Out on the road one day, I saw a Confederate bumper sticker on a Vermont SUV.
Now, given that:
a) Vermont was part of the Union in the little skirmish that preoccupied the country between 1861 and 1865
b) Vermont banned slavery in 1777 when it became its own small and fiercely independent country,
c) the ban remained in effect when it joined the Union and became a small and fiercely independent state, and
d) despite loopholes and de facto slavery continuing for a few decades after 1777, the state was essentially a free state by around 1810,
one would not necessarily expect to see the Stars & Bars on a vehicle registered in the same part of the country that has gifted us with Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, The Trapp Family Ski Lodge/Singers empire, the country’s best-known socialist since Norman Thomas, and that delicious, fat-free, and highly caloric substance known as “maple syrup.” Stranger things have happened — I once saw a minivan with over 100 Greatful Dead dancing bears plastered to its surface, and yes, I counted — but this was not what I expected to see from my neighbor to the north.
I initially assumed that the sticker belonged to a transplant from the Old South who’d somehow wandered across the border into Yankeeland, but for all I know the owner of the SUV was a descendant of one of the Rebels who’d blasted across the border to disrupt the 1864 foliage season and drive all the leaf-peepers in St. Albans back to New York. America is a mobile society, after all, and if a Pittsburgher born and bred like me can land near the bucolic and quaintly rocky shores of the Manhan River, what’s to prevent someone from Alabama or another Confederate state from making a pilgrimage to the land of fine ice cream and deciding to stay?
As charming as this idea might be, alas, it’s much more likely that this was yet more evidence of what I like to think of as the Revenge of the Daughters.
I’ve lived in the North for all but two years of my life, so until recently I was unaware of the influence of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. This worthy group, founded in 1894 as a sort of rough analogue to the Daughters of the American Revolution, had the professed goal of honoring the memory of the Confederate war dead through such worthy actions as maintaining cemeteries, promoting local history, and making sure that the descendants of Confederate soldiers and sailors (and everyone else) did not forget the sufferings and sacrifices of those who had paid the last full measure of devotion to the Glorious Cause of Southern Independence.
That this might — just might — result in the public coming to believe that secession, slavery, and the plantation lifestyle had been something to be admired, emulated, and (if possible) recreated may or may not have been the intent. I wasn’t around back then, so I can but speculate as to how the original mission of preserving the memory of the Glorious Dead quickly morphed into what can only be called a propaganda campaign designed to whitewash — whoops, sorry, terrible word choice, I’ll try to do better — rehabilitate the memory of the Glorious Cause and its Glorious History.
This may seem harsh, especially to those of you from the South. However, it is no exaggeration to say that from the Gilded Age through the early 1920’s, the UDC pretty much carpet-bombed the South (and the Midwest, and the Border States, and even Montana, yes, really, they put a Confederate monument in MONTANA) with memorial statues, pageants, plaques, gravestones, textbooks, and plenty of other material objects and historical efforts dedicated to fond remembrance of the Old South and its peculiar ways. They did other things as well — scholarships for the descendants of Confederate soldiers, military hospitals for the Allied wounded in the Great War, nursing courses during World War II, publication of dozens of women’s memoirs — but it’s hard to overestimate the influence upon American culture of the UDC’s promotion of the “moonlight and magnolias” image of the beautiful plantation, its benevolent owners, and its happy, contented, unpaid workers.
Tonight I bring you a prime example of the UDC’s yeah, I’m going to say it, it’s a horrible pun but it’s actually accurate whitewashing of the Confederacy. Written by a turn of the last century Southern educator, lecturer, and devotee of the hoop skirt, this was a key text in the first wave of revisionism that swept the country prior to World War I:
Truths of history : a fair, unbiased, impartial, unprejudiced and conscientious study of history. Object: to secure a peaceful settlement of the many perplexing questions now causing contention between the North and the South, by Mildred Lewis "Miss Millie" Rutherford — you probably haven’t heard of Mildred Lewis Rutherford, known to one and all as “Miss Millie,” but that’s not for lack of trying. Miss Millie, the descendant of a wealthy planter and the niece of pro-slavery Congressman Howell Cobb, was one of the first and most brilliant students of the Lucy Cobb Institute, a school in Athens, Georgia, dedicated to educating the daughters of the elite in "orthodox southern moral and racial values could be transmitted to future generations."
