Interpreting Sacred Ground: The Rhetoric of National Civil War Parks and Battlefields

4. The Symbolic Landscape: Visualizing Violence at Gettysburg National Military Park

4 The Symbolic Landscape VisualizingViolence at Gettysburg National Military Park How is battlefield injuring and killing represented visually at national Civil War battlefield parks such as Gettysburg National Military Park? This chapter addresses the visual representation of violence through the physical landscape, monuments, photographs, and vivid “word pictures” featured within the stops on the self-guided auto tour of the battlefield that follow those from the preceding chapter. By linking combat to a pastoral landscape, I argue that visual representations of battle at GNMP function to complement,idealize,and naturalize heroic masculinity.This pastoral rhetoric effaces savage interpretations of the war by contextualizing combat within a vast, bucolic, serene landscape, thereby fusing representations of the body (living and dead) of the Civil War soldier and the pastoral landscape into a harmonious synthesis. Moreover, by repeatedly directing the visitor’s gaze to broad, panoramic battlefield vistas that replicate a commanding officer’s strategic point of view, visual representations of combat in the wayside exhibits help assist visitors in linking combat to the pastoral. The physical landscape, more so than other forms of visual interpretation (with the exception of photography, perhaps), appears to reflect a past unmediated by the subjective forces of history and human agency. yet battlefields are designated, after all, as battlefield parks, and the beautifully maintained battlefield grounds, while undoubtedly a source of the Park Service’s popularity, do contribute to its overall depiction of combat. The rhetoric of visual representation at a given wayside is also complicated by the combination of visual mediums used at a given stop, while each of those mediums is influenced by its own artistic and institutional conventions. The next stop on the driving tour of the battlefield that focuses on Visualizing Violence at Gettysburg National Military Park / 107 combat, for example, seamlessly blends photography and landscape to complement the written wayside text. “General Rodes Attacks” includes a contemporary color photograph that provides a panoramic view of oak Ridge facing south, with a cannon in the foreground of the photo. The cannon, which obviously is used to help frame this picture, nevertheless awkwardly puts visitors in the position of engineering the cannonade. Cannons are the only weapons that were used in the service of killing at Gettysburg that are “preserved” by the Park Service on the battlefield. Their presence, however, does not easily conform to a savage or heroic interpretation of battle. The savage perspective, linked to soldiers’ experience of killing as amoral, random, destructive, and dehumanizing, would be more accurately represented by positioning visitors on the receiving end of a shell, whose indiscriminate damage defies heroic masculinity ’s courageous tenets. Placing visitors behind the cannon helps efface the savage perspective, although there is nothing about the photograph that suggests the need to utilize the heroic perspective to make sense of it. The perspective is dehumanizing , to be sure, as it removes visitors by hundreds of yards from the injuring and killing while also inviting them to associate its cause with the lead shell rather than the human individual. This form of dehumanization is not savage, however, for it renders people as abstractions, thereby desensitizing, as opposed to repelling, visitors to killing.1 In this sense, the positioning of battlefield cannons, both in photographs and on the landscape, is consistent with modern representations of antiseptic “high-tech” war that might help naturalize, for contemporary visitors, the ubiquitous presence of cannons at NPS battlefields. It becomes obvious that visitors are invited to understand the combat at oak Ridge from the perspective of Maj. Gen. Robert E. Rodes, not the Confederate soldiers operating the cannons,once the verbal interpretation of this site is combined with the visual. once again, conventions of military history writing are utilized to reduce the armies to a colossal body, this time that of Rodes: GENERAL RoDES ATTACKS At midday on July 1, after a lull in the fighting, Maj. Gen. Robert E. Rodes took position on this hill north of Gettysburg with 8,000 Confederates. other Confederate divisions were converging 108 / Violence and Memory on the town from your right and left. The closest Union troops were on oak Ridge about ¹⁄³-mile in front of you. The thunder of Southern cannon positioned here signaled the beginning of the attack. following the cannonade, Brig. Gen. Alfred Iverson’s North Carolina Brigade advanced with other Confederates against oak Ridge. As Iverson neared the ridge, federals concealed behind a stone wall rose...