History or Memory?

At Antietam, veterans, state organizations, and individuals have placed 97 monuments, most of them Union monuments built during the first twenty years after Congress established the battlefield in 1890. Each monument reflects the perspective of its builders and the historical moment in which it was created. The National Park Service preserves and protects the battlefield’s cultural and natural resources, including monuments and their historical narratives, while facing the challenge of interpreting works that can mean different things to different people and may express conflicting ideas. Its policy holds that, unless legislation directs otherwise, these works and their inscriptions will not be altered, relocated, obscured, or removed even when deemed inaccurate or incompatible with prevailing present-day values. A private citizen erected the Lee Monument at the Newcomer Farm in 2003, before the National Park Service acquired the farm. After the war, many Southerners, including women’s groups and former Confederate generals, promoted the Lost Cause myth, claiming the Confederacy was overwhelmed by insurmountable odds in a fight for states’ rights and denying that slavery was a primary cause of the war, despite their stated reasons for secession; these views spread widely among the white population.

Maryland · United States