A Traitor to the Traitors
The Atlantic|December 2023
The Confederate general James Longstreet became a champion of Reconstruction. Why? 
Eric Foner
A Traitor to the Traitors

During the summer of 1997, my wife and I picked up our 9-year-old daughter from a ballet camp in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and drove to the nearby Gettysburg National Military Park, which they had never seen and I barely remembered from a boyhood visit. The park’s presentation of history left much to be desired. The visitor center’s small museum and the numerous monuments scattered across the battlefield conveyed a great deal about how the battle had been fought in July 1863, while offering almost no explanation of why the combatants were fighting. The park commemorated the Union’s greatest military victory, but its emotional centerpiece was the disastrous southern assault known as Pickett’s Charge, identified, in the romantic glow of nostalgia, as the “high-water mark” of the Confederacy. In labels accompanying the display of historic artifacts and images, the words valor and glory were almost always applied to soldiers who fought for the South, not for the Union.

That the place where the Civil War reached its turning point had become a shrine to the courage of those who fought to destroy the nation and preserve slavery should not have been a surprise. It has long been a commonplace that the South lost the Civil War but won the battle over historical memory. For decades, almost from the moment of surrender, the ideology of the Lost Cause shaped both popular and scholarly understanding of the conflict.

この記事は The Atlantic の December 2023 版に掲載されています。

7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。

この記事は The Atlantic の December 2023 版に掲載されています。

7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。