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By Paul Horton.

Part 1: Historians and the “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy

Part 3: Confederate Monuments and Southern Memory: The Case of One Confederate General

Part 4: Where “Southern Heritage” Falls Short

Part Two:
The United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) and other groups played a central role in the push to erect Confederate monuments between 1890 and 1920. They read Dunning School histories sympathetic to the South that downplayed the political violence of the Klan in the South during Reconstruction, embracing and promoting the view that the Klan was an honorable organization that defended Southern womanhood. “The Birth of a Nation,” when released, bolstered this perspective. By attacking the image of Black men, many, if not most, Southern middle and upper class Southern women strengthened the Southern white patriarchy and their own power. Their path to power and influence stood in stark contrast to women in the labor movement during the same period.

From 1870-1920, northern women asserted themselves into the public sphere in the women’s suffrage, temperance, social gospel, and settlement house movements. Some women joined unions and advocated for labor causes like Lucy Parsons, Emma Goldman, and Mother Jones. Thousands of women took to the streets during strikes for the eight-hour day, fair wages, and better working conditions. Garment workers, in particular, were active supporters of unions. In the early twentieth century, Margaret Sanger led a campaign to educate women and men about effective birth control.

In the postbellum and early twentieth century South, however, where the bonds of patriarchy held firmer, public sphere outlets for feminist activism were more restricted. Some women did write and speak for southern populists and the Knights of Labor, but the numbers of women who took part in political and social protests was relatively small. Several historians, Anne Firor Scott, Drew Gilpin Faust, and Jane Turner Censer to name a sampling, have all commented on the persistence of the “domestic sphere” for women in the South before and after the Civil War; while Stephanie McCurry in her book, Masters of Small Households, explained and analyzed the strength of male patriarchy in southern yeoman families that represented seventy-five percent of all southern families on the eve of the Civil War. When Southern women did become more active in the suffrage movement in the South during the Progressive movement, they insisted that only white women should be qualified to vote in an effort to preserve white supremacy, according to Yale historian Glenda Gilmore in her book, Gender and Jim Crow.

In the past twenty years, however, the role of women in actively shaping southern memory and southern history has received increasing attention from many historians. The following excerpts sample some of the more recent historical work that connects an increasingly public role for some women in the south with the construction of Lost Cause history and, some would say, myth.

As you read the excerpts below, be prepared to discuss how and why women shaped the narrative of the south, slavery, the Civil War and the memories of all three.

Karen L. Cox, Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture(Gainesville, 2003)

Page 1: 

 I argue that women were longtime leaders in the movement to memorialize the Confederacy, commonly referred to as the “Lost Cause,” and were active participants in debates over what would constitute a “new” South.  I also argue that the Daughters, as UDC members were known, raised the stakes of the Lost Cause by making it a movement about vindication, as well as memorialization.  They erected monuments, monitored history for “truthfulness,” and sought to educate coming generations of white southerners about an idyllic Old South and a just cause—states’ rights. They did so not simply to pay homage to the Confederate dead.  Rather, UDC members aspired to transform military defeat into a political and cultural victory, where states’ rights and white supremacy remained intact. By preserving and transmitting these ideals through what I call “Confederate culture,” UDC members believed they could vindicate their Confederate ancestors.

Page 2:

After the UDC was founded, the majority of monuments erected to the Confederacy were placed in public settings such as courthouse lawns or town squares, where, it was reasoned, they could be observed by children.  Likewise, the Daughters successfully placed Confederate flags in nearly every white public school in the South. The flags accompanied portraits of Confederate heroes, particularly Robert E. Lee, for the purpose of reminding children of just causes like states’ rights and, correspondingly, the defense of white supremacy.  Monuments and flags were significant in transmitting Confederate ideals to white southerner children, because they were vivid symbols of the lessons the Daughters vehemently believed should be learned.

Pages 2-3:

UDC founders cast a wide net when establishing objectives for the organization.  Those objectives were formally referred to as memorial, benevolent, historical, educational, and social.  They translated into building monuments, caring for indigent Confederate veterans and widows, promoting and publishing pro-southern textbooks, and forming chapters of the Children of the Confederacy. There was a regional consistency in the types of activities in which the Daughters engaged because the objectives were dictated by the general organization.  Thus, UDC members from Virginia to Texas built monuments and published pro-southern histories; the differences essentially boiled down to which local and state heroes should be memorialized.

