Abraham Lincoln
Lincoln held the Union together, issued emancipation, and was killed five days after Appomattox. His sentences still outrank most generals' memoirs in public memory.
Office
3
Address
3
Died
3
Lincoln and Lee became a paired American myth; Douglass and Tubman are the necessary third and fourth portraits.
Photographs (Brady, Gardner) made this the first US war with a public corpse.
People
Jefferson Davis
Davis, a former US secretary of war, ran a new state that never solved its states'-rights contradiction. He was captured in 1865 and later became a Lost Cause relic.
Office
3
Capital
3
After
3
Ulysses S. Grant
Grant won in the west, then coordinated the 1864-65 war of attrition in Virginia. His presidency (1869-77) is a different, harder story.
West
3
East
3
Later
3
Robert E. Lee
Lee became the Confederate icon -- a brilliant defensive-offensive operator who lost the war and, in memory, almost won the statues. Historians now stress his slaveholding and the cost of his invasions.
ANV
3
Gettysburg
3
Surrender
3
Frederick Douglass
Douglass pressed Lincoln toward emancipation and Black enlistment. His oratory is a primary source for the war's freedom meaning.
Role
3
Pressure
3
After
3
William Tecumseh Sherman
Sherman took Atlanta and marched to Savannah, making war on the Confederate war economy. "War is hell" is the caption; the politics were hard war, not nihilism.
Atlanta
3
March
3
Phrase
3
Harriet Tubman
Tubman, already famous for the Underground Railroad, served as a Union scout in the Combahee raid (1863) -- a reminder that the war's icons include people the Lost Cause omitted.
Raid
3
Before
3
After
3
Clara Barton
Barton organised battlefield nursing and later founded the American Red Cross -- the war's medical-civilian icon in US schoolbooks.
Role
3
Later
3
War
3
Debate
Could the South have won?
A durable counterfactual. Most academic answers: only with foreign recognition or a northern political collapse -- neither arrived after emancipation and Atlanta.
Was Reconstruction a failure or an unfinished revolution?
Both framings are in use; the 1877 retreat is the hinge everyone names.
Statue removal is about 1890-1920 monument campaigns as much as about 1863.
Ken Burns's sentimental chorus is now itself a historical artefact.