Early Legislative Attempts

Round directed his energies toward persuading the federal government to legally acquire the battlefield. He began his legislative attempts with a petition to Congress on 1 December 1901. Rep. John F. Rixey of Culpeper County, Virginia, introduced H.R. 277 the following day, and Round testified before Subcommittee No. 2 of the House Committee on Military Affairs on 2 April 1902. [13]

At the same 1902 hearings, Brig. Gen. George Breckenridge Davis, a distinguished career officer of the U.S. Army, offered a strategy for battlefield preservation, later known as the "Antietam Plan." Davis believed that the federal government need acquire only small tracts of land and place historical plaques at key positions, keeping the remainder of the battlefield in the same agricultural condition it had been in at the time of the war. He based this recommendation on survey work he had done in the early 1890s at Antietam and on his experience as chairman of the Commission for Publication of The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, a massive historical source for which he also conducted surveys at various battlefields. At Antietam, General Davis had the government purchase only narrow lanes along several battle lines, leaving the rest as privately owned farmland, resulting in significant cost savings while memorializing the historic events. [14]

The Antietam Plan provided an attractive alternative to the significant land acquisition and maintenance costs the House Military Affairs Committee had been considering. In addition to H.R. 277, at least eighteen other bills as of April 1902 proposed the establishment of military parks at such locations as Valley Forge and Brandywine, Pennsylvania. The federal government had already spent more than $2 million in acquiring, developing, and maintaining the five original battlefield parks, and the prospect of adding more than a dozen more sites gave pause to the committee members. Although never formally adopted, the Antietam Plan remained a major influence in the federal government's battlefield preservation program until well after 1933 when the National Park Service began administering the national military parks. [15]

Early Manassas legislative proposals serve as specific examples of the influence of the Antietam Plan on battlefield preservation. H.R. 277, which never made it out of the subcommittee, emphasized the protection of the 1865 monuments through limited land acquisition rather than recommending the establishment of a large battlefield park. The bill, which had an overall appropriation of $25,000, allowed the secretary of war to purchase at a reasonable price for the United States a "sufficient" amount of land surrounding the monuments to permit visitation. The bill also provided for the construction of "suitable roadways and approaches" between the sold property and public highways to improve accessibility. [16]

When testifying in support of H.R. 277 and subsequent Manassas bills, Round adopted General Davis's suggestions and argued for acquisition of the "historic positions where the monuments are located," as opposed to a larger parklike area that might be "laid out with walks and driveways and flowers." Significantly, Round's conception of the battlefield park focused on its importance as a historic area rather than an inviting public park filled with diversions to please a range of visitors. Round believed that, most importantly, the battlefields must remain preserved in the condition they had been in between 1861 and 1865, meaning as farmland, and that steel towers—another Davis recommendation—should be built to facilitate viewing the entire scene where First Manassas had occurred. He envisioned the purchase of a total of two hundred acres, including Henry Hill, about twenty-five acres of the Dogan Farm where the Groveton monument stood, and a few isolated strips of land around Maj. Gen. John Pope's headquarters and the unfinished railroad cut. At Henry Hill, Round thought a former soldier should reside at and care for the property, or, if the federal government established a national park at Fredericksburg, this commission could administer the Manassas reservation. [17]

Despite Round's claim that H.R. 277 was the first proposal for purchasing lands at Manassas, an earlier bill introduced by Rep. Peter J. Otey of Lynchburg, Virginia, proposed the establishment of a "national battle park" in recognition of the "world-renowned" conflict along the Bull Run. Introduced on 1 February 1900, H.R. 7837 would have preserved for "historical and professional study" the battleground where soldiers had fought at First Manassas. The bill did not delineate the amount of land to be acquired or create a mechanism for administering the proposed park, and Congress failed to act. [18]

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