The organization’s overarching objective, though not officially stated in its constitution, was vindication for the Confederate generation.  It is important to understand that vindication motivated the Daughters and was key to their effectiveness, because the people they sought to vindicate were their parents and grandparents. Their pursuit of this all-important goal is critical to understanding the Lost Cause and its impact on the creation of a “new” South. The enormous success of the UDC in achieving its goals makes its history a useful lens through which to view issues of race, class, and gender; women’s political power; the South’s distinctive form of progressivism; sectional reconciliation; and, most important, the role of women in the preservation and transmission of Confederate culture.  Moreover, the long-term significance of the Lost Cause for the New South becomes much more obvious.3

Pages 4-5:

The Confederate celebration expanded in the 1890s, as the region became a fertile breeding ground for the foundation of new Confederate organizations for both men and women. White political supremacy was being sanctioned by every southern state legislature, and states’ rights appeared secure.  Moreover, northern whites, troubled by an ever-increasing ethnic diversity in their region, expressed both sympathy and admiration for southern whites, adopting a conciliatory tone on the subject of southern race relations.  This “cult of Anglo-Saxonism,” as historian Nina Silber describes it, provided a supportive climate for a movement that celebrated white heroes.8

….  Reclaiming Civil War history and providing it with a pro-southern interpretation became a primary objective of Lost Cause devotees. Southern white women had long shared the stage with their men in promoting this form of “revisionist” history, but beginning in the 1890s, UDC members became the most visible and vocal proponents of “rue” history.  Although the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCB) was founded in 1896 with similar objectives, most “New Men” were more committed to their own business and political success than to the success of the Confederate tradition.

Pages 5-6:

Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson each hosted a UDC president at the White House to discuss ways in which the federal government could assist the organization in achieving its goals of memorializing the Confederacy at Arlington National Cemetery—further evidence of the status and influence of the organization.  When the UDC held its annual meeting in Washington, D.C., in 1912, the Washington Post reported that the group’s opening reception was one of the highlights of the city’s social season and provided detailed descriptions of the women’s gowns.  The UDC, to be sure, was an elite organization.11

Pages 126-127:

The UDC, like other Confederate organizations, wanted children to believe that although the Confederacy suffered military defeat, the cause was still just.  Furthermore, Lost Cause supporters did not want children to regard their ancestors as traitors or rebels. As textbooks with the pro-Confederate slant made their way into southern classrooms, children learned instead that the region’s veterans were heroes and defenders of states’ rights.  These “unbiased” texts were also useful for preserving a version of the southern past in which elite culture was held in high esteem.  Indeed, historian Fred Bailey argues that by glorifying the patrician culture of the Old South, southern textbooks were instrumental in preserving traditional class and race relations for the New South.22

Caroline E. Janney, Burying the Dead But Not The Past: Ladies’ Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause (Chapel Hill, 2008)

Page 5: 

But an examination of the LMAS [Ladies’ Memorial Associations] demonstrates that, for many Confederate women, devotion to the cause and participation in female-driven organizations did not end with Appomattox but grew stronger in the postwar period.  The war proved to be a pivotal moment for white women, creating unusual opportunities and amplifying their activities.11 Most important, the war politicized them far more than partisan rallies or benevolent societies ever could have.  Middle-class and elite southern white women emerged from the war more active, both socially and politically, than at any previous time in their history and immediately directed their energies into memorial societies.  The LMAS, therefore, served a critical role in the evolution of southern white women’s socieities.12

Page 6:

LMAS actively rejected northern attempts to remake southern identity, even as they fashioned material for remembering the past. White women’s postwar memorialization efforts were therefore an extension of their deep devotion to the Confederate nation and of the time-tested vehicles of benevolent societies, memorial associations, and partisan campaigns.  As Anne Firor Scott has argued, “It was in the Reconstruction period that the first foreshadowing of a new style of woman began to appear.”  LMAS, therefore, reveal not only well-laid networks of southern white women, but also the highly bureaucratized, political nature of such women’s organizations.14

…. Because women, and not ex-Confederate soldiers, directed early memorialization efforts, white southerners hoped that northerners would perceive their work as less politically motivated and threatening.

