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

Introduction

Introduction Preservation or Interpretation? The National Park Service and Public Memory This book examines how the National Park Service (NPS), through its interpretive history exhibits, invites the American public to interpret the legacy of their most divisive and destructive national event: the Civil War. A rhetorical analysis of the artifacts that the NPS uses to interpret the war at Civil War historical parks and battlefields— including field markers, orientation films, museum exhibits, and orientation brochures—reveals how the Park Service has constructed interpretations of the war and its enduring themes of reconciliation, racial conflict, emancipation, and the struggle for equality, the relationship between warfare and masculinity, and the morality of war. The NPS has,since 1916,been the federal agency responsible for identifying , preserving, and interpreting public spaces deemed of historic, cultural, natural, and scenic national significance.1 Currently the Park Service is committed to the dual objective of preserving and interpreting nearly four hundred public spaces of national importance to millions of visitors each year.2 Not surprisingly, a federal agency with as much power and influence as the Park Service has been subjected to a fair amount of close scrutiny in a democratic society wary of excessive federal control over local, state, and private interests. However, the Park Service has traditionally been evaluated by scholars and the general public mostly on their ability as historical preservationists to restore those spaces with the appropriate measure of accuracy,authenticity,and discretion .Largely absent from bureaucratic,scholarly,and public discussion on the Park Service have been efforts to understand the Park Service’s second objective: interpreting and creating meaning at these public spaces.3 2 / Introduction Until the 1990s, the dominance of a preservationist orientation has been reflected in the Park Service’s overall philosophy. The Park Service ’s main objective of preservation, in fact, defined their interpretive objectives.“first,” explains former NPS assistant director Robert M.Utley when defining the management objectives of Park Service historical programs, “we were to care for ‘historic resources’ and guard them from whatever forces, natural or human (including our own managers), [that] endangered them....Second,we were to ‘interpret’ these resources through museums,films,publications,lectures,tours,and other media,to give the visitor an understanding and appreciation of the resources and events being illustrated.”4 Preservation, as defined by Utley, is the material protection of historical sites from forces that would alter their original appearance, while “interpretation” amounts to verbal, written, or mediated “preservation” of the events that took place on those material landscapes.Therefore, interpretation has traditionally served the interests of historically accurate preservation and does not refer to the Park Service ’s own interpretations that function to actively create, and not just passively preserve, meanings and memories about the past. A preservationist perspective also tends to prevail in academic scholarship about the Park Service outside the field of rhetorical studies,perhaps influenced by the Park Service’s own preservationist agenda.5 Those who evaluate the Park Service from a preservationist perspective tend either to assess the historical accuracy of the various structures and exhibits at a given park or to examine the conflicts between the Park Service and outside interest groups over whether or not landscapes of national importance should be preserved or used for economic gain.6 Alternately, an interpretive perspective not defined by preservation objectives would involve understanding the rhetorical dimensions of NPS historical parks or the symbolic processes used in NPS interpretive exhibits to shape the meanings that park visitors are invited to construct about their collective past.7 A Rhetorical Analysis of National Park Service Interpretations of the CivilWar In this book,I conduct a close rhetorical analysis of how the Park Service interprets Gettysburg National Military Park (GNMP), Harpers ferry National Historical Park (HfNHP), and Cold Harbor visitor Center (CHvC), three of the most popular and important sites of Civil War Introduction / 3 memory. These three parks represent the past and present foci of Park Service interpretation of the Civil War. Spearheaded by the efforts of former Park Service chief historian Dwight T. Pitcaithley in the mid1990s , followed by a decree from Congress in the late 1990s, the Park Service began developing interpretive exhibits that identified slavery as the principal cause of the Civil War.8 Harpers ferry National Historical Park represents one of the NPS’s first concerted efforts to place slavery at the war’s epicenter. While the public memory of the...