Swept Away By History

These sorts of atmospherics floated about in the cultural id, but the tangible remnants of the belief were preserved here: Robert E. Lee's uniform, the plumed hat of J.E.B. Stuart, hundreds of battle flags, thousands of soldiers' letters from mud-filled trenches that soon would become their graves.

People brought such things from across the war-ravaged South, thousands of them, artifacts presented with such reverence that they were called "sacred relics."

"I went there in the 1960s when I was about 14, and it was a shrine, no question -- the sacred relics, locks of hair, all that," says Gary W. Gallagher, professor of Civil War history at the University of Virginia and author of more than a dozen books about the era.

Today, while the Museum of the Confederacy goes begging, the brand-new, $13 million American Civil War Center -- a museum that looks at the war from three perspectives (Southern, Northern and black) -- is a gleaming testament to what might be called a more modern memory of the past. It's only a few blocks away, on the banks of the James River at the city's Civil War-era gun foundry, a National Park Service site.

It's on an eight-acre campus -- 10 times the size of the Museum of the Confederacy site. The center's prime backers include Pulitzer Prize-winning historian James McPherson. Just six months old, it's already packed with school kids coming to learn about the Confederacy as a flawed participant in the Civil War, not as the Great Defender of (white) Southern Heritage.

You walk into the bookstore at the Museum of the Confederacy, then the one at the Civil War Center, and the first differences you notice are the black faces on the shelves in the latter: Nat Turner. "Slave Nation." Harriet Tubman. "Remembering Slavery." There were 4 million black people in the 11 slave-owning states at the start of the Civil War, and by war's end, 500,000 had fled to the North -- one out of every eight men, women and children -- looking for something, anything, other than the genteel world of the gallant South.

"A lot of people in Richmond are just sort of embarrassed by [the Museum of the Confederacy], particularly when we have this beautiful new American Civil War Center that people are not embarrassed by," says Harry Kollatz Jr., a senior writer at Richmond magazine, who writes regularly about city history.

The real issue, rarely articulated in direct terms, says Gallagher, is race: "our great national bugaboo."

Ah. The haunted past, the uncertain future.

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Rawls is a balding, amiable, energetic graduate of the Virginia Military Institute. He's talking in his office on the second floor of the museum. Windows offer a view of the adjacent balcony of the White House of the Confederacy and the portico from which Jeff Davis's 5-year-old son fell to his death in April 1864.

That's about all you can see.