The Golden Age of Battlefield Preservation: The Decade of the 1890s and the Establishment of America's First Five Military Parks (review)

J U L Y 2 0 0 9 233 courses of bodies of water do both. They reveal and they hide sites, all at the same time. Although objects covered by the force of the rivers and their shifting sands eventually come to light, more often than not these offerings from the mud are covered again. Many discoveries await adventurers who enter the swamp, but one should not enter without preparation . Gone to the Swamp offers much in the way of sage advice to all time travelers, and I highly recommend it be taken along as standard boat equipment—tucked safely away in a watertight container. IAN W. BROWN University of Alabama The Golden Age of Battlefield Preservation: The Decade of the 1890s and the Establishment of America’s First Five Military Parks. By Timothy B. Smith. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2008. xxiii, 294 pp. $38.95. ISBN 978-1-57233-622-3. Of the thousands of places where Union and Confederate soldiers fought between 1861 and 1865, a few battlefields retain eternal distinction . Perhaps it was the unbelievable amount of bloodshed and sacrifice or their strategic significance that a few fields in Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Georgia, Maryland, and Mississippi were the first to be preserved in the wake of the bloodiest war in America’s history. By the 1880s veterans began to preserve and commemorate the war’s most important battles: Chickamauga and Chattanooga (separate battles commemorated in one park), Antietam, Shiloh, Gettysburg, and Vicksburg. These were the battles that defined the Civil War and were the battlefields that veterans selected to preserve for future generations. In The Golden Age of Battlefield Preservation, Timothy Smith examines the formation of these five military parks, arguing that “never before had American battlefields been preserved so extensively” (p. 28). Placing the preservation of these battlefields within a larger societal context, Smith concludes that the creation of these parks by the war’s veterans represented themes of reconciliation, preservation, and commemoration. He argues that several factors allowed this “golden age of preservation,” mainly decreasing animosities over Reconstruction, increasing desires for reconciliation, and veterans’ political influence. Smith offers a chronological and topical approach to the subject. He provides contextual discussion on the early preservation efforts, followed by chapters on each battlefield. Such an approach is useful, because T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 234 the comparative nature of Smith’s account allows an understanding of not only how each of the five parks developed, but how one battlefield compares to another. Smith argues that the preservation of the first five battlefields occurred in two distinct fashions. One method, practiced at Chickamauga and pioneered by park commissioner Henry Boyton, provided for the preservation of the entire battlefield through massive land acquisition, as well as extensive marking of battle lines and monumentation . The second method, practiced at Antietam, included piecemeal land purchases and varied monumentation practices. In the modern era the crown jewel of the Civil War parks is Gettysburg. Although Smith acknowledges that basic preservation patterns began at Gettysburg, noting that “the work at Gettysburg indeed pointed the direction battlefield preservation would take,” he does not believe Gettysburg set the precedent for battlefield preservation (p. 26). Instead, Smith finds preservation and commemoration precedent at Chickamauga/ Chattanooga, the first battlefields to be preserved by the federal government in 1890. Comparatively, because Gettysburg was the fourth park to be preserved by the federal government in 1895, Smith asserts that “such a late start does not diminish Gettysburg’s historical position, but it does show Gettysburg was not the foundation upon which all federal battlefield preservation was built” (p. 145). Smith concludes that although there were similarities, overall each of the first five Civil War parks developed in a unique fashion. Some threads of continuity were based on location. Commissioners in the western parks of Shiloh, Vicksburg, and Chickamauga/Chattanooga, for example , adopted a color scheme for their unit markers, while the eastern parks of Antietam and Gettysburg did not. In addition to the armies’ color scheme, the commissioners at...