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The Memorial Military Murals
by Charles Hoffbauer
Painted more than fifty years after the American Civil War (1861-1865), the murals in this gallery illustrate how former Confederates wanted the war to be remembered.
Commissioned by the Confederate Memorial Association and completed in 1920, the Memorial Military Murals were intended to honor the soldiers, sailors, and civilians who supported the Confederate cause and to memorialize those who died.
These murals are evidence of the widespread postwar effort by former Confederates to justify and glorify the Confederacy known as the Lost Cause.
This influential ideology suggested that the war was fought out of noble impulses to preserve states' rights, but it intentionally denied the central role of slavery as a cause of the conflict, the enduring emotional scars resulting from unprecedented slaughter, and the deliberate suppression of black civil rights through subjugation, disenfranchisement, and threats of violence.
As with most monuments and memorials, these paintings tell us more about the intentions and values of the people who created them than about the historical subjects they depict. |