The Confederacy's Daughters Dance In Our Heads (1)
HISTORY AND MEMORY Myth-Making That Has Blighted Lives for Over a Century. Part 1.
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This tale begins with a story about a statue in a small town in Georgia.
If you think you already know where this is going, sit comfortably, and prepare to be surprised.
Mostly, I’m writing, as I normally do in Tales posts, about a single book by an academic historian. Dixie’s Daughters, by Dr. Karen L. Cox, is about the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and especially about a legacy that goes well beyond a statue. It’s the story of how the Daughters got into our heads, about how they came to shape the way we (yes, we) think about the past, and not just the Civil War, and not just in the South.
This is also a story I have found hard to write. That’s not just because (as is often the case when I write Non-Boring History) it’s not about early American history, my main field of expertise.
What made this difficult is that it’s even more personal than usual. You see, I lived for many years in a small town in the Deep South as a professor of history at Georgia Southern University (and later as a member of the Africana Studies program). I lived every day with the consequences of what the Daughters of the Confederacy did. Not just in my teaching, as you might expect. But in my professional life. My personal life. My head.
I lived with it even in my most casual interactions with a Black community that had been and still was deeply harmed by the Lost Cause, the name given to the story the Daughters had so successfully imposed on the past. I lived with it in my interactions with white people who were—although they couldn’t even acknowledge it themselves—trying to be people they were not, to fit the story the Daughters had told. Nobody was free to be themselves. Nobody. Not even me. Nobody got out unscathed. Most never escaped at all.
That’s why, before I begin my take on Dr. Cox’s book, I am going to take you back 25 years, to a small town in Georgia named Statesboro.
Welcome to Statesboro, Georgia (1996)
After fourteen years in California, I moved to a small town in rural southeast Georgia. I didn’t move to the South by free choice. Academic history has so few real tenure-track jobs, I was lucky to have two offers. They were both in the South.
Honestly? I didn’t mind at all. It was a relief to escape L.A. traffic, and, anyway, I was genuinely looking forward to this as an adventure. I had seen indications at my interview that the South had moved on from the days of Jim Crow (segregation). And I was confident that, even if I found the community difficult, I would of course have the university as my cosmopolitan refuge, where I could be myself. After all, that’s what universities are, right?
I had even bought myself a book called Culture Shock! The South.
My sweet and elderly next-door neighbors in Statesboro immediately asked me which church I attended.
Thanks to Culture Shock, I was prepared for this question! Everywhere else I have ever lived, it would have been rude of them to ask. But the book told me this question was part of Southern culture, and no offense was intended. So I took none. Sorted!
There was so much about the South, and about Statesboro, and even about the institution that had hired me, for which my handy-dandy little book (written by someone whose grasp of Southern history was slim) did not prepare me at all.
In short, I was clueless. The phrase “lamb to the slaughter” comes to mind.
I was at a party in the community, to which I had been invited as a newcomer. I got chatting to a middle school teacher, and she said, for some reason, and I honestly don’t remember provoking this, “It stands to reason that slaves were treated well, because they were valuable property.”
I remember doing a double-take. What? I may not be an expert on 19th century slavery, but I know rubbish when I hear it. I also knew a thing or two about slavery in the colonial period. I had read slaveowners’ letters in which they did not hesitate to describe flogging and otherwise brutalizing enslaved people. Even Thomas Jefferson, a slaveowner himself, had the decency to admit that slavery was an evil, although he considered it a necessary one (which it was, if he was to continue to live in the luxury to which he was accustomed) .
What I knew about 19th century slavery specifically was that physical punishments, while still very much used to control people as they had been in the 18th century, were giving way to psychological controls. These included threatening to sell away enslaved people’s partners and kids as a means of extracting compliance. And even when people were brutally beaten (and they were) they were returned to the fields as soon as possible, their punishments having also served as a warning to other slaves. And don’t get me started on the rape and sexual abuse in which slaveowners freely indulged. All of this was flooding through my brain.
I tried to give the brief version, to explain to this teacher that, in fact, slaveowners could treat enslaved people extremely badly, and still exploit their work. I also tried to point out that the problem wasn’t just how enslaved people were “treated”, but the fact that they were human beings who were deprived of their freedom and exploited.
