IT WAS one of the most important battles of the American Civil War, a bloodbath in which the legendary Union leader, Lieutenant-General Ulysses S Grant, faced his Confederate counterpart, General Robert E Lee, for the first time.
When the guns fell silent on 7 May, 1864, the Battle of the Wilderness had claimed 29,000 casualties. For nearly 145 years, the site of the two-day battle in Virginia has been considered sacred ground, with a congressional committee designating the
area as being of the highest historical importance.
But now a battle of a different nature is under way, as historians and other campaigners fight to hold back a new enemy: Wal-Mart.
The retail giant wants permission to build a 141,000sq ft superstore at the edge of the Wilderness battlefield.
Campaigners claim that victory for the store would pave the way for the desecration of a national shrine, "a monument to American valour, determination and courage and one of the places where the Civil War – and the nation – changed forever".
Jim Lighthizer, the president of the Civil War Preservation Trust, which is leading the charge against the development, said: "A Wilderness Wal-Mart would wreck the unique character of the existing battlefield park and countryside.
"It would shatter the reverent atmosphere that suffuses one of America's bloodiest battlefields, which already endures existing sprawl gnawing away at its edges."
The Battle of the Wilderness, which involved 160,000 men, represented the start of Lt-Gen Grant's so-called Overland Campaign, a series of battles that gave the Union armies the strategic gains necessary to advance on – and ultimately capture – the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia.
Today, 2,773 acres of the Wilderness Battlefield are protected as part of the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Park. Wal-Mart says that the site it has earmarked falls outside that boundary and that county authorities have long tagged the land as ripe for commercial development.
Keith Morris, a Wal-Mart spokesman, insisted: "We recognise the significance of the Wilderness Battlefield, but we are not building on the battlefield."
But campaigners say that the proposed construction site is still inside the "historic limits" of the battlefield as identified by a congressional committee in 1990. They also point out that Wal-Mart already has four other stores in a 20-mile radius.
The campaign has drawn in eminent historians and Civil War experts including film-maker Ken Burns, who directed a 1990 US TV series The Civil War, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author David McCullough.
A letter sent to Wal-Mart's president, Lee Scott, signed by 253 historians, said: "The Wilderness is an indelible part of our history, its very ground hallowed by the American blood spilled there, and it cannot be moved,"
WalMartWatch.com, a Washington-based website that campaigns against Wal-Mart over issues such as foreign outsourcing, exploitation of workers, anti-union policies and predatory pricing, has produced a protest video in which generals Grant and Lee are depicted as criticising the plans.
The issue will come before planning hearings next month, though some campaigners fear that the retail behemoth could get a sympathetic hearing from local authorities eager to encourage new trade that could stimulate the local economy – if the plans get the go-ahead, it would bring the county an estimated $500,000 in taxes a year.
BACKGROUNDPROTESTERS against Wal-Mart's plans say they take courage from previous victories, such as the defeat of plans by the Walt Disney Company to build a theme park near Virginia's Manassas Battlefield in 1994, and of plans two years ago to build a casino at Gettysburg, both important US Civil War sites.
However, Wal-Mart has triumphed elsewhere, winning permission to build stores on ancient American Indian burial grounds and close to a fragile archaeological site in Mexico.
Civil War historian James Robertson said: "Wal-Mart stores exist to make a profit in the present so as to invest heavier in the future … yet at some point on a regular basis, every one of us needs to remember an inescapable fact of history: any nation that forgets its past has little future."
