RICHMOND, Virginia (Bloomberg) — Richmond, Virginia, whose statue-lined Monument Avenue has glorified Confederate heroes for a century, is making room for new voices to tell the story of the Civil War.The American Civil War Center, which opened in the one-time capital of the Confederacy in October, is the first museum in the US to discuss the history of the war from the perspectives of three sides — the North, the South and the slaves.

A century and a half after the fighting ended, the museum isn’t settling old arguments about the war, which took more American lives than any other conflict.

“The hope has been to try to educate everybody away from whatever prejudices or ill-informed biases they had,” said James McPherson, winner of a Pulitzer Prize for his 1988 book, “Battle Cry of Freedom: the Civil War Era,” and an adviser on the museum.

Some black residents say the museum, founded by the Tredegar National Civil War Center Foundation, doesn’t go far enough to shed light on the past.

“This presentation simply serves to sanitise the Confederacy and to glorify false heroes,” said Raymond Boone, publisher of the Richmond Free Press, the city’s leading newspaper aimed at a black readership. “If we were going to have balance in a Second World War museum, would you give Hitler the same weight as Roosevelt?”

Bragdon Bowling, 58, of the Virginia division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, has the opposite view. He quit an advisory board for the museum because he “saw from the beginning that the Confederate side would get short shrift”.

Bowling, a real-estate investor whose great-grandfather was a Confederate artilleryman, said most Southerners were fighting to defend their homes.

“It would be grossly unfair to make the Confederate soldier into some kind of storm trooper,” he said.

The $13.6 million building, on the site of the former Tredegar Gun Foundry overlooking the James River, is a labour of love, said Alex Wise, a descendant of a Confederate general. The museum was his idea, and he recruited supporters to create the Richmond-based Tredegar foundation.

“Everyone is afraid around here that when you do a Civil War project, it’s going to have racial overtones or create controversy,” Wise said. “We laid an awful lot of groundwork, talked to an awful lot of leaders to explain what this was and what it wasn’t.”

Wise, who served in the US Information Agency, recalled how former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt in 1982 supported showing the movie “Holocaust” in his country against opposition from those who feared opening up old wounds.

“I felt there was a measure of that here, that we still needed to have a public discussion of the Civil War,” said Wise, 55, a former director of Virginia’s Department of Historic Resources, the state agency charged with maintaining historic sites.

The 1995 decision to erect a statue to black tennis champion Arthur Ashe along Monument Avenue in 1995 riled some residents, who argued that putting the athlete amid statues of Confederate heroes such as Jefferson Davis violated the Civil War theme.

In 2000, a new mural of General Robert E. Lee, which had sparked protests from some blacks, was burned. Then, in 2003, the placement of a statue of President Abraham Lincoln with son Tad prompted a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans to hire an aircraft with a streamer protesting the statue.

John Motley, chairman of the foundation, which established the museum in affiliation with the Smithsonian Institution, recalled how Wise described his plan to him. Motley, a black man who collects Civil War artefacts, was so impressed that he donated his collection of 3,000 items, valued at about $1 million.

“I got goose bumps,” said Motley. “Too many times, the story is told in a segregated way. That’s not the way the war was. It was all intertwined.”

While the tales may be interlaced, the stories and voices of the slaves are the most compelling in the new museum. Exhibits show how slavery survived even in Union-occupied areas during the war. A November 1861 poster offers a $75 reward for an escaped Maryland slave: “A Mulatto Girl, Charlette Gaither, 17 years of age, low of stature and rather inclined to be fleshy.”

After Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 freed the slaves in states in rebellion, some blacks complained that their owners failed to tell them. Slavery endured in some Union- controlled border states for two more years, the museum shows. An estimated 4 million slaves were finally freed.

When Confederate President Davis granted freedom to slaves who enlisted in the Rebel army during the last month of the war, some volunteers felt deceived.

“I wondered whether young master had taken me in the army to keep the Yankees from getting me,” wrote William Johnson Jr. of Virginia.

Richmond Mayor Douglas Wilder, who in 1990 became Virginia’s first black governor, said the museum is a welcome addition, even though it’s hardly the final word.

“It answers some questions and then leaves some unanswered,” said Wilder.