Preserving Our History

The country may be undergoing a revival of interest in the Civil War era. The excellent “Battle Cry of Freedom” by James M. McPherson is on the best-seller list. Another fine book, “The Generals: Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee” by San Diegans Nancy Scott Anderson and Dwight Anderson, is in the stores. And a mini-series production of Gore Vidal’s novel “Lincoln” will be on television during the coming week.

A revival would be appropriate because many of the great Civil War battlefields are under assault themselves from encroaching business and residential development. On these pages we earlier decried plans for construction of a giant shopping mall adjacent to the Manassas National Battlefield Park in what was serene Virginia countryside about 20 miles outside Washington.

The plight of Manassas has received attention from important figures in the government--including Secretary Donald P. Hodel of the Department of the Interior, which manages the battlefields through its National Park Service; Transportation Secretary James H. Burnley IV, a Civil War buff, and Rep. Morris K. Udall (D-Ariz.), the chairman of the House Interior Committee. Although the developers say that the mall area itself is of little historic significance, it would cover the location of field hospitals and the site of Lee’s headquarters tent. All that would separate the mall from the battlefield would be a line of trees. Hodel, Burnley, Udall et al. should do whatever they legally can to preserve the integrity and the rural nature of the Manassas battlefield.

The Antietam battlefield, near the Potomac River west of Frederick, Md., also is threatened by encroaching residential and business development--including a mall project and a proposed row of condominium homes on a ridge overlooking the field. Up to now, Antietam (called the Battle of Sharpsburg by Confederates, for the nearby town) has been so isolated that it is virtually unchanged since it became the setting for the bloodiest day of the war--Sept. 17, 1862--with about 23,000 Americans of both sides dead, wounded or missing.

Preservationists are willing to compromise if developers will, but one says that “we don’t want Sharpsburg to become another commercial Gettysburg.” The Gettysburg battlefield also is preserved by the National Park Service, but directly across the road is a strip city of fast-food places, motels and curio stands.

The renewed interest in the Civil War is significant because it has placed less emphasis on military action and more on the complex economic, political and social forces that led to the war and that battered both sides during the war, and on the effect of the personalities of the major figures of the period. To get a firsthand feel for the events, there is nothing like walking the battlefields and envisioning the terrible havoc that Americans visited on fellow Americans. The National Park Service and other involved groups should make a special inventory now of all the Civil War’s hallowed grounds to be sure that the nation is doing all that it should to preserve them.