The United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) sponsored a lot of essay contests to encourage young people to learn “the true history” of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. Funny story is that at one point they sponsored a contest in NYC overseen by prominent academics. The college girl who won wrote that Lee had committed treason. That essay contest was discontinued.
The contest was in 1907. Leonora Schuyler of the UDC sat on the judging committee as did Edward Alderman, president of the University of Virginia, C.A. Smith President of the University of North Carolina, and John Finley, president of the City College of NY. The winner was a Columbia Teachers’ College student named Christine Boyson. Her essay was entitled “Robert E. Lee: A Present Estimate.” 1907 was the Centennial of Lee’s birth.
The essay was dutifully published by The Confederate Veteran magazine, albeit with a disclaimer. It can be read here. I won’t go into a discussion of Boyson’s piece, but rather into the reaction to it.
The next issue of The Confederate Veteran was filled with denunciations of the Traitor Lee article. Even newspapers took time to criticize what was, as we should remember, an essay by an undergraduate. Boyson was criticized, Ms. Schuyler of the New York UDC was nearly drummed out, and venom was unleashed on the college professors who voted to give her the prize. One can find many of the elements of the White Supremacist Lost Cause in the protests against Boyson, foremost, the idol worship of Robert E. Lee.
From the Confederate Veteran, Volume 17, pp. 104-105:
CONCERNING THE PRIZE ESSAY.
MARYLAND Daughter’s PROTEST Aagainst THE PRIZE Essay.
The following protest was offered by Mrs. D. Giraud Wright, Honorary President of the Maryland Division and of the Baltimore Chapter, United Daughters of the Confederacy:
“The Baltimore Chapter desires to enter a protest against the action of the committee who awarded the $Ioo prize offered by the United Daughters of the Confederacy for the best essay on the South in our War between the States to Miss Christine Boyson for her paper,‘Robert E. Lee—A Present Estimate.’
…she utterly fails to grasp the Southern estimate of the causes that led to the war and the motives that animated us in that gigantic struggle for independence. And not only so, but in attempting to analyze the conditions existing during the war the essay is filled with inaccuracies and misstatements…
A Northern schoolgirl writing an essay on the South during the War between the States, with the limited knowledge necessarily hers, with the lack of experience of the conditions which confronted us, and with her theories evolved from her Northern education and environment and her principal guide the one-sided histories from which she seems to have gleaned her information, could hardly be expected to write with better knowledge of her subject or to succeed in her pose as an expert military critic of General Lee’s campaigns or of the skill and competency of his generals! The essay might be excused as an immature schoolgirl’s effort at composition were it not that it received the prize intended by the Daughters of the Confederacy for a different type of article.
Therefore the Baltimore Chapter protests against this award and calls attention especially to the following misstatements:
We deny absolutely Miss Boyson’s statement that ‘Robert E. Lee was a traitor, who sacrificed all to aid the enemies of his country.‘ We hold that Robert E Lee was a patriot of the highest type, who sacrificed all to defend his home and State against the enemies of his country. The South believed then and the Daughters of the Confederacy believe now that the South truly interpreted the Constitution as granting to the States the right to secede from the Union.
…Robert E. Lee was no traitor in any sense, technical or otherwise, but a noble patriot, true to his allegiance to his country, the State of Virginia—a perfect, gentle knight without fear and without reproach!
We protest against her statement that ‘intellectually the South was dead and most of the people were densely ignorant.’ The negro population in the South was certainly ignorant; a small portion of her people in the mountain districts were ignorant; but the people in her villages and towns and the small farmer class, as distinguished from the planters in the South, were men and women who well compared with the same grade in the North. Descended as they were from the Scotch, English, and Huguenot settlers, they formed a class of citizens of the best type; while the aristocracy of the South was fully the equal if not the superior of anything the North could produce in its highest civilization, which has never given to the world a Washington or a Lee!
We protest against the contemptuous mention of the officers of our Confederate army under Lee as ‘his ignorant and inferior assistants, often making his faith in them a cloak for their own designs.’ And it would be strange indeed if the Daughters of the Confederacy should be so recreant to their trust as to sit tamely by and silently accede to a prize being given in their name to one who so asperses the fair fame of heroes whom we hold in the deepest reverence. The luster of the fame of Stonewall Jackson, of Johnston, of Beauregard, of Forrest, of Gordon, of Hampton, of Stuart, and the mighty host of other great Confederate soldiers will hardly be dimmed by her criticism, yet under the circumstances we cannot let it pass.
It is difficult to understand how the committee of award should have so failed to comprehend the intent of the United Daughters of the Confederacy in offering this prize as to bestow it upon one who so utterly failed to attain the object for which it was offered. Whatever literary merit the essay may have possessed, her mode of dealing with her subject should have condemned it. Ordinary reflection should have shown that the United Daughters of the Confederacy would never have given a prize for an essay in which the righteousness of the Southern cause was denied, the mass of her people contemptuously declared ‘densely ignorant,’ her leaders pronounced ‘inferior. ignorant, and designing,’ and Robert E. Lee called a traitor!
While dozens of UDC chapters denounced the essay, The Columbia Record of South Carolina pointed out in its Mar 09, 1909 issue that the essay had been approved by many of the same chapters at a recent UDC convention. Apparently the scholarly club women had not bothered to read the essay before voting on it.
Note: I first read of this incident here: Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture by Karen Cox published by Florida University Press (2003).
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If only the internet existed in 1907. Imagine the comment threads!
“and with her theories evolved from her Northern education and environment and her principal guide the one-sided histories from which she seems to have gleaned her information”
Pray tell someone point what one-sided Lee-bashing histories a New York college student would have had available to them in 1907?
“a perfect, gentle knight without fear and without reproach!”
Not one human being who has ever lived or ever will live is without reproach.
I was reading a book on the “legitimacy” of the Confederate Constitution and Lee’s dedication to that end and the author all but granted Lee a halo….Why does not Davis get this level of hero worship? Is it the fascination with ‘battles and leaders’ / ‘lines and arrows’ and not with the political