Iconic America | United Daughters of the Confederacy's Lost Soldiers | Episode 7

- The women of the South were in the forefront to memorialize the Confederate veterans.

There's a story told by a federal soldier right after the war and he said, "The Confederate soldiers themselves "are reconciled to the results of the clash of arms."

I think that's how he put it, but the women of the South are bitter and would continue the war on.

The United Daughters of the Confederacy, they were the ones that went out and decorated the graves and started the cemeteries and began the movements to put up memorials and monuments.

These monuments represented a grave marker for the people of the time whose husbands and sons went off to war and never came back.

- I learned a little bit about one of the founding members of The Daughters of the Confederacy whose name was Helen Plane.

She was a Civil War widow.

She was also a Klan sympathizer, but strikes me that much of her fervor might have had initially to do with a sense of personal grief.

"I lost a husband.

"I want to redeem whatever it was "I believe he stood for."

Whether or not that jives with historical fact or political fact.

- [Narrator] The United Daughters of Confederacy became probably the greatest propaganda organization this country has ever seen.

- They literally will create censor boards, a rubric, for determining what kinds of textbooks could go into schools.

It had to talk about the war of Northern aggression.

You had to frame slavery in a particular way.

This reimagining of what the Civil War was.

That only is allowed to gain currency and become part of the dominant narrative because white northerners are willing to go along with it.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7sa7SZ6arn1%2BrtqWxzmisp6GkmrFusMCunqGslafAbrvFZquhnV2YvK%2ByxJ2cq5mTrsBuuM6sq2arn6GxqrHRrGY%3D