INTRODUCTION
In June 2015, the waning days of the Civil War sesquicentennial, the governor
of South Carolina, an Indian American woman, asked the legislature to approve
measures that would remove the Confederate fl ag from State House grounds. Th e
Civil War began in South Carolina more than 150 years before, and it would be
gratifying to think the battle for Civil War memory ended there when the fl ag came
down a few weeks later. Th is victory seemed hollow; nine African American men and
women lay dead—pastors, grandmothers, and others—gunned down as they prayed
in a historic Charleston church; that single act prompted this request. Th e accused
shooter’s social media accounts demonstrated his devotion to white supremacy and
the Lost Cause—Confederate Civil War memory. In response to his actions, other
states rejected Confederate symbols. Th e Lost Cause came under attack in places as
varied as Stone Mountain, Georgia, home to the largest statuary of the Lost Cause,
and Bowdoin College in Maine with its Jeff erson Davis Prize. A new phase in the
contest over Civil War memory between the Lost Cause and the Union Cause—how
federal supporters remembered the Civil War—had begun.
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When Nobel Prize–winning author William Faulkner proclaimed that “the past is
never dead. It’s not even past,” he might have been speaking about how Americans
remember the Civil War. Nothing else can explain why Americans contest the Civil
War and its memory one hundred and fi fty years after the war ended. To understand
