Preface
Americans love their battlefields. In 2010 alone, over 8.5 million people visited the twenty-two battlefields administered by the National Park Service, and millions more likely visited the many other sites run by state, local, or private organizations. At these battlefields Americans do more than learn about their pastthey enact their patriotism by commemorating, preserving, and remembering the places where patriot blood won our nations independence. Gettysburg attracts over one million yearly visitors because American history was forged there, and people seek out a personal connection with an evocative place to understand their nations past. Many tourists claim to feel something special at Gettysburg, a sense that transformative events occurred there, and frequently comment on the chill that runs down their spine while on the battlefield. Twenty-first-century Americans assume that all battlefields have always elicited this kind of emotional response, that the National Park Service has been offering guided tours for hundreds of years, that monuments have dotted the terrain since Washington chopped down the cherry tree, and that we have always been able to engage our nations past by visiting battlefields.
We expect to discover history at historic sites, and that the conveniently placed markers and interpretive signs will allow us to better understand our nations past. Yet this kind of reverence for place did not begin immediately after 1776, and was not a standard part of American life until fairly recently. It took more than fifty years, as veterans of the Revolutionary War dwindled in number and few founding fathers remained alive, for Americans to even begin commemorating battlefields, much less make touring them a required part of an American familys summer vacation. In writing this book I wanted to investigate why it took so long for Americans to remember their battlefields, and what kind of memories they constructed once they began viewing such sites as sacred places worth visiting. The cultural work required to construct memory at battlefields, and to deem them worthy of preservation and commemoration, took decades to accomplish, and during the period addressed in this book some of the crucial foundation was laid for the type of battlefield tourism that is so pervasive today.
My interest in battlefield commemoration comes in large part from one of the earliest and most vivid memories of my childhood. During the nations bicentennial, my family observed what so many other Americans witnessed during that celebrationa battle reenactment. It took place in the familiar setting of Ballston Center, New York, a few miles west of my grandparents house and barn, and just a short distance east of dee farm where my Scots-Irish ancestors faltered as agriculturists and where my paternal great-uncle and great-aunt still resided. The familys ties to the area were real but also attenuated. No one from my parents generation lived in the area, and my family had driven twenty miles from our suburban subdivision to attend the event.
Ballston Center is the principal crossroads of a farming community settled in the late eighteenth century. Where the eastwest Charlton Road meets the northsouth Middle Line Road, amid rolling hills and mediocre soil, stand a few houses, a cemetery, a Grange hall, and a white clapboard Presbyterian church. This is all that marks what was once the hub of an agricultural community. My family and hundreds of others descended on the intersection one late-summer day as the town held its bicentennial event. I can still see the heat rising from the asphalt as the shrill sound of fifes and drums drifted across the fields, heralding the approach of British soldiers from the direction of my great-uncles farm. Defending the crossroads was a motley crew of minutemen dressed in fringed hunters garb of James Fenimore Coopers Leatherstocking.
After what seemed to a child to be hours of waiting, the redcoats crested a rise in the road a hundred yards from the church. Rough battle lines were formedthe minutemen being a bit more unpolished than the supposed British regularsand each side opened fire. The clatter of musket fire rose and fell in waves, and the acrid smoke of gunpowder wafted over soldier and civilian alike. The minutemen gave way after a few rounds of musketry, and the British made a show of burning the church before turning left up Middle Line Road and marching off toward what as a ten-year-old I assumed was the famous battle of Saratoga.
I interpreted the Revolution as a contest between well-dressed British regulars dead set on disturbing a pleasant community of humble farmers. It didnt matter that the Saratoga battlefield was almost twenty miles to the east, or that this reenactment converted what the historical record demonstrates was a Loyalist guerrilla raid into a fictionalized, organized march along paved roads. This was how I remembered the Revolution. Shortly after the staged battle, and once the smoke cleared, the townsfolk, militiamen, and British soldiers joined together under the trees of the churchyard for a barbecue. This community celebration featured familiar people, food, smells, and buildings. The pretense of historical reenactment was over.
The events of the day and the landscape on which they took place remain etched in my memory. On the infrequent occasions when I visit my grandfathers grave near Ballston Center, I am reminded of the bicentennial reenactment; the churchyard and battlefield are just down the road from the cemetery, and my mind goes back to that childhood visit. During one recent stop the historian in me contemplated how place, whether it be a specific site with a personal connection or a battlefield with broader historical significance, serves as a prompt for constructing memory. In my visits to Ballstons historic sites during the bicentennial era and afterward, I engaged in activities that many Americans have done millions of times, and continue to do today. Perhaps my responses to this particular historic site belonged to the larger American impulse to remember our past.
In writing this book I sought evidence of the kind of highly personal, vivid responses to battlefields that I possessedmemory influenced by specific places with historical and social contextin the primary sources. This books research depends upon some sources that historians have already employed, such as newspaper articles, formal commemorative ceremonies, broadsides, and published histories from the post-Revolutionary period. More important, it also exploits the many travel guidebooks and travelogues printed during the early republic and antebellum periods, as well as the personal letters and diaries of people who visited the Revolutionary Wars decaying battlefields.
I attempted to understand the interaction between place and memory by visiting archives at many of the battlefields under study, where manuscript and printed sources told the stories of the people who fought and later visited each battlefield. During the 1970s, the National Park Service began writing administrative histories and historical resource surveys of its sites, and these rich documents helped me to understand each battlefields neglect and eventual commemoration; they also revealed additional primary sources. Far from the battlefields themselves, I conducted research at nineteen different libraries and archives up and down the eastern United States and into Ontario. The most important locations, in terms of the amount and quality of material I discovered, are listed in the acknowledgements below. Important archives that did not require travel include the Niagara Falls (NY) Public Library, the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society, the Old Fort Niagara archives, and the Niagara Falls (Ont.) History Museum at Lundys Lane.
