The United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) is an American lineage-based neo-Confederate hereditary association for female descendants of Confederate Civil War soldiers engaging in the commemoration of these ancestors, the funding of monuments to them, and the promotion of the pseudohistorical Lost Cause ideology and corresponding white supremacy.
Established in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1894, the group venerated the Ku Klux Klan during the Jim Crow era, and in 1926, a local chapter funded the construction of a monument to the Klan. According to the Institute for Southern Studies, the UDC "elevated [the Klan] to a nearly mythical status. It dealt in and preserved Klan artifacts and symbology. It even served as a sort of public relations agency for the terrorist group." The organization restricted membership to whites at one time, but later lifted the requirement. As of 2011, there were 23 so-called "Real Daughters" (that is, actual children of Confederate veterans) still living, one of whom, Mattie Clyburn Rice, was black. There are no longer any living children of Civil War veterans. The last, Irene Triplett, died in 2020.
The group's headquarters are in the Memorial to the Women of the Confederacy building in Richmond, Virginia, the former capital city of the Confederate States. In May 2020, the building was damaged by fire during the George Floyd protests.
Formation and purpose The group was founded on September 10, 1894, by Caroline Meriwether Goodlett and Anna Davenport Raines as the National Association of the Daughters of the Confederacy. It is believed the name of the group came from an expression used by General John B. Gordon. On April 30, 1886, he was escorting Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy, to Georgia's capital when he introduced Davis's daughter, Winnie, to a waiting crowd as "the daughter of the Confederacy".
The first chapter was formed in Nashville. The name was soon changed to United Daughters of the Confederacy. Their stated intention was to "tell of the glorious fight against the greatest odds a nation ever faced, that their hallowed memory should never die." Their primary activity was to support the construction of Confederate memorials. The UDC has said that its members also support U.S. troops and honor veterans of all U.S. wars.
In 1896, the organization established the Children of the Confederacy to impart similar values to younger generations through a mythical depiction of the Civil War and Confederacy. According to historian Kristina DuRocher, "Like the KKK's children's groups, the UDC utilized the Children of the Confederacy to impart to the rising generations their own white-supremacist vision of the future." The UDC denies assertions that it promotes white supremacy.
The communications studies scholar W. Stuart Towns notes the UDC's role "in demanding textbooks for public schools that told the story of the war and the Confederacy from a definite southern point of view." He adds that their work is one of the "essential elements [of] perpetuating Confederate mythology."
The UDC was incorporated on July 18, 1919. Its headquarters is in the Memorial Building to the Women of the Confederacy, Richmond, Virginia, built in the 1950s.
History
Early work
Across the Southern United States, associations were founded after the Civil War, chiefly by women, to organize burials of Confederate soldiers, establish and care for permanent cemeteries, organize commemorative ceremonies, and sponsor impressive monuments as a permanent way of remembering the Confederate cause and tradition.
The organization was "strikingly successful at raising money to build monuments, lobbying legislatures and Congress for the reburial of Confederate dead, and working to shape the content of history textbooks." They also raised money to care for the widows and children of the Confederate dead. Most of these memorial associations gradually merged into the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which grew from 17,000 total members in 1900 to nearly 100,000 by World War I.
The UDC explicitly excluded black women from membership in 1902 (previously the requirement that the women be descended from Confederate soldiers effectively excluded black women). Furthermore, even white women from outside the upper classes were effectively excluded from membership by the requirements that a certain number of existing members had to approve a new member. Members of the UDC usually also had membership in numerous other clubs, ranging from innocuous clubs like gardening clubs to other white supremacist clubs. Some UDC speeches attracted crowds as big as 15,000 or 20,000 people. Speeches at UDC rallies explicitly endorsed white supremacy and criticized Reconstruction.
Monuments, memorials, and charity
The UDC was influential primarily in the early twentieth century across the South, where its primary role was to preserve, uphold and romanticize the memory of the Confederate veterans, especially those husbands, sons, fathers and brothers who died in the Civil War. Memory and memorials became the central focus of the organization.
Historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall notes that the UDC had a particular interest in the position of Southern (Confederate) women, with "a commitment to bolstering vanquished and disheartened veterans and keeping the memory of the dead alive. But it was also committed to immortalizing the heroism of Confederate women, whose valor, its leaders believed, had been every bit as important as men's." The UDC's methods were wide-ranging and ahead of their times:
UDC leaders were determined to assert women's cultural authority over virtually every representation of the region's past. This they did by lobbying for state archives and museums, national historic sites, and historic highways; compiling genealogies; interviewing former soldiers; writing history textbooks; and erecting monuments, which now moved triumphantly from cemeteries into town centers. More than half a century before women's history and public history emerged as fields of inquiry and action, the UDC, with other women's associations, strove to etch women's accomplishments into the historical record and to take history to the people, from the nursery and the fireside to the schoolhouse and the public square.
"The number of women's clubs devoted to filiopietism and history was staggering," says historian W. Fitzhugh Brundage, noting that women were much more likely to be involved in a variety of (historical) organizations than men, who devoted their energies to fraternal societies. Brundage notes that after women's suffrage came in 1920, the historical role of the women's organizations eroded.
After 1900, the UDC became an umbrella organization that coordinated local memorial groups. The UDC women specialized in sponsoring local memorials. After 1945, they were active in placing historical markers along Southern highways. The UDC has also been active in national causes during wartime. According to the organization, during World War I, it funded 70 hospital beds at the American Military Hospital on the Western front and contributed over US$82,000 for French and Belgian war orphans. The homefront campaign raised $24 million for war bonds and savings stamps. Members also donated $800,000 to the Red Cross. During World War II, they gave financial aid to student nurses.
In 1933 the Tennessee branch of UDC donated $50,000 for the construction of a Confederate memorial hall on the campus of the George Peabody College for Teachers which merged with Vanderbilt University in 1979. A university effort to remove the inscription "Confederate" from the building, resisted by the UDC, led to a 2005 Tennessee appeals court ruling that the inscription could be removed only if the UDC donation was returned at present value. In 2016 an anonymous source donated $1.2 million to the university specifically for that purpose, and the inscription was removed.
Memoirs The UDC encouraged women to publish their experiences in the war, beginning with biographies of major southern figures, such as Varina Davis's of her husband Jefferson Davis. 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 Pryor, Virginia Clopton, Louise 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. These memoirs were part of the growing public memory about the antebellum years and vigorously defended the Confederacy and its founding principles (which included the enslavement of African Americans), thus supporting the white supremacist Lost Cause narrative.
Southern Cross of Honor
The Southern Cross of Honor was a commemorative medal established by the United Daughters of the Confederacy for members of the United Confederate Veterans. It was proposed by Mary Ann Cobb Erwin at a meeting in 1898, with 78,761 crosses issued by 1913. The medal was never authorized to be worn on the United States Army, Navy, or Marine Corps uniform.
Scholarships During the first decades of their existence, the UDC focused on caring for Confederate soldiers and their widows. When the numbers of Confederate veterans began to dwindle, they focused on their remaining objectives. Education of the descendants of those who served the Confederacy became one of the key interests of the organization. Some state divisions within the UDC built dormitories and sponsored scholarships, but there was no coordinated support for education by the national organization. The divisions were responsible for scholarships and building dormitories for women. At the 1907 General Convention, Caroline Meriwether Goodlett spoke of the shift in the UDC's focus. As monuments were erected, she "sat by ... thinking that the monument fever would abate." She believed that "the most thoughtful and best educated women" in the organization should have realized that the "grandest monument (they) could build in the South would be an educated motherhood."
The UDC combined education with support of the military during World War II by establishing a nurses' training fund. Each scholarship provided approximately $100 per year for a three-year nursing program. When a scholarship was offered, local Chapters were encouraged to contact local schools to locate students who needed assistance to fund their education.
In addition, the UDC sponsors essay and poetry compositions, in which the participants are not to use the phrase "Civil War," "War Between the States" being the preferred term.
Children of the Confederacy
The Children of the Confederacy, also known as the CofC, is an auxiliary organization to the UDC. The official name is Children of the Confederacy of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. It comprises children from birth through the time of the Children of the Confederacy Annual General Convention following their 18th birthday. UDC chapters sponsor all Children of the Confederacy chapters. Children are taught Lyon Gardiner Tyler's "Catechism on the History of the Confederate States of America, 1861–1865," which says that Northerners did away with slavery because the climate was unsuitable, that they had no intention of ever paying the South for its slaves after abolition, that slaves in the South were faithful to their owners, who were caring and gentle people: cruel slave owners existed only in the North.
Before 2015, the "Creed" of the CofC read:
The phrase "nor was its underlying cause to sustain slavery" was deleted by the UDC General Convention of 2015.
George Floyd protests