Battle of Gettysburg: The Official History by the Gettysburg National Military Park Commission (review)

172CIVIL WAR HISTORY and souvenir hunters who descended on the area. For years after the battle, farmers encountered human bones in their fields and children were killed by shells they found. Ernst's book should appeal to a wide audience, particularly general readers. The writing is vivid, skillfully blending military and social history. The only major shortcoming is the absence of a good map of the area. Sharon Seager BaU State University Battle ofGettysburg: The Official History by the Gettysburg National Military Park Commission. Compiled by George R. Large. (Shippensburg, Pa.: White Mane Publishing, 1999. Pp. xiü, 328. $19.95.) Members ofthe Civil War generation established and developed five preserves— Chickamauga-Chattanooga, Antietam, Shiloh, Gettysburg, and Vicksburg—that constitute the nucleus of the national battlefield park network. Their veteranfounders and Congress intended those first parks to serve as memorials to the great armies of North and South and to preserve the venues of major contests for historical and professional military study. Responsibility for shaping the areas as monuments and outdoor classrooms fell to the War Department, their first steward. The actual task of surveying and mapping the sites and pinpointing troop positions devolved upon commissions of Northern and Southern battle veterans, working under department auspices. Those commissions, in turn, had authority to mark the locations of various commands with metal tablets that recorded combat action. Having compiled and chronologically ordered the inscriptions on 349 such tablets in Gettysburg National Military Park and along the campaign routes, retired army officer George Large presents them as a tactical account of the battle. A hallmark ofthose inscriptions is their recounting of the deeds of the Army of the Potomac and those of the Army of Northern Virginia "without praise and without censure," as directed by 1893 legislation that established the three-man Gettysburg commission. The measure's emphasis on objectivity was crucial, reflecting contemporary concern with rigorous scholarship and awareness of the need for bipartisan support to bring the unfinished Gettysburg park crusade to fruition. The resulting engravings "provide a carefully researched, impartial history of the Battle of Gettysburg," as Lt. Col. Large defines his work (vii). A useful introduction chronicles preservation efforts at Gettysburg (first under the private-sector Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association and later under federal control), thus placing the War Department tablets in historical context. The book then is divided into six sections based on phases of the campaign . Each section features a summary of combat activities (with one map), a diagram of tablet locations, period and modern photos of the scene, and an inventory of tablet inscriptions (with Union army listings preceding Confeder- book reviews173 ate). The work concludes with the organizational structure of each army and a tablet index. By theirvery nature, the inscriptions makefor tedious reading; wading through three hundred-plus is as stimulating as watching paint dry. Students ofthe battle who seek tactical specifics (mainly to the brigade level), however, will find them here. The paucity of maps and the failure of existing ones to illustrate movements fully are more substantial drawbacks for a volume that claims to be a battlefield guide. More useful in that regard is the U.S. Army War College Guide to the Battle ofGettysburg, which features a variety of situational/topographical maps. Ultimately, the best solution might be to excerpt the fine maps from Edwin Coddington's Gettysburg Campaign and use them with the guidebook of choice. Besides the desire to commemorate Civil War armies and provide instructional sites for future soldiers, veterans who founded the first military parks were animated by a heroic and nonideological memory of the war that was characteristic of mainstream America at the turn of the twentieth century. Remembrance then focused on the war itself rather than its political or racial issues , which were potentiaUy subversive ofcontemporary reunionism. Battlefield preservation of the 1890s thus emphasized tactical reconstruction of the stories of great battles rather than recalling the reasons for the conflict. Large's Battle of Gettysburg, which documents that tactical reconstruction, reveals as much about American society of a century ago as it does about a pivotal contest of July 1863. Mary Munsell Abroe Loyola University, Chicago A Reporter's Lincoln. By Walter B. Stevens. Edited...