The historical ideology of Mildred Lewis Rutherford: a confederate historian's New South creed.

"PATRIOTIC MEN AND WOMEN OF THE NORTH AS WELL AS OF THE SOUTH," Mildred Lewis Rutherford wrote in 1915, "are demanding true history, and our sectional differences will disappear when we succeed in getting down to the truth of history." Rutherford, the long-serving national historian of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), spent her life publicizing her version of the "truth" about the Civil War and the southern past. (1) The UDC, like other Confederate societies, considered its first priority to be the veneration of southern soldiers as heroes, despite their military defeat, by preserving graveyards, aiding veterans' reunions, and building monuments. (2) Yet from its founding, the organization also sponsored activities with more overtly political goals. As historian general of the UDC, Rutherford used her work to justify secession, segregation, and "home rule." Never losing sight of the UDC's first mission of celebrating the bravery of Confederate soldiers, Rutherford also appealed to history to warn of the folly of deviating from white supremacy, Democratic control, and gender hierarchy. (3) At the same time, although her celebration of plantation life and its social hierarchies seemed to reject the values of the New South, Rutherford actually welcomed both economic development and sectional reconciliation. Even while glorifying the antebellum era, Rutherford contributed to the re-creation of the white southern elite within the new, urban, industrial, and fluid twentieth-century South. (4) Rutherford's ultimate goal, as her statement quoted above implies, was the production of a "true history" that would reunify North and South, while legitimizing southern culture and autonomy in matters of racial policy.

The United Daughters of the Confederacy became the most enduring and influential of the women's organizations founded to honor the Lost Cause. Created from several existing women's Confederate memorial groups in 1894, the UDC played a large role during an especially active period of women's social and political organization. (5) Although much of the scholarship in women's history and club activism during the Progressive era has focused on the urban North, historians studying southern women have recently broadened our knowledge of women's social and political club work in the South. (6) Historians of Progressive-era women have also begun to explore the activism of conservative women, including those who joined political groups and movements that supported an antidemocratic New South social order and an antifeminist view of gender hierarchy. (7) Certainly, not all UDC members would have considered themselves conservative on issues of gender or even class. Indeed, the group's interest in women's accomplishments and its organizational strategies resembled those of feminist and reformist women's clubs in certain respects, as scholars have suggested. (8) The UDC celebrated the sacrifice and heroism of women during the Civil War, and like other women's clubs, it provided a space for individual women to participate in such untraditional activities as fund-raising, historical research, and public speaking. (9) But the overall effect of the UDC's activism, especially that of the national organization, served to buttress a political culture that sentimentalized women's subordination and viewed hierarchy as the key to social stability.

The UDC exemplified the late-nineteenth-century obsession with memorializing the past. The period witnessed the founding of the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Colonial Dames, as well as historical preservation groups such as the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities and the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities. (10) The Civil War received particular attention from memorializers, and both northern and southern veterans formed organizations that celebrated their wartime heroism. (11) The Confederate men's group, the United Confederate Veterans (UCV), encompassed somewhere between one-quarter and one-third of the survivors of the war and included both working-class and elite men. The UCV held public rituals, such as annual reunions and parades, that served both a social and psychological function for the aging veterans, whose personal honor and military prowess had been undermined by Confederate defeat. After the turn of the century, new groups representing the next generation began to replace the UCV. Both the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the larger and more active United Daughters of the Confederacy consisted of men and women of wealth and social standing, with links to old southern families. In his important study of organizations promoting the Lost Cause, historian Gaines M. Foster has argued that the very fact that women assumed the role of "guardians of the tradition" indicated the declining significance of the Confederate celebration after the turn of the century. Yet in the early years of the twentieth century, the UDC actually expanded the influence of the Lost Cause movement by emphasizing its goal of educating the nation about the "true" nature of the Civil War and the Confederacy. (12)

The UDC's activities had precedents in antebellum and wartime womanly ideals. (13) Although less politically active than the urban, middle-class, northern women who joined the temperance or antislavery movements, some antebellum southern women had participated in organized benevolence, and some, especially elite urban women, became affiliated with political parties or joined reform movements, particularly for causes that benefited their class. Antebellum sanction of women's public organizations that provided charity or upheld elite interests made the UDC's activities appear quite traditional. (14)

Further, women were strongly associated with Confederate patriotism and with remembrance of the war. The stereotype of women as arch-Confederates developed during the southern states' secession debates, when it functioned to ensure the loyalty of men, according to historian Elizabeth R. Varon. After the creation of the Confederacy, it became women's civic duty to conform to the ideal of the female patriot, and wartime propaganda sensationalized women's support for secession in order to shame men into military service. (15) Women also were the first to memorialize the conflict. During the war, wives and mothers attempted to find and bury the remains of soldiers, and after Appomattox, southern women founded chapters of the Ladies' Memorial Association that continued to tend to soldiers' grave sites. According to historian LeeAnn Whites, women's collective burial of the war dead politicized private mourning. Without a nation to remember its fallen soldiers, women honored the dead individually, but in doing so, they also honored the Confederacy. (16) The enduring belief that southern women had been the most dedicated Confederates and the devotion with which southern women built cemeteries and memorials provided justification for the UDC's taking a leading role in the celebration of the Lost Cause.

The social status of UDC members also provided access to resources and gave their work visibility and respectability. Most UDC members, unlike those of the UCV, came from prominent families. In order to join the UDC, potential members needed to prove themselves not of "objectionable character," and indeed, leaders placed great importance on feminine decorum. (17) National leaders of the UDC came from the highest levels of the antebellum political and social elite; many had fathers or husbands who had served as officers in the Confederacy or as state governors and congressmen before, during, and after the war. (18)

Mildred Rutherford certainly could claim her own family's place in the antebellum elite. Her grandfather, Colonel John Addison Cobb, had profited from investment in agriculture, railroads, and real estate in Athens and surrounding Clarke County, Georgia. In addition to owning a plantation and 209 slaves throughout the 1840s (only one other man in the county owned more than 200), Cobb served on the board of directors of the Georgia Railroad and owned property in an area of town, still known as Cobbham, that became the site of Athens's most desirable addresses. (19)

Cobb's younger son Thomas, or T. R. R. Cobb, was an influential lawyer and proslavery propagandist. Howell Cobb, Thomas's older brother, made a career as a politician, serving as a U.S. congressman for five terms (and briefly as Speaker of the House), as governor of Georgia, and as secretary of the treasury in President James Buchanan's cabinet. Although Congressman Cobb fought for the Compromise of 1850 and was considered a Unionist, in 1860 he and his brother were instrumental in securing Georgia's secession vote. The brothers also participated in Confederate politics, Thomas by helping draft the Confederacy's constitution and Howell by serving as the first Speaker of its Congress. Both men served in the war as generals; Thomas Cobb lost his life at Fredericksburg. Howell Cobb remained in politics after the war, resisting Reconstruction and supporting the Democratic Party until his death in 1868. (20)

Thomas and Howell Cobb had a sister, Laura, who married Williams Rutherford, a mathematics professor at Franklin College (which would become the University of Georgia in 1869) and a large plantation owner. Much like the Cobb family, the Rutherfords had a strong sense of aristocratic privilege. Williams and Laura's daughter Mildred was born in 1851, one of five siblings who survived childhood. With such a lineage, Mildred Rutherford grew up with a sense of personal and family pride. (21)

Laura Rutherford, like other wealthy southern women during the war, faced new challenges and struggled with the scarcities of food and other goods created by the conflict. After her husband left for military service, she took on new responsibilities in her home and on the family plantation, and she became very active in women's "war work" as well. As the co-founder and second president of the Athens Volunteer Aid Society (later the Soldiers' Aid Society), she supervised the collection of clothes and other supplies, and she even took wounded Confederate soldiers into her own home. After the Confederate surrender, she turned the Soldiers' Aid Society into the Athens chapter of the Ladies' Memorial Association. (22)

Despite some wartime difficulties, the Rutherfords weathered the war and its aftermath comparatively well. Sherman's army did not pass through Athens, and throughout the war the family's plantation continued to produce. After emancipation, many of the family's slaves became sharecroppers on Williams Rutherford's land, while he resumed teaching at the university. But the extended family did not escape unscathed. Union troops destroyed the plantation of Howell Cobb, and the Rutherfords sustained financial and personal losses. The experiences of war and economic hardship, and the deaths of family members and of young soldiers who had been nursed in their home, left a deep psychological imprint upon the Rutherford children, especially Mildred, whose later activities attested to her abiding bitterness over wartime loss. (23)

Mildred Rutherford would become best known as a Confederate historian, but she also had a fifty-four-year career as a schoolteacher. Her uncle Thomas Cobb had founded Athens's first school of "higher learning" for girls, the Lucy Cobb Institute, which opened in 1859, and Mildred graduated from the school in 1868. After teaching in Atlanta for eight years, she returned to Athens and taught the Bible, literature, and history at the Lucy Cobb (as it was affectionately called by students) for nearly half a century, and she served as director of the school for twenty-two of those years. As principal of the Lucy Cobb, Rutherford created a school with a serious academic program that also sought to create properly modest and moral southern "ladies." Strict rules ensured proper behavior. Lucy Cobb students were not allowed to spend the night away from the school; to entertain male visitors other than brothers, fathers, and uncles; to receive food other than fruit as gifts; to dress "extravagantly" or wear silk or satin; or to venture on their own beyond the stately magnolia tree in front of the main building. (24) Rutherford made sure that students also learned moral lessons in the classroom. Unhappy with the literature textbooks available for young women, Rutherford wrote and published her own texts on the Bible, as well as on English, American, French, and southern literature. Incorporating some of the same themes as her UDC speeches and pamphlets, each book reflected an intense concern with modesty and familial duty along with a recognition of the accomplishments of women. For example, The South in History and Literature (1906) included many descriptions that resembled one praising a now-forgotten writer for her "masculine strength of intellect" while noting that she remained "womanly in manner and heart." Her public lectures in the Lucy Cobb chapel, on topics ranging from southern history to Rutherford's travels in Israel and the Middle East, also emphasized these same themes. (25)

