In 1988, Sen. Dale Bumpers of Arkansas pleaded with his colleagues to pass legislation that would prevent a new shopping mall on land integral to the Second Battle of Manassas. He imagined a future in which ever more commercial development encroached on land in Virginia preserved by the National Park Service, eating up the fragile buffer between the modern world and the carefully preserved 19th-century landscape that memorializes two bloody battles.

"I can see a big granite monument inside the mall's hallway right now: 'Gen. Lee stood on this spot,' " the Democrat said.

The speech was a crucial moment in what has been called "The Third Battle of Manassas," an effort by preservationists, historians and Civil War enthusiasts to keep Manassas from becoming an isle of memory in a sea of big-box retail. In the end, Congress acted to save a large tract of private land — important to history but not part of the park — from the fate Bumpers imagined, and more than 200 hectares of land was added to the park. But it was a rare victory in a war that, like the Civil War itself, is full of thousands of small battles.