She said, in strangled tones, “Well, it’s very interesting to hear your opinion.”
“But it’s not an opinion,” I said, bewildered. “It’s facts. There’s loads of evidence . . .”
Too late. She had already fled, not just me, but the party.
It took me a few years to understand that “It’s interesting” means “I’m not interested.” That believers in the Lost Cause will not engage, except to parrot back what they were taught as children. Mostly, they respond to facts with silence. And that contradicting white Southerners, no matter how justifiably, on any subject, and (intriguingly) no matter their politics, could easily be taken as a massive and unforgivable personal insult to a degree I’ve never seen elsewhere. This isn’t just my experience, either. There’s a whole body of scholarship in history and psychology about “Southern honor culture.” But I didn’t know that in 1996. For years, I thought the problem was me, an outspoken Scot.
Now I know the problem was much, much deeper.
A few months after my encounter with the teacher, I picked up a “shopper”, one of those freebie local publications that’s full of ads. And there it was, in a space the staff hadn’t managed to sell to an advertiser. It read something like this:
DID YOU KNOW? Slaves were treated well, because they were valuable property.
Where on earth was this nonsense coming from? I assumed it had been passed down on gold tablets since before the Civil War.
But it hadn’t. Turns out, although I couldn’t have known it then, that it was the product of a massive, organized, determined, and very successful campaign between the mid-1890s and the First World War to shape people’s thinking about the Southern past. And it was a campaign by women, who had also taken charge of writing about the Old South, slavery, race relations, and the Civil War’s impact on the Home Front. It was a project led by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a national group formed almost thirty years after the end of the Civil War.
And, I now realize, their campaign had first touched me long before I arrived in the South, and perhaps even before I landed in the US.
The Statue
For fifteen years, I lived in Statesboro, Georgia, within a mile of the Confederate soldier statue that stood on the courthouse square. He was a memorial to local men who lost their lives fighting for the South in the Civil War.
I assumed. Why wouldn’t I?
The thing about statues and war memorials is that they always seem important, so permanent, so self-explanatory. In Britain, every little town and village has its war memorial, built for the First World War, with the names of every local man known to have lost his life in combat recorded on its sides. Names of locals who died in World War II, always a shorter list, were typically added to the first memorial. They were, let’s be clear, memorials honoring local troops. We find our great-grandfathers, our great-uncles, memorialized on these statues. They do not romanticize war. They were not controversial. That’s how I grew up thinking about war memorials. Most grander statues of single people, usually in London, didn’t really appeal: They usually were of men of whom I had never heard, long-dead generals and businessmen and politicians.
In 2020, we learned that statues aren’t simple, and can be moved.
True, folks were wrong to think that statue removal was new: American Revolutionaries pulled down statues of George III. Statues of Communist leaders fell with the Berlin Wall.
Still, when something is made from heavy stone, apparently welded to the ground, it does look immoveable. That’s certainly true of Statesboro's Confederate statue, raised in 1909, with the Bulloch County Courthouse standing grandly behind it. In case you’re wondering, the statue is still there. And the State of Georgia has now passed a law forbidding its removal, even if the people of Statesboro eventually decide that’s what they want.
I did assume, however, that any statue honoring soldiers who fought on behalf of slavery would not sit well with Black people. Maybe, I guessed in 1996, local Black folk just shrugged, rolled their eyes, and accepted the statue as one of those hard-to-change things in a small town in the South? Protesting it certainly had to be less of a priority than all the everyday racism I was already seeing in Statesboro. But, of course, local black folk weren’t about to discuss this subject with a strange white woman. And I wasn’t about to ask.
Most white people in a small town in the South in 1996 were equally silent on race, at least to me. There were a few who were more vocal, especially older people, who assumed, because this is how racism works, that a white person automatically shared their views. Let me tell you, it was fascinating. But overt racism also distracted me from the more subtle and apparently less harmful things, like a local businesswoman and former teacher who called the Civil War “the War Between the States.” And the statue.
What puzzled me about the statue was not that it existed. It was that it was dated 1909. That’s a good 45 years after the Civil War ended. Why so late? And who were the United Daughters of the Confederacy?
Statesboro’s Statue?
The story goes (and I hope it’s true): When Union General William Tecumseh Sherman was leading his men on the March through Georgia, he arrived at an inn in the woods. “Where’s Statesboro?” he asked the innkeeper.
