Civil War: Keeping history alive in the first national military park

Thursday, May 11, 2006

CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. -- The first visitor to tour the battlefield at Lookout Mountain was Ulysses S. Grant. It was only days since his Union soldiers had captured the Confederate stronghold and turned the tide for the advance through Georgia that would spell the Confederacy's doom.

But the general hadn't managed to see what had been going on because of the dense fog that enveloped the steep ridge overlooking the Tennessee River valley. So he walked around a battlefield already marked by signs indicating where soldiers had fallen and cavalry charged.

"People began to visit sites within hours of the end of an engagement. Soldiers were impressed that something grand, terrible, impactful had happened here," said Jim Ogden, the National Park Service historian who has explored the Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park for 17 years.

Lookout Mountain, the Chickamauga battlefield and several other sites around Chattanooga comprise America's first and largest national military park. When Congress authorized the creation of the Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park in 1890, largely thanks to the joint efforts of Union and Confederate veterans, it became the symbol of a nation capable of preserving its bloodied past in honor of its reconciliation.

To the 900,000 tourists who wander through annually today, it's a unique chance to stare history in the face. The blissfully bucolic parkland might look like perfect picnic ground. But it was here, over ridges and into forests, that two armies fought -- bravely, brilliantly, haphazardly -- for what they knew would either make or break the South's bid for independence.

Congress mandated that the earthworks, farmsteads and even vegetation patterns stay the same as they were in the fall of 1863, when 150,000 soldiers fought over Chattanooga. The city's railroads were a lifeline to central Georgia and Alabama, where the industries lay that kept Southern soldiers armed, dressed and moving.

"The military-industrial complex in those two states was the most physical manifestation of the Confederacy," Ogden said as he took a group of Civil War buffs on a tour of Lookout Mountain last fall. "Union generals knew they'd have to destroy that complex, and that was through Chattanooga."

Listening to Ogden's tour, you could almost imagine the blue and gray uniforms across the deceptively beautiful expanse of landscape. Chattanooga's artsy riverfront and gritty ribbons of interstate highways seemed to disappear as he described the troops wading across the river and sweeping across town.

At the Chickamauga site, 12 miles south of the city, Confederates won the first battle, breaking up Union soldiers, who took refuge in town. Nestled on Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, a hilly backbone that runs parallel to it a few miles east of downtown, Southerners thought they had Northerners in a squeeze.

But in a month, the Union brought reinforcements across the forested ridges of Tennessee and that bend of the river where a power plant now spews smoke over the valley. The Union also brought in two new commanders -- Grant and William T. Sherman, who couldn't have gone on to scorch the ground from Atlanta to the sea, if it hadn't been for the brilliant maneuver and impromptu rank-and-file victory that happened here.

While Confederates peered at Union movements from the foggy mountain down the craggy ravine, troops caught them from the easier slope behind and pushed them back on Missionary Ridge -- the last physical line between them and Georgia. The next day, Sherman ran into trouble and Grant ordered troops to attack just the base of the ridge as a diversion.

That part of the order got lost in translation and up the Union soldiers went, sweeping like blue arrows along the two-mile front. Before Grant, stunned by the craziness of a frontal assault in the November twilight, could recall them, they had conquered the crest. It would be literally downhill for the Confederacy afterward.

Small wonder Grant felt like touring the sites, or that Congress eventually turned them into a park by buying and seizing more than 7,600 acres of mostly privately owned land, now interspersed with 1,400 monuments and markers placed by veterans and the states whose soldiers fought there.

The congressional authorization marked a turning point in federal protection of historic sites. While before efforts were sporadic and mostly local or private, Washington now had legislation supporting systematic preservation of the nation's past, said Richard Sellars, a National Park Service historian of early Civil War battlefields.

"It put the federal government for the first time ever right into historic preservation," he said. Parks at Shiloh, Gettysburg and Vicksburg followed in the 1890s.

Since the National Park Service didn't exist yet, the War Department oversaw the park until 1933. Just a year later, a group of Chattanoogans, led by Adolph Ochs, who would go on to publish The New York Times, put together Lookout Mountain park and donated it -- another 3,000 acres and the most spectacular view of the lower Appalachian range, with the placid Tennessee River making an unlikely U-turn at its feet.

Protected from construction and commercialism, the park is now facing an unexpected challenge from its own natural lure.

For hundreds of miles, drivers are peremptorily told to "See Ruby Falls" or "See Rock City" by glaring, house-sized signs on barns and walls along interstates. The two commercial attractions just outside the park on Lookout Mountain are symbols of the mass appeal nature has in these deep forests and smooth hills.

But there's something both reassuring and disturbing about going out for a day in the park where some 7,000 men died in tragically personal, often hand-to-hand combat.

Demand for recreation in open spaces and historic preservation is a dichotomy that worries historians and often puzzles the NPS.

"Locally, many people see them as city parks, open spaces, and that desire is compatible with historical parks," Ogden said.

Twenty acres in the middle of Chickamauga are reserved for recreation, Ogden said, but there's growing concern that as younger generations lose personal connections to the war, the demand for accommodating bicyclists and inline skaters, for example, could take over more land.

"Ball games, I don't think so, but biking and walking, that's fine," Sellars said. "The balance should be in favor of preservation."

Visiting today, it's hard to imagine the gory battle amid the soft sun dappling the leaves and the light mist floating on the Tennessee River.

Yet nature here comes second to that living history, available to all almost as it was because some soldiers fought together to preserve the same ground where they had faced one another in mortal combat.

At the Chattanooga military park, it's not a monument that marks one of the crucial turns in American history. It's the whole sweep of the land, open like a cyclorama over city, river and mountain ranges, ready to be filled before your eyes with the people who made history as soon as a ranger starts placing them, and your imagination clicks.

If You Go ...

CHICKAMAUGA AND CHATTANOOGA NATIONAL MILITARY PARK: http://www.nps.gov/chch or (706) 866-9241. Park sites are located in and around Chattanooga, Tenn., about 100 miles from Atlanta and 110 miles from Nashville.

TOURS: A seven-mile driving tour runs through the park. Lookout Mountain, accessible via a steep road, must be seen on foot; $3 entrance fee per person. Rangers lead tours in the summer.

NEARBY ATTRACTIONS: Chattanooga has a number of new attractions in its pleasant downtown. Whimsical sculptures and fountains adorn the waterfront from the Tennessee Aquarium to the Bluff View Art District, dominated by the Hunter Museum of American Art. Its remarkable collection is housed in three buildings, including a 1905 mansion and a wing in steel and zinc built in 2005.

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