Landscape Preservation and Interpretation:
Issues of Use, Historical Experience, and Myth at
Gettysburg National Military Park

Nathan Jefferson Riddle

VI. Conclusion

Preserving Civil War battlefields appears to be an unquestioned necessity for American society. Revisionist tendencies are acts of heresy against the national mythology. Contemporary culture is facing deterioration due to inherent commercial malignancies, and any efforts to subject to critical evaluation the lessons inscribed upon the sacred soil of Civil War landscapes or to question the needs for and methods of preserving battlefields endangers the American social fabric. Citizens need these places, for without contact with their symbols, Americans risk falling deeper into the slough of materialism. For these places are described as being sacred, their features relics capable of mystical possibilities. Contact with a battlefield, stepping upon the very soil into which leached so much blood ideologically shed in the name of civil liberty, imparts the pilgrim with the holy American spirit of the heroes of the Civil War. Americans need to occasionally partake of a communion with history, imbibing symbols of patriotism and heroism. Standing on Cemetery Ridge, surrounded by memorials to righteousness, standing on the sacred soil of the battlefield perusing the visually harmonious, serene landscape, the visitor, mystically through the power of his own imagination, aided by the spirit of the place, experiences the events of the first three days of a July one-hundred and thirty-four years ago. Driving home after the pilgrimage, the visitor is instilled with the glory of the past and a rejuvenated, and perhaps even new, patriotic love for what it means to be an American.

The National Park Service and historians need to ardently reassess the argument for preserving Civil War battlefields. The planning process and the proposed product at Gettysburg National Military Park is not an isolated case of preservation. Describing the landscape as sacred, possessive of didactic capabilities, and pursuing period restoration govern the park service’s practices at all of its Civil War holdings. These arguments and methodologies also guide the National Park Service’s preservation of other types of historic properties. Desiring authenticity in physical fabric and historic experience, whether achieved honestly of fictitiously, is a proclivity of American culture. Colonial Williamsburg is a much maligned preservation effort, often presented as being an anomaly, as a misguided product of a recent past that lacked the informed historical consciousness and preservation methodologies of the present. Rather than being an anomalous product of a specific cultural context, the desire to clean up the past, to create an ordered, socially stable, nostalgic presentation of the past, evident in Rockefeller’s interpretation of colonial history, is a pervasive American tendency. Williamsburg "commemorated the planter elite, presented as the progenitors of timeless ideals and values, the cradle of the Americanism that Rockefeller and the corporate elite inherited and guarded.... Colonial Williamsburg was the appropriate past for the desired future". Throughout the twentieth century, Gettysburg has also been defined and presented as a symbolic past from which the present needs to receive lessons in order to be able to proceed virtuously into the future, dedicated to the ideals of the American Revolution.

Using the past for present purposes is not inherently malicious or necessarily a suppressive tool of those in power. History’s relevance derives from its abilities to provide understandings of not just the past but of the present. Specific lessons may not be learned but an educated awareness of the past enables critical thinking and strengthens the possibilities for rational action. Uses of the past, however, can be iniquitous. This is what needs to be questioned at Gettysburg, where the park service continues to present the landscape’s lessons and symbols as if they were inviolable historical truths. But each one of the ostensibly factual metaphors was a construct of a specific culture, and they had unique, clearly recognizable contingent meanings to the society for whom they were presented. These cultural contexts are invisible in present interpretive efforts. The landscape is one harmonious symbol of heroism and reconciliation. Of course, visitors come to Gettysburg with their own preconceptions of the landscape and understandings of the Civil War, and the reception of texts, whether understood in traditional or postmodern terms, is never a process of simple imposition. Evaluation of information is a subjective process, but rigidly circumscribing the presented interpretation of the text, or in the case of Gettysburg, the landscape, limits the ability of visitors to assess what they are shown and told.

Being repeatedly bludgeoned by stories of patriotism and national progress anesthetizes an ability or willingness to more vigorously scrutinize official narratives. The National Park Service needs to stop their preservation efforts at Gettysburg because they are based upon the worn supposition that the battlefield is sacred and for that reason must be preserved. The must in the argument needs to be subjected to rigorous criticism. Presenting the Gettysburg battlefield as a didactic, rhetorical relic of a prelapsarian past is a dubious activity.