“You’re looking at it,” was the man’s reply.
I don’t know if Sherman burned the inn, but he did burn down the log courthouse, which stood where the early 20th century courthouse in the photo stands today.
Fifteen years after the Civil War, Statesboro was still only a hamlet. Fewer than thirty people lived there. But Statesboro is also the county seat of Bulloch County, and most people then lived out in the country. The county’s population in 1860, right before the Civil War, was more than 5600. Nearly half of these people were enslaved African Americans.
You wouldn’t know it to look at the modern city of Statesboro, but it was once a very big deal. From 1890-1910, the same period when the statue was built, there was an influx of people into town, people with money and ambition. Lawyers and entrepreneurs came from elsewhere in Georgia, and well beyond, and essentially invented the town. Few, if any, of these new movers and shakers were related to the farm families who had settled Bulloch County. Most conspicuous of them all: James Alonzo Brannen (1858-1923). Only a small child during the Civil War, he was a lawyer turned entrepreneur. He built a house (still there) in Statesboro in 1881, got himself elected mayor, launched two newspapers, and developed property, including a downtown strip mall (still there). Most notably, he got a railroad branch line built to link Statesboro to the main line that went to Savannah, and led the successful campaign to bring to Statesboro the school that would one day become Georgia Southern University.
Statesboro thus became a regional centre, and completely unrecognizable from the hamlet it had been during the Civil War. The Statesboro shopkeepers with whom Bulloch County farmers came to trade their cotton were incomers, some of them immigrants. Statesboro’s grand new Jaeckel Hotel (1905), which lodged Henry Ford, William Jennings Bryan, and Cornelius Vanderbilt, was built and operated by a Swiss guy. By the way, in case you’re interested, I fictionalized much of this in the last novel in my series, One Way or Another.
None of these leading citizens of the new city, whose businesses were flourishing at the turn of the century, so far as I am aware, were related to Bulloch County’s Confederate soldiers. But allying with the Lost Cause version of the past certainly made sense: It was an ideology that presented white supremacy as a good thing, that kept Black citizens from rising. And that was fine with most prominent whites. They did not object to a Confederate statue being raised in the middle of town.
I looked at this picture in Dixie’s Daughters, and I wondered if I was seeing what I thought I was seeing, as I strained to read the tiny font. I was pretty sure I could see the word “Statesboro”. So I searched for and found the same photo on the web. Here it is.
As you can see, it’s a newspaper ad for The McNeel Marble Company, makers of monuments of all kinds in Marietta, Georgia, from around 1914. It’s appealing to local chapters of the Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). McNeel is boasting of how, in the past three or four years, they have sold Confederate statues to thirty-four chapters of the UDC.
Among them? The UDC chapter in Statesboro, Georgia.
“Why wait and worry about raising funds?” the ad asks.
“Our terms to UDC Chapters are so liberal and our plans for raising funds are so effective as to obviate the necessity of either waiting or worrying.”
In other words: We offer great credit! We have great suggestions for fundraising! Buy Your Statue Now, Risk Free!
That’s right, ladies! We at McNeel Marble design, make, and ship your affordable memorial, and we give you foolproof ideas to recoup the cost of your personalized, heartfelt, mass-produced generic Confederate McStatue that you order from the comfort of your own tasteful living room!
But wait, there’s more! I found this on the web!
Yes, ladies! It’s true! Just send us the address of another UDC chapter. If they choose to put up one of our handy-dandy statues, we’ll send you a thank-you gift— Absolutely FREE— of a marble breadboard (five dollar value)! That’s right! Absolutely FREE! Almost as good as a set of steak knives!
But wait, there’s even more! We’ll send you TWO marble breadboards! One for your President, one for another chapter officer. Don’t need yours? Give it to a friend for Christmas! What a great gift!
Nearby Screven County’s chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy put up the exact same statue, on the exact same day, April 26th, 1909! And Jenkins County’s statue, also identical, was put up in June! I wonder which chapter referred which to the McNeel Marble Company? Which chapter earned the FREE breadboards? I would love to know. Never dreamed that Confederate statues were part of an MLM scheme.