Rutherford, in fact, was much praised as a public speaker. She had a commanding presence and an ability to inspire admiration among men and women alike. (26) Her most outstanding physical feature may well have been her ramrod-straight posture. One former student remembered that whenever Rutherford passed through a room, people instinctively straightened themselves. Using her impressive bearing and powerful personality to advantage, Rutherford became a leader not only of an elite educational institution but also of various women's organizations. She held state, regional, and national offices in the YWCA, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and the Women's Christian Temperance Union. But Rutherford was best known for her work with Confederate memorial associations, particularly the UDC. (27)

Rutherford was introduced to the movement to commemorate the Confederacy by her mother, who through the Ladies' Memorial Association had overseen the erection of a statue to the Confederate dead in Athens. After Laura Rutherford's death in 1888, Mildred Rutherford became president for life of the Athens chapter of the Ladies' Memorial Association, but the UDC ultimately gave her more opportunity for broader historical activity. In 1896, the year after she ended her first term as principal of the Lucy Cobb Institute, Rutherford created an Athens branch of the UDC and named it for her mother. Remaining president of the Laura Rutherford chapter for ten years, Mildred Rutherford served as Georgia's historian general for life and held the state presidency from 1901 to 1903. (28) As state historian she pushed local chapters to implement active historical programs. She sent each chapter a form requesting them to report the number of pages written, number of war relics collected, and number of meetings held, and to provide information on other activities related to their historical activities. Chapter historians sent back a wide range of replies, some admitting to lack of attention to the subject, but most claiming to have fairly lively programs. (29)

Because Rutherford had established a reputation as a historian and southern patriot through her textbooks American Authors (1894) and The South in History and Literature (1906), she was appointed historian general of the national UDC in 1911. Rutherford's popularity led the UDC to amend its constitution, twice overturning two-year term limits, in order to allow her to remain its national historian until 1916. Rutherford used the office to broaden her prominence as a historian and conservative activist. She created an archive of Confederate memorabilia, set the agenda for the UDC historical program, and gave an annual speech, which she then published in pamphlet form and promoted as part of the "Mildred Rutherford Historical Circle" series, a sort of correspondence course for adults on southern history. The titles of her published speeches, such as The Civilization of the Old South: What Made It, What Destroyed It, What Has Replaced It (1916) and The South Must Have Her Rightful Place in History (1923), make clear their messages. (30)

Although Rutherford's speeches and pamphlets echoed earlier UDC themes such as the heroism of southern soldiers, her writings also took on more ambitious goals: to establish the South's contribution to United States history, to legitimize secession, and to idealize the antebellum plantation. (31) As early as 1894 Rutherford had championed in her American literature textbook the South's literary achievements; under the auspices of the UDC she continued to celebrate the artistic, military, and political accomplishments of her native region and to insist on its central place in the formation of an American identity. (32) After becoming UDC historian general, Rutherford lectured on the importance of southerners and slaveholders such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, James Madison, and John Marshall in the early American republic. (33) She also published pamphlets that listed southern and Georgian "firsts," such as "First to trail the Spanish flag in the dust," "First Christian baptism in America," and "First to have a college for women," all of which she claimed for her native state. The South, Rutherford argued by way of her lists of its accomplishments and acts of patriotism, was not a backward, separatist region; rather, it was integral to the nation itself. (34)

Many of Rutherford's concerns were standard fare among postbellum southern advocates. (35) She defended the legality of Confederate secession and asserted that the true cause of the war had been not slavery but "a different and directly opposite view as to the nature of the government of the United States." (36) In doing so, she sought to justify the extensive segregation and disfranchisement laws passed by southern state legislatures in the 1890s and early 1900s in direct violation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Like other Confederate apologists, she criticized the morality and questioned the motives of the Radical Republicans, writing that Thaddeus Stevens hoped to "humiliate" the South and that he lived intimately with a black woman who "influenced" him; that the national government created the Freedmen's Bureau "to punish the South"; and that carpetbaggers "were the scum of the North" and scalawags "the scum of the South." Rutherford also argued that the Reconstruction amendments had been passed in a coercive manner and claimed that, as a result, they were unconstitutional and should not be considered legally binding in the South. (37)

For Rutherford, "right[ing] the wrongs against the South" required justifying not only secession but also the plantation system and slavery itself. Like other "plantation legend" writers popular in the 1880s and 1890s such as Thomas Nelson Page and Joel Chandler Harris, Rutherford suggested that African Americans had fared better on the antebellum plantation than in the New South city. In her UDC speeches and articles Rutherford asserted that slaves had been unprepared for freedom and that sudden emancipation had caused their moral and physical corruption. Since slavery's abolition, Rutherford insisted, blacks had become "disorderly, idle, vicious and diseased." (38) Despite these harsh judgments, Rutherford generally preferred to make her points about the degeneracy of modern African Americans by sentimentalizing slavery. (39) In Civilization of the Old South she wrote, "The servants were very happy in their life upon the old plantations," and she approvingly quoted an English traveler who described joyful slaves singing, dancing, and laughing. Rutherford even disparaged the D. W. Griffith film Birth of a Nation as "unjust to the negroes" because "it presented the bad type of negro that was entirely unlike the real southern negro." A former family slave who worked as a housekeeper at the Lucy Cobb Institute well into the 1910s personified for Rutherford the real southern Negro, and a portrait evoking her "kindliness, honesty, and faithfulness" was prominently displayed at the school. Rutherford claimed that she gave "every one of the old-time negroes in Athens" a gift at Christmas "in appreciation of their faithfulness of the long ago" and to show her "love for everyone in Athens, white and black." Despite this "love," Rutherford's glorification of plantation slavery implied that modern blacks did not behave with the servility that she expected; the "faithfulness" of the "old-time negroes" was, to her dismay, dying out with the former slaves themselves. (40)

The plantation legend, usually noted for its celebration of slavery, also idealized antebellum gender roles for whites: in these narratives submissive, virtuous women were protected by powerful, chivalrous men. The idea that contemporary southern women benefited from the conservative gender roles associated with the antebellum plantation, although not as prominent in Rutherford's UDC speeches and pamphlets as her attempts to justify secession or prove slavery benign, emerged as a major part of her worldview in her overall activism, teaching, and writing. In one UDC speech, for example, she assured her listeners that antebellum life had been "a picture of contentment, peace and happiness," where ladies received respect and honor. Unfortunately, she lamented, modern women no longer enjoyed the reverence of the belle; "old time chivalry" was fading away. (41) Some historians have proposed that the nostalgia for the plantation articulated by Rutherford and other UDC members called into question the masculine virtue of men of their generation. (42) In "Thirteen Periods of United States History," for example, Rutherford wrote that white southern men had more difficulty trying "to adjust themselves to the new order of things in the South," and that white women had to work harder and become more independent as a result. In another speech she argued that the aftermath of the war "caused a complete uprooting of all customs and ways of living in the South," and that women, in particular, had to work harder, "think faster," and "act more circumspectly." Rutherford's descriptions of chivalry suggest that when southern men lost the war, and along with it their wealth and way of life, they had failed their women, leaving them unprotected and vulnerable. (43)

By reflecting Rutherford's deep preoccupation with propriety and morality, her several literature textbooks evinced her high standards for manly virtue. Each of these works criticized authors, male or female, who included any allusion to sexuality or appeared to sanction immorality. Her textbooks also clearly revealed that she believed that, just as women had a duty to obey their husbands and fathers, men also had a duty to protect and honor their wives, mothers, and children. These books severely castigated men for acting cruelly toward or neglecting their families and applauded faithful and generous sons, husbands, and fathers. For example, Rutherford praised Thomas Jefferson because, in her words, he "retained a romantic devotion to [his wife] throughout his life" and "was never beyond her call" during her last years. She chastised Jonathan Swift, on the other hand, for courting two women at the same time without intending to marry either of them. The textbooks all testified to her intense sense of moral righteousness and, particularly, of male duty. (44)

Yet Rutherford not only had strong criticism for the shortcomings of white men, but also for unfeminine behavior on the part of white women. Women, she believed, must prove themselves worthy of men' s protection. If women failed to conform to traditional standards of femininity, they no longer deserved the protection and affection of men. Modern girls had become so much "bolder and less modest," Rutherford lamented, that they allowed boys to address them by their first names, declined to discourage men from smoking in their presence, and worst of all, pursued men "instead of making the men seek them...." Rutherford directly suggested that this familiarity would lead to further sexual misconduct, writing that girls no longer followed the example of antebellum women who "kept their lovers waiting a long time to get the prize well worth the having...." By experimenting with new social and sexual behavior, she implied, women acted "so as not to deserve any thing better" and therefore endangered their claim to deference and protection. (45)

To enforce these sentiments, Rutherford tried to suppress any hint of impropriety in her students at the Lucy Cobb. After stepping down as UDC historian general in 1916, she resumed her role as president of the school and continued to monitor students' behavior in order to safeguard the respectability of "Lucies." Talking to boys, wearing makeup, and venturing alone beyond the magnolia tree in the school's front yard remained prohibited. Rutherford measured each girl's skirt before group outings to make sure that it fell below the ankle. Asked how she handled experimentation by students with flapper fashion and bobbed hair in the mid-1920s, Rutherford, according to her biographer, declared, "We have no flappers at the Lucy Cobb." (46)

Rutherford did not restrict her judgment to youthful indulgence in immodest fashion and behavior; she also condemned the political activism engaged in by some southern women. By 1910 significant numbers of southern women had embraced the woman suffrage campaign to the great dismay of Rutherford, a leader of the antisuffrage movement in Georgia. In a 1912 speech she declared, "If there is a power that is placed in any hands, it is the power that is placed in the hands of the southern woman in her home.... That power is great enough to direct legislative bodies--and that, too, without demanding the ballot." Suffrage, she continued, was not a step toward equality but rather a way of robbing women of the only power that they truly held--that of feminine influence and persuasion within their families. Three years later, using language typical of the "antis," Rutherford argued to the Georgia House of Representatives that "the glare of public life" had made the modern woman "an unsexed mongrel, shorn of her true power and vainly beating against the air in dissatisfaction with herself," and she warned that the vote would only harm women more. (47) Rutherford never reconciled this view with the fact that she herself was one of Georgia's most publicly active and well-known women of her time. (48)

