Altogether Fitting and Proper: Civil War Battlefield Preservation in History, Memory, and Policy, 1861–2015 by Timothy B. Smith (review)

Timothy B. Smith is an old hand at writing about the preservation of Civil War battlefields, having authored three books on this subject previously. Altogether Fitting and Proper, his newest book, recounts the mammoth effort to preserve battlefields across the nation from the beginning of the Civil War to its sesquicentennial. It focuses on three main themes: preserving battlefields, federal battlefield preservation policy, and the interplay between Civil War memory and battlefield preservation and commemoration. The bulk of the book is dominated by the struggle to safeguard battlefields. Smith identifies four levels of preservation—federal, state, local, and private—and each receives a fair bit of attention. Overall, he argues that battlefield preservation began as a private and state endeavor, evolved into a federal effort, then became dominated by state and local governments, before finally returning to the private sector.

The book is divided chronologically into seven chapters, each covering an era of preservation. The prologue and first chapter cover from 1861 to 1890. During this period, preservation and commemoration were mostly private and limited in scale, with the notable exceptions of national cemeteries and the work at Gettysburg. The following three chapters cover 1890 to 1945, a period when federal efforts at preservation peaked. The national government was especially influential during the Golden Age (1890s), when the first national battlefields were created, and the New Deal era, when the National Park Service took over the existing battlefields, received additional ones, and benefited from extra funding and labor. The next two chapters treat 1945 to 1990. Federal involvement had already begun to wane during the tail end of the New Deal period, and this trend continued after 1945. The excitement generated by the centennial, however, helped build enthusiasm for the creation of state and local battlefields. For Smith, the second half of this period was a dark age, as little preservation took place at any level due to the economic downturns in the 1970s and government funding cuts in the 1980s. The final chapter covers what Smith calls the renaissance of battlefield preservation. Beginning in 1990, interest in the Civil War and battlefield preservation increased. Private groups organized to protect their local battlefields, and the Civil War Trust emerged as a national leader in Civil War battlefield preservation.

Laced throughout Smith's narrative is a sense of missed opportunity, as each generation failed to preserve battlefields ultimately lost to later development. This was especially true in the Golden Age, when feelings of reconciliation were at an all-time high, veterans were still alive to mark the fields, the battlefields were in most cases still intact, and veterans dominated the federal and state governments. Smith is also critical of the federal government for adopting George B. Davis's Antietam plan for most battlefields, cutting costs by buying only the most significant areas of a battlefield, instead of implementing Henry Boynton's model of preserving the battlefield in its entirety at greater expense.

Smith touches on two other themes throughout the book. The first is the evolution of federal battlefield preservation policy. Smith concludes that despite many opportunities to form a consistent plan, the federal government has repeatedly failed to do so, and as a result, the private Civil War Trust has recently tried to fill this leadership void. The second theme is the back-and-forth between battlefield preservation and memory. He argues that veterans and later preservationists chose what fields to preserve based on their own memory of the war, and, in turn, the choice to preserve certain battlefields and not others affected how future generations would remember the conflict. The influence of David Blight's Race and Reunion is also present throughout the book, as Smith repeatedly condemns the reconciliationist interpretation adopted by veterans in the 1890s, which minimized the importance of race and slavery...