The Mission of The National Civil War Institute

For over 165 years, the Civil War has loomed large in the public consciousness of the United States. Hundreds of thousands of books have been written about the subject, movies have been made, and millions of pages and documents relating to the period are preserved in the National Archives. Monuments have been raised, battlefields preserved, and dedicated reenactors strive to portray the men and women of this climactic event.

However, even after all this time, and with all of the resources available to us, knowledge of the American Civil War seems to be rapidly fading not only from America’s public consciousness, but also from her universities and school systems. Today, unfortunately, the Civil War has become increasingly politicized, with figures in both major political parties creating fictitious or selective narratives of the War in order to advance contemporary political agendas. Statues are being torn down, flags burned, battlefields forgotten, and history erased or reimagined. Truly, America’s great epic, her Iliad, is disappearing.

How do we respond to this catastrophe? If you are like me, you want America to grow and learn from her own history. You do not want her history to be distorted by those who do not know the facts, do not value the historical record, or seek to subordinate the past to the politics of the present.  This has often produced distorted views of the men and women of this era, the causes for which they fought, the nature and brutality of the conflict, the complex questions surrounding secession, and the courage, sacrifice, and memory of the veterans who endured it.

Today, nearly every major aspect of the American Civil War has become the subject of modern political controversy. The causes of secession and war remain fiercely debated, especially the roles played by states’ rights, constitutional interpretation, sectionalism, tariffs, economics, slavery, and the long political divisions between North and South. Even the question of secession itself—whether it was constitutional, revolutionary, or outright rebellion—continues to divide historians and the public. Too often, these complicated questions are reduced to slogans, with one side attempting to make the War about only one issue, while another may attempt to remove uncomfortable issues from the discussion altogether.

The motives of the men who actually fought have also become heavily politicized. Millions of Americans took part in this conflict, and they did not all fight for exactly the same reasons. The motives of presidents, governors, politicians, soldiers, civilians, Unionists, Confederates, slaves, and Southern Unionists or Northern Copperheads, cannot simply be placed into one neat category. Yet today, people often attempt to speak for these men rather than allowing them to speak for themselves through their letters, diaries, speeches, newspapers, and official records. The result has often been a distorted understanding of why Americans on both sides believed they were fighting.

The great leaders of the War have likewise become battlegrounds in our modern political disputes. Abraham Lincoln may be presented either as an almost flawless savior of the Union or as a tyrant who destroyed the old constitutional order. Robert E. Lee may be portrayed either as one of America's greatest soldiers or reduced almost entirely to the cause for which the Confederacy fought. Grant, Sherman, Jackson, Davis, and countless others are often treated in the same fashion. Rather than studying these men as complete historical figures—with virtues, faults, beliefs, contradictions, triumphs, and failures—we increasingly seem determined to place them into the political categories of our own century.

Perhaps nowhere is this controversy more visible than in the debate over monuments, flags, and public memory. Confederate monuments have been removed, relocated, destroyed, or subjected to new interpretation. The Confederate battle flag has become one of the most controversial symbols in American history, regarded by some as a symbol of ancestry, regional identity, and remembrance, while others see it principally as a symbol of slavery, segregation, or racial oppression. Schools, roads, military bases, buildings, and other public institutions have been renamed as Americans continue to argue over whom the nation should honor and how the dead of the War should be remembered. In many cases, the question is no longer simply what happened in history, but whether particular parts of that history should remain visible at all.

The battlefield itself has not escaped these disputes. There is an ongoing debate over how Civil War battlefields should be interpreted and what their central purpose ought to be. Should they primarily tell the story of military campaigns, tactics, commanders, and the soldiers who fought and died upon that ground? Or should they devote greater attention to slavery, race, politics, emancipation, civilians, and the wider social causes and consequences of the War? Surely all of these subjects belong within the larger story. The real danger comes when one aspect of history is used to crowd out another, until the battlefield upon which thousands struggled, suffered, and died becomes little more than a platform for present-day political arguments.

