Memories of War: Visiting Battlegrounds and Bonefields in the Early American Republic

by Thomas A. Chambers

Even in the midst of the Civil War, its battlefields were being dedicated as hallowed ground. Today, those sites are among the most visited places in the United States. In contrast, the battlegrounds of the Revolutionary War had seemingly been forgotten in the aftermath of the conflict in which the nation forged its independence. Decades after the signing of the Constitution, the battlefields of Yorktown, Saratoga, Fort Moultrie, Ticonderoga, Guilford Courthouse, Kings Mountain, and Cowpens, among others, were unmarked except for crumbling forts and overgrown ramparts. Not until the late 1820s did Americans begin to recognize the importance of these places. In Memories of War , Thomas A. Chambers recounts America’s rediscovery of its early national history through the rise of battlefield tourism in the first half of the nineteenth century. Travelers in this period, Chambers finds, wanted more than recitations of regimental movements when they visited battlefields; they desired experiences that evoked strong emotions and leant meaning to the bleached bones and decaying fortifications of a past age. Chambers traces this impulse through efforts to commemorate Braddock’s Field and Ticonderoga, the cultivated landscapes masking the violent past of the Hudson River valley, the overgrown ramparts of Southern war sites, and the scenic vistas at War of 1812 battlefields along the Niagara River. Describing a progression from neglect to the Romantic embrace of the landscape and then to ritualized remembrance, Chambers brings his narrative up to the beginning of the Civil War, during and after which the memorialization of such sites became routine, assuming significant political and cultural power in the American imagination.

Genres: Nonfiction

252 pages, Hardcover

First published September 24, 2012

Reviews

[Yan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not an easy read for a non-native speaker who had to brush off the dust from his bachelors degree in History. Nevertheless so happy that I picked up this book and read it. Compared to my home country, the US is very strong in commemorating the heroes of its past. This book shows that that has not always been the case. The reasons why? The book doesn’t explicitly give them. This costs Chambers one star. However: in between the lines you can read that Americans struggled with the ‘how’: how can we praise the generals without turning them into sort of nobelry? If you make a huge statue for one of them wouldn’t that look like a statue for a king, the very thing the Americans wanted to get rid of?
What helped, near the beginning of the civil war, and this is very clear in this book, is the new meaning that can be given to the battles and thus its heroes. I think my home country, The Netherlands, could learn from that.

[Kristi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chambers traces early American tourism and commemoration at American's pre-Civil War battlefields, arguing that these sites were either largely ignored until the nineteenth century, when they figured primarily as ahistorical and nationalistic supplements to picturesque tourism. In the decades before the Civil War, sectional politics fueled the reiminaging of these sites in both the North and South,centered around the Revolutionary legacy as a useable past. Well-written, discerning and insightful.