Interpreting Sacred Ground: The Rhetoric of National Civil War Parks and Battlefields by J. Christian Spielvogel (review)

Christian Spielvogel's book Interpreting Sacred Ground: The Rhetoric of National Civil War Parks and Battlefields demonstrates the value that a distinctly rhetorical perspective brings to the examination of historical narrative. The cultivated habit of "overlooking the simultaneous existence of multiple public memories," Spielvogel explains, paves the way for dominant, albeit contested, public memories to "appear unified and consensual" (9–10). Rather than being inevitable, meaning is attributed to historical events by interested parties seeking to direct the meaning of the past for present purposes. Within this framework, Interpreting Sacred Ground offers a "close rhetorical analysis" of Gettysburg National Military Park, Harpers Ferry National Historical Park, and Cold Harbor Visitor Center. Beyond being popular tourist destinations that preserve historically significant Civil War memory sites, Spielvogel's analysis demonstrates how the interpretive exhibits are themselves products of and the media of expression for strategic decisions of the National Park Service (NPS), the federal agency tasked with directing the meaning of these sites.

The NPS was created in 1916, Spielvogel explains, to identify, preserve, and interpret "public spaces deemed of historic, cultural, natural, and scenic national significance" (1). By 1933, the NPS held all federally owned national parks, battlefields, cemeteries, and monuments under its administrative control. By 1935, the NPS had "become the first federal agency in the United States responsible for promoting a coherent narrative about the country's historical, archaeological, and aesthetic past" with the intent to develop a "coherent interpretive history program" (18). From its inception then, scholars of rhetoric will quickly note that the NPS sought to utilize historical sites as discursive nodes where audiences would come into contact with a larger narrative about U.S. history, identity, and values.

As stewards of the Civil War memory sites analyzed in this monograph, the NPS traditionally utilized a "preservationist orientation" that privileged the presumed value-free mission of, first, preserving and protecting historical resources and, second, providing interpretive materials to "give the visitor an understanding and appreciation of the resources and events being illustrated" (2). While this orientation cloaks itself in a discourse of historical accuracy, Spielvogel is quick to point out the axiological conceit that it seeks to conceal—namely, that the NPS's work on Civil War memory sites was guided by the "ideology of reconciliation" developed by veterans groups decades after the war, from the late 1880s to early 1890s, that promoted patriotic veneration of war heroes at the cost of other interpretive possibilities presented by the event of the Civil War.

Spielvogel argues that the discourse shifted in the 1990s when NPS chief historian Dwight Pitcaithley directed the administration to reframe the story of the Civil War. While remaining historically accurate, the new story would explicitly frame the war as being caused primarily by the institution of slavery and would identify the freeing of slaves as its most significant result. With such an orientation as a guide, the same historical facts that once breathed life into a version of patriotism based on martial heroism started to be recast in such a way that acknowledged racial complexities while offering an opportunity to reflect on the tragic and unnecessary loss of life wrought by moral decisions.

The monograph is split into two thematic sections—"Race and Memory" and "Violence and Memory." These sections quite appropriately demarcate two consequences of the shift in the NPS's perspectival orientation. The first section comprises one chapter on the Gettysburg Address as it relates to the developing exhibitions at the Gettysburg National Military Park and one on the revival of emancipationist memory at Harpers Ferry National Historical Park. In the former, Spielvogel contends with the shifts in interpretation of Lincoln's speech and the conflicting maintenance of the markers of martial heroism on the battlefield and critical account of the racial dimensions of the Civil War in the new Museum and Visitor Center. In chapter 2...