ABSTRACT
In the years before, during, and following the Civil War, Americans faced the task of representing national division and destruction in ways that reaffirmed their collective exceptionalism and the success of the American Experiment. Whether in the national battlefields that were constructed in the 1890s or in the photographic collections that were published immediately after the war, Americans were engaged, to use Richard Slotkin’s terms, in the process of grafting this crisis onto their “historical sense” of themselves as “a people and culture” who, strong and unified, lead the world in technological advancement (Slotkin 6-7).
