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This project traces specific patterns of representation in the American art contributions to the 1876 Centennial Exhibition to expose a persisting preoccupation with the recent Civil War and its effects on the structure of American society. By analyzing the content of particular objects, their placement within the art galleries, and their roles in the greater exhibition context, this study disentangles the complexities of the War's impact on Americans and clarifies the implications that memories of the War held for restructuring a national identity. The central problem this project addresses is the disjunction between the rhetoric of forgotten grief and dispelled animosity associated with the War that consistently guided official efforts to rouse public enthusiasm for the Centennial, and the American art exhibition, which offered evidence of much more complex perceptions of the War among the nation's communities. This study approaches the problem through the conceptual framework of memory, which functioned as an organizing principal not only for the greater event, but also for the ways in which the American art exhibition addressed the Civil War. By virtue of their presence at an event celebrating one hundred years of nationhood, the objects in the American art exhibition purported to represent the collective memory of the national community. Yet because the country was comprised of diverse social and political groups, the particular memories evoked by these objects depended on the unique experiences, perspectives, and needs of each group. Although all Americans shared in some manner the psychological trauma of a devastated nation, former Federals, Confederates, and newly established African American citizens held competing memories of the War, and the attending cultural tensions which were otherwise unutterable were negotiated through visual articulation. I argue that as sites of debate over American national memory, the images addressing fundamental issues of the