Rutherford also feared that woman suffrage legislation, and especially a national amendment, would create new voting opportunities for African Americans and open the way for more federal civil rights laws. Although southern black women would almost certainly be disfranchised by the same measures that prevented their husbands and fathers from voting, white southern antisuffragists nevertheless insisted that extending the franchise to women would broaden the chances for black women to register to vote and thus would invite federal scrutiny of southern elections. (49) In a 1914 speech at the University of Georgia, Rutherford invoked the specter of Reconstruction to argue:

   If we today yield our state rights, whether for National prohibition or for
   National Woman Suffrage or for any other causes, no matter how much many of
   us desire world wide prohibition, no matter how many of our Northern
   friends desire Woman Suffrage, and other innovations--I repeat, if we yield
   the right to state legislation while our negro population is so great, yes,
   greater in Georgia today than in all of the New England States and Northern
   states combined, we will have a Reconstruction Period worse than that which
   followed the War Between the States. Early take a stand, young men, against
   this peril threatening us. (50)

Of course, a second Reconstruction in 1914 was unlikely. But Rutherford never missed an opportunity to question the legitimacy of the first Reconstruction, especially the validity of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. She not only criticized the way that these amendments had been passed, but also the very principle of federal legislation. Indeed, she opposed all constitutional amendments, including the child labor amendment proposed in 1924 and prohibition, despite her anti-alcohol sentiments. (51) Rutherford reserved her strongest resistance for the suffrage amendment on the basis that it would allow the national government to legally interfere with the internal political processes of the states.

The idea that black women might claim voting rights was frightening enough, but suffrage and feminism threatened to create even more profound disruptions of the South's racial, sexual, and political hierarchies. Rutherford recognized the interconnectedness of southern racial and sexual ideologies, and in calling for a return to chivalry, she reminded both white men and white women of their racial duty to conform to sexual stereotypes. Too much freedom for women, as well as men's neglect of duty, she believed, actually endangered women and, further, white supremacy. While historian Grace Elizabeth Hale's assessment that Rutherford carefully negotiated the "gendered boundaries" of her society "[i]n order to develop a role for white women that expanded rather than overturned her region's conservative ideology of womanhood" is in some ways accurate, Rutherford believed that she was working within, and even preserving, the traditional boundaries of gender, as well as of race and class. Rejecting feminism, suffrage, and sexual freedom, Rutherford favored instead the protection of feminine privilege within a hierarchy of race, class, and sex. (52)

Although Rutherford did not make the connection directly, "lady-like" behavior by white women was essential to the political power of the southern elite and the Democratic Party. Even the appearance of immodesty (a quality often attributed to suffragists) by white women brought into question one of the key justifications for segregation, disfranchisement, and Democratic hegemony: the protection of white women's virtue. (53) Racist appeals to protect white women from the "black beast" served as the basis of Democratic Party platforms throughout the South, especially where party hegemony faced internal or external threats. (54) In Rutherford's home state of Georgia, Governor (and later Senator) Hoke Smith freely used antiblack propaganda to win elections in the early decades of the twentieth century. In 1906, one month after a particularly racist campaign for the Democratic nomination for governor, rumors of rapes of white women by black men ignited a riot in Atlanta that by one account left 25 blacks dead and over 150 people injured. Three years later Governor Smith helped pass a new state constitution that significantly reduced the number of both blacks and whites eligible to vote. (55) Smith, the husband of Rutherford's cousin and a member of the Lucy Cobb's board of directors in the 1920s, proved the political success of antiblack appeals. (56)

Disfranchisement, promoted as a way to keep both elections and white women pure, helped ensure the political hegemony of wealthy white voters. After the new constitution was ratified, Georgia historian Numan V. Bartley has noted, elections in Georgia were primarily concerned with such "important" issues as "patronage, preferment, personality, and political power." (57) Although politicians such as Smith insisted that they intended to protect white women, political appeals that emphasized women's vulnerability to rape, as Glenda E. Gilmore has shown, actually restricted women's freedom and regulated women's behavior. (58) Rutherford's speeches and writings suggest that she understood that white women must prove that they were worthy of the protection offered by disfranchisement and segregation in order for the racist rhetoric of politicians like Smith to resonate with voters. If white women did not follow the example of the antebellum belle and instead were promiscuous, acted carelessly in public, or campaigned for the vote, they endangered a key rationale for the early-twentieth-century southern racial and political hierarchy. (59)

Rutherford also genuinely believed that suffrage would not benefit women like herself. She insisted that elite white women profited most from gender relationships that promised protection in exchange for submissiveness and sexual purity. (60) Although Rutherford's support for traditional womanhood seems jarring when compared to the way she lived her own life, it makes more sense within the context of her worldview and personal experiences. Rutherford's faith in social hierarchy--a hierarchy that gave her an exalted place as a white woman from a socially prominent family--led her to believe that gender, as well as race, was immutable. Faith is a key word here, as Rutherford's strong Baptist beliefs depicted social difference as God-ordained, not man-made; for her, resisting one's place in the social order defied both biology and God's will. Further, as a woman who never married, Rutherford never experienced the control, of movement or will, that nineteenth-century husbands could legally exert, or the debilitation of pregnancy and childbirth. As an unmarried "career" woman, Rutherford could more easily idealize female domesticity and submission than could her married contemporaries. And of course, her own life demonstrated the possibilities of political influence for women without, as she put it, "demanding the ballot." Like other prominent women who rejected feminism and suffrage, Rutherford believed that women held more power through influence than through a spurious equality. (61)

In her emphasis on women's political and racial duty to conform to modest behavior, Rutherford differed from sister Georgian and UDC member Rebecca Latimer Felton, wife of a congressman and the first woman to serve in the U.S. Senate. Like Rutherford a defender of white supremacy, but unlike her a suffragist and feminist, Felton faulted white men's failure to protect, and more vehemently black men's violence, for white women's new insecurity. While Felton declared that whites might "lynch a thousand [black men] a week" if it would guarantee white women's safety, Rutherford placed some blame for white women's increased vulnerability on their own sexual and political experimentation. (62) In the case of Georgia's most well known lynching, that of Jewish factory manager Leo Frank, Rutherford rejected the reasoning of the "reactionary populists," as Nancy MacLean has termed them, who defended murder victim Mary Phagan's sexual innocence by calling for Frank's hanging. Rutherford even wrote a letter to Georgia's governor, asking him to grant Frank clemency. (63)

Indeed, unlike Felton, Rutherford never publicly endorsed lynching. In one of Rutherford's very rare allusions to the subject in an essay that otherwise supported the Reconstruction-era Klan, she blamed "some deeds that the South regretted and tried to punish" on unscrupulous imposters dressed as Klansmen. Of course, Rutherford did not hesitate to criticize African Americans who stepped out of "their rightful place." At the same time, rather than directly sanctioning lynching or violent control of black men, Rutherford explained that the new vulnerability of white women resulted from the breakdown of the antebellum sexual bargain between white men and women. In doing so, however, she hoped to solidify the control of white elites over twentieth-century society; for African Americans themselves, the effect of Rutherford's racial politics differed little from that of Felton's. (64)

Rutherford sought to influence not just contemporary morality, race relations, and politics but economic development as well. Scholars of the UDC have argued that the organization resisted economic development and sectional reconciliation, and Rutherford's glowing depictions of the antebellum plantation would seem to sustain this analysis. (65) Yet despite her profoundly conservative impulses, Rutherford did not really want a society modeled on antebellum agrarianism. Although her speeches and articles suggested that contemporary southerners had lost the grace and manners of the antebellum elite, these same writings included endless lists praising the industrial accomplishments of the New South. Rutherford never viewed her goal in writing history as the prevention of economic development or national unification. Rather, her sentimental portraits of antebellum life were intended to have the opposite effect: they served to promote southern industrialization and sectional reunification.

Although Rutherford disliked the term New South, perhaps because it represented a stronger repudiation of the culture and values of the past than she was willing to accept, the same speeches that defended secessionists and denounced lapses in modern manners extolled the myriad accomplishments of the South, Old and New. (66) Like the New South boosters, she identified the industrial potential and a tradition of invention in the Old South. Georgia, she pridefully stated, could claim to be the first state to have a paper mill, the first to make cottonseed oil, and the first to develop steam navigation--all in the antebellum era. Still, Rutherford mused that before the Civil War "[w]e had been an agricultural people ... and were satisfied to be. We never realized the possibilities in our grasp." Rutherford was therefore pleased that in recent years the South had more fully taken advantage of its resources. In a 1912 speech, sounding like any New South promoter, she pointed to the productivity of the region with respect to cotton, sulfur, oil, marble, and coal; boasted of the South's lumber and cotton mills; and claimed the world's largest fertilizer and sulfuric acid plants for the southern states. These were hardly the words of the nostalgic agrarian that at first glance she appeared to be. (67)

Rutherford was not alone in lauding the Old South while welcoming the New. As historian Paul M. Gaston has pointed out, the "New South creed" and the "mythic image of the Old South" developed simultaneously in the 1880s and reinforced each other. Other writers in the plantation tradition, including Thomas Nelson Page and Joel Chandler Harris, also endorsed New South development. Harris, the author of the Uncle Remus stories written in slave dialect, also wrote for Henry Grady's Atlanta Constitution, the chief organ of New South boosterism. Even Grady, the best-known New South promoter and Rutherford's childhood classmate, praised antebellum life in his speeches and articles. In fact, as Gaston found, the two themes worked together in support of the New South. After the war, the defeated South sought psychic reassurance of its bravery in battle and of the righteousness of its cause. Honoring the Old South, Gaston suggested, reminded white southerners of a worthy past, one they could take pride in despite their subsequent defeat. Memorializing the Confederacy assuaged southerners' fears that economic development would destroy their regional distinctiveness or identity. Confederate celebrations kept the Old South alive, while southerners busily went about bringing in the New. (68)

