The Confederacy's 'Living Monuments' - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...ederacys-living-monuments.html
confederacy white supremacy history US culture racism
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by World War I they were an army of 100,000 women, engaged in the fight to preserve and perpetuate the myths that the Confederate cause was a just and honorable one and that states’ rights, not slavery, was its call to arms. (Of course, a state’s right to maintain the institution of slavery was generally not part of that narrative.)
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The Daughters’ ambitious agenda was not solely focused on monuments. They sought to collect and preserve the artifacts of war, as well as archival material, which they believed would help tell a “truthful” history of the Confederacy. Indeed, what they collected often formed the basis of the first state archives and museums of history in the South.
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Members of the U.D.C. developed a multipronged approach to educating white children about the “truth” of the “War Between the States.” They developed lesson plans for teachers, a number of whom were members of the organization. They placed pro-Confederate books in school and public libraries, which they insisted students use when they competed in U.D.C.-sponsored essay contests. They led students in the celebration of Robert E. Lee’s life on his birthday and placed portraits of Confederate heroes, festooned with the battle flag, in classrooms across the South and even in some schools outside of the region. They also formed Children of the Confederacy chapters for boys and girls ages 6 to 16, intended to serve as a pipeline for membership
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The Daughters’ primary objective, however, was to instill in Southern white youth a reverence for Confederate principles. Indeed, they regarded their efforts to educate children as their most important work as they sought, in their words, to build “living monuments” who would grow up to defend states’ rights and white supremacy.
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The children’s organization is also where the Daughters taught the Confederate catechism, generally written by one of their members. Cornelia Branch Stone, of Galveston, Tex., wrote one of the earliest in 1905. The catechism, a call and response to a series of questions, was drilled into children at their meetings. “What causes led to the War Between the States, between 1861 and 1865?” was a typical question. “The disregard, on the part of the states of the North, for the rights of the Southern or slaveholding states” was the answer. “What were these rights?” The answer, according to Stone’s catechism, was “the right to regulate their own affairs and to hold slaves as property.” There were also questions and answers that led children to believe that slavery was a benevolent institution in which cruel masters were rare.
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Those “citizens of tomorrow,” who drank from the cup of history brewed by the U.D.C. for generations, became the “living monuments” that Southern white women sought to build. In the 1950s and ’60s, they were segregationists who hoisted the Confederate battle flag with talk of defending states’ rights and who denounced federal intervention into their affairs. They were members of the White Citizens’ Councils who spoke of “states’ rights and racial integrity.”