“And when I say ‘pitiful’…,” he paused, trying to interpret how the UDC handled the incident. “There’s this sense of grandness from their perspective about what they’re doing,” he continued, “and that did not feel grand.”
I’m accustomed to the UDC’s rebuffs, but I found it striking that the group refused St. Paul’s, a neighbor rather than a journalist. I asked Caroline Janney, the Civil War historian, why she thinks groups like the UDC resist self-examination, or refuse to engage those who want to take a closer look at who they are. “Maybe it’s self-preservation?” she speculated. “Then you have to admit all those warts.” During our conversation, she pointed me to a scrapbook crafted by a Confederate society in the 1930s. The book pairs newspaper clippings about the Scottsboro trials with updates about the UDC, which at the time was campaigning against a proposed peace memorial that would feature Lee with General Ulysses S. Grant. The Daughters didn’t like Grant. “They talked about how Grant was responsible for ‘letting loose the hordes of Black people on the South,’” Janney explained. The scrapbook suggested the nine boys in Scottsboro proved the Daughters right. The UDC’s campaign, Janney said, “was absolutely as blatantly white supremacist as you can get.”
Maybe it’s self-preservation. Maybe heritage—ignoring one history to fixate on another—is bliss. Maybe they’re so practiced at confusing Confederate history with the Lost Cause that Daughters can’t see their own history clearly. In their official online statement, their “final word” on the country’s reckoning with the Confederacy, the president general states: “Our members are the ones who, like our statues, have stayed quietly in the background, never engaging in public controversy.” I asked Karen Cox, the UDC expert, about the claim. She agreed it doesn’t add up. “If they understood the history of their organization, some of these things that they say,” she said, “they wouldn’t say.” Janney added that looking away from the full scope of history isn’t exclusive to the UDC: It’s an American problem, one the country still has. When we look away from who we are, we can’t right wrongs. Fixating on what nice ladies we are doesn’t get us anywhere, especially when the fixation is blinding.
When I flip through my UDC magazines, I recognize faces from Myrtle Beach in the glossy photos. The Daughters are smiling, draped in pins engraved with the names of Confederate ancestors. As I skim these pages, a 1965 essay by James Baldwin, “The White Man’s Guilt,” comes to mind. I think he articulated how to understand the UDC best, and most literally, when he wrote: “People who imagine that history flatters them (as it does, indeed, since they wrote it) are impaled on their history like a butterfly on a pin and become incapable of seeing or changing themselves, or the world. This is the place in which it seems to me, most white Americans find themselves. Impaled.”
The day I left Richmond, I walked back by the UDC’s headquarters. A no trespassing sign lay on the grass. Tape appeared stuck to the wire legs poking out of the grass: a repair that did not hold. Because of the property deed stipulations, the Daughters are stuck in their marble behemoth, a building they cannot sell or move and refuse to let go of. I recognized the guard sitting in the shade of a tree, in the shadow of the dreadlocked rider atop a charging horse. A special varnish was applied to the marble after the 2020 attack to make graffiti easier to remove. The windows were fortified, too. The UDC may not speak, but these modifications suggest members do hear rumors of war.
Jefferson Davis and St. Paul’s aren’t the only memorials in Richmond to emerge from the crucible of 2020 refashioned. The monument to the Confederate monument makers likewise better symbolizes who the Daughters now are. From the sidewalk, I see a mausoleum for a dying organization, a fortress for impaled butterflies who refuse to see or change themselves, even as their city changes without them. When I Zoomed with Margaret last summer, when she initially expressed enthusiasm about this article, I asked her about the headquarters. She smiled, and to my surprise, noted that good can come from the bad. After the fire, she said, the building looks better than ever.
*This article has been updated.