United Daughters of the Confederacy

United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), American women’s patriotic society, founded in Nashville, Tennessee, on September 10, 1894, that draws its members from descendants of those who served in the Confederacy’s armed forces or government or who gave to either their loyal and substantial private support. Its chief purpose is broadly commemorative and historical: to preserve and mark sites; to gather historical records and other material; to celebrate historic occasions; and, by offering prizes, to encourage student essays on the historic South. The UDC played a central role in spreading and perpetuating the Lost Cause interpretation of the American Civil War, which downplays or dismisses slavery as a cause of the war and instead emphasizes states’ rights as the reason for secession and which has been used to serve the goals of white supremacists. The UDC was instrumental in ensuring that the characterization of the war in textbooks conformed to the Lost Cause narrative, and it was a prime contributor to the creation of the Confederate memorial landscape of statues and monuments that became increasingly controversial in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.