Introduction

This very well may be your introduction to the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Whether or not you may be familiar with the organization, you are undoubtedly aware of their work. They may not be the typical social movement one might expect to be thoroughly investigated in such a liberal environment, but it is important to examine their case regardless. In the one-hundred-plus years since the organization’s founding, the United Daughters of the Confederacy (U.D.C.) have altered the American public’s understanding of the Civil War and the South’s struggle to secede from the Union. Although it was comprised of mostly white socialites (and extremely well-funded), and despite its inconsistent-with-reality ideology, the U.D.C. was – and still is – a social movement that was immensely successful in achieving their goals. Even today, many Americans have learned an entirely different history of the Civil War than the rest. In this report, I will examine the United Daughters of the Confederacy as an extremely effective social movement, stemming from a perceived detrimental loss and an unnerving desire to regain power over American discourse, leading to a highly influential campaign and incomparable success in rewriting Civil War, Confederate and Union, Southern and Northern, and American history altogether.

If a social movement from the Civil War seems inconsequential and antique, it is critical to consider that, although much of their work occurred in the first half of the twentieth century (Lowndes, 2017), the effect that the U.D.C. had on the social consciousness and discourse of the nation still persists to this day. First I will justify why I believe the U.D.C. to be a social movement, and then how and why the organization was so successful in achieving its goal of redefining the role of the Confederacy in history.

Analysis

At the first unofficial meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, in September of 1894, women from mostly Southern states gathered with the purpose of “forming a woman’s society commemorative of the ‘lost cause’ in the civil war” (“The daughters of the confederacy,” 1899, p. 319). The “lost cause” was the response to a resounding feeling of encroachment and destitution within the antebellum South. Ex-Confederates had lost their short-lived Southern government, had to assimilate freedmen into their society, endure economic turmoil, and rebuild their destroyed homestead. These newly recovered Americans had lost their voice in their community (Heyse, 2011, p. 57), and the desolation among Southern ex-Confederates surged. The campaign to restore some gusto to the South was contingent on four tenets of the “lost cause”: (1) building “collective memories” and appealing to states’ rights (2) their fight was “heroic,” and the Confederacy were not traitors (3) slavery was not malevolent and even benevolent, and therefore slavery could not be the cause of the Civil War, and (4) the glorification of Confederate heroes (Heyse, 2011, p. 60; Lowndes, 2017). These new contextual definitions of the Civil War and the South’s role as a righteous defender completely recharacterized how Southerners viewed their identity and heritage. So, after that single informal meeting in Tennessee to address growing resentment in the South, the United Daughters of the Confederacy was born.

The U.D.C.’s beginning may not be the most humbling, but their mobilization and drive to act was largely rooted in the destitute conditions of the post-war South, and extreme resentment towards the Northern interlopers who completely usurped the Southern way of life. But the U.D.C. had all of the tenets of a social movement: Their casual networks and friendships with other antebellum socialites turned into an organization of action, all promoting the Southern “lost cause” ideology. However, where the organization falls out of line somewhat with Freeman (1973) is that their “crisis” (p. 33) occurred over decades and was generally more a feeling of destitution throughout the South. More importantly, this feeling sprouted from a perceived “relative deprivation” (Milkman, Luce, & Lewis, 2012, p. 74), as their briefly prosperous Confederate States of America surrendered and dissolved, leaving the South with a Dixie-shaped hole in every community, down to the individual and personal level.

The U.D.C.’s push to stoke confidence and pride in Southern heritage resulted in extremely liberal interpretations of the conditions that led to the Civil War. Presenting themselves as staunch defenders against Northern aggression (and as benevolent employers of minorities in America) proved to be extremely effective in garnering support. The organization worked hard as hell to widen their scope of influence, running community programs, afterschool clubs, and veteran’s care throughout the South. In 1902, The New York Times described the U.D.C.’s effort as “benevolent work” (“Daughters of the confederacy,” 1902, p. 7). One year after their first meeting in Nashville, the U.D.C. had over three thousand members (“Daughters of the confederacy: A great gathering of southern women at the Atlanta exposition,” 1895, p. 6), and in the twenty years up until World War I, the organization boasted over one-hundred thousand members (Lowndes, 2017).

Although the organization provided many much-needed community and social services throughout the South, and even some major cities in the North, like New York and Philadelphia (“Daughters of the confederacy,” 1902, p. 7), the U.D.C. proved highly effective in dividing the country. Just as their fathers before them tried to split the Union, the organization created their own interpretation of history, striking a crack in the heart of American discourse. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the organization by far erected the majority of Confederate statues, mainly between 1900 and 1914, including one in Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, D.C., which then-President Woodrow Wilson unveiled (Lowndes, 2017). But the many statues glorifying the South’s struggle in the Civil War was not their most consequential effort to rewrite history. [It was, however, visually indicative of the organization’s lobbying power – then-President William McKinley attended the U.D.C.’s national convention in Glen Echo, Maryland, in 1899 (“Daughters of the confederacy,” 1899).]

