"The Sesquicentennial is going to be a minefield"

Laura Bly has an article in USA Today about the history of, and in, the Confederacy:

For many tourism marketers below the Mason-Dixon Line, old times are not forgotten, they're promoted. But, as Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell discovered when he proclaimed April as Confederate History Month without mentioning slavery (an omission he corrected after a volley of protests), pitching Dixie's past during the run-up to next year's 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War could be challenging.
"The Civil War sesquicentennial is going to be a minefield throughout the South. It's going to take a near miracle to tiptoe through it without serious injury, and this McDonnell incident has made things much worse," says Larry J. Sabato, a native Virginian and director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics.
Virginia, where the current capital of Richmond was also the capital of the Confederacy, and an estimated one in seven tourism dollars come from visitors interested in the Civil War, isn't the only government to put a spotlight on the Lost Cause.
Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi also have Confederate History Month proclamations this year, and at least seven states celebrate Confederate Memorial Day, says Calvin Johnson of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. "We lost, and we know that," says Johnson, who lives in Kennesaw, Georgia. "But I think more people are looking beyond the politically correct view that anything Southern is negative. We're proud of who we are: American by birth, Southern by the grace of God. And when visitors come here, they want to see both sides: the old South of the Confederate flag and antebellum ladies in hoop skirts and the new South of Martin Luther King's grave."
Despite the Old Dominion dust-up and the governor's mention of tourism as an impetus for his original proclamation, travelers won't find many highlighted references to Confederate heritage on southern state tourism websites, including Virginia's.
In Georgia, where Stone Mountain draws four million visitors a year to the world's largest relief sculpture depicting southern war heroes Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis, "we're very sensitive to the word Confederate, and we'd like to think we can honor the sacrifices made by everyone during that era," says Alison Tyrer, director of communications for the Georgia Department of Economic Development.

In South Carolina, where the Battle of Fort Sumter in Charleston's harbor marked the launch of the Civil War and the NAACP still maintains a boycott over the display of a Confederate flag on the State House grounds in Columbia, "we know it's a sensitive story, and we have to be as honest and inclusive as we can," says Marion Edmunds of the South Carolina Department of Parks, Recreation, and Tourism.
This Saturday in Richmond, Virginia, more than fifteen museums and historical sites are offering a day of free activities as part of Civil War & Emancipation Day: the 150th Anniversaries, which commemorates the start of the Civil War in 1861 and the end of slavery in 1865. "The job of the tourism industry is not to promote one aspect over the other, but to tell all sides of the story, and invite travelers to come to Virginia and learn Civil War history first-hand, from the battlefield to the home front to slavery," adds Alisa Bailey, head of the Virginia Tourism Corporation.
But even that can be tricky, says Sabato. "You can't simply let all the various elements do their thing, because some of those things are going to be offensive, by their very nature," he argues. "Frederick Douglass said, after the Civil War, that there was a right side and a wrong side to this war, and we should never forget which is which. And that's the point of these sesquicentennial celebrations: There is right and wrong in history. It isn't all value neutral."