Over its 133-year existence, the Cyclorama has proved uniquely pliable as a Civil War memento, perhaps because it was designed that way.

In their 19th-century heyday, cycloramas traveled from city to city, just as fairs or circuses did. They needed to appeal to a wide audience. When the Milwaukee-based American Panorama Company created the Atlanta Cyclorama, it instructed its team (all German immigrants who spoke no English) to paint an ambiguous juncture in the Battle of Atlanta: 4:45 p.m. on July 22, a moment when four Confederate brigades had just broken the Union line and taken control of Union artillery. Minutes later, Union reinforcements led by General John Logan would beat back the Confederates and end the threat. The Cyclorama depicts Logan on horseback, gallantly charging toward the battle. But he wasn’t there yet. The scene is tense, the outcome unresolved. The painters in Wisconsin crafted the Cyclorama to depict an impending Union victory. From another angle, though, the scene could also be interpreted as a Confederate opportunity. This was a moment when the war could have gone the other way.

In 1892, Paul Atkinson, a promoter from Georgia, brought the Cyclorama to Chattanooga, Tennessee, and then to Atlanta. Atkinson knew he would need the painting to tell a different story. “This is all right to the son of a federal soldier,” he recalled later in a letter to a friend. “But it don’t sit so well with the son of a Confederate.”

Because the Cyclorama only hinted at the Union victory to come, it didn’t take much to alter the intended meaning. Simply by repainting gray uniforms in blue, Atkinson converted captured Confederate soldiers into Union prisoners. He also added a few tattered American flags, which he showed lying in the dust. “The painting is wonderful,” wrote the Atlanta Constitution when the Cyclorama premiered in Atlanta, because “it is the only one in existence where the Confederates get the best of things.” “The only Confederate victory ever painted,” raved an advertisement. Fake news, 1890s-style.

But fake news can stick. The retouched Cyclorama settled in Atlanta just as white Southerners were embracing the Lost Cause narrative of the Civil War, a myth in which Confederates fought valiantly to defend the old South’s noble way of life. David Blight, the leading expert on Civil War memory, says that the Cyclorama “clearly became a memorial to the Confederacy, either as a false victory or just as Lost Cause sentiment.” In the next few decades, statues and plaques to the Confederacy rose up all over the South. The Cyclorama, Sheffield Hale said, became Atlanta’s version of such a monument.

Yet Atlanta was also emerging as the cradle of a new, more economically dynamic South, and the Cyclorama was soon caught up in its host city’s identity crisis. In the 1930s, Mayor William Hartsfield, who wanted Atlanta to become “the city too busy to hate,” tried explicitly to decouple the Cyclorama from the Lost Cause. “It must be remembered that this picture is not a shrine or memorial,” Hartsfield said in an interview with the Atlanta Constitution. “It was painted purely for exhibition purposes, not to be worshipped or venerated as a relic.” The mayor commissioned a restoration of the Cyclorama—which included the addition of plaster figurines spread out at the base of the painting, in an attempt to give it a three-dimensional element—and Atkinson’s Union prisoners were restored to their Confederate originals.