Mocking McStatues is a cheap shot, sure. And I have a bias, oh, indeed, I do. I earned it. I came South in good faith, prepared to believe that rural Georgia was changing for the better, making progress, as people claimed, and that I could get on with my work. Instead, I spent many years in a small town in a very Southern institution fighting against an untrue narrative and its insidious effects as best I could, even though it meant doing a lot of work unrelated to the subject I had come to teach and write about, early America, and left me, quite honestly, traumatized.
At the time, I had no idea how much this narrative was the lasting work of a long-dead generation who had been determined to rewrite past and present. And who succeeded.
The biggest problem with the statue may not even be the statue as such. It’s the timing of it, 1909, and its placement, slap in the middle of downtown. Both these things give the statue meaning that goes far beyond simply commemorating the local Confederate dead. Look, imagine that statue had gone up in a Confederate cemetery, next to the graves of the soldiers it purports to commemorate. Imagine it had appeared in, say, 1875. Or even 1885. I doubt we would be having the same discussion right now.
But it didn’t. And if you bear with me, I’ll show you why that happened, and why it matters. If I’m making you uncomfortable? That’s what history should do, to every last one of us, at some point or other.
However you feel about statues like Statesboro’s, they were not the most important legacy of the organizations that erected them. That legacy was—and is— firmly planted in the heads of millions. By putting the statue in Statesboro when and where they did, the local chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy made a political statement about the past, and their present. And that was just the beginning.
We need to take a closer look at the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and learn what else they did, apart from buy tacky mail-order statues.
That’s why I’m going to riff on historian Karen L. Cox’s Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture. This book was published in 2003, long before the campaign against Confederate memorials in the South had any chance of success. Like most academic books, it was ignored by the public, but it was also ahead of its time, and now deserves renewed attention.
What it tells us is that the United Daughters of the Confederacy not only influenced but controlled history education throughout the South, and well beyond it. They determined not only what white Southern kids were taught about the Civil War and Reconstruction, but about slavery, and race. The Daughters were determined to impose their views about the past on history curriculum. And they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. The first time I was taught about Reconstruction (the period after the Civil War) in America, it was from a Southern point of view, although neither we nor our teacher understood that at the time: I only recall reading about “Carpetbaggers”, supposedly evil Northern men who came South to exploit the region after the Civil War, and “Scalawags”, corrupt white Southerners who did the same, while African American legislators were deemed to have “failed” because they were uneducated. I was taught this in California in the early 80s. That’s because, while the Daughters mostly focused on the white South, they were hard at work for decades to bring a false story to everyone. If you’re not in the States? Well, did you see Gone With the Wind? Quite.
The Lost Cause: From Mourning the Dead to Rewriting the Past
You are probably confused by that phrase, “the Lost Cause”. I know I was for a very long time. Did it just mean the South lost the Civil War? Or were white Southerners complaining that they couldn’t enslave people anymore? This may surprise you, but there is a lot more to it than that. It’s not just an interpretation of the Civil War and Reconstruction, but of life in the slave South and in the early 20th century. And it’s not an “interpretation” at all: It is a made-up story about the past, a bit of wishful thinking presented as fact.
And it changed over time. So let’s start with its fully formed version, and then learn where it came from.
The Lost Cause By 1900 (Version 3.0)
{Swelling Gone with the Wind Theme Tune} A kindly and well-mannered white elite of gentlemen cotton planters, with well-mannered ladies in massive crinoline dresses at their side, benevolently rule the South. They live in mutually adoring harmony with their loyal, contented, and happy slaves. They unselfishly fought the War Between The States , and sacrificed everything they held dear, to preserve the sacred principle of States’ Rights. They did not fight the War to save slavery, even though slavery was the kindest possible thing for Black people. Despite doing all the field work, cooking, building, and housework, and most of the supervising, slaves were innocent children who depended on whites to look after them.
I mean, this really is obviously drivel. Try reading it aloud.
And any white Southern readers of Non-Boring History who are cringing right now? No wonder. Bless you, and thank you for sticking with me. You were fed this stuff from the cradle, and your parents and grandparents and great-grandparents were fed it before you. Courage, folks. I come in peace, offering a hand of friendship. And remember, it's not like I didn't warn you about Non-Boring History. I will piss off everyone eventually. This is why I don't get invited to parties.
