It can be easy to forget that the American Revolution included a long and difficult armed conflict. Scholars of the period, in both historical and literary studies, have focused almost entirely on the ideas that drove the American colonists to resist British imperial rule and underpinned the new form of government they adopted in that process, the so-called experiment in democracy. The contrast to the historical memory of the American Civil War is instructive. The symbols and images of the Civil War are for the most part specifically related to the bloodshed of war: battlefields such as Gettysburg and Petersburg and events such as the burning of Atlanta and Richmond have become the enduring emblems of the conflict that divided the states. Although battlefields are not entirely absent from the memorializing of the Revolution, the national imagination has been captured more by political sites such as Independence Hall, Mount Vernon, Monticello, and documents such as the Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. Moreover, images such as the signing of the Declaration of Independence (disseminated widely as a popular engraving), the Liberty Bell, and the Boston Tea Party focus attention on the political motivations for independence and push the war into the background, as if the war were incidental to the Revolution and not essential to its success. War, in other words, remains at the center of the cultural memory of the Civil War, whereas it has been pushed to the margins of the story of the American Revolution.