In fact, the families of many UDC members depended on the new economy to perpetuate their elite status. In towns and small cities like Athens, the "new" urban-industrial elite mostly descended from planters, and most "new men" worked in industries closely linked to the production and distribution of agricultural goods, such as textiles, banking, and railroads. (69) Like the southern antisuffragists studied by Elna Green, the fathers and husbands of UDC members often worked in New South industries or urban professions linked to the plantation economy. (70) The parents of Rutherford's students at the Lucy Cobb also depended on the economy of the New South. Lucies were typically grandchildren of planters, but the children, and later wives, of urban businessmen or professionals. (71) Rutherford's own family took part in these economic and social changes. Before the Civil War both of Rutherford's grandfathers owned sizable plantations, and her father had grown cotton while teaching at the college. Her brother became a lawyer, while her three sisters all taught at the Lucy Cobb and were involved in women's clubs and charities. (72)

Rutherford herself played an active role in the New South economy with a sharp, even aggressive, business sense. In many ways, her career as a historian depended on the expansion of publishing and advertising and on the improvements in travel of the early twentieth century. (73) Rutherford energetically raised money for her Confederate work and for the Lucy Cobb Institute through public speaking, fund-raising letters, and print advertisements. In Miss Rutherford's Scrap Book, a monthly magazine that ran from 1923 to 1927, she ran prominent ads for the Lucy Cobb and for the "Mildred Lewis Rutherford Historical Circle," and at the school she used her own textbooks extensively. In correspondence with her publishers, she displayed her business savvy, quite interested in the sales and the promotion of her books. Indeed, her creation in 1915 of the Historical Circle can he seen as a way to gain new readers--and buyers--for her writings. Rutherford took full advantage of the New South economy to publicize her vision of an idealized antebellum era. (74)

Rutherford's sentimental portrayal of the antebellum era and the Confederacy, moreover, actually served to support the economic, political, and social changes associated with the New South. By romanticizing, but containing, the memory of the Old South, Rutherford and other members of the UDC helped alleviate their husbands' and fathers' guilt over moving away from the culture and values associated with the plantation myth. Just as the cult of domesticity in the 1830s imagined the home as a nonproductive, nurturing space that relieved some of the psychic tension of early industrialization in the Northeast, early-twentieth-century southern men could come to terms with their new urban, commercial experience by keeping alive a romantic, feminized, and comforting space of a past far removed from their daily lives. Rather than creating an alternative, anticapitalist value system that critiqued the New South, as Karen L. Cox has argued, the women of the UDC, by defending the Confederacy and Old South, enabled their men to reconcile themselves to leaving the plantation behind. (75)

Their identity as women aided Rutherford and the UDC with the creation of this gendered psychic space. Had men, especially political leaders, spoken publicly and stridently about the Confederacy and antebellum past with the same longing and pride that Rutherford displayed, they might have been seen as a real threat to sectional harmony and national peace. But from the mouths of women, the celebration of the Confederacy seemed harmless, even charming, since voteless women could hardly have been taken seriously as political actors. Women who perpetuated the nostalgia for the antebellum past and the spirit of the Confederate revolt kept these ideas in the public consciousness without presenting them as a political threat.

Rutherford's pro-Confederate work had another ironic consequence: it helped to bring about sectional reconciliation. Northerners participated in the romanticization of the Old South as well, identifying it with the values missing from their own competitive, acquisitive, and diverse society. Southern writers such as Rutherford, Harris, and Page offered northerners a vision of a simpler, gentler time when human relationships meant more than commerce, when blacks and whites shared bonds of love and reciprocity. (76) This mutual celebration of the antebellum South, like the shared military success of the Spanish-American War, helped to begin the psychological reunification of the sections. (77) Rutherford constantly identified her purpose in writing history as creating peace through truth, and she infused her writing with American, not just southern, patriotism. The South, she wrote, "desires that the truth be told in such a way that peace between the sections shall be the result." Her 1917 pamphlet, Where the South Leads, was full of paeans to national patriotism and sectional unity. She even included a new version of "Dixie" that substituted America for Dixie, as in: "I'm glad I love America, Hurrah, Hurrah, / In America I'll take my stand to live and die in America." (78)

The romanticization of the antebellum plantation further brought the North and South together over the issue of race. Southerners acknowledged their defeat insofar as they admitted that slavery had no place in the twentieth century. Of the institution, Rutherford declared, "I would not have it back, if I could...." (79) Yet the benevolent, harmonious, and peaceful view of slavery put forth by Rutherford and others aided the South in "winning the peace"--that is, in implementing segregation, disfranchisement, and other forms of racial control. The sentimentalization of slavery lent credence to white southerners' claim that they knew best how to handle the "race problem." It further served to obscure the freedpeople's liberty, let alone equality, as the most meaningful legacy of the war. Endless portraits of contented slaves in southern literature, history, and art helped ease northern guilt about allowing states to control racial policy. Rutherford's pro-Confederate rhetoric, far from rekindling sectional tension, justified local control of racial issues in a reunited nation. (80)

Rutherford remained active as a historian of the Confederacy and the Old South until her death in 1927. Citing a wish "to spend her remaining life in the devotion of her literary work in Southern history," she again resigned as president of the Lucy Cobb in 1922. (81) She quickly became embroiled in a controversy over one of her favorite topics, Abraham Lincoln. At the 1922 United Confederate Veterans convention in Richmond, Virginia, the Rutherford Historical Committee, led by its namesake, endorsed and suggested for school use a 1921 book by Confederate veteran Colonel Huger W. Johnstone that accused the Civil War president of a "war conspiracy." Johnstone's book argued that Lincoln violated a promise not to resupply Forts Sumter and Pickens and thereby provoked an unnecessary war. The committee passed a series of resolutions, based on the book's allegations, that Lincoln purposely goaded the South into war out of hatred and jealousy of slaveholders; that he was not a tree Christian; and that he did not deserve his reputation as a great leader. (82)

Of course, Rutherford had written stridently pro-Confederate speeches and pamphlets before, but this time she had gone to a new extreme. Not only did Rutherford directly attack Lincoln's integrity, but she embarked on this attack after World War I had sparked renewed reverence for Lincoln's memory, and during the very year of the dedication of his memorial. (83) The Kansas City, Missouri, branch of the UCV denounced the Rutherford Committee's resolutions, which led to a spate of sharp criticism in the press and from the public. Northern newspapers from Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, New York, and elsewhere chided Rutherford for trying to "reopen the wound between North and South." (84) Even southern papers, including the Atlanta Constitution, reported unfavorably on her speech; the Chattanooga Evening News described it as "unfortunate." (85) A woman from Georgia wrote to Rutherford to denounce her accusations as "treasonable." (Rutherford scrawled on the bottom of the letter, "Who is this--white or black?") But supporters also sent letters, and the Athens newspaper defended its native daughter, even printing an extensive letter to the editor she wrote defending her views. (86)

Unswayed by the controversy, Rutherford carried on with her work on Confederate causes, becoming a leading fund-raiser for the Stone Mountain monument, a sort of Confederate Mount Rushmore carved on the granite hillside outside of Atlanta where the Ku Klux Klan had been reborn in 1915. (87) She also reassumed the directorship of the Lucy Cobb in 1925, began a capital campaign to secure an endowment for the school, and continued overseeing historical activities and writing speeches and pamphlets for the UDC and other Confederate memorial groups. (88)

Yet the attack on Lincoln heralded a subtle shift in Rutherford's popular support. While Rutherford maintained a reputation as a leading Confederate historian, by the mid-1920s her work no longer won the automatic respect that it had been accorded ten or twenty years earlier. (89) Newspapers increasingly reported unfavorably on her activities. In 1924 a Texas paper suggested that "some good friends should give her a calendar for the current year, 1924. That calculated for the year 1865 is out of date." Even in Athens she received some teasing; after a devastating fire in her home in 1926, a rumor went around town that her writings on Lincoln had exploded by "spontaneous combustion." (90)

The change did not simply reflect Rutherford's lack of diplomacy in the Lincoln matter. By the mid-1920s the Confederate celebration had begun to fade. Most Confederates, even those who had been children during the war, had died by this time. There were political changes as well. With the election of Woodrow Wilson, southerners gained both national influence and political self-confidence. The South seemed to have won its battle to keep its region free from federal interference, and laws restricting African American voting and movement remained in place. Some even hoped that the Wilson administration would introduce the "southern formula" of racial control to national legislation. In addition, World War I, much more emphatically than the Spanish-American War, marked a turning point in sectional reconciliation, as Karen Cox has argued convincingly. As if in return for the UDC's full support of the war effort and participation in aid groups such as the Red Cross, the defenders of the Confederacy became recognized as a "patriotic," not simply "southern," organization. By the end of the war, even the most anti-Yankee members had toned down their rhetoric. (91) Finally, the woman suffrage amendment brought neither the full-scale destruction in gender roles anticipated by some antisuffragists nor the large numbers of black women to the polls feared by white southerners. (92)

By the mid-1920s the white South seemed no longer to need the sort of strident defense of the Confederacy championed by Rutherford and her allies. Defenses of Confederate heroism, southern "heritage," and regional political independence became less important by the 1930s, as the region struggled with economic depression and faced its new reliance on federal aid. (93) Not until the 1950s and 1960s, when white southerners again felt threatened by national interference, would symbols of the Confederate past such as the battle flag reemerge as hallmarks of southernness, used by white southerners to justify oppressive racial policy and widespread violence. (94)

Although Rutherford had lost some of the esteem in which she was held before 1920, the UDC historian's version of Confederate history and antebellum life had lasting influence. Not only did the "truths" of history that she promoted remain white southern orthodoxy for almost another half century, but the hierarchical social and political structure that she favored also remained in place. Her work writing history helped create a culture that legitimized control by traditional southern elites. Glorifying antebellum life and Confederate heroism, Rutherford actually lent credence to economic and social changes that privileged whites used to their advantage. By inventing a mythical Old South, Rutherford aided a reinvented elite in asserting its hegemony over New South society and politics.