Have you noticed, though, who’s missing altogether from Lost Cause fiction?
No? Then I’ll tell you: Most white Southerners. You see, last time I checked, only 15% of white Southerners on the eve of the Civil War owned slaves or belonged to families who owned slaves. Yet this majority of white people are nowhere to be found in the Lost Cause’s idealized South. How about that?
Seen Gone With The Wind? Remember the only part poor whites played in the movie? The Slattery family, ne’er do well poor white Southerners. Even their name, with apologies to Slatterys everywhere (it’s a good Irish name, I know), sounds a lot like “slattern”, which is not a coincidence. The Slatterys live in a swamp near Tara, being too poor (or too tacky) to afford land. They are the “baddies’ of the 1939 film, and the bestselling book by Margaret Mitchell, published in 1936. Emily Slattery, the only Slattery we actually see in the movie, if I recall, gives birth out of wedlock, the father being a “white trash” overseer. Later, Emily hooks up with a Yankee from the Freedmen’s Bureau, who has come to the South to bring education to Black people (shocking!) but is actually corrupt and self-serving . . . You get the idea.
Who would want to identify with the Slatterys? Let me think . . . Yeah. Nobody.
So it’s hardly surprising that so many white women I met in Statesboro, Georgia, who were descended from poor whites, nonetheless identified with the planter class. They were Georgia’s answer to Mrs. Bucket in BBC TV’s Keeping Up Appearances. They did their best to emulate fancy manners. They dressed up, were carefully coiffed and made up. They had identical taste in Old Plantation interior decorating with four-poster beds and foxhunting prints. Some of their kids even dressed up in crinolines for an annual party held by the Kappa Alpha Order, a college fraternity. I recall at least one of my students wittering on about how she wished she had lived in those days, how lovely the dresses were. I just remember thinking, as I so often do, how do I even start? Psst . . . I actually have alternative white Southern women role models to suggest, Mrs. Sema Wilkes and Mrs. Ferrol Cosper, both of whom started life as poor rural women, and both of whom lived a long time and were magnificent. I’ll write about them for the Nonnies (paid supporters) soon.
Look, all history is revisionist: Historians argue, find new evidence, and, like everyone and everything else, historians and history change over time. That’s why, while the past doesn’t change, history does. But when I discuss the Lost Cause, I’m not describing revisionist history as academics practice it, which involves a lot of evidence, honesty, peer review, and plenty of fierce argument. I’m talking “revisionist” in the bad way, the kind that the public assumes “revisionist” always means. This “revisionism” ignores most evidence, while deliberately cherry-picking, and yes, making things up, in order to push a highly political and false agenda. Holocaust denial is the most outrageous example of such “revisionism”, and it’s not something real historians do. There was even a lawsuit about that in London. Historians don’t debate whether the Holocaust happened. It did. The evidence is massive, overwhelming, and unarguable, unless you want to claim it came about by magic or massive forgery, or doesn’t exist, in which case, as someone with the dust of 18th century letters in her lungs, I can’t help you.
The “Lost Cause” is an invented story, based on cherrypicked evidence, wishful thinking, and nostalgia for a time its authors barely remembered, or didn’t remember at all. It was grounded in a desire to turn back the clock, selectively. It was, along with Jim Crow segregation laws, lynching, and violent attacks on Black communities, part of a massive effort to maintain white supremacy, to keep African Americans subordinate, at the turn of the twentieth century, a time when Black Southerners were shaking off the mental as well as physical chains of slavery. The Lost Cause wasn’t (and isn’t) history. It’s ideology. Belief. Something people are determined to hold onto, no matter how much the evidence is against it. As you will discover, as I discovered, when we try to explain it to people who believe in it, and are frightened by the possibility it's not true.
One example of Lost Cause wishful thinking: According to “Lost Cause” ideology, the Civil War wasn’t fought to save slavery. No, it says: The War was about states’ rights, the right of individual states to conduct their own affairs. That’s why, they say, it should be called The War Between The States, because, they contend, this wasn’t a war within a sovereign nation to which states had agreed to belong, since that would have made white Southerners rebels and even traitors. This, it says, was a war among sovereign nations, And anyway, slavery was a good thing for Black people, it says.