That a good education might, just might, require students to learn more than “orthodox southern and moral racial values” didn’t seem to occur to anyone. By the time Miss Millie graduated at the tender age of sixteen in 1868, the Lucy Cobb Institute had earned a reputation as a suitable prep school for Southern girls of good family and fine sensibilities.
This continued after Miss Millie took over as President of the LCI in 1880. She was only twenty-nine, but had spent several years teaching in Atlanta and was more than qualified to ensure that the school’s mission of transmitting orthodox values to the mothers of future generations would be fulfilled. She improved the school’s curriculum and finances, raised money for a new chapel, and increased enrollment, and even though she formally stepped down as president in 1895 to go on the lecture circuit (see below), Miss Millie continued to be involved with the LCI almost until her death, including stints as acting president.
Along the way she somehow found the time to write several textbooks on prominent authors of Britain, the United States, and France, as well as articles and books on Southern history. Add in her habit of delivering lectures on the Late Unpleasant Aggression Perpetrated Upon the Confederacy by the Nasty Yankees while dressed in an antebellum hoop skirt, and it’s not hard to see why the Georgia Writers’ Project characterized her in the 1940’s as “a woman of powerful personality, commanding presence, and fearlessly outspoken opinions.”
Alas for history, the country, and the little girls who attended the Lucy Cobb Institute Miss Millie was also an unreconstructed, unrepentant, and thoroughly committed proponent of the Glorious Cause theory of American history.
.This shouldn’t surprise anyone — remember her uncle the Congressman? — but Miss Millie quickly surpassed her relatives in her intensity and influence even though she was not interested in political office and strongly opposed female suffrage. A tireless amateur historian and superb public speaker, she was (of course) a proud member of the UDC, serving as a local officer in the 1890’s and as Historian General of the national organization during the Wilson Administration. Many was the gathering of the UDC (and the YMCA, and graced by her presence, and the United Confederate Veterans, and the Georgia Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, etc., etc., etc.), and many were the Confederate memorials and celebrations that could trace their origins to the work of Miss Millie.
And then there was this work, the grandly named Truths of history : a fair, unbiased, impartial, unprejudiced and conscientious study of history. Object: to secure a peaceful settlement of the many perplexing questions now causing contention between the North and the South.
Not an actual book, but rather a collection of quotations wrenched badly out of context and used to promote Miss Millie’s staunch belief in the goodness and rightness of the Lost Cause, the necessary of slavery, the horrid character and general evilness of Abraham Lincoln and the North, and the sterling character and unjustly defamed righteousness of Jefferson Davis, Truths of History was a treasure trove of primary source material for Old Confederates, convinced Neo-Confederates, and pretty much anyone who wants to know why the South was right and the North was wrong. Never mind that some of her quotes are actually from novels (Thackeray was such an expert on slavery), or that her understanding of Constitutional law would have Professor Kingsfield drinking himself to death from sheer despair; Miss Millie knew that the Lost Cause and the Old Plantation were the source of all that good and true and civilized before the Yankees came marching through Georgia, and that was that. She’d been alive during the War of Northern Aggression that began when the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, after all, and who better to judge the truth than someone who’d actually seen the conflict with her own eyes?
That Miss Millie might, just might, have been less than objective when it came to the South...a quick perusal of James Loewen’s The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader might assist the curious in coming to zir own conclusion.
As for Miss Millie herself...after her Glorious Career, she retired to her long-time home, which was located directly across the campus of the Lucy Cobb Institute. There she continued to write, lecture, and edit a historical journal until almost the end. She died in 1928, a few months after a fire had destroyed much of her collection of Confederate memorabilia, and thus was spared the dreadful day that the Lucy Cobb Institute had to close early in the Depression due to lack of funding. She had loved the school dearly, and her reaction to its end can only be imagined.
But as for Miss Millie’s influence...thanks to her tireless work as lecturer, researcher, and historian of the Confederacy, its legacy can be seen in a thousand monuments, pamphlets, statues, and even websites. Her Confederate apologia are back in print, her works are quoted, and she herself is still regarded in certain circles as an admirable example of True Southern Womanhood of a Certain Era, Social Class, and Skin Tone.
I’m sure she would have been very pleased, even if it’s not known if she was one of the people responsible for putting up a Confederate memorial in Montana.
%%%%%
Have you ever seen a Confederate memorial? Read one of Miss Millie’s books? Encountered an unreconstructed Scion of the Rebellion? Seen one for sale and fled shrieking? Slapped an Obama bumper sticker over the Stars & Bars on a random stranger’s car? Time to ‘fess up and share….
%%%%%