Today, Southerners often repeat these same ideas when they oppose removing monuments.įor example, when the Lauderdale County GOP Executive Committee recently passed a resolution against moving a courthouse monument in Florence, the document stated the Confederate Army “fought against oppressive taxation and to preserve states’ rights, in an army that included African-Americans in support and combat roles,” according to the TimesDaily newspaper. These principles permeated the South through textbooks, pamphlets and speeches written or influenced by the Daughters, according to historians. Source: Alabama Department of Archives and History. Members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Another idea included in the Lost Cause is that slaves were contented and happy with their condition, and slaveholders were mostly kind to them. The Confederacy was simply defending its states’ rights and homeland from Northern aggression, according to that belief. These books promoted a false Lost Cause version of history to impressionable young white students, who then grew up to enforce segregation.”Ĭhief among Lost Cause principles is that the Civil War was not about slavery. “What is harmful about them is that for generations, they vetted textbooks, which were adopted into Southern public schools. “They created an ideology which glorified the ‘Old South,’ and dressed this up in seemingly harmless cotillion balls and bake sales. “The conventional view of the UDC is that they are innocent old ladies who just want to remember their Confederate ancestors,” said Jalane Schmidt, a race and religion professor at the University of Virginia. While monuments endure until a mob or mechanized crane removes them, historians and academics say the UDC holds a more lasting and insidious influence over generations of minds in the South. Today, hundreds of UDC Confederate monuments are under attack as Black Lives Matter activists target them in protests against the killings of unarmed black men by white police officers. That sacred cause - or Lost Cause - is a legacy of the UDC that critics say amounts to whitewashing the history of a slave-owning South. “To you the selfsame welcome of the heart goes out as went that day to Jefferson Davis, the martyr chieftain of our sacred cause.” “You stand before the world the living witness that the past is not dead, but all in it that was good and great and true still lives and has its worshipers,” Marielou Armstrong Cory told the UDC in her opening address. ![]() The women sat just steps away from the spot where Confederate President Jefferson Davis took the oath of office 39 years before. The Alabama Legislature adjourned in 1900 so the United Daughters of the Confederacy could convene its national convention in the state Capitol. The Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Linn Park was defaced by protesters and has been removed.
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