The daughters of the confederacy didn’t just erect the statues. They were the architects of the lost cause mythology. While certain pieces of what would become the narrative would start to form immediately in the aftermath of the Civil War, it wasn’t really until the daughters of the Confederacy started retelling the southern side of the war, that the entire picture of the loss cause really shaped in its current form, and was pushed out to the public, including efforts to get schools to teach it and put it in the history books.
The damage done by the daughters of the confederacy really can’t be overstated. We tend to think of the Ku Klux Klan as this unending thing which is going to perpetually exist in perpetuity, when in reality President Grant actually hunted them down into extinction in the decades following the Civil War. The Klan was all dead by the time the daughters began erecting confederate statues and teaching lost cause mythology. Unfortunately, the newfound fervor for this revisionist history led to the filming of the birth of a nation, and because a white nationalist happened to be elected President of the United States at the time, he decided to screen the movie at the White House and this effectively lead to the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan in its most popular era, where it reached upwards of 3 million or more members. With different branches and chapters in various states.
The numbers today are barely anything to really worry about compared to back in the heyday but it’s honestly pretty sad that the daughters of the Confederacy couldn’t leave well enough alone and the Ku Klux Klan could’ve just been a thing that only existed in the 1800s.
Now, of course racism was still going to be something that we were gonna be dealing with no matter what, but the thing is so many lives didn’t have to be lost due to the Klan itself during the fight for civil rights. All because southern, women, interestingly enough, didn’t want history to remember their fathers and grandfathers as the villains.