Even the memory of the veterans themselves has become controversial. The men who survived this terrible conflict spent decades attending reunions, erecting monuments, preserving battlefields, writing memoirs, honoring their fallen comrades, and in many cases reconciling with former enemies. Today, even this reconciliation is debated. Some see the reunions of Union and Confederate veterans as one of the most moving examples of national healing in American history, while others argue that reconciliation sometimes came at the expense of remembering the struggle for emancipation. Yet whatever conclusions we reach about the postwar period, these veterans deserve to be remembered as human beings who endured one of the most terrible experiences in our national history, and their own voices and memories deserve to be heard.

The Civil War has therefore become something more than a subject of historical study. It has become ammunition in the political and cultural battles of our own time. Both the political left and right have at times selected the parts of the War that are useful to their own arguments while ignoring those that are inconvenient. In doing so, we risk turning an extraordinarily complicated nineteenth-century conflict into little more than a weapon for twenty-first-century politics. If we truly wish to understand the American Civil War, we must resist that temptation. We must go back to the sources, listen to the people who actually lived through these events, preserve the places where they occurred, and allow the historical record—not our modern political preferences—to guide us.

This is precisely why I believe the National Civil War Institute is needed. America does not need another organization dedicated to forcing the Civil War into a modern political narrative. She needs an institution dedicated to understanding the War as it actually happened, through the men and women who lived it, the documents they left behind, the battlefields upon which they fought, and the world in which they lived. We want to return to the original record—to the letters, diaries, newspapers, speeches, military reports, government documents, photographs, memoirs, and countless other primary sources that allow the people of the nineteenth century to speak for themselves.

The National Civil War Institute seeks to tell the whole story of the American Civil War. That means examining both North and South, Union and Confederate, soldier and civilian, political leader and ordinary citizen. We do not believe that honoring the courage and sacrifice of one side requires dishonoring the other. Nor do we believe that understanding why Americans fought for the Union requires us to ignore why other Americans fought for the Confederacy. These were Americans divided by one of the greatest political and constitutional crises in our history, and hundreds of thousands of them paid for that division with their lives. Their stories deserve to be told carefully, truthfully, and with respect.

This does not mean pretending that every cause, policy, or action was equally right, nor does it mean ignoring the difficult and painful questions surrounding slavery, secession, emancipation, race, constitutional government, or the conduct of the War. Quite the opposite. It means examining these questions more deeply rather than reducing them to slogans. It means allowing the evidence to lead us wherever it leads and refusing to erase inconvenient facts simply because they do not fit comfortably within a modern political narrative.

Education will be at the heart of this mission. Through lectures, courses, documentaries, videos, articles, historical research, battlefield studies, and the examination of original documents, the National Civil War Institute hopes to make serious Civil War history accessible once again to ordinary Americans. We want to teach not merely what happened, but why it happened, how the people of the time understood it, how the armies fought, how civilians experienced the conflict, and how the War continued to shape the nation long after the guns fell silent.

We also want to encourage Americans to return to the sources themselves. There is something immensely powerful about reading the actual words of Lincoln, Davis, Lee, Grant, Sherman, Jackson, Douglass, soldiers in the ranks, grieving mothers, frightened civilians, slaves, politicians, ministers, newspaper editors, and veterans. History becomes far more difficult to manipulate when we allow those who lived it to speak in their own voices. The deeper we go into the historical record, the more we discover that the Civil War was far more complicated, human, tragic, and fascinating than the simplified versions so often presented today.

Ultimately, the National Civil War Institute hopes to help America return to her history. We want to see a country in which Civil War battlefields are preserved, monuments are understood within their historical context, original documents are studied, the dead are remembered, and the courage and sacrifice of Americans on both sides are treated with dignity and respect. We want a renewed historical culture in which Union and Confederate veterans can be studied and remembered without demanding that honoring one requires hatred of the other.

The Civil War belongs to all of us. It is the story of a nation that divided, fought, suffered, mourned, and ultimately remained one country. It contains heroism and tragedy, courage and cruelty, great principles and terrible failures. It should neither be sanitized nor weaponized. It should be studied, preserved, taught, and remembered.

That is the purpose of the National Civil War Institute: to return to the sources, recover the fullness of the story, honor the people who lived it, educate the generations who follow us, and help ensure that America’s great epic is never forgotten.