United Daughters of The Confederacy - History

History

Across the South, associations were founded after the Civil War, many by women, to organize burials of Confederate soldiers, establish and care for permanent cemeteries for Confederate soldiers, organize commemorative ceremonies, and sponsor impressive monuments as a permanent way of remembering the Confederate cause and tradition. They were "strikingly successful at raising money to build Confederate monuments, lobbying legislatures and Congress for the reburial of Confederate dead, and working to shape the content of history textbooks." In addition to arranging for reburial of soldiers in the South, the women funded and commissioned memorials to Confederate veterans and battles. They were instrumental in organizing to commemorate the war, including annual events in many towns across the South. They led the struggle to shape memory in the aftermath of the war. They also raised money to care for the widows and children of the Confederate dead.

Most of these memorial associations eventually merged into the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which grew from 17,000 members in 1900 to nearly 100,000 women by World War I. At a time of increasing fraternal and civic organizations in the United States, the UDC grew rapidly with local and state chapters.

In addition to raising money for cemeteries and memorials, the UDC encouraged women to publish their writing about the war, beginning with biographies of major southern figures, such as Varina Davis' of her husband Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy. Later, women began adding more of their own experiences to the "public discourse about the war", in the form of memoirs, such as those published in the early 1900s by Sara Agnes Rice Pryor, Virginia Clay-Clopton and Louise Wigfall Wright and others. They also recommended structures for the memoirs. By the turn of the twentieth century, a dozen memoirs by southern women were published. They constituted part of the growing public memory about the antebellum years and the Lost Cause, as they usually defended the Confederacy. The UDC established approved reading lists for histories of the war, and they criticized accounts of the war by Northern writers.

The Encyclopedia Virginia wrote recently of the organization, "The context of these efforts was the Lost Cause interpretation of the Civil War, which emphasized states' rights and secession over slavery as causes of the war and was often used to further the goals of white supremacists in the twentieth century." Recent histories, such as Chandra Manning's study of letters on both sides of the war, showed soldiers were very aware of slavery having a central role in what the war was for and that it constituted a basic part of southern society even for men who were not slaveholders.

During the twentieth century, the UDC members participated in battles over the content of textbooks and how history would be taught in the South. This included controversy over how the war would be named. In the South, it was taught as the "War between the States". In their version, all the slaves were loyal and willingly contributed to the Cause. In the 1920s and 1930s, the UDC tried to organize a monument to "faithful slaves", to be built on the Mall in Washington, DC. Blacks strongly objected to this; in 1923 two thousand women of the Phyllis Wheatley YWCA protested with a resolution to Vice President Calvin Coolidge and House Speaker Gillette.

During World War I, the UDC supported 70 hospital beds at the American Military Hospital at Neuilly-sur-Seine, France and contributed $82,069 for French and Belgian orphans. At home, the UDC members purchased $24,843,368 worth of war bonds and savings stamps. They also donated $841,676 to the Red Cross.

During World War II, the organization assisted the National Nursing Association by donating financially to student nurses until the United States Congress passed the Bolton Act, which created the first Cadet Nurse Corps. Through the Red Cross, the UDC donated ambulances for use at European battle sites and a blood plasma unit. They were commended by the Red Cross for their outstanding contributions to the war.

In the years of rising activism by African Americans for civil rights, the UDC opposed Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the U.S. Supreme Court decision that ended legal segregation of public schools. Many of its chapters participated in the Massive Resistance in Virginia and other states.

In 1959 the UDC in Jacksonville, Florida supported renaming an all-white public high school after General Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate hero and post-Civil War elected leader of the Ku Klux Klan. By the 21st century, the school's demographics had changed. Its students are now 54 percent African American. Although many local residents (and the students) wanted to change the name of the high school, in November 2008, the Duval County school board (which controls the county facilities) voted to keep the name. Its five white members voted for the measure, and the two African-American members voted against it.

The association's work on memorials and memory has continued. For instance, during the 1950s, the UDC raised funds to commission window memorials to the Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall" Jackson for the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. They were installed in 1957. The tracery windows depict episodes in the lives of each of the generals.