Dixie's Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture (review)

Abstract

Dixie's Daughters The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Culture By Karen L. Cox University Press of Florida, 2003 218 pp. Cloth, $55.00 Many young southerners today may have heard of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). If they have, they probably did so when Congress refused to renew a patent on its insignia or when the Daughters defended the flying of the flag. A century ago, however, most southerners knew of the UDC and its activities; it was the largest independent organization of women in the region. Despite the UDC's historical importance, however, Dixie's Daughters is the first (other than official histories) book-length study of the group. Author Karen L. Cox traces the origins of the United Daughters of the Confederacy to the Civil War relief efforts of southern women and, more directly, to the numerous Ladies Memorial Associations that formed right after the war. These local organizations cared for graves and established Memorial Day, thereby shaping the South's initial memory of the Civil War. In 1894 the UDC organized and soon established chapters across the South, indeed across the nation. By the end of World War I, it boasted a membership of 100,000, made up primarily of upper-class women, both those women who had lived through the war and those descended from veterans. The group undertook various progressive benevolent projects, including college scholarships and homes for veterans and women, but the UDC's major goal always remained vindicating the Confederacy. They erected monuments across the South and in various other ways helped establish a historical record of the war. Most important, the UDC tried to indoctrinate the young with what Cox calls Confederate culture. They created an organization for them--the Children of the Confederacy--sponsored essay contests, ensured state adoption of school textbooks with a southern view of the war, and placed flags and pictures of Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis in southern schools. Through its efforts, the UDC sought not just to ensure that future generations of white southerners agreed with them but also to secure vindication from the Yankees. The group had always promoted an American patriotism, conditioned on the North's respect for the South, and in World War I southern support for the war effort evoked a northern response that the Daughters felt constituted that vindication. After the war, Cox argues, the group never again exerted the public influence it had. Dixie's Daughters provides a much-needed institutional history of the UDC at the height of its influence; that alone would be a major contribution. …