a society in which, in 1860, one-third of the South's population - 3,950,511 souls - was enslaved, that it seems deluded or obfuscatory. The exhibition's refusal to illuminate fully the lives of the Confederacy's black inhabitants suggests that an embrace of the Lost Cause has not been fully relinquished.