Page 7:

 While northern women such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucy Stone debated women suffrage and the Fifteenth Amendment, the LMAS were likewise busy redefining southern women’s relationship to men and the state, thus creating an alternate (and uniquely southern form of women’s political engagement. They stated elaborate public spectacles; moved beyond the local nature of earlier southern benevolent work that had focused on orphanages and almshouses; and called on municipal and state governments to support their projects.  Expanding on their wartime roles, the LMAS allowed southern white women to engage in civic life as never before.  In between the localized benevolent societies of the 1830s and the women’s club movement of the late 1880s and 1890s, the LMAS served as a transitional group in the evolution of southern white women’s organizations.

…  But, regardless of the specific situation, gender patterns did not return to their antebellum status, as some historians have posited; rather, women of the LMAS proved determined to control the direction of their associations, expand their civic duties, and redefine the very nature of southern femininity.15

Sarah E. Gardner, Blood and Irony: Southern White Women’s Narratives of the Civil War, 1861-1937 (Chapel Hill and London, 2004)

Page 117:

By the early 1890s, women who had belonged to auxiliaries of United Confederate Veterans (UCV) camps splintered off, setting a separate agenda and beginning separate work.  The relationship between the UCV and UDC remained friendly, however.  Even after the UDC’s formation, the UCV maintained its interest in praising the work of Confederate women, frequently setting aside time and its reunion meetings for women to address the aging veterans.  For its part, the UDC’s objectives were at once philanthropic, educational, historical, and memorial.  The driving force behind its creation was the divinely commanded imperative its members felt to tell the “true” story of the Civil War.  Kate Noland Garnett, a founding member of the Virginia Division of the UDC, summarized the organization’s mission at its 1905 annual convention, held in San Francisco: “We have met together to pledge anew our undying fidelity to the memory of the Confederate soldier, to teach our children, to remote generations, the true history of the South’ the deeds of bravery, of heroism, of patriotism and of self-sacrifice that distinguished ‘the men who wore the grey.’”  In an era of progressive reform, the UDC’s “function was to celebrate the past, not to reform the present.”3

Page 128:

The UDC, in turn, bolstered this authority, avowing that any southern woman’s personal story of the war deserved to be told.  As an organization that asserted its influence in local communities, state governments, and national dialogues, the UDC forcibly demonstrated that southern women possessed a great deal of cultural power by encouraging its members to wield their pens.  As white southern women grew more confident in telling their tales, and with the backing of national association, they increasingly abandoned the task of writing strict biographies, shifting the focus of their narratives to themselves.

Pages 136-137:

Sallie Pickett’s biography of her husband resonated with white southerners not only because it mimicked traditional works on Confederate leaders, however.  Pickett also espoused a millennial, preordained conception of history that complemented the UDC’s understanding of the discipline.  Explaining, General Pickett’s ill-fated charge at Gettysburg, his widow suggested the ways in which Nature prepared for the battle.  “looking down the far slope of time,” wrote Pickett, Nature “saw a great battle in which questions that had heretofore weakened the unity of the nation should be settled at countless cost of blood and treasure, and prepared for that mighty conflict a fitting field.”  Elsewhere, Pickett transferred the course of events out of the realm of human action and placed it within a diving mission.  “By this untrammeled will,” she explained, “does the god of war choose the state for the unfolding of each scene in his blood-red drama.  Having made his selection, he leads hither his followers by some slight incident in which his hand is unseen.

Pages 137-138:

Finally, La Salle Corbell Pickett offered an interpretation of the Civil War that was palatable to most white southerners.  Like most of her contemporaries, Pickett located the cause of the war not with the institution of slavery but with the principle of states’ rights.  Because the Confederacy upheld the vision outlined by the framers of the Constitution, southerners were blameless for the war.  “under the Southern flag there were no traitors, no rebels,” she proclaimed.  “To state the reverse of this proposition is to falsify history; to charge it is a crime.”  Moreover, Pickett argued that traditions of the Old South maintained their resonance in the postwar era.  Although the Union might have obliterated the Confederacy, the North had not eradicated the roots of southern culture, which “dwell deep in the hearts of the people, where they give light and glory to life, as the sunlight of the ages, locked up in the depths of earth, transmuted its glow into the sparkle of the glittering gem.”39 Not only was the Confederate cause justified, but its defeat signaled only its political demise.  The roots of the antebellum civilization, according to Pickett, remained to nourish the following generation.

Prepare a three-minute summary of the main points of the excepts above for an historian’s expert testimony before a school board, a city council, or a state historical commission.

Paul Horton
 is History Instructor
University High School, The University of Chicago Laboratory School

Author

Anthony Cody

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