D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
January 2010
Dwight Pitcaithley
Page: 2
After the policy change, Pitcaithley's office fielded a flood of protest. "We got 2,500 cards and letters against doing that, and they all ended up on my desk."
Each letter was answered. At the heart of the outcry was a new NPS reference to slavery as a "cause" of the "the recent unpleasantness" — a sore point to descendants of Confederate veterans who fought for what is still sometimes today called "the Lost Cause."
In his essay "Becoming a Historian," Pitcaithley notes that part of the protest surrounding the decision came from the idea that NPS superintendents were not necessarily veterans of military service. Other historians, amateur and professional alike, however, "reflected on their own military experience to bolster their claim that the NPS was dishonoring their ancestors by addressing the issue of slavery as a cause of the war." Some claimed that slavery became an issue only after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.
When Pitcaithley responded to all those who felt this was a concern, he noted his own personal history as a veteran, one who saw combat in Vietnam and was awarded the Purple Heart. He was wounded by mortar shrapnel in a battle in the spring of 1966, while serving as a radio operator.
He says that this response did have a "moderating effect" on some. Thereafter, when he addressed Civil War-interested audiences, he wore his Purple Heart lapel pin. That "didn't change any minds about what the NPS was doing, but it did tend to reduce the hostility in a room."
As much as we care to think otherwise, the Civil War will never, ever be over.
Since his retirement and relocation back to New Mexico, at NMSU, Pitcaithley has more time to research, write about, and lecture on the slavery issue. He is also a member of the Organization of American Historians, which keeps him on the road as an occasional lecturer but not on a steady basis, and is working on a book about the coming of the Civil War.
"I've been digging into the bedrock about the secession conventions that took place before the war," he says. "All of the states that seceded except Tennessee (which discussed its possibility of secession in their general assembly) had conventions. Virginia alone has 2,000 pages of written records from their convention. It was a very deliberate process."
Pitcaithley has been poring through 8,000 pages of baseline information on secession, including the 60 amendments to the US Constitution that were introduced prior to the war that attempted to protect slavery.
He feels that no one has ever looked at the specific reasons that made the southern states feel they needed to secede, or at the amendments — none of which, of course, passed.
"It took me two years to go through the 8,000 pages, and it was like having a front row seat at the secession debates," Pitcaithley says. "Editors wrote editorials, there were sermons and secession pamphlets. There was no real argument against secession."
Border states such as Missouri and Kentucky never seceded, but there were cadres of citizens that passionately argued for both sides. West Virginia exists, of course, because of that part of the state's opposition to slavery and secession. New Mexico, too, was a part of the slavery debate and during that time did allow slavery (see Tumbleweeds, November 2009).
In January 1861, a Peace Conference attended by the "Committee of Thirty-Three" — one member from each of the then-33 states — worked to avert the impending war through compromise. At one point, the committee reported that it had reached majority agreement on a constitutional amendment to protect slavery where it existed and for the immediate admission of New Mexico Territory as a slave state. An even earlier such compromise attempt took place in 1850, which would have included making New Mexico a state as part of an anti-slavery constitutional amendment. But it took another 62 years for our fair state to enter the union in 1912 — perhaps on the very day you are reading this, Jan. 6.
Numerous other issues came up with the slavery debate, Pitcaithley notes, including the formation of the American Colonization Society. The society was formed in 1816, in part because of the number of free blacks who were living in the US after slavery was abolished in the northern states, putting its roots (no pun intended) squarely into the jaws of racism. One of the main projects of the American Colonization Society was to send blacks back to Africa, and in particular to the colony of Liberia. The plan eventually failed, but it also did draw the support of many well-known names from early American history, including Henry Clay, Thomas Jefferson, Daniel Webster, Stephen Douglas and, to a point, even Abe Lincoln.
"He was involved and favored shopping blacks to Liberia," Pitcaithley says of the 16th president. "Nor did he believe that African-Americans were equal to whites, but that they did deserve a balanced economic playing field. He believed that colonization should be part of emancipation, and encouraged Congress to pass legislation to give money to slave owners. But after the Emancipation Proclamation, he dropped his support."
Pitcaithley recently spoke on "Lincoln's Lasting Influence on New Mexico" at the Nov. 20 grand opening of the Branigan Cultural Center's exhibit, "Abraham Lincoln: Self-Made in America," which closed Dec. 18.
Dwight Pitcaithley remains a firm supporter of the National Park Service and its programs, to which he devoted three decades of his life. In talking with him, it seems at times that the agency was a second home to him, from the time he started doing research at the Buffalo National River in Arkansas to his years in Washington, DC.
The park service — specifically the Carlsbad Cavern area of the Guadalupe Mountains where he began his NPS career — will also probably provide a final resting place for Pitcaithley someday.
"I helped my mother scatter the ashes of her mother, my grandmother, in the Guadalupes," Pitcaithley says, "and have every expectation of having my ashes scattered in the Guadalupes."
For more information on your National Park Service, visit nps.gov. For more on the history of America's national parks and the PBS program "America's Best Idea," see www.pbs.org/nationalparks KRWG-TV in Las Cruces will be rebroadcasting the series Jan. 27-March 3 on Wednesdays at 8 p.m.
Senior writer Jeff Berg lives in Las Cruces.