Headquarters for the United Daughters of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia.
(Courtesy of Wikipedia Commons)
(Note to reader: This is a compilation of information from a group project that I worked on for my Public History class during my program on the United Daughters of the Confederacy, focusing on a book written about the UDC by historian Karen Cox.)
Karen L. Cox is a historian with a focus on southern culture in the American south. She is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte since 2002 and a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. Cox has lived most of her life in North Carolina. She has written Goat Castle: A True Story of Murder, Race, and the Gothic South and Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture. She is also the editor for Destination Dixie: Tourism and Southern History and co-editor for Reassessing the 1930s South. Cox has also contributed to the History of the Headline Series book Confederate Statues and Memorialization. She has also written co-eds for the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, TIME, Publishers Weekly and the Huffington Post. This blog focuses on her book Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture. The book won the 2004 Julia Cherry Spruill Prize for the Best Book in Southern Women’s History.
The UDC was devoted to impartial history. They did not want to stand idle while historians condemned the Confederate founding fathers. The UDC thieved on the amnesia of war at the willingness to forget for reunification. A major issue Cox’s focus is on is that the perseveration of the Confederate culture has been problematic because it has been romanticized and impartial when depicting historical accounts in order to paint the Confederates as heroes that were fighting for a noble cause. The UDC wanted to ensure that the soldier in the war would not be remembered as villains but heroes. Another issue, according to Cox, is that the UDC helped to foster and keep the bitterness of the Civil War alive between the North and the South.
The major theme of this book is that women who founded the UDC were vital to maintaining the lost cause and keeping the Confederate culture and memories alive through monuments, buildings, flags, and education. The UDC was a big factor in preserving this Confederate culture and why it has such a strong standing today. The UDC was about vinification and memorization. UDC did not want the Confederacy to be viewed in history as traders and villains. The portrait of Confederates seen as heroes was important during the reconstruction period. They commissioned to build monuments, paintings, buildings, and helped with historical bias in order to keep the Lost Cause alive. Cox argues that women were long time leaders in the movement of the Confederacy and used the argument that Confederate soldiers were heroes because they were trying to defend states' rights and southern culture. The UDC spread hate and promoted books to teach southerners about the history of the KKK and help promote the Klan as a noble organization of the reconstruction period.
A Short Timeline of the early years of the UDC.
From 1865 to 1890 the Ladies’ Memorial Association was created to maintain southern traditions for the Lost Cause through the construction of memorials.
In 1890 Daughters of the Confederacy (DOC) was created by elite white women whose mission was to preserve southern culture for future generations.
On September 10, 1894, the United Daughter of the Confederacy (UDC) was created to vindicate Confederate ancestors through social, education, memorial, and historical accounts.
In 1913 the UDC headed by Laura Martin Rose promoted the book “The Ku Klux Klan or Invisible Empire” for use in schools in the state of Mississippi.
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