Since most adult "Americans get their continuing education in history from the parks than from almost any other source", it becomes imperative for the National Park Service, the proprietor of these parks and the official interpreter of the nation’s past, to ask themselves why they are preserving Civil War battlefields. It will most likely be discovered that the answer is because they have always done so. The 1998 Gettysburg GMP is a case in point because it bases its arguments upon the enabling legislation which began the park’s history in 1864. Analysis will most likely suggest that the reasons behind creating the park and giving it certain missions are no longer relevant, and may possibly even be deleterious, to present society. The historian Mike Wallace argued that most Americans know relatively little about their past and have an underdeveloped sense of how history happens. This is not a reflection on popular intelligence, but an estimate of the strength of our historicidal culture. People are clearly interested in the past, but when they seek understanding they are confronted with institutions ... that tend to diminish their capacity to situate themselves in time. The political consequences of this impoverished historical consciousness are profound.

Institutions, such as the National Park Service, "should walk that difficult line between fostering a definition of the present solely in terms of the past and disconnecting the past so thoroughly from the present that we forget that people in the past produced the matrix of constraints and possibilities within which we act in the present". At Gettysburg, revisionism offers the possibility for disassembling the historical myths of the place to thereby create new possibilities for current relevance. The National Park Service needs to confront two issues guiding the preservation plan at Gettysburg: landscape restoration and the interpretation of the battlefield.

Restoration of the landscape to an 1863 appearance purports to create a conduit to the past. This medium of natural features will enable a visitor in the present to interact with ghosts of the past, picking up some important moral guidance in the process. In the park service’s analysis, visual unity will recreate historical authenticity, but restoration faces the hurdles imposed by the monuments. There is no point on the battlefield where one is out of contact from their visual presence. Period restoration is thus an impossible effort; moreover, it is an intellectually spurious endeavor. The Gettysburg landscape is already infused with historical fabrications; restoration will only make the invented myth complete.

Standing amidst a scene recreated in its entirety will absolutely disassociate the viewer from the present, an effect which will make nostalgic impulses even more insidious than they already are on the battlefield. Dell Upton argued that "Landscape - the scene - undeniably offers itself to us as a transparent totality, coherent, and final. Compared with the ephemeral nature of human consciousness and social action, the continuity of the material world and its apparent unchangeability seem to promise constant or certain meaning. Yet the stability of physical form falsely certifies stability of meaning; there may be no meaning at all". The Gettysburg landscape already contains reified meanings that present an appearance of having remained stable since their inception. Return to an authentic historic appearance can only make these symbols seem to be even more factual, more natural in their existence and truthfulness. Further complicating the issues is the fact that the Gettysburg battlefield has not existed as the soldiers saw it since they first trod upon its fields. Various authorial interventions followed the destruction of the land by the armies’ shells. Monument building and farming followed the destruction of war. Restoration can not be to what the soldiers experienced; it will instead recreate what existed before the battle. If the plan is implemented, what a visitor will experience is a serene farmland untouched by war. The monuments, however, will confuse even this basic visual appearance. Their ubiquitousness precludes an imaginable battle experience.

Restoration and reconstruction are carelessly proposed as the means of preserving the Gettysburg battlefield to the result that the General Management Plan proposes the physical creation of a false historical setting. Not knowing that Ziegler’s Grove or the Peach Orchard are new growth, visitors will imagine that they are standing amidst the trees which shielded some fortunate men and fell shredded to the ground for their immobile efforts. Due to its deceit, a false setting can not present true historical narratives. This acceptance of restoration as a viable means and end of preservation is a problem associated not just with Gettysburg. The Antietam Civil War battlefield is protected from commercial encroachments upon its land and into its viewsheds by land acquisitions and easement strategies. Reforestation is also being used to fill in missing, natural historic pieces of the landscape. This approach is the guiding principle behind the preservation and management of all of the National Park Service’s Civil War holdings. Battlefields are treated by the park service and by the public as untouched sylvan retreats from the present where one, in mythological fashion, may happen upon an oracle, hidden amongst the ancient natural landscape features, from whom one may learn mysterious and empowering secrets of the past. Anti-modernism permeates the preservation arguments of the park service. Gettysburg, Antietam, and other historical sites represent a past where one may seek physical and spiritual refuge from the present. Since the 1930s, park service officials have made this characterization explicit.

