Museum of the Lost Cause #museummonday

Organizations like the United Daughters of the Confederacy  promoted a version of the past that has come to be known as “the Lost Cause.” That term was coined in 1866, and is now used by critics of the idea as code for holding a distorted, pro-Confederate, and pro-white supremacist view of events surrounding the Civil War. 

At the turn of the 20th century, the idea that white people were superior to Black people was a commonly held attitude. This had a widespread effect on peoples’ understandings of the past, and it was a bedrock of the Lost Cause interpretation of the South. Among other things, the Lost Cause mythology declared that African Americans were happy in slavery and that slavery was NOT the major cause of the Civil War.  

CFM 1981.001.0168

“Mammy” image,  1906

By the end of the 19^th century, Southern “patriotic” groups like the UDC had helped create and promote a version of history that revered Robert E. Lee and focused on the bravery and sacrifice of southern white men and their female family members.  As one historian has put it, "With religious fervor the Daughters set out to prove--perhaps to themselves as well as to others--that the Lost Cause had been a just cause."

The local UDC ladies' love of the Confederacy and idolization of Robert E. Lee shine through in their early minutes. The chapter's meetings were held on the 19^th of each month to honor the day of the month that corresponded to Robert E. Lee’s birth date (except then the 19th fell on a Sunday). And they called the artifacts they collected relics, implying that they were somehow holy.

Their ideas about race are less clearly articulated. The UDC’s early minutes do not talk about race explicitly.  But the chapter did declare in 1905 that they supported the “Clansman” a book that glorified the Ku Klux Klan.  And, in the same year, the ladies donated money to help buy a Ku Klux Klan flag for the North Carolina room at the “Museum in Richmond,” which is how the ladies referred to the Confederate Museum.

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Museum of the Confederacy's KKK flag

So, while we don't know what the Museum's labels or exhibits said (or indeed if there were labels!) we can be fairly confident that the early Museum was a proponent of the Lost Cause.