Memories of War: Visiting Battlegrounds and Bonefields in the Early American Republic by Thomas A. Chambers (review)

Americans have long indulged their fascination with the nation’s historic battlefields, with successive generations of eager tourists descending on popular heritage sites such as Gettysburg and Yorktown. Within the broader scope of American history, however, these reverential excursions so familiar to us today remain relatively recent phenomena. As Thomas A. Chambers explains in this insightful and well-researched volume, the earliest citizens of the United States generally lacked both the means and the inclination to visit the many fields where their countrymen had fallen. Even after an emerging transportation network and the commercialization of leisure facilitated travel for an elite class of tourists during the years of the early Republic, visiting dilapidated forts and overgrown battlefields remained a secondary concern among well-to-do travelers more inclined to “social display, amusement, and dissipation” (63). Not until the 1850s, during the bitter sectional crisis that threatened to sunder the union, says Chambers, would growing numbers of Americans seek to commemorate their sacred grounds of war. By then, however, such sites had become newly politicized, carrying different meanings for the North and the South.

Spanning the century from 1760 to 1860, Memories of War explores the often convoluted and haphazard process by which Americans began to visit, commemorate, and preserve the nation’s battlegrounds. Specifically, the author aims to explain “why it took so long for Americans to remember their battlefields, and what kind of memories they constructed once they began viewing such sites as ‘sacred places’ worth visiting” (x). Privileging visitors’ personal interactions with place, Chambers seeks to illustrate how battle sites help “societies and nations invent and legitimize their histories, traditions, and myths” (15). Within the early United States, he shows, tourism proved instrumental to that enterprise by linking diverse locales to ongoing constructions of historical memory. To illuminate Americans’ place-centered reminiscences, Chambers draws on recent scholarship on American memory and a wide array of manuscript and printed sources, including newspapers, guidebooks, travelogues, personal correspondence, and administrative histories and historical resource surveys from the National Park Service.¹

According to Chambers, curious visitors could be seen strolling America’s abandoned battlegrounds during the late 1750s, when passing travelers paused to investigate the sites of the Seven Years’ War. With the remnants of war scarring the landscape and the crisis still resonating in the imperial consciousness, the somber scenes evoked more melancholic contemplation than deep historical reflection. Years later, during the Revolutionary War, locations of earlier British defeats such as Braddock’s Field and Fort Ticonderoga recalled imperial arrogance and provincial resourcefulness among patriot visitors eager to distinguish themselves from their erstwhile transatlantic kindred. Budding nationalists, for instance, proudly trumpeted the young George Washington’s exploits at the scene of General Edward Braddock’s defeat, boldly appropriating the site as “both an example of American distinctiveness and the spot where the nation’s first hero—the father of the country—made his mark and came of age” (34).

Yet into the early nineteenth century, travel remained mostly business or family related, with crude transportation, insufficient accommodations, and a general lack of interest curbing more leisurely excursions to remote battlefields. As Braddock’s Field gave way to local agriculture, the site attracted fewer curiosity seekers and receded from historical memory. To the northeast, however, an expanding transportation system and a growing tourist trade soon brought new traffic to the neglected ruins of Ticonderoga from a privileged set of travelers keen to take in the sights of the celebrated Northern Tour, which encompassed the Revolutionary War battlefields scattered amid the scenic Hudson River Valley and Lake George/Lake Champlain corridor. Well-to-do travelers, guidebooks in hand, now gazed upon the aging fortifications lining the Hudson River from the decks of passing steamboats or took a carriage to the overgrown fields of Saratoga during leisurely stays at the region’s fashionable hotels or resorts.

Ultimately, insists Chambers, the Northern Tour “served nationalistic as...