President Wilson addresses a Peace Jubilee at Gettysburg, praising veterans' valor and declaring the war's quarrel forgotten, while Black veterans are absent.

President Andrew Johnson repeatedly vetoes Reconstruction legislation and blocks the redistribution of land to formerly enslaved people.

Radical Republicans pass the First Reconstruction Act, making Black male suffrage a required condition for Southern states' readmission to the Union.

Horace Greeley contributes to Jefferson Davis's bail and publicly praises soldiers from both sides of the war.

Black Charlestonians and Northern abolitionists hold the first Decoration Day celebration, marching to honor Union dead and proclaim their freedom.

Ulysses S. Grant wins the presidency as a conservative Republican, marking the political decline of Radical Reconstruction.

The Ku Klux Klan murders Republican politicians and terrorizes Black Americans through beatings, burnings, and lynchings across the South.

Congress passes Enforcement Acts and holds hearings on Klan violence, exposing the lawlessness and racial terror across the South.

Horace Greeley runs for president as a Liberal Republican candidate, marking the collapse of radical Reconstruction politics within the party.

The Compromise of 1877 ends Reconstruction, withdrawing federal troops from the South and leaving Black Americans without protection.

Ulysses S. Grant publishes a popular memoir near death, acknowledging slavery as the war's cause while respectfully describing Lee's surrender.

Jefferson Davis's former Virginia mansion opens as a Confederate museum, where a speaker denies slavery caused the Civil War.

The Supreme Court rules in United States v. Stanley that states, not the federal government, hold authority to enforce civil rights.

The Shaw Memorial honoring the Black soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry is unveiled in Boston amid rampant national racism.

D.W. Griffith's film Birth of a Nation is released and screened nationwide, spreading white supremacist Lost Cause mythology to millions.

Following the Civil War, radical Republicans attempted to remake the South through Reconstruction, demanding Black suffrage and federal protection for formerly enslaved people. However, moderate Republicans undermined these efforts while the Ku Klux Klan's terrorism dismantled Black political power across the South. The Compromise of 1877 ended federal Reconstruction entirely, leaving Black Americans without protection and handing white supremacists control of Southern governments. Over the following decades, Lost Cause mythology spread through monuments, literature, and public memory until it dominated national consciousness. By the 1913 Peace Jubilee at Gettysburg, reconciliationism had triumphed so completely that Black veterans were absent and slavery went unmentioned in Wilson's address. The release of Birth of a Nation in 1915 marked the full cultural victory of white supremacist Civil War memory.

The rise and triumph of reconciliation over racial justice.

Abraham Lincoln delivers the Gettysburg Address, framing the Civil War as a new birth of freedom rooted in human equality.

Northern traveler John R. Dennett tours the postwar South and finds white Southerners already refusing to accept Black political equality.

Kate Stone returns to her destroyed plantation, expresses contempt for Black soldiers she encounters, and joins movements to memorialize Confederate dead.

Radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens condemns President Johnson's lenient Reconstruction policies, warning they allow Southern disloyalty to continue unchecked.

Richmond's Dispatch newspaper resumes circulation after the war's end, articulating early Lost Cause ideology without mentioning slavery or emancipation.

Northern Union veterans organize the first national Memorial Day commemoration, gathering to decorate the graves of fallen soldiers.

Black veterans are excluded when Northern and Southern veterans collaborate on a joint memorial ceremony in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Former Confederate general Roger Pryor delivers a speech in Brooklyn praising Southern soldiers and claiming the war was not about slavery.

Democrats launch a racist presidential campaign portraying Reconstruction as an illegitimate scheme to give Black Americans power over whites.

A severe economic depression weakens Republicans, and Democrats win multiple governorships and make major Congressional gains in midterm elections.

Century magazine begins publishing veterans' war stories that celebrate soldiers on both sides while ignoring slavery and depoliticizing the conflict.