In reality, in all the documents and speeches in which Southern politicians discussed seceding from the United States, they banged on and on about their rights to own slaves. They only wheeled out states’ rights to justify their having slavery—never as a principle unattached to slavery. This context was conveniently ignored by the authors of the Lost Cause.
And who were they, these authors of the Lost Cause?
Men wrote the military stuff. But supported by their men, it was elite white Southern women who took the lead in crafting the complete take on the past. To repeat: This wasn’t history. It was myth. It was used to justify the suppression of Black people’s lives, hopes, dreams, achievements, and even—especially, in fact—their self-respect. One thing I learned living in the small-town Deep South is how pervasive that culture is, even to the present day: It affects everyone. And I do mean everyone. Because some of the most miserable people I met in Statesboro were those who saw themselves as elite white women. That’s because living a lie, gaslighting yourself, is a road to hell. Truly, the truth, painful though it is, will set you free. One white Southern former student of mine moved far to the West of Georgia, and I sometimes feel guilty for encouraging her. I knew she missed her family. I told her that in a message once. She wrote back to reassure me. “I will never live in the South again,” she wrote. “I can be myself here.”
Let’s find out how it all started, shall we?
Lost Cause 1.0: Paving The Way for the Daughters of the Confederacy
How on earth, in a society that had been all about the rule of powerful men for centuries, did writing a fake history become the work of women?
The Lost Cause did not start out fully formed. It started out simply, as a story perhaps best described as, “It’s over. Let’s mourn.”
As soon as the Civil War ended in 1865, a whole generation before the United Daughters of the Confederacy, white Southern women started the first local Ladies Memorial Associations. First, they arranged for Confederate soldiers’ corpses to be moved from shallow battlefield graves to proper cemeteries. They raised money to build Confederate monuments in those cemeteries (not slap in the middle of downtown, as happened later, like in Statesboro). The LMAs led processions every Memorial Day to put flowers on Confederate graves.
Innocuous as it seems, this was also a surprisingly public role for elite women in a very conservative culture.
But just as happened with elite American (and British) women during the First World War, elite white Southern women in the Civil War had taken on what had traditionally been men’s work, including nursing soldiers and fundraising. This had got everyone used to seeing white women in leadership outside the home. It wasn’t a big stretch for white women to care for the bodies, and memories, of the living and the dead. But in such a public form? That was new.
Now, elite white Southern men had been humiliated by the loss of the Confederacy. The humiliation hadn’t ended with the Civil War, either. As the federal government stepped in to try to ensure that white Southerners did not restore slavery, or impose white supremacy, in the twelve-year period known as Reconstruction, Confederate men had lost their power to govern. Elite white women rationalized that it was up to the womenfolk to step forward to their men’s aid.
During Reconstruction, Memorial Day parades in the South were not permitted to march without the United States flag. The Ladies’ Memorial Associations, now joined together throughout the South as the Confederated Southern Memorial Association, did it anyway.
Even if their men could not, they would show those damn Yankees.
Lost Cause 2.0: Back In The Driver’s Seat
By the end of Reconstruction in 1877, the withdrawal of US troops from the South had returned power to white Southern men. This was extremely bad news for Black Southerners.
But elite white women did not now go back to their needlework. They still had a role to play in public life. Now, their job was to escalate “Lost Cause” thinking from just mourning the dead. Now, they set about telling everyone that the Confederacy, and what it stood for, had been good.
In the 1880s, following the end of Reconstruction in 1877, the Lost Cause entered what Dr. Cox calls its “celebratory phase”. No longer would the Lost Cause just be about mourning the Confederate dead. Now, it was about rewriting the Confederacy. And support for it among white Southerners increased.
Even as a New South was dawning, a South of factories and cities and new money and new people in power, more and more elite white Southerners rebelled. They began refurbishing the reputation of the Old South, of cotton plantations, planter elites, and even, yes, slavery. New South and a pretendy Old South now lived together in an uneasy relationship.
As Cox notes, newspaper editor Henry W. Grady was a huge booster of the New South. He lived and worked in Atlanta, the heart of postwar change. Yet he was pressured to exalt the Confederacy and “Lost Cause” mythology. But it didn’t take much to convince him to get on board. He was also pushing white supremacy for the New South.