(1) Mildred Lewis Rutherford, "Historical Sins of Omission and Commission" (originally delivered on October 22, 1915), in Rutherford, Four Addresses (Birmingham, Ala., [1916]), 113 (quotation); Margaret Anne Womack, "Mildred Lewis Rutherford: Exponent of Southern Culture" (M.A. thesis, University of Georgia, 1946); Fred Arthur Bailey, "Mildred Lewis Rutherford and the Patrician Cult of the Old South," Georgia Historical Quarterly, 78 (Fall 1994), 509-35. See also Virginia [Pettigrew] Clare, Thunder and Stars: The Life of Mildred Rutherford (Oglethorpe University, Ga., 1941). Clare took liberties in this admiring biography of Rutherford, freely including imagined dialogue and colorful descriptions of events, and she also wrote with the racism of her time. As a result, I use it with care. The author would like to thank Jane Sherron De Hart, Carl V. Harris, John Majewski, Beverly J. Schwartzberg, Jay Carlander, Susan Case, and the anonymous readers for the Journal of Southern History for their comments and suggestions on this essay.

(2) Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865 to 1913 (New York and Oxford, 1987); Angie Parrott, "`Love Makes Memory Eternal': The United Daughters of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia, 1897-1920," in Edward L. Ayers and John C. Willis, eds., The Edge of the South: Life in Nineteenth-Century Virginia (Charlottesville and London, 1991), 219-38; Karen L. Cox, "Women, the Lost Cause, and the New South: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Transmission of Confederate Culture, 1894-1919" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Southern Mississippi, 1997).

(3) Rutherford, "Historical Sins of Omission and Commission," 107-11; Mildred Lewis Rutherford, What the South May Claim, or Where the South Leads (Athens, Ga., [1916]), 16-18; Mildred Lewis Rutherford, Truths of History: A Fair, Unbiased, Impartial, Unprejudiced and Conscientious Study of History (Athens, Ga., [1920]), esp. 27-29, 86-91; Mildred Lewis Rutherford, "Wrongs of History Righted" (originally delivered on November 13, 1914), in Rutherford, Four Addresses, 61-64; Mildred Lewis Rutherford, The Civilization of the Old South: What Made It, What Destroyed It, What Has Replaced It (Athens, Ga., [1916]), 7, 40-42.

(4) Mildred Lewis Rutherford, "Thirteen Periods of United States History" (originally delivered on November 21, 1912), in Rutherford, Four Addresses, 4043; Rutherford, "Historical Sins of Omission and Commission," 113; Mildred Lewis Rutherford, The South Must Have Her Rightful Place in History (Athens, Ga., 1923), 2.

(5) Several organizations claimed to be the first "Daughters of the Confederacy." Mary B. Poppenheim et al., The History of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (3 vols. in 2; Raleigh, N.C., 1956, 1988), I, 1-12; Parrott, "`Love Makes Memory Eternal,'" 221-22; Cox, "Women, the Lost Cause, and the New South," 1-8, 50-54; Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy, 172.

(6) Recent work on southern women's early-twentieth-century activism includes Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, New Women of the New South: The Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the Southern States (New York and Oxford, 1993); Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 (Chapel Hill and London, 1996); Anastatia Sims, The Power of Femininity in the New South: Women's Organizations and Politics in North Carolina, 1880-1930 (Columbia, S.C., 1997); Elna C. Green, Southern Strategies: Southern Women and the Woman Suffrage Question (Chapel Hill and London, 1997); Elizabeth Hayes Turner, Women, Culture, and Community: Religion and Reform in Galveston, 1880-1920 (New York and Oxford, 1997); and Joan Marie Johnson, "`Drill into us ... the Rebel tradition': The Contest over Southern Identity in Black and White Women's Clubs, South Carolina, 1898-1930," Journal of Southern History, 66 (August 2000), 525-62.

(7) Studies of women's conservative activism contemporaneous with that of the UDC include Kathleen M. Blee, Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Oxford, 1991); Nancy MacLean, "White Women and Klan Violence in the 1920s: Agency, Complicity and the Politics of Women's History," Gender and History, 3 (Autumn 1991), 285-303; Jane Jerome Camhi, Women Against Women: American Anti-Suffragism, 1880-1920 (Brooklyn, N.Y., 1994); Thomas J. Jablonsky, The Home, Heaven, and Mother Party: Female Anti-Suffragists in the United States, 1868-1920 (Brooklyn, N.Y., 1994); Susan E. Marshall, Splintered Sisterhood: Gender and Class in the Campaign against Woman Suffrage (Madison, Wisc., 1997); and Green, Southern Strategies, chaps. 4 and 5.

(8) Sims, Power of Femininity in the New South, 120-22, 143-44, and Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, "`You Must Remember This': Autobiography as Social Critique," Journal of American History, 85 (September 1998), 439-65, both emphasize these aspects of the UDC. See also Cox, "Women, the Lost Cause, and the New South," 57-58, 66.

(9) Parrott, "`Love Makes Memory Eternal,'" 220, 225-26; Cox, "Women, the Lost Cause, and the New South," 93-98, 146-49; Historical Reports for 1924 (completed by local chapter historians and sent to Rutherford as Georgia historian general), Folder 18, Box 4, Mildred Lewis Rutherford Papers (Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia, Athens, Ga.; hereinafter cited as Hargrett Library). The historian general of the national UDC gave a speech at the annual convention, and Rutherford became especially well known and respected as a speaker. Turner, Women, Culture, and Community, 177-82, gives a fascinating glimpse into the power struggles within the Galveston, Texas, UDC, suggesting that women gained political skills and practiced them aggressively within the organization.

(10) David Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill and London, 1990); Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York, 1991); James M. Lindgren, Preserving the Old Dominion: Historic Preservation and Virginia Traditionalism (Charlottesville and London, 1993); John R. Gillis, ed., Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton, 1994); James M. Lindgren, Preserving Historic New England: Preservation, Progressivism, and the Remaking of Memory (New York and Oxford, 1995).

(11) Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920 (Athens, Ga., 1980); Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy; Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1895-1900 (Chapel Hill and London, 1993); Cecilia Elizabeth O'Leary, To Die For: The Paradox of American Patriotism (Princeton, 1999), esp. chap. 3, and pp. 121-28; David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 2001).

(12) Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy, 105-7, 163 (quotation), 169-71, 178-79; Parrott, "`Love Makes Memory Eternal,"' 222-23; Fred Arthur Bailey, "The Textbooks of the `Lost Cause': Censorship and the Creation of Southern State Histories," Georgia Historical Quarterly, 75 (Fall 1991), 507-33; Fred Arthur Bailey, "Free Speech and the Lost Cause in the Old Dominion," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 103 (April 1995), 237-66; Cox, "Women, the Lost Cause, and the New South," 12-15, chap. 6; Sims, Power of Femininity in the New South, 145-49; Turner, Women, Culture, and Community, 174-77.

(13) Important works discussing southern womanhood include Anne Firor Scott, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830-1930 (Chicago, 1970); Catherine Clinton, The Plantation Mistress: Woman's World in the Old South (New York, 1982); Jean E. Friedman, The Enclosed Garden: Women and Community in the Evangelical South, 1830-1900 (Chapel Hill and London, 1985); Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill and London, 1988); and Victoria E. Bynum, Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South (Chapel Hill and London, 1992).

(14) Suzanne Lebsock, The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784-1860 (New York and London, 1984), chap. 7; Bynum, Unruly Women, 52-56; Elizabeth R. Varon, We Mean to Be Counted: White Women and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill and London, 1998). On antebellum northern women see Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven and London, 1977); Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (Cambridge, Eng., and other cities, 1981); Barbara Leslie Epstein, The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelism, and Temperance in Nineteenth-Century America (Middletown, Conn., 1981); Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (New York, 1986); and Loft D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven and London, 1990).

(15) Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy, 29-30; Silber, Romance of Reunion, 26-28; Varon, We Mean to Be Counted, 137-68; Drew Gilpin Faust, "Altars of Sacrifice: Confederate Women and the Narratives of War," Journal of American History, 76 (March 1990), 1200-1228, esp. 1211.

(16) LeeAnn Whites, "`Stand by Your Man': The Ladies Memorial Association and the Reconstruction of Southern White Manhood," in Christie Anne Farnham, ed., Women of the American South: A Multicultural Reader (New York and London, 1997), 133-49, esp. 138-39. See also Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy, 38-40; Parrott, "`Love Makes Memory Eternal,"' 221; and Lindgren, Preserving the Old Dominion, 65.

(17) Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy, 171 (quotation); Parrott, "`Love Makes Memory Eternal,"' 221-22; Cox, "Women, the Lost Cause, and the New South," 54-55.

(18) Members of the UDC included Mrs. Fitzhugh Lee, wife of the governor of Virginia (who was a nephew of Robert E. Lee), and both the wife and daughter of Jefferson Davis. Kate Mason Rowland, "Work of Southern Women: Daughters of the Confederacy Trying to Preserve History [reprinted from the Richmond Enquirer]," 174, 176, and Bertha Damaris Knobe, "The Four Honorary Presidents," 237-38, both in Mildred Lewis Rutherford Notebooks, Vol. I: "Origin of the Daughters of the Confederacy and the U.D.C.," United Daughters of the Confederacy Collection (Eleanor S. Brockenbrough Library, Museum of the Confederacy, Richmond, Va.).

(19) Ernest C. Hynds, Antebellum Athens and Clarke County, Georgia (Athens, Ga., 1974), 27, 30, 32, 174; Frances Taliaferro Thomas, A Portrait of Historic Athens and Clarke County (Athens, Ga., and London, 1992), 46.

(20) Unidentified newspaper clipping on Howell Cobb, Folder 15, Box 30, E. Merton Coulter Historical Manuscripts Collection (Hargrett Library); Hynds, Antebellum Athens and Clarke County, Georgia, 63-67; Numan V. Bartley, The Creation of Modern Georgia (Athens, Ga., and London, 1983), 29, 45; Lewis Nicholas Wynne, The Continuity of Cotton: Planter Politics in Georgia, 1865-1892 (Macon, Ga., 1986), 56, 64; Thomas, Portrait of Historic Athens and Clarke County, 71-78.

(21) Genealogy, Box 2, Mary Ann Rutherford Lipscomb Family Papers (Hargrett Library); Mildred Rutherford, handwritten genealogy, Folder 1, Box 1, Rutherford Papers; Womack, "Mildred Lewis Rutherford," 1-2; Clare, Thunder and Stars, 11-12, 21-22.

