How do you describe a man who orchestrates a massacre of civilians in a time of war?
William Clarke Quantrill, the head of a band of guerrilla fighters known as Quantrill’s Raiders, led a campaign of retaliation and mischief around the bloody Kansas-Missouri border during the Civil War. A 1996 PBS program, “New Perspectives on the West,” described Quantrill’s Raiders as “perhaps the most savage fighting unit” of the era. In 1863, during a nighttime raid of Lawrence, Kansas, they dragged 183 men and boys from their homes and murdered them in front of their families. But to his supporters, PBS added, Quantrill was a “dashing, free-spirited hero.”
Quantrill’s legacy surfaced in Harrisburg this week, prompting local partisans to attach their own descriptions. The occasion was a new exhibit at the National Civil War Museum, called “Guns & Lace: Firearms and Apparel of the Civil War.”
The exhibit is sponsored by a $25,000 grant from the National Rifle Association. Among the displayed artifacts is a revolver Quantrill owned. Harrisburg Mayor Eric Papenfuse, who has sparred with both the NRA and the museum since taking office in 2014, questioned the memorialization of a “mass-murdering, racist sociopath.” The gun’s presence also disturbed Homer Floyd, a local civil rights leader and past director of the state Human Relations Commission. He organized a protest outside the museum Wednesday night, during a reception for the exhibit’s opening.
You’d have thought, from the uproar, that Quantrill’s gun held a prominent place in the display. But you could easily have missed it. In fact, the exhibit had no curatorial focus at all. It was simply an assemblage of firearms and dresses—42 guns, 11 gowns, and a plain frock once worn by a slave.
Neutrality is a point of pride for the museum, which aims to present a “balanced” view of the Civil War. One of the first exhibits in the permanent collection is a pre-war timeline, with events color-coded as being about “slavery,” “states’ rights,” or a “convergence of issues.” What school of history this is meant to appease I can only guess, but it results in an odd parsing of the record. The Missouri Compromise, a temporary fix to the problem of regulating slavery in the western territories, is coded as purely “states’ rights.” So is Prigg v. Pennsylvania, the Supreme Court decision overturning a law that made it a felony to forcibly retrieve runaway slaves.
Who gets to decide a museum’s interpretive bent—its angle on history, its bias? Certainly not the NRA, said museum director Wayne Motts, as he hustled back and forth across the lobby in the minutes leading up to the reception. “This exhibit, we have been able to curate it the way we wanted to curate it,” he said. The museum claims to have exercised editorial independence, though it defines the term rather narrowly. “No one told us that we couldn’t put out certain guns or certain weapons,” Motts said. That is not the same as saying no one asked for certain things to be put in. The exhibit includes a replica 1860 rifle, one of two donated by the Henry Repeating Arms Co., with the other set to be raffled to benefit the museum.
The exhibit also shares the “Guns & Lace” name with an online magazine that the NRA identifies as a partner on its “Women’s Channel.” (“What’s hotter than an awesome gun? An awesome gun in the hands of a beautiful girl,” the site advertises.) The channel itself is sponsored by Smith & Wesson, which happens to be one of the half-dozen gun manufacturers whose histories take up a significant portion of the exhibit’s copy. (The aforementioned Henry Repeating Arms Co. is another.)
Motts said he wasn’t aware the exhibit shared its title with an NRA partner program. Neither was Gene Barr, a museum board member and the president of the Pennsylvania Chamber of Business and Industry. “Well, gee, I guess there’s only so many words in the English language, and I don’t know where it came from,” Barr said of the name.
Jeffrey Poole, the managing director of the NRA’s “Shows and Exhibits” division, saw his group’s role somewhat differently. “We approached the museum about supporting their programs,” he said. “They could come up with the exhibit, and if it met the NRA’s criteria we would fund it.” Those criteria, he said, could be found on the website of the NRA Foundation, the organization’s grant-making arm. A mission statement there says the foundation supports activities “designed to promote firearms and hunting safety, to enhance marksmanship skills of those participating in the shooting sports, and to educate the general public about firearms in their historic, technological and artistic context.”
Just outside the exhibit door was a television screen, cycling through images of the museum, shooting ranges, and tips for gun safety. But the “Guns & Lace” name, Poole said, was just “coincidence.” “Certainly the makeup of the exhibit is well-described by the title,” he added.
“Coincidence” is an important concept for the NRA. It’s what allows the country’s high rates of gun violence and the wide availability of guns to be causally unrelated—they’re simply two things happening at the same time. But sometimes, just placing things side by side can speak volumes. At the reception, I met an older white couple who live in the city. The husband, a Republican, complained that a person of his party and his race couldn’t run for office in Harrisburg. Servers were circulating the room with hors d’oeuvres, and as we spoke, one of them approached and recognized me. It took me a moment to place the face. He was the stepfather of Rayon Braxton, the 26-year-old shot to death in an Allison Hill warehouse last fall. He wore a button-down shirt and a black apron. He carried slices of sausage stuck through with toothpicks on a small ceramic tray.
I thought of him later when, giving a speech at the reception, Dauphin County Commissioner Jeff Haste referred to one of Papenfuse’s criticisms—that the exhibit was “tone deaf.” “Thank you all for being tone deaf with me,” he said, to laughter. Down the hall, as a complement to deafness, was the exhibit: mute dresses, mute weapons, small plaques with nothing in particular to say. And, by sheer coincidence, standing among all those guns, the father of a murdered son.