It was, in fact, the infiltration of education in the South that has proven the most effective in popularizing their ideology. The U.D.C. had one major goal: “to instill a proper pride in their glorious war history... of the struggle for Southern independence” (“The daughters of the confederacy,” 1899, p. 319). The U.D.C. accomplished reconstituting the discourse of the Confederacy not by erecting monuments, but by lobbying for control of textbooks. This effort is precisely why some textbooks still today seem very tolerant of slavery in America. But that lightheartedness is a result of a heavy-handed oversight of education in the South. In fact, the U.D.C. released a pamphlet instructing how to portray the Confederacy in textbooks, and had the political clout to reject the “unjust” textbooks. A textbook review committee was formed, and five ex-Confederate generals had seats on the board (Lowndes, 2017).

The organization was extremely influential especially after school, when the textbooks are closed. In highly popular afterschool programs, the U.D.C. cultivated an “us versus them” ideology against the North, relying heavily on peer influence from the U.D.C.’s outreach program, the Children of the Confederacy, started in 1896 (Heyse, 2011, p. 59- 60). And it worked. As Lalich (2004) asserts, successful reconstitutions of ideologies are of a higher calling (p. 221). When it reaches this level of righteousness in rhetoric, it persuades much easier. But the U.D.C. was entirely successful in marketing their goals, and in 1903, Bishop Ellison Capers, a former Confederate general, declared: “we came through great trial and struggle with our battered shields pure, our character untarnished, and nothing to regret in our faithful defense” of the South (“Daughters of the confederacy,” 1903, p. 3012). Not ten years after its founding, the U.D.C. had successfully altered the discourse of a war from the losing side, and ensured their influence on American education for generations, and likely, for generations more to come.

Conclusion

Conservatives tend to be very successful in their work to influence American discourse and society. From the U.D.C. to the Federalist Society, their commitment to take control is unceasing. We can take three things away from analyzing the organization’s effort to re-contextualize the Confederacy: (1) Lobby, lobby, lobby – the U.D.C. garnered mainstream political support for decades, and this brought them to the forefront of the discussion; (2) Challenge the context of the discussion – as D’Emilio (1983) and Milkman et al. (2012) discern, discourse is flexible and it can be shaped; and (3) Get them young – it was not statues in public parks that changed the guttural beliefs of the American South. Rather, it was the U.D.C.’s infiltration of Southern education that threw out any (true) accusations against the Confederacy and replaced it with their extremely glorified and lighthearted account of the South’s attempt at secession. If we are going to restore truth and agreement to racial and elitist discourse in America, we will have to undo one hundred years of work.

References

Constitution of the Confederate States. art. 1, § 9, cl. 4

Chapters from The Social Movements Reader:

D’Emilio, J. (1983). The gay liberation movement. In Goodwin, J. and Jasper, J. M. (eds.), The Social Movements Reader: Cases and Concepts (pp. 52-61). Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

Freeman, J. (1973). The women’s movement. In Goodwin, J. and Jasper, J. M. (eds.), The Social Movements Reader: Cases and Concepts (pp. 32-51). Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

Lalich, J. (2004). True believers and charismatic cults. In Goodwin, J. and Jasper, J. M. (eds.), The Social Movements Reader: Cases and Concepts (pp. 211-227). Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

Milkman, R., Luce, S., and Lewis, P. (2012). Occupy wall street. In Goodwin, J. and Jasper, J. M. (eds.), The Social Movements Reader: Cases and Concepts (pp. 62-83). Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

Journal Articles:

“Daughters of the confederacy.” (1903, December 17). The Independent... Devoted to the Consideration of Politics, Social and Economic Tendencies, History, Literature, and the Arts (1848-1921), 55(2872), pp. 3012.

Heyse, A. L. (2011, January-March). “Reconstituting the next generation: an analysis of the United Daughters of the Confederacy’s catechisms for children.” Southern Communication Journal, 76(1), pp. 55-75.

Periodicals:

Daughters of the confederacy: A great gathering of southern women at the Atlanta exposition. (1895, November 10). The New York Times, pp. 6.

Daughters of the confederacy. (1899, June 6). The New York Times, pp. 5.

Daughters of the confederacy. (1902, November 16). The New York Times, pp. 7.

The daughters of the confederacy. (1899, April 15). Harper’s Bazaar, 32(15), pp. 319.

Internet:

Lowndes, C. (2017, October 25). “How southern socialites rewrote civil war history.” From Vox YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOkFXPblLpU