The daughters of the confederacy shaped the ideology that there is a false equivalence between southern pride and confederate pride. A common belief among Southerners is that the confederacy was in opposition of slavery, and for the freedom of the states from government control. This is not true at all.

The daughters of the confederacy are a group of women who are descendants of confederate soldiers. They work to preserve the ideology that the civil war was not about slavery by building confederate monuments, honoring confederate soldiers and publishing textbooks with their own version of history.

Some confederate monuments claim to remember history, yet that remembrance is often plagued in misinformation and intimidation toward racial minorities.

That intimidation stems from the fact that the majority of these monuments were erected in periods of racial disparity, such as when Jim Crow laws were established and during the civil rights era. One such monument was established as a confederate memorial in Arlington National Cemetery in the summer of 1914, in the midst of the Jim Crow laws.

The relation southern pride has with confederate symbols such as these monuments can be traced directly to the daughters of the confederacy’s work to rewrite history of the war.

These monuments honor confederate soldiers for their brave fighting, but they conveniently ignore the fact that they were fighting for slavery and against states’ rights not for it. This is shown in the fact that the confederate memorial in Arlington National Cemetery was called a peace monument.

“We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race,” stated by the State of Texas and restated by Washington Post in relation to their succession from the Union.

Historians say it is an undeniable fact that the confederacy was created in support of slavery, therefore honoring the soldiers fighting for this ideal is in turn supporting slavery. We are the only country that honors their past mistakes, Germans do not have monuments of Nazi’s, yet we have monuments of soldiers who believed people should owned just because of their race.
According to the Pew Research Center, the majority of Americans believe the war was fought over for state’s rights. This misinformation stems from textbooks carefully filled with propaganda about the war, funded by the daughters of the confederacy.

Not only would the daughters of the confederacy create their own textbooks but they would police textbook publishers to favor the confederacy or the publishers would not have a market in the South.

One textbook called The History of Georgia would describe slaves as being happy, even some claiming their owner would barbecue with them. Not only do they teach children that slavery was benevolent but they also describe the war as The Northern Aggression, making these kids think the North was the ‘bad side’ during the war.

All of this work by the daughters of the confederacy puts white supremacy in the form of southern pride, creating the support for confederate flags and monuments that we see today.
The only way to fix this problem is to reeducate the public through correct textbooks and taking down confederate monuments, also we need prominent Republican politicians to denounce supporting the confederacy and denounce the daughters of the confederacy.