Atlanta’s Civil War Monument, Minus the Pro-Confederate Bunkum
Every city in the South, it seems, is trying to figure out what to do with its monuments. Richmond has kept its grand “Monument Avenue” lined with statues of Confederate luminaries. New Orleans took Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis down from their pedestals. In the city of Atlanta, whose leading Civil War monument is the enormous Atlanta Cyclorama, the strategy is novel: use history itself to strip a divisive object of its symbolic power.
Cycloramas are panorama paintings designed for exhibition in rotundas. The viewer stands in the middle, cocooned by a canvas that becomes the world. The Atlanta Cyclorama shows the 1864 Battle of Atlanta, a crucial turning point in the Civil War that launched General Sherman on his infamous march and sealed the South’s fate. Now the center of a major new exhibition at the Atlanta History Center, its canvas measures 49 feet high by 382 feet long and weighs over 9,000 pounds, making it one of the largest paintings in the United States.
Ever since it premiered in 1886, the Cyclorama has itself been a battleground—a key theater in America’s 150-year-long fight over how to remember its Civil War. Some exhibitions have cast it as a Union victory; others as a Confederate one. At various moments, Union and Confederate veterans, white and black politicians, civil rights leaders and segregationists have all tried to claim and control the Cyclorama. Some When I spoke to Hale and his team of curators at the opening weekend late last month, they were very clear about the goal of the exhibition. They hope to end the Cyclorama’s career as a vessel for Civil War myths—to take away its power without erasing its history.
