Although the Treaty of Paris officially ended the Revolutionary War in 1783, in many ways, the battle over independence was just beginning. In the years following the conclusion of the war, Americans sought to not only forge a new nation from the ground up, but to develop an identity separate from the British. Although the Revolution could serve as a cultural touchstone to bring the diverse peoples of the new republic together, as often as not, the legacy of the Revolution came to serve as a source of division in the heated battles for partisan control in the early national period. This talk will explore the ways that Revolution was remembered and manipulated by political actors in the earliest years of the fledgling nation’s history and offer insight into the ways that, even today, the past serves a political purpose.