(22) Clare, Thunder and Stars, 73-74, 89; Womack, "Mildred Lewis Rutherford," 6-7. On wealthy southern women's experiences in the Civil War generally, see George C. Rable, Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism (Urbana and Chicago, 1989), esp. chaps. 5 and 6; Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill and London, 1996); and Drew Gilpin Faust, Thavolia Glymph, and George C. Rable, "A Woman's War: Southern Women in the Civil War," 1-27, and Kym S. Rice and Edward D. C. Campbell Jr., "Voices from the Tempest: Southern Women's Wartime Experience," 73-111, both in Campbell and Rice, eds., A Woman's War: Southern Women, Civil War, and the Confederate Legacy (Charlottesville, 1996).

(23) Womack, "Mildred Lewis Rutherford," 15; Clare, Thunder and Stars, 99, 107-8; Thomas, Portrait of Historic Athens and Clarke County, 101; Joseph T. Glatthaar, The March to the Sea and Beyond: Sherman's Troops in the Savannah and Carolinas Campaigns (New York and London, 1985), 7-9. Rutherford's sense of loss comes through especially clearly in a 1926 sketch, "Memories of Christmas on a Southern Plantation," in which she described an idyllic childhood Christmas spent playing with her personal slave and indulging in rich foods. Reprinted in Phinizy Spalding, comp. and ed., Higher Education for Women in the South: A History of Lucy Cobb Institute, 1858-1994 (Athens, Ga., 1994), 211-16.

(24) Mildred Lewis Rutherford, "Life Sketch of Miss Mildred Rutherford," in H. J. Rowe, History of Athens and Clarke County (Athens, Ga., 1923), 105-6; Thomas, Portrait of Historic Athens and Clarke County, 129-30; Phyllis Jenkins Barrow, "History of Lucy Cobb Institute, 1858-1950" (M.A. thesis, University of Georgia, 1951), reprinted in Spalding, comp. and ed., Higher Education for Women in the South, 5-82, esp. 11-13, 25, 27, 29-31; Womack, "Mildred Lewis Rutherford," 14, 16-17, 25, 27-29; "ANNOUNCEMENT of Lucy Cobb Institute, Athens, Georgia, 1890," in "Lucy Cobb Institute, 1858-1908" scrapbook, Box 4, Mildred Lewis Rutherford Scrapbooks (Hargrett Library) (quotations).

(25) Mildred Lewis Rutherford, Bible Questions with References to the Old Testament, Adapted for Schools of All Grades ([Atlanta], 1890); Rutherford, English Authors: A Hand-Book of English Literature from Chaucer to Living Writers (Atlanta, 1890); Rutherford, American Authors: A Hand-Book of American Literature from Early Colonial to Living Writers (Atlanta, 1894); Rutherford, French Authors: A Hand-Book of French Literature, Froissart-Living Writers (Atlanta, 1907); Rutherford, The South in History and Literature: A Hand-Book of Southern Authors from the Settlement of Jamestown, 1607, to Living Writers (Atlanta, 1906), 237-38 (quotations); "Lecture Talks by Miss Mildred Rutherford, Ex-principal of Lucy Cobb Institute," n.d., Folder 10, Box 2, Rutherford Papers; Womack, "Mildred Lewis Rutherford," 80-81, 91.

(26) "Lecture Talks by Miss Mildred Rutherford." Womack notes that Rutherford gave speeches at the University of Georgia and at the Georgia House of Representatives as well as in the Lucy Cobb chapel and at UDC conventions. Womack, "Mildred Lewis Rutherford," 85-86, 91, 97, 102. For general praise of Rutherford by alumnae and others see George Ernest Miller to Mildred Lewis Rutherford, February 18, 1924, Folder 16, Box 1; "Letters from H [&] H," Folder 1, Box 1; Anne Bates Windship, memorial letter, 1928, Folder 1, Box 1; "Miss Mildred Rutherford Paid Tributes By Former Lucy Cobb Girls," 1928, unidentified clipping in Folder 3, Box 4; and George Foster Peabody to Lamar Rutherford Lipscomb, June 10, 1929 [?], Folder 7, Box 2; all in the Rutherford Papers.

(27) Katherine Trussell Wilson, LaGrange Trussell DuPree, and Phyllis Jenkins Barrow, "Interview with Mrs. Bessie Mell Lane," in Spalding, comp. and ed., Higher Education for Women in the South, 266; Rutherford, "Life Sketch of Miss Mildred Rutherford," 105-7; Womack, "Mildred Lewis Rutherford," 79-82, 85; Bailey, "Mildred Lewis Rutherford and the Patrician Cult of the Old South," 516, 521-22.

(28) List of Athens Chapter UDC; "Report of State Historian, Mildred Rutherford, Athens, Ga.," n.d.; Mildred Rutherford, State Historian, and Lillian Martin, Assistant State Historian, "Letter to All Chapter Historians, Georgia Division, UDC"; all in Folder 4, Box 4, Rutherford Papers; Rutherford, "Life Sketch of Miss Mildred Rutherford," 106-7; Womack, "Mildred Lewis Rutherford," 7, 73-74; Clare, Thunder and Stars, 73-74, 114, 129.

(29) Rutherford and Martin, "Letter to All Chapter Historians," Folder 4; Historical Reports for 1924, Folder 18; Mrs. Kirby Smith Anderson to Rutherford, September 2, 1924, Folder 17; Louise Irwin to Rutherford, September 13, 1924, Folder 17; Maud Rogers to Rutherford, September 26, 1924, Folder 17; Rutherford, handwritten list of each state chapter and their historical activities, [1924?], Folder 18; all in Box 4, Rutherford Papers.

(30) Bailey, "Mildred Lewis Rutherford and the Patrician Cult of the Old South," 520-21; Womack, "Mildred Lewis Rutherford," 85, 93, 104; Rutherford, What the South May Claim, 37; "The Mildred Lewis Rutherford Historical Circle," 1915, Folder 7, Box 4, Rutherford Papers.

(31) Mildred Lewis Rutherford, "The South in the Building of the Nation" (originally delivered on November 14, 1912), in Rutherford, Four Addresses, 7-10; Rutherford, "Wrongs of History Righted," 49-51; Rutherford, Civilization of the Old South, esp. 6-17; Rutherford, "Memories of Christmas on a Southern Plantation," 211-16. The interest of the UDC in southern soldiers' heroism during its first decade is documented in Poppenheim et al., History of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, I, 26, 30; and Rowland, "Work of Southern Women," 169.

(32) The textbook emphasized southern writers such as Edgar Allen Poe and Thomas Nelson Page; it also devoted much space to southern political writers such as Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, and Rutherford's uncle, T. R. R. Cobb. Rutherford, American Authors, 3-6, 108-18, 264-74, 439-45, 599-604.

(33) Rutherford, "South in the Building of the Nation," 7-8; Rutherford, "Thirteen Periods of United States History," 21-28.

(34) Mildred Lewis Rutherford, Where the South Leads and Where Georgia Leads (Athens, Ga., [1917]), 41. Also see Rutherford, Georgia: The Empire State of the South (Athens, Ga., 1914); and Rutherford, What the South May Claim.

(35) Rutherford's ideas closely resembled those of the Association of the Army of Northern Virginia, an organization of Confederate military leaders that formed just after the end of the war. Led by Jubal A. Early, its members attributed their loss to the North's "overwhelming numbers," insisted that secession had been legal and honorable, and created almost godlike heroes out of Robert E. Lee and, to a lesser extent, other military leaders. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy, 53-62 (quotation on p. 57). Rutherford's writings contain the distorted ideas about Reconstruction that are examined in Kenneth M. Stampp, The Era of Reconstruction, 1865-1877 (New York, 1965), chap. 1; and the ideas about race and slavery that are analyzed in George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (New York and other cities, 1971); John David Smith, An Old Creed for the New South: Proslavery Ideology and Historiography, 1865-1918 (Westport, Conn., and London, 1985); and Joel Williamson, A Rage for Order: Black/White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation (New York and Oxford, 1986). Rutherford's thinking, however, does not fit the schema of either Fredrickson or Williamson perfectly. She combines the sentimentality of Fredrickson's paternalists (or as Williamson calls them, Conservatives) with the more pessimistic ideas of black degeneracy associated with the "negrophobes" (in Williamson's terms, Radicals), yet she refrains from the latter group's explicit endorsement of violence.

(36) Rutherford, "Historical Sins of Omission and Commission," 113 (quotation); Rutherford, "Wrongs of History Righted," esp. 49-50; Rutherford, Truths of History, 1-7.

(37) Rutherford, What the South May Claim, 17 (quotations); Rutherford, "Historical Sins of Omission and Commission," 108-11; Rutherford, Truths of History, 19-21.

(38) Rutherford, "Wrongs of History Righted," 50 (first quotation), 61-63; Rutherford, South Must Have Her Righted Place in History, 16-17; Rutherford, Civilization of the Old South, 6-7, 30-31, 33 (last quotation); Rutherford, "Historical Sins of Omission and Commission," 110-11. On Thomas Nelson Page and Joel Chandler Harris see Paul M. Gaston, The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking (New York, 1970), 181-83; Fredrickson, Black Image in the White Mind, 205-8, 211; and Wayne Mixon, Southern Writers and the New South Movement, 1865-1913 (Chapel Hill, 1980). As Fredrickson shows, Harris and his editor at the Atlanta Constitution, Henry W. Grady, saw some hope for black progress in the New South through white-supervised uplift and education. Rutherford made no mention of education for African Americans and praised only those contemporary blacks who continued to display servility and loyalty to their former masters.

(39) Rutherford, "Memories of Christmas on a Southern Plantation," 213, 216; Rutherford, Civilization of the Old South, 6-7; Rutherford, South Must Have Her Rightful Place in History, 18-19.

(40) Rutherford, Civilization of the Old South, 7 (first quotation); Florida Orr, "The Lucy Cobb: Reminiscence by an `Old Pupil,'" Athens Banner-Watchman, June 1887, clipping in "Lucy Cobb Institute, 1858-1908" scrapbook; "Miss Rutherford Thrills Audience in Story of the South," unidentified clipping in Folder 2, Box 1, Lipscomb Family Papers (second and third quotations); "A Word to the Alumnae of Lucy Cobb and the Citizens of Athens," 1925, p. 2, Folder 9, Box 2, Rutherford Papers (fourth quotation); Rutherford, What the South May Claim, 18; Rutherford, "Memories of Christmas on a Southern Plantation," 216 (fifth and sixth quotations); Rutherford, "Life Sketch of Miss Mildred Rutherford," 105 (seventh quotation).

