“Altogether Fitting and Proper: Civil War Battlefield Preservation in History, Memory, and Policy, 1861-2015” by Timothy B. Smith. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2017. Notes, Bibliography, Illustrations, and Index. Xxiv + 384 pp. $39.95.

The Civil War has never ended. Despite Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865, the end of the military contest between the Union and the Confederacy did not bring to a close the hard and bitter sentiments between the North and the South. Those sentiments can be easily – and sometimes tragically – found today in the modern culture wars over taking down the Confederate flag or removing statues of Confederate leaders from sight. Our long national agony over the issue of race, which began in Virginia in the 17th century, has never abated, despite the commitment of the Declaration of Independence – later reinforced by Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address – to the equality of all Americans.

Timothy B. Smith’s informative book, “Altogether Fitting and Proper: Civil War Battlefield Preservation in History, Memory, and Policy, 1861-2015,” has very little to say about the racial struggles that have kept whites and blacks at odds during and since the Civil War, even while white Americans marched proudly into the future, honoring Union and Confederate soldiers alike by establishing battlefield parks and erecting heroic monuments to those who, as the veterans said of themselves, fought with equal courage.

Smith rightfully notes that while the federal government began preservation efforts during the war by creating national (i.e., Union) soldiers’ cemeteries near or on the former battlegrounds of the war, Northern and Southern veterans later took up the cause of reconciliation between the sections. They held soldier reunions on the battlefields where they had fought to commemorate the valor of soldiers on both sides, but who did not believe that African-American soldiers who waged war for the Union, some 175,000 of them, should be invited to attend these prodigiously patriotic events. In this way, Smith points out, as other historians have done, slavery became the forgotten cause of the war, and black soldiers became the unheralded heroes who had helped make military victory possible for the Union. In his penultimate chapter, Smith does discuss the relatively new commitment of the National Park Service to underscoring slavery’s importance in causing the war, but he does not venture very far into the culture wars that have grown particularly toxic in recent decades. Nor does he assess how social conflicts over race and civil rights may have influenced the preservation of Civil War battlefields. African-Americans today tend not to visit Civil War battlefield parks. That should not come as a big surprise to anyone.

Putting to use his deep research into primary sources, Smith’s reckoning of battlefield preservation advances steadily, practically park by park, including more modern (and generally successful) efforts undertaken by states, local communities and public organizations such as the Civil War Trust, a nonprofit group that in the 21st century has assumed leadership in the struggle to save and preserve Civil War sites. Smith’s account is full and reliable.

Smith mostly equates preservation with the purchase of acreage. He does not discuss in substantive terms how commissioners, bureaucrats and superintendents have committed gross – and sometimes ridiculous – preservation mistakes at almost every Civil War national park. For instance, when the War Department commissioners took over the management of Gettysburg National Military Park in the 1890s, they sought to provide a convenient way for visitors to see the salient spots on the battlefield. So the commissioners built roads that ran past all the legendary places on the field and planted abundant trees to enhance the ambience and peacefulness of the park’s landscape. As a result, the topography of places like Little Round Top were irrevocably changed or destroyed – not just by the construction of roads alone, but by the installation of culverts, parking lots and steel observation towers that transformed the battlefield landscape forever by changing historic terrain features, including the hillside where the famous 20th Maine repelled repeated Confederate assaults, or, more recently, by the destruction of a portion of the Railroad Cut that was fully approved by the park service. Similar instances of disturbing “hallowed ground” have occurred at nearly every Civil War park, not only in the past but also in the present.

In that respect, Smith makes no mention of the lame-brained program launched by the National Park Service in the mid-1990s to return the Gettysburg battlefield to its “1863 appearance” by cutting down trees (the descendants of the ones planted by the War Department commissioners), building and installing new snake-rail fences and acquiring private property for the purpose of razing buildings and cutting down more trees, when all the while the more than 900 monuments and memorials on the battlefield will forever prevent it from looking anything like it did in 1863. Buying acres and saving battlefields from being obliterated by Walmart and other developers is only the first step in battlefield preservation. The later steps involve coming to grips with the fact that these Civil War battlefields are no longer battlefields. They are parks. They have had a panoply of different disruptions, intrusions and mismanagement over the years. Perhaps those who preserve battlefields should acknowledge their duty not only to protect their slice of Civil War history, but also that the history of their parks should be told at the same time.

In the continuing contest between preservationists and developers, the Civil War lives on. More important, the great task remaining before us, as Lincoln said, is the ongoing fight between those who desire to take rights away from the American public and those who seek to gain equality and to increase civil rights for everyone. While Civil War preservationists fight a good cause, our greater challenge as Americans is to make sure, without lapses, that every person is treated equally in this country, without distinction of color, gender, religion or wealth. The preservation of Civil War battlefields, for the most part, has failed to make the real meaning of the war evident to all Americans. Tourists inevitably get caught up in the romance of military history. Lincoln hoped the war would produce a “new birth of freedom.” Americans are still waiting for it to happen.

– Reviewed by Glenn W. LaFantasie, the Richard Frockt Family Professor in Civil War History and the director of the Institute for Civil War Studies at Western Kentucky University.

– Editor’s note: The author will speak about his book and sign copies in WKU Libraries’ “Kentucky Live” series at 7 p.m. Thursday at Barnes & Noble Booksellers on Campbell Lane.