White Southern men were already writing their own Lost Cause version of the past, and it focused on military history. The Southern Historical Association, which I assure you is now firmly in the hands of an increasingly diverse body of professional (academic) historians from around the nation and even the world, didn’t start out that way. Beginning in 1869, just four years after the end of the Civil War, the new SHA published a journal full of pro-Confederacy essays. Small wonder that Black historians remained leery of (and excluded from) academic history for a very long time, and that many people remain leery of it today.
Not surprisingly, elite white women involved in the LMAs and other pro-Confederate groups now did their bit. They started shining a light on Confederate heroes, and most especially, on General Robert E. Lee.
The first place where women moved to place a memorial to Lee was Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the Confederacy, and of Lee’s home state. Women raised the money for the memorial, and because of that, they ended up on the committee that picked the design. They even successfully pressured the male committee members to accept the design they favored, and put it in the place they preferred.
In the 1880s, more and more white women were getting involved in promoting the Lost Cause: They raised money to build homes for aged Confederate veterans, built monuments, and so on.
But by 1890, things were starting to take a new turn. These groups were starting to develop the nostalgic and fictional story of the Old South, Lost Cause 3.0 that I described earlier. This was happening as white Southern legislatures were stripping away votes and power that Black men had briefly gained during Reconstruction. States’ rights were now very much expressed by maintaining white supremacy by the removal of Black men from state legislatures, and through “Jim Crow” segregation laws, which were always much more about being unequal than about being separate.
Even so, the women’s Lost Cause movement until the 1890s was still focused on honoring the veterans, the dead, and Confederate leaders, especially Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis, the former president of the Confederacy, who, until 1889, was alive and happy to accept the adulation. Even before his death, the idolization of Davis extended to his daughter, Winnie, who had been born in the Confederate White House in Richmond.
Ironically, Winnie Davis spent very little of her life in the South. She was educated mostly at boarding schools in France and Germany. She moved into the family home in Mississippi in the 1880s, and spent much of the decade pushing the Lost Cause, which was when she became popular among elite white Southern women. By 1891, however, she had moved to New York City with her mother, the widow of Jefferson Davis, and she died aged just 34 in Rhode Island. Unmarried, she had only come close to marrying once, to a New York lawyer, which caused unease among the Lost Cause crowd. However, the marriage was called off, and Winnie Davis’s early death cemented her iconic status among elite white Southern women.
While on a Lost Cause speaking tour in 1886, Winnie Davis had been nicknamed “the Daughter of the Confederacy.”
Are your ears perking up yet? They should be.
Starting in 1890, white Southern women’s local Confederate organizations began calling themselves “Daughters of the Confederacy”. The first state organization to do this was in St. Louis, Missouri, and they were focused on building a home for disabled Confederate veterans. Let me assure you all, Brits and confused Americans: Missouri was NOT a Confederate State. Sure, visiting Missouri after many years spent in Georgia, I can tell you now that it felt pretty darn Southern to me. But, no, it never signed up for the Confederacy. So this is curious. Oh, and within three years, the Daughters of St. Louis had raised the money and built their veterans’ home, while the male veterans’ association of Missouri had farted around for nine years and failed to accomplish the same thing.
Inspired by St. Louis, elite pro-Confederate women in other states now began taking on projects their men hadn’t finished. With each success, ladies’ groups’ prestige rose, and with it, their popularity. Confederate women’s organizations flourished, including the Ladies Memorial Associations, ladies’ auxiliaries to Confederate veterans’ groups, and local Daughters of the Confederacy groups.
The groundwork was now laid for a national organization, and for the full development and promotion of Lost Cause 3.0
It was time for a National Daughters of the Confederacy. Buckle up, y’all.
Only Certain Daughters of the Confederacy Need Apply
Most of the men who fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War were poor whites. They signed on as “substitutes” to fight in the place of rich white slaveowners who preferred to stay home. Or they were simply conscripted. Maybe that’s why their names weren’t on the statues that supposedly commemorated them? Anyway, the elite women who put up the statues would not knowingly have admitted poor white women, the daughters of these men, to their club. The Daughters of the Confederacy, from the start, were united in being raging snobs.
Daughters and granddaughters of the vast, vast majority of Confederate dead and veterans, were definitely NOT welcome to join the first United Daughters of the Confederacy.
