The Smithsonian and the Civil War
By Elizabeth A. Plageman
July 2002

Seven years ago I discovered that our nation’s museum has no exhibit on the Civil War. The Smithsonian Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., houses a jumble of artifacts, but no coherent display to put the war before us.

Here I’ll describe my efforts to change that and adventures along the way, including an editorial in The Washington Post, a faxed interview with a U.S. senator, and a tour with my Dad of D.C. Civil War sites recommended by historian pen pals. The goal of this piece is to recruit you to the campaign for a first-class Civil War exhibit at the Smithsonian.

In 1995 I visited the museum and asked a volunteer where the Civil War exhibit was. "We don’t have one," she said. "There are a few artifacts upstairs, but you should really go to one of the battlefields. Manassas is 40 miles away."

I wrote a letter to the Smithsonian. The acting curator of the Division of Armed Forces, James Hutchins, quickly wrote back. "The Civil War period is certainly not exhibited as we would like to see it, particularly in view of the sustained public interest in the subject." However, "we are endeavoring to place an exhibition of the highest quality in the Civil War section of the Armed Forces Hall as soon as possible."

In the summer of 2000 I returned to D.C., and my first stop was the Museum of American History. I asked a volunteer about the Civil War exhibit. "We don’t have one," he said. "There are some artifacts upstairs, but you really have to go to one of the battle sites to see anything."
I pulled out the letter from Hutchins, and asked if that gentleman was around. He had retired, but 10 minutes later I found myself talking to Barton Hacker, a curator for Armed Forces. We chatted for over an hour.

"In my opinion there’s not any likelihood of a real Civil War exhibit happening in the foreseeable future," he said. "There’s no money, and there’s no space." He explained that although the Smithsonian receives funds from the federal government, those monies cover operating expenses and salaries. New exhibits are funded by sponsors with specific interests.

With respect to the space problem, he said, "what is really necessary is a military museum. As far as I know, Washington is the only major city that doesn’t have one. They are major features of virtually every capital in Europe."

Was it just me? Did other museum-goers ask for directions to the Civil War exhibit? "All the time," Hacker replied.

I went upstairs to explore what was on display and took notes till the museum closed. The Civil War section was about a third the size of a new exhibit on submarines. I saw no images of Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee or Ulysses S. Grant. There were no maps.

On the plane back to Boston I thought about what to do. Perhaps other Americans were also un-aware of the situation and would find it as extraordinary as I did? I’d told Hacker that I planned to write about the situation, but didn’t know where the resulting story might run. It ultimately found a home in the Dec. 10, 2000, Washington Post.

Immediately afterward I mailed the story to a variety of people. They included the editor of this publication, historians, the senators on the appropriations committee that provides annual funding for the Smithsonian, and the editors of those senators’ hometown newspapers.

Among the results: I was asked to write a follow-up editorial for the Madison (Wis.) Capital Times, the hometown paper of Sen. Herb Kohl. Heart in hand I called the senator’s office for an interview, and found myself faxing him a few questions. His response, faxed back a few days later, contained some good news.

In the fall of 2000 the museum received an $80 million gift from Kenneth E. Behring. Of that amount, Kohl wrote, "$20 million is pledged to a new 18,000-square-foot exhibition on military history, including a substantial Civil War section. It is expected that the exhibit will appear in 2005."

It didn’t look like anything would change drastically in the meantime, however. So when I found myself traveling to Washington again last June, I wrote to a few key Civil War historians asking for their opinions on sites in the city that should be visited by a Civil War buff. I included both of my editorials.

Thanks in large part to suggestions from experts such as Professor James McPherson of Princeton and Richard Snow, editor of American Heritage, I put together a list of some nine sites. When Dad found out, he determined to drive down from Binghamton, N.Y., to join me. That was quite fitting, since he and Mom stimulated my interest in the war with childhood tours of battlefields.

Together we spent a day touring six sites: the National Museum of Health & Medicine, Fort Stevens (where Lincoln was exposed to enemy fire from Jubal Early’s Confederates), the United States Soldiers’ & Airmen’s Home (Lincoln’s retreat during the war, and where he drafted the Emancipation Proclamation), Arlington House (Robert E. Lee’s home before the war), the Frederick Douglass Na-tional Historic Site, and Ford’s Theatre (the latter, however, was closed for renovations when we arrived).

More than any other site on our tour, the National Museum of Health & Medicine punched home the horrors of the war. Founded in 1862, it includes a section on Civil War medicine complete with real bones and other tissues showing the ravages of disease and bullets. True to the original mandate of the museum, some of these specimens are used to this day in medical research into conditions such as bone infection.

Many of the displays were accompanied by short histories of the individuals whose traumas were on display. Gen. Daniel Sickles, for example, donated his amputated leg to the museum with the note "compliments of Major General D.E.S." He made annual trips to visit the limb. "This got into the newspapers, and that’s how we got our first visitors to this museum," said a tour guide.

Perhaps most startling, however, was the display in a small case near a corner. There I found bone fragments from Lincoln’s skull, the blood-stained sleeve of his doctor’s shirt, and the bullet that killed him.

The average Washington tourist, however, would find it difficult to share my experience because the museum (and most of the other sites on our tour) cannot be easily reached without a car. Which brings me back to the need for an equally compelling Civil War exhibit at the very accessible Smithsonian.

At the very least, the museum could create a brochure showing the locations of important Civil War artifacts outside the Armed Forces Hall. It is home, for example, to the furniture used by Lee and Grant at the surrender, but they are not easy to find. (As of last June they were on display in the exhibit "The American Presidency.")

Similarly, the remains of a tree that went through the battle at Spotsylvania Courthouse are also in the museum’s collection. "All the violence and insanity of warfare somehow were encapsulated in that pockmarked hunk of deadwood," wrote Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post this May.

Yardley went on to note, however, that when he recently rediscovered the tree it was "in a poorly lit spot near an elevator and the entrance to a gallery closed for renovation. It was in no context—the display case immediately next to it contained a pair of sailor’s trousers—and no effort had been made to draw people’s attention to it."

In the long term I am excited about Kenneth Behring’s gift to the museum and plans for a substantial new Civil War section. But the news also sounds familiar. Seven years ago Hutchins wrote of plans to open a Civil War exhibit of high quality "as soon as possible."

So I’m continuing my efforts to push for such an exhibit in the Smithsonian, and hope readers of The Civil War News will do the same.