Over one hundred Black veterans gather for a reunion in Boston, organizing separately from the segregated Grand Army of the Republic.

Veteran and novelist Albion W. Tourgée publicly attacks the romanticized plantation school of literature for its racist stereotypes of Black Americans.

W.E.B. Du Bois publishes The Souls of Black Folk, centering the Black Southern experience and dismantling Lost Cause mythology.

President Wilson segregates the federal bureaucracy in the same year as the Peace Jubilee, embodying the union of white supremacy and reconciliationism.

Abraham Lincoln's vision of the war as a rebirth of freedom quickly gave way to reconciliationist pressures from both North and South. White Southerners like Kate Stone and the editors of Richmond newspapers began crafting Lost Cause ideology almost immediately after the war ended, while early Memorial Day rituals were progressively stripped of their emancipationist origins. Democrats weaponized racism in presidential campaigns while a severe economic depression eroded Republican support for Reconstruction, together gutting what remained of radical politics. Veterans' publications and magazines like Century depoliticized the war for mass audiences, while Black veterans organized separately and writers like Tourgée and Du Bois pushed back against white nostalgic mythology. By the time Wilson segregated the federal bureaucracy in 1913, the union of white supremacy and reconciliationism had become the governing logic of American public life.

Key voices, moments, and movements shaping Civil War memory.

Frederick Douglass argues that Black Americans cannot move forward toward freedom by ignoring or suppressing the history of enslavement.

Black veterans demand commissions as officers in the Union military forces occupying the Reconstruction South, asserting their wartime sacrifice earned equal rank.

A Stonewall Jackson monument is unveiled in Richmond after Black militiamen and Black Republican assemblymen are barred from the parade.

The Southern Historical Society begins publishing papers that actively counter emancipationist interpretations of the Civil War and promote Lost Cause mythology.

Frederick Douglass warns a New York City Memorial Day audience not to seek sectional reunion through the mutual sacrifice of soldiers.

Northern Union veteran Russell H. Conwell tours the South and publishes his encounter with Confederate flags and Lost Cause imagery displayed in homes.

Black Union veteran George Washington Williams delivers a public speech claiming glory and recognition in the nation's memory for Black soldiers.

George Washington Williams leads a push for a national monument to Black Civil War soldiers, but the memorial never materializes.

Jefferson Davis publishes a memoir blaming the North for forcing the South's secession and claiming that slavery benefited enslaved Black Americans.

The Robert E. Lee monument is unveiled in Richmond, with Northern newspapers praising Lee and labeling the memorial a national monument.

The United Daughters of the Confederacy and United Confederate Veterans establish history committees to control and guard the Confederate past.

Frederick Douglass urges vigilance at a Washington DC emancipation celebration, warning that the battle for racial justice is far from finished.

Black activists at a convention in Lexington, Kentucky refuse to endorse the Republican Party and demand full civil and political rights.

Ida B. Wells publishes investigative exposés on lynching, exposing the false rape charges used to justify white mob violence against Black men.

W.E.B. Du Bois writes and stages The Star of Ethiopia pageant in major American cities to celebrate multiple modes of Black memory.

From the earliest days of Reconstruction, Black leaders like Frederick Douglass insisted that honest memory of slavery was essential to securing genuine freedom and equality. Lost Cause organizations immediately worked to counter this emancipationist vision, erecting Confederate monuments that excluded Black participants and publishing propaganda in newspapers and journals. Black veterans and activists fought for recognition, demanding officer commissions and national memorials, while white reconciliationists unveiled statues and published memoirs that rewrote the war's meaning entirely. By the 1890s, organizations like the UDC and UCV had institutionalized revisionist history through education systems and dedicated history committees. Black thinkers debated accommodationism versus resistance, with Ida B. Wells and W.E.B. Du Bois warning that no amount of racial progress could satisfy a system built on white supremacy. Du Bois's Star of Ethiopia pageant represented a powerful assertion of Black memory against the tide of Lost Cause triumphalism.