Spotsylvania

This weekend was too nice to stay inside, so after church I took off to visit the Civil War battlefields in Spotsylvania County: Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Wilderness, and Spotsylvania Court House. Aside from a big traffic jam (on Sunday at 1:30pm!) it was a great trip.

Maybe I'm the only one who is overwhelmed by the sense of the weight of history, but the feeling of pressure and smallness when standing in the middle of the Bloody Angle, where the sharp rises and dips of the land follow the course of the old Confederate earthworks, is simply overwhelming. Similarly, gunpits and trenches are still very much in evidence along the Brock Road and at the Confederate works in Fredericksburg. I had the dizzying feeling of knowing that the very ground I was standing on was once the site of pitched battle, hot with lead and blood, and that I was somehow occupying a piece of space I had no right to occupy.

Quite coincidentally, the Washington Post ran a story the same day saying that Spotsylvania County had been added to the list of Top 10 most endangered Civil War sites. The county, like most, is pursuing a policy of unrestricted growth. Fredericksburg has a beautiful, old-style center, with straight streets and colonial houses, but outside of that it looks like one never-ending strip mall. People have addresses like 14233 Jackson Trail West, parking their Ford Explorers on driveways off a National Park Service road that was built to trace the route of Stonewall Jackson's famous march around the Union right at Chancellorsville.

Isn't there an alternative to command-and-control limits on development? Can't landowners take it upon themselves to protect historic places? Can't county commissioners be a little more conservative with zoning changes? Does every piece of land have to be viewed as a potential source of government revenue? Conservationism, unlike environmentalism, is a conservative idea because it puts the land ahead of the government. Neither the county nor the federal government is truly sovereign, and neither should pursue unrestricted growth simply to line its own pockets and ensure its executives' reelection.