(41) Rutherford, Civilization of the Old South, 7 (first quotation), 15, 40-42 (second quotation on p. 40).

(42) Grace Elizabeth Hale, "`Some Women Have Never Been Reconstructed': Mildred Lewis Rutherford, Lucy M. Stanton, and the Racial Politics of White Southern Womanhood, 1900-1930," in John C. Inscoe, ed., Georgia in Black and White: Explorations in the Race Relations of a Southern State, 1865-1950 (Athens, Ga., and London, 1994), 173-201, esp. 183; Cox, "Women, the Lost Cause, and the New South," 72-74.

(43) Rutherford, "Thirteen Periods of United States History," 40; Rutherford, Civilization of the Old South, 42.

(44) The description of Jefferson is in Rutherford, American Authors, 82, and that of Swift is in Rutherford, English Authors, 162. For other examples see Rutherford, English Authors, 36-38, 159, 405; and Rutherford, American Authors, 75-76, 110-11, 603-4.

(45) Rutherford, Civilization of the Old South, 40. UDC members across the South expressed views similar to Rutherford's in the 1915 essay contest on "Women of the Confederacy." Some of the essays are collected in Rutherford Notebooks, Vol. XL: "Women of the Confederacy," UDC Collection.

(46) "Memories of a Lucy Cobb Girlhood," Athens Observer, October 13, 1986, and John Toon, "Lucy Cobb," Athens Observer, December 28, 1978, both clippings in Lucy Cobb Institute File (Athens-Clarke Heritage Foundation, Athens, Ga.); Lucy Cobb Institute Catalogue, 1925, pp. 38-40 (Georgia Room, Hargrett Library); Clare, Thunder and Stars, 222 (quotations). When Rutherford resumed leadership at the Lucy Cobb in 1917, she changed the name of her position from "principal" to "president." It is not clear why. She may have been trying to assert her authority against the Board of Trustees, who entertained the idea of selling the school to the University of Georgia in 1916, a plan she strongly opposed. See Minutes of the Board of Trustees, April 9, 1917, Lucy Cobb Institute, Stock Book and Minutes (Hargrett Library); "Lucy Cobb to Open Its 60th Session Today," [Athens Banner], September 19, 1917, Lucy Cobb Institute File; Barrow, "History of Lucy Cobb Institute," 45.

(47) Green, Southern Strategies, 40; Rutherford, "South in the Building of the Nation," 4 (first quotation); Womack, "Mildred Lewis Rutherford," 97-99, 102 (second and third quotations).

(48) "Lecture Talks by Miss Mildred Rutherford"; "Miss Rutherford Thrills Audience in Story of the South"; Womack, "Mildred Lewis Rutherford," 85-86, 91, 97, 102.

(49) Suzanne Lebsock, "Woman Suffrage and White Supremacy: A Virginia Case Study," in Nancy A. Hewitt and Suzanne Lebsock, eds., Visible Women: New Essays on American Activism (Urbana and Chicago, 1993), 62-100, esp. 73-74; Camhi, Women Against Women, 129-32; Jablonsky, Home, Heaven, and Mother Party, 108-10; Green, Southern Strategies, 86-88.

(50) Womack, "Mildred Lewis Rutherford," 97.

(51) On the 1924 Child Labor Amendment see "The Children's Amendment," in The Mountain Star, a newsletter published by Rutherford and her niece Lamar Rutherford Lipscomb, July 19, 1924, Folder 6, Box 4, Rutherford Papers; Miss Rutherford's Scrap Book: Valuable Information about the South, 3 (March 1925), 9. Rutherford was active in the Women's Christian Temperance Union, but she opposed a prohibition amendment. Womack, "Mildred Lewis Rutherford," 82, 85, 97; Clare, Thunder and Stars, 172-73.

(52) Hale, "`Some Women Have Never Been Reconstructed,'" 179. Rutherford's views of African Americans' and women's social places are part of a hierarchical worldview; Elna Green has described this interconnectedness as a "triangular structure" of society, in which hierarchies of race, class, and gender reinforced and were dependent on each other. Green, Southern Strategies, 90.

(53) Accusing suffragists of sexual immodesty and the abandonment of womanly virtue was a standard weapon used against the woman suffrage cause. Camhi, Women Against Women, 64-66; Andrea Moore Kerr, "White Women's Rights, Black Men's Wrongs, Free Love, Blackmail, and the Formation of the American Woman Suffrage Association," in Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, ed., One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement (Troutdale, Oreg., 1995), 61-79, esp. 73-75; Marshall, Splintered Sisterhood, 121, 191.

(54) Green, Southern Strategies, 87-91; Williamson, Rage for Order, 186-91 (quotation on p. 188); Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow, 95-99.

(55) Harold H. Martin, Georgia: A Bicentennial History (New York and Nashville, 1977), 144-46; Bartley, Creation of Modern Georgia, 151-53; Williamson, Rage for Order, 141-51, esp. 150.

(56) Smith married Marion "Birdie" Cobb, Lucy Cobb's sister. He helped raise money for the Lucy Cobb during its endowment campaign in 1925 and became a board member in 1926. Lamar Rutherford Lipscomb to Hoke Smith, March 23, 1925, Hoke Smith to Mildred Rutherford, March 25, 1925, Mildred Rutherford to Hoke Smith, April 20, 1925, Billups Phinizy to Hoke Smith, April 15, 1926, all in Folder 15, Box 30, Coulter Manuscripts; L. F. Woodruff and Hal M. Stanley, eds., Men of Georgia: A Ready and Accurate Reference Book for Newspapers and Librarian[s] (Atlanta, 1927), 15; Dewey W. Grantham Jr., Hoke Smith and the Politics of the New South (Baton Rouge, 1958); Josephine Mellichamp, Senators from Georgia (Huntsville, Ala., 1976), 200-207.

(57) Bartley, Creation of Modern Georgia, 165. Bartley also notes that in every Georgia election between 1920 and 1944, less than one-quarter of the adult population voted (p. 153).

(58) Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow, 96. Gilmore also points out that white women could also use rhetoric that emphasized their vulnerability to their own advantage by politicizing white men's duty to protect them.

(59) Rutherford, Civilization of the Old South, 39-40; Rutherford, "South in the Building of the Nation," 4; Womack, "Mildred Lewis Rutherford," 99, 102.

(60) Rutherford, "South in the Building of the Nation," 4; Rutherford, Civilization of the Old South, 42-43; Clare, Thunder and Stars, 172-73. Yet Rutherford did admit that some aspects of modern womanhood were positive. For example, although she lamented that clubs took women away from their duties at home, she also praised club work for causes that she approved of, especially that of the YWCA and "patriotic" clubs, and acknowledged that although modern women had become "less gracious," they had also grown "more independent." Rutherford, Civilization of the Old South, 42-43.

(61) Rutherford, "South in the Building of the Nation," 4; Hale, "`Some Women Have Never Been Reconstructed,'" 180-81. On Rutherford's religious beliefs see "Life Sketch of Mildred Rutherford," 107; "Miss Mildred Lewis Rutherford Paid Tributes by Former Lucy Cobb Girls," Folder 3, Box 4, Rutherford Papers; Thomas, Portrait of Historic Athens and Clark County, 129; Wilson, DuPree, and Barrow, "Interview with Mrs. Bessie Mell Lane," 266.

(62) Williamson, Rage for Order, 93-95 (quotation on p. 95), 235; LeeAnn Whites, "Rebecca Latimer Felton and the Problem of 'Protection' in the New South," in Hewitt and Lebsock, eds., Visible Women, 41--61; Rutherford, Civilization of the Old South, 39--40; Womack, "Mildred Lewis Rutherford," 99, 102. Hale sees no real distinction between Rutherford's rhetoric and Felton's, arguing that Rutherford's defense of the Klan implied support for lynching. Hale, "`Some Women Have Never Been Reconstructed,'" 180-81.

(63) Womack, "Mildred Lewis Rutherford," 102; Nancy MacLean, "The Leo Frank Case Re considered: Gender and Sexual Politics in the Making of Reactionary Populism," Journal of American History, 78 (December 1991), 917-48.

(64) Rutherford, What the South May Claim, 18 (first quotation); Rutherford, "Historical Sins of Omission and Commission," 111 (second quotation). Rutherford often distinguished between "good" and "bad" Negroes; see Rutherford, Civilization of the Old South, 6--7, 30, 33; and "What Was the Freeman's Bureau" and "The Birth of a Nation," in Rutherford, What the South May Claim, 17-18.

(65) Cox, "Women, the Lost Cause, and the New South," 23, 60, 70-72; Parrott, "`Love Makes Memory Eternal,'" 222.

(66) She preferred "the South of yesterday remade." Rutherford, "South in the Building of the Nation," 13-14 (quotation on p. 14).

(67) Rutherford, "Thirteen Periods of United States History," 40-43 (quotation on p. 40); Rutherford, Where the South Leads, 41.

(68) Gaston, New South Creed, chap. 5, esp. 159-60, 167-68 (quotations on p. 167), 173-75, 180, 185-86; Womack, "Mildred Lewis Rutherford," 14; Clare, Thunder and Stars, 4. Academic historians in southern universities also paid tribute to the Lost Cause while welcoming New South development. Dan R. Frost, Thinking Confederates: Academia and the Idea of Progress in the New South (Knoxville, 2000), 61-64, 105, 109.

(69) Thomas, Portrait of Historic Athens and Clarke County, 103-4; James C. Cobb, "Beyond Planters and Industrialists: A New Perspective on the New South," Journal of Southern History, 54 (February 1988), 45-68; Bartley, Creation of Modern Georgia, 103-6.