A desire to keep a landscape historically accurate as an artifact turns it into a museum piece while, in contrast, continuity engenders periodic renewals of social meaning. Even the power of archaeological sites derives not solely from an authenticity defined as a rigid concept pertaining to issues of siting, materials, and state of intactness; a great amount of their historical power stems from an ineffable spiritual presence that only ruins can generate. Edward Gibbon’s mystical encounter in the Roman Forum that became the genesis for his eighteenth-century The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire lay in a sense of continuity of place as he watched Christian monks in the pagan landscape. Meaningful connections to the past are made through a continuity of use. Gettysburg is such a continuously used place, and attempting to sever it from the present with a boundary between history and modernity will antiquate it by effectively sealing it from contamination by modern public memory.

Most Western countries, with the exception of the United States, heavily discourage reconstruction or period restoration. The 1966 Venice Charter, drawn by the Second International Congress of Architects and Technicians of Historic Monuments, serves as the officially accepted preservation criteria for those in charge of cultural property in the West. Article 11 reads, "the valid contributions of all periods to the building of a monument must be respected, since unity of a style is not the aim of a restoration. When a building includes the superimposed work of different periods, the revealing of the underlying state can only be justified in exceptional circumstances and when what is removed is of little interest and the material which is brought to light is of great historical, archaeological or aesthetic value, and its state of preservation good enough to justify action". Article 15 claims that "All reconstruction work should however be ruled out a priori. Only anastylosis, that is to say, the reassembling of existing but dismembered parts can be permitted". If the United States had signed the Venice Charter, the act of nonagreement signifying a cultural disinclination to compromise on a unique American methodology of caring for the past, the Gettysburg plan would be severely in violation. Demolition would be precluded because the Cyclorama Building is a valuable historic component of the commemorative landscape, and it reveals the park service’s historical and managerial attitudes during the 1950s and 1960s. Reconstruction of the landscape would also have to be avoided since very little of Ziegler’s Grove remains and other parts of the natural landscape no longer exist.

Recognizing that the Venice Charter applied to monuments rather than to more broadly conceived cultural sites and that the charter did not exactly fit the unique needs of Australia, Australia ICOMOS drafted the Burra Charter in 1977. Article 16 reads, "The contributions of all periods to the place must be respected. If a place includes the fabric of different periods, revealing the fabric of one period at the expense of another can only be justified when what is removed is of slight cultural significance and the fabric which is to be revealed is of much greater cultural significance". The Gettysburg landscape consists of a complex layering of history in which the Cyclorama Building is an important piece of the commemorative landscape and of a record of the park’s ownership. Removing it will excise from the landscape an important memory of the park service’s history. Mission 66 was a culturally important project whose history deserves to be interpreted at Gettysburg. The merit of preserving the battlefield primarily lies in its ability to recount the historical uses of a specific place and the concomitant public memory of particular cultural contexts.

Even though the "Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for the Treatment of Historic Properties" claims that "The replacement of intact or repairable historic materials or alterations of features, spaces, and spatial relationships that characterize a property will be avoided" and that "Changes to property that have acquired historic significance in their own right will be retained and preserved", the Standards are rather permissive of reconstruction and period restoration. The Gettysburg plan reveals flaws in American arguments for preservation. Authenticity is the guiding principle behind the park service’s efforts, but they construe authenticity in a paradoxical fashion by defining it as the creation of an experience that abides by fanciful, nostalgic notions of what the past should have been like, rather that what is physically intact. Since true authenticity of the Gettysburg battlefield is a product of its layering, restoring the landscape will create an inauthentic place in physical and ideological terms. Fences, trees, grading, and other features will all be new landscape elements masquerading as the ones that existed in 1863, while the image of Gettysburg, the historical concept, will be a romanticized myth. The Society of Architectural Historians complained to the park Superintendent that if the plan is implemented "What visitors will experience, then, is neither a mid-nineteenth-century landscape, nor one of later decades, but a new quasi-historical patchwork.... Equally disconcerting is that this new creation is likely to be interpreted, and will readily be seen by most visitors, as an authentic one. And even if this program is carried out to the full degree proposed, it will always be compromised by changes wrought in the twentieth century over which the Park Service has no control". Criticism of a restoration of the park can not be considered without a reevaluation of what the park teaches since a claritfication of the lessons drives the park service’s arguments for a need to restore visual harmony and authenticity.

