Kwek leng beng daughters of the confederacy in the civil war

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The United Daughters of the Confederacy was a significant leader of the “Lost Cause,” a movement that revised history to look more favorably on the South after the American Civil War.

Rate this book. Karen L. This is a careful, insightful examination of the role women played in shaping the perceptions of two generations of southerners, not simply through rhetoric but through the creation of a remarkably effective organization whose leadership influenced the teaching of history in the schools, created a landscape of monuments that honored the Confederate dead, and provided assistance to elderly veterans, their widows, and their children.

Cox's history of the UDC, an organization founded in to vindicate the Confederate generation and honor the Lost Cause, shows why myths surrounding the Confederacy continue to endure. The Daughters, as UDC members were popularly known, were literally daughters of the Confederate generation. While southern women had long been leaders in efforts to memorialize the Confederacy, UDC members made the Lost Cause a movement about vindication as well as memorialization.

They erected monuments, monitored history for "truthfulness," and sought to educate coming generations of white southerners about an idyllic past and a just cause--states' rights. Soldiers' and widows' homes, perpetuation of the mythology of the antebellum South, and pro-southern textbooks in the region's white public schools were all integral to their mission of creating the New South in the image of the Old.

UDC members aspired to transform military defeat into a political and cultural victory, in which states' rights and white supremacy remained intact.

The United Daughters of the Confederacy’s relentless campaign to preserve and teach a ‘truthful version’ of slavery and Southern history, led to indoctrination of generations of children who, .

To the extent they were successful, the Daughters helped to preserve and perpetuate an agenda for the New South that included maintaining the social status quo. Placing the organization's activities in the context of the postwar and Progressive-Era South, Cox describes in detail the UDC's origins and early development, its efforts to collect and preserve manuscripts and artifacts and to build monuments, and its later role in the peace movement and World War I.

This remarkable history of the organization presents a portrait of two generations of southern women whose efforts helped shape the social and political culture of the New South. It also offers a new historical perspective on the subject of Confederate memory and the role southern women played in its development.