In coming together to form a national organization in 1894, the new United Daughters of the Confederacy embarked on a power struggle. Two ladies claimed to be the founders of the UDC.
Let the bout begin! Ding Ding! In the left corner, we have Caroline Meriwether Goodlett of Tennessee, age 61, and a strong contender who worked to support soldiers during the Civil War itself. In the right corner? Anna Davenport Raines of Savannah, Georgia, a young up and comer, aged 41, only a kid during the War, but who presents an upstart challenge to Mrs. Goodlett.
Young Mrs. Raines agrees with Mrs. Goodlett that a national Daughters organization should continue to support veterans. But she also knows that when the Confederate veterans die, so will these women’s organizations. The ladies’ groups must, she argues, reinvent themselves.
However, Mrs. Raines did not want to throw open the doors to gain members. She was determined to keep undesirables out of the UDC. A prospective “Daughter” had to be white (that went without saying, honestly) and descended from someone who served honorably in the Confederate Army and Navy. Even women who married Yankees were quickly banned. But that wasn’t all:
Mrs. Raines firmly believed that a candidate for membership in the UDC must be of elite social standing. If not, then three anonymous negative votes could keep her out of the club.
Anna Raines of Savannah, Georgia, only wanted posh ladies in the UDC. No trashy people need apply.
In the end, the UDC Constitution gave local chapters the right to decide whether or not they wanted to blackball prospective members on the grounds of insufficient social standing.
Still though, isn’t that interesting? And by “isn’t that interesting?” I do mean, “Isn’t that interesting?”
And bless their hearts. Which I mean in the Southern sense.
This snobbery didn’t improve. UDC members were expected to be “ladylike” in their manners and conduct, reinforcing a conformist performance, an extra-precious group public persona. Their contemporaries, British suffragettes, many of whom were highly privileged ladies, even aristocrats like Lady Constance Lytton, would have found this extraordinary. After all, they broke a lot of taboos (including breaking windows) for the cause of votes for women. Although the UDC was divided on the issue of women’s suffrage, such “unladylike” action was not in keeping with the UDC’s image. In 1911, the leader of the UDC suggested that chapters were “not obliged to accept as a member one who is not personally acceptable to the chapter.” Her successor, Rassie White, added,
“As the organization grows in strength, popularity, and prominence, membership in it becomes more desirable, and therefore should be hedged about and protected by more stringent rules.”
Because being in the UDC gave women social status, chapters popped up across the South, not to mention Ohio, Montana, Pennsylvania, Illinois, New York, California . . . Wait, you say, Ohio? Montana?? Pennsylvania??? California??? They weren’t part of the Confederacy. They weren’t even remotely in the South! Yup. But white Southern women lived across the nation, and everywhere they lived in large enough numbers, they started chapters of the UDC. In 1905, the United Daughters of the Confederacy held their national convention in (get this) San Francisco.
Anna Raines’s greatest accomplishment, however, was successfully arguing that the Daughters should use their power to protect kids from “falsehoods” (lies) in history textbooks. The new UDC established their goals for their role in promoting the Lost Cause: Memorial, benevolent, social, and (here’s where it gets interesting) historical and educational.
Now they were national, the UDC were going to help the men write the “true history” of the Confederacy. And they were going to use their national clout to get that history into schools throughout the South, or, at least, schools for white kids.
Everywhere they were, posh white Southern women started chapters of the UDC, and got busy, doing everything within their power to make sure that children had “correct” information about the history of the Confederacy, the South, and slavery. And this, in turn, was used to justify the white supremacy of the twentieth century in which they lived.
The “Lost Cause”, the UDC’s “correct” version of the history of the Old South presented slaves as happy, contented, and cared for. It was also in Dr. Cox’s words, “a class-based fiction”, in which poor whites, the vast majority of white Southerners, simply didn’t exist.
Lost Cause 3.0, the fully-realized myth of the Old South and the Confederacy, was about to arrive in classrooms. The United Daughters of the Confederacy would use their new national clout to ensure that everyone signed on to it, using not only books, but college scholarships for teachers, essay contests, ceremonies, and yes, statues in the middle of every Southern town. But first, they had to put it in writing.
I grew up in the South and your description of the abiding myth, which EVERYONE was expected to accept, is spot on. What a terrific read.
Needless to say, I no longer live in the South myself.