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Temple for a Lost Causer
You are standing in the oldest part of the museum. Built more than a century ago, it was designed by a different institution for a different purpose.
Completed in 1921, the Confederate Memorial Institute (also known as the "Battle Abbey") was originally built as a memorial to the more than 250,000 Confederate lives lost during the American Civil War. It was also part of a widespread effort across the South to glorify and justify the Confederacy.
Confederate monuments and memorials built during that period furthered the Lost Cause ideology that remembered the Confederate cause as a heroic struggle against great odds to maintain a southern way of life -- including the subjugation of African Americans -- and minimized the central role of slavery in the conflict.
These efforts to shape public memory of the Confederacy occurred at a time when black southerners were being stripped of most of the rights they gained during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Public memorials signaled the dominance of white authority to all members of society. |