Public commemoration of the Civil War and monuments to memory: The triumph of Robert E. Lee and the lost cause

This dissertation examines the significance of the Virginia Memorial located on the former battlefield of the Gettysburg Military Park in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Dedicated on June 8, 1917 and prominently featuring an equestrian image of Robert E. Lee, this work of public commemorative art represents a dominant voice in the dialogue of the constructed public memory of the causes and the consequences of the Civil War. It signals the legitimacy and wide spread acceptance of the myth of the Lost Cause and its prominent association with the image of the most notable canonical icon of this ideology, Robert E. Lee.;Today, as it has done since the time of its dedication, the Virginia Memorial remains an important sign post in the nation's memory of the Civil War and is the result of an ongoing political discussion that continues to take place in the public sphere regarding the structures of power that are inextricably linked with the formation of public memory. It stands as a unique physical marker in the text that comprises the dialogue constructing the nation's public memory of the Civil War, a unique work of commemorative public art that serves simultaneously as a battlefield monument and war memorial to the Virginians who fought at Gettysburg, and a site specific work of public sculpture in contested civic space. As such, it serves the purposes of seemingly contradictory and antithetical interests while asserting the ideas of both cultural continuity and cultural revision within the constructed symbolic code of America's commemorative patriotic landscape.;Although the Confederacy was defeated in battle it emerged on the field at Gettysburg as victorious in memory. The constructed image and public memory of Robert E. Lee makes this final victory of memory possible.;It represents a public memory and reiteration of the war's legacy that, as Frederic Douglass declared, forgets the difference "between those who fought for slavery and those who fought for liberty." It is this myth that in effect controls the commemorative discourse of the preserved battlefield at Gettysburg and beyond.