(70) Green, Southern Strategies, 40, 45-50. A list of Athens UDC members reads like a female "who's who" of the town. List of Athens Chapter UDC, Folder 4, Box 4, Rutherford Papers; Women of Georgia: A Ready and Accurate Reference Book for Newspapers and Librarian[s] (Atlanta, 1927), 39, 67, 80, 82, 107, 119. This was tree across the South. The members of the Richmond, Virginia, chapter included the daughters or wives of railroad men, bankers, businessmen (including the officers of the Tredegar Iron Works), and agricultural merchants. "Richmond Chapter, Daughters of the Confederacy Organized January 28th, 1904" (with handwritten notes updating the list to 1908), Box 4, UDC Collection; The Richmond Society Blue Book (Richmond, 1904).

(71) John E. Drewry, "Some of our Lucy Cobb Girls," in The Lightning Bug, 1 (November 1925), 44-45; Drewry, "Some of our Lucy Cobb Girls," The Lightning Bug, 1 (January 1926), 36; "The Old Fashioned Women, Atlanta, Ga.," The Lightning Bug, 1 (January 1926), 37; Women of Georgia, 39, 67, 124, 137, 150-51, 155, 156.

(72) Clare, Thunder and Stars, 11, 21; Thomas, Portrait of Historic Athens and Clarke County, 46; Rutherford, handwritten genealogy, Folder 1, Box 1, Rutherford Papers; Mildred Lewis Rutherford, "The Early History of the Lucy Cobb," The Lightning Bug, 1 (March/April 1926), 16; List of Lucy Cobb Institute Faculty, Lucy Cobb Institute File; Bessie Mell Lane, "Mildred Rutherford Mell (1889-1982)," in Spalding, comp. and ed., Higher Education for Women in the South, 257.

(73) On the growth of advertising see Susan Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of an American Mass Market (New York, 1989); T. J. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York, 1994); and Pamela Walker Laird, Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing (Baltimore, 1998). On the development of railroads in the South see C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge, 1951), 120-24; Gavin Wright, OM South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil War (New York, 1986), 39--42; Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (New York and Oxford, 1992), 9-13, 18-20; and Silber, Romance of Reunion, 70.

(74) For discussion of publishing, sales, advertising, and fund-raising see Ginn and Company, Publishers, to Mildred Rutherford, January 4, 1924; Minutes of Executive Board Meeting, Georgia Division UDC, January 29, 1924; Marie Clark of J. Standish Clark, Publisher, to Mildred Lewis Rutherford, February 26, 1924; David Webb to Mildred Lewis Rutherford, April 29, 1924; Ruby Jones Grace to Mildred Rutherford, May 13, 1924; Ginn and Company, Publishers, to Mildred Rutherford, January 3, 1925; all in Folder 16, Box 1, Rutherford Papers. Examples of Rutherford having placed ads for her other books or for the Lucy Cobb in her own publications include Rutherford, What the South May Claim, 37, 42; "The Mildred Lewis Rutherford Historical Circle," 1915, Folder 7, Box 4, Rutherford Papers; and Miss Rutherford's Scrap Book, 1 (October 1923), 20-21. The Lucy Cobb Annual Announcements of 1904-5 and 1908-9 (both in the Georgia Room, Hargrett Library) indicate that the school used Rutherford's textbooks. Rutherford was an aggressive fund-raiser for the perpetually cash-strapped Lucy Cobb. In 1925 she launched a campaign to create an endowment for the Lucy Cobb, creating a circular ("A Word to the Alumnae of Lucy Cobb and to the Citizens of Athens") and a monthly newsletter called The Lightning Bug to publicize her fund-raising efforts, mailing this and other material to alumnae, residents of Athens, and other potential donors. Rutherford did not limit her fund-raising efforts to alumnae or even to local citizens. Hoping to attract northern philanthropists, she asked her cousin by marriage, Hoke Smith, for suggestions. Rutherford to Smith, March 25, 1925 (telegraph), and Rutherford to Smith, April 20, 1925, both in Folder 15, Box 30, Coulter Manuscripts.

(75) Cox, "Women, the Lost Cause, and the New South," 69-74. On industrialization and the cult of domesticity in the Northeast see Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (New York and Oxford, 1990).

(76) Gaston, New South Creed, 172-73, 178-83; Silber, Romance of Reunion, 108-9.

(77) Nina Silber identified the Spanish-American War as a turning point in sectional reconciliation, but I am more convinced by Karen Cox's argument that the war of 1898 was only a first step, and that World War I did much more to further sectional unity. Although Rutherford called for sectional "peace" well before 1917, and she viewed the Spanish-American War as an important step towards unification, Cox shows that the UDC as a whole remained ambivalent about reconciliation until the United States's entry into World War I. Silber, Romance of Reunion, 178-85; Cox, "Women, the Lost Cause, and the New South," chap. 8; Rutherford, "South in Building of the Nation," 14 (quotation); Rutherford, "Thirteen Periods of United States History," 41.

(78) Rutherford, South Must Have Her Rightful Place in History, 2 (first quotation); Rutherford, "South in the Building of the Nation," 14-15; Rutherford, "Wrongs of History Righted," 81-82; Rutherford, "Historical Sins of Omission and Commission," 113; Rutherford, "New America," in Where the South Leads, 21 (second quotation).

(79) Rutherford, "Wrongs of History Righted," 62.

(80) Gaston, New South Creed, 181-83; Fredrickson, Black Image in the White Mind, 204-9; Smith, Old Creed for the New South, 105-7; Silber, Romance of Reunion, 124, 135-36, 139-41. For examples from Rutherford see "Memories of Christmas on a Southern Plantation," 211-16; and Civilization of the Old South, 7.

(81) Womack, "Mildred Lewis Rutherford," 122. She expressed a similar sentiment in a letter to the Georgia Division UDC president, Mrs. McKenzie, August 12, 1926, Folder 2, Box 2, Rutherford Papers.

(82) Womack, "Mildred Lewis Rutherford," 123-24; H. W. Johnstone, Truth of the War Conspiracy of 1861 ([Athens, Ga.], 1921); Mildred Lewis Rutherford, speech to UCV Reunion in New Orleans, 1923, Folder 4, Box 4, Rutherford Papers (a speech justifying her actions at the previous year's convention). Rutherford's 1923 pamphlet, The South Must Have Her Rightful Place in History, also defended this interpretation of Lincoln; see esp. pp. 2-3.

(83) Merrill D. Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory (New York and Oxford, 1994), 195-97, 214-15.

(84) See the following clippings in the "Lucy Cobb Institute, 1858-1908" scrapbook: "The Voice of a Lost Cause: Two Writers Cling to a Dead Illusion," Boston Evening Transcript, August 30, 1922; "Slur on Lincoln a `Lie,' Say Speakers," New York Times, June 26, [1922]; and "Degrading Her Talent," Wilkes-Barre (Penn.) Evening News, December 1922 (quotation).

(85) Mildred Lewis Rutherford to editor, Atlanta Constitution, undated clipping in Folder 2, Box 3, Rutherford Papers; Chattanooga Evening News, October 28, 1922 (quotation), and Little Rock Guardian, December 16, 1922, cited in Womack, "Mildred Lewis Rutherford," 126.

(86) Georgia Stenger to Mildred Lewis Rutherford, November 2, 1922, Folder 14, Box 1, Rutherford Papers (quotations); Larry Gantt, "Anent Criticism of Miss `Millie,'" Athens Banner-Herald, July 27, 1922, clipping in Folder 3, Box 4, Rutherford Papers; Mildred Lewis Rutherford, "`Miss Millie' Denies That She is `Stirrer Up' of Sectional Strife," Athens Banner-Herald, July 23, 1922, clipping in Folder 3, Box 4, Rutherford Papers.

(87) Jno. Goolrick to Rutherford, April 12, 1924, Folder 16, Box 1; David Webb to Rutherford, April 29, 1924, Folder 16, Box 1; Sam Tate to Rutherford, November 21, 1925, Folder 1, Box 2; all in Rutherford Papers.

(88) "A Word to the Alumnae of Lucy Cobb and the Citizens of Athens," 1925, Folder 9, Box 2, Rutherford Papers; Womack, "Mildred Lewis Rutherford," 138-42.

(89) Rutherford, however, remained well respected in Confederate circles. When the directors of the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond were unable to answer a request for more information about an incident at Andersonville prison, they forwarded the letter to Rutherford. See C. I. Millard to Gentlemen, Confederate Museum, July 24, 1924, Folder 16, Box 1, Rutherford Papers.

(90) "Miss Rutherford Once More," The Courant, 1924, clipping in Folder 3, Box 4, Rutherford Papers (first quotation); Wilson, DuPree, and Barrow, "Interview with Mrs. Bessie Mell Lane," 265 (second quotation).

(91) Woodward, Origins of the New South, 480-81; Dewey W. Grantham, The South in Modern America: A Region at Odds (New York, 1994), 63-64, 68 (quotation); Cox, "Women, the Lost Cause, and the New South," 239-46.

(92) Camhi, Women Against Women, 231-32; Jablonsky, Home, Heaven, and Mother Party, 115-16; Adele Logan Alexander, "Adella Hunt Logan, the Tuskegee Woman's Club, and African Americans in the Suffrage Movement," in Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, ed., Votes for Women! The Woman Suffrage Movement in Tennessee, the South, and the Nation (Knoxville, 1995), 71-104, esp. 95-96; Green, Southern Strategies, 175-77; Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850-1920 (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1998), 151-55.

(93) Frank Freidel, "The South and the New Deal," 17-36, and Pete Daniel, "The New Deal, Southern Agriculture, and Economic Change," 37-61, both in lames C. Cobb and Michael V. Namorato, eds., The New Deal and the South (Jackson, Miss., 1984); Grantham, South in Modern America, 116-25; Roger Biles, The South and the New Deal (Lexington, Ky., 1994).

(94) Stephen A. Smith, Myth, Media, and the Southern Mind (Fayetteville, Ark., 1985), 35-36, 41-42; J. Michael Martinez, "Traditionalist Perspectives on Confederate Symbols," in J. Michael Martinez, William D. Richardson, and Ron McNinch-Su, eds., Confederate Symbols in the Contemporary South (Gainesville, Fla., and other cities, 2000), 243-80, esp. 264-65.

MS. CASE is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of California at Santa Barbara.