The Gettysburg landscape proclaims that America’s progress and America’s periodic regenerative experiences, which led to recommittals to the ideals of the Founding Fathers, occur through violence. It is the National Park Service’s duty to reject this myth and clearly say that the Civil War was not a knightly war fought by idealistic heroes - that the Civil War was not fought over abstract causes - that reconciliation did not occur as easily and as completely as has been traditionally suggested - that equality and democracy were not achieved in totality through the five years of bloodshed. As the narrative is now constructed, it mocks the history of black Americans since no mention is made of slavery at Gettysburg. Claiming that the war solved issues of inequality insults the history of all ethnic groups in America. Racism against the Irish, belied by the presence of Gaelic monuments at Gettysburg, was violently present in the North at the time of the Civil War. Presenting the war as a conflict between competing conceptions of constitutional government commits an act of fallacy by omitting the very real role slavery played in the rhetoric of the time. What are we as Americans bequeathing future generations, not to mention the falsehoods we are committing in the present, by exonerating the Confederacy and covering the Gettysburg battlefield with an impenetrable shroud of heroism and idealism?

Selective memory diffuses controversial issues from the past, and this prettying-up of history is a malignancy in American public culture. Entertainment and patriotism, inextricably intertwined, create a myth of progress that negates continuing social struggles and lessens Americans’ abilities to adequately and honestly deal with present issues. Anti-revisionism is, however, not all-pervasive; the Little Bighorn Battlefield now tells a story with more concern given to Native American viewpoints, and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. questions America’s involvement in Vietnam. But with the exception of a few examples, propagandistic symbols of mythical history permeate the American landscape.

During my several trips to the battlefield, I heard, repeatedly, men, who obviously knew the history of the battle, recounting to their wives, girlfriends, children, and male friends stories of heroic deeds enacted upon the landscape. Inevitably, comparisons were made, empirically, of past and present weapon capabilities with wonderment expressed towards how the war would have preceded if only the men of 1863 had possessed modern weapons and known modern battle tactics. Through the presence of actual cannons, printed displays, and videos of reenactors in full action, a large exhibit in the Visitor Center museum tells the viewer how nineteenth-century artillery operated and just what it could do. The war everywhere appears to have been a glorious, romantic, and idealistic contest for honor. I never heard, or read for that matter, true accounts of why those men had been fighting. Neither is death as a concrete fact discussed, even though there were 50,000 casualties at Gettysburg. The battlefield tries to push the vistior to lament, If only we could be so honorable. If only we lived in a time when men fought for what they believed in, were in fact willing to die for a higher cause, than in this materialistic world most flagrantly symbolized by the proliferation of McDonalds and shopping malls and the errant ways of a profligate President.

The invidiousness of Gettysburg, and of a deeply nostalgic American desire for clean, stable, and orderly historic settings of which it is a product, stems from the severance the landscape makes with the present. Looking at Gettysburg, one is well aware of the fact that the landscape is not a coherent remnant from the nineteenth-century, but the park service tells the visitor that the national park is a sanctuary and a memory fragment of a better time. The National Park Service needs to renounce anti-modern tendencies in their preservation of historic sites. Interpretation should emphasize continuity, not of a stable transmission of meanings but of use and adaptation through time.

At Gettysburg, the park service needs to recant their desires for the restoration of historical periods and should instead focus their energies and resources towards maintaining what they hold in their care. This includes measures necessary to preserve the Cyclorama Building. Secondly, the park service needs to reevaluate current interpretation. The narrative should honestly investigate the war’s causes and results and the uses to which the park has been put. Explication of individual monuments and of the different periods of commemoration needs to be undertaken. No longer should the Gettysburg National Military Park be an unquestioned symbol of honor, heroism, and reconciliation that glorifies violence in the name of patriotism and national progress.

This site composed and administered by Christine Madrid French 2004.