| The 1894 establishment of the Shiloh National Military Park in southwest Tennessee grew out of an effort by veterans themselves to preserve and protect the site of one of the Civil War's most important engagements. Other preservation activities had already taken place, including the marking of Revolutionary battlefields around the bicentennial of that war and the establishment of national parks to commemorate Civil War battles at Chickamauga/Chattanooga and Antietam in 1890. Other legislation in that decade established parks at Gettysburg and Vicksburg.;Feelings of nationalism and reconciliation sweeping the nation in the 1890s spurred these Shiloh veterans into action. Returning to the Pittsburg Landing battlefield, they organized themselves to push the Federal government to authorize a park to honor both the living veterans of the battle and the dead interred within the National Cemetery and on the battlefield itself In a larger sense, these veterans were also contributing to the contemporaneous reconciliation of the North and South by focusing on the honor, courage, and bravery of Civil War soldiers instead of continuing the debates on slavery and race.;It was the veterans' efforts that made Shiloh National Military Park a reality. The War Department appointed a park commission made up of veterans of the battle. This commission, led by Cornelius Cadle, David W. Reed, and Atwell Thompson, surveyed and mapped the field, purchased land, opened roads, marked troop positions, and established the historical interpretation of the early April 1862 battle. Within a decade, monuments, artillery, and position tablets decorated the battlefield.;Based on records housed at Shiloh and in the National Archives, this dissertation is a study of the creation of a major National Park Service military park as a microcosm of a larger generational movement of national scope that included efforts to reconcile the sections, to honor veterans, and to remember the heroism and forget the controversy of war. |
