Confederate Museum

This just shows the south's push against northern commercialization.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/10.1525/tph.2011.33.4.35.pdf

Just twenty-three years after the end of the Confederate War businessmen from Chicago bought the Confederate Prison in Richmond, Virginia.  These men took the prison apart and moved it to Chicago and rebuilt it, with fake medieval walls around it.  The prison was filled with relics from the North and South, and was then the Libby Prison War Museum; the museum opened in 1889.  

            A newspaper in Chicago (the Herald) thought the removal of the prison from Richmond was wrong, but the people who moved it claim it was not offensive to move it.  A group of elite women in Richmond thought otherwise, and the Confederate Memorial Literary Society founded the Confederate Museum.  This was the response to the Libby Prison War Museum, and the commercialization of the New South.  The Confederate Museum was created to document the confederate cause, and to vindicate the Lost Cause idea.

            The museum was portraying “slavery as benevolent, the museum justified Jim Crow; by depicting the white South as ‘solid,’ the museum called for deference from a discontented working class; by emphasizing military valor and sacrifice, the museum gained sympathy from North and thus fostered sectional reconciliation.”  In the end the museum used war relics to show the Lost Cause story and showed vindication and reconciliation.  The museum showed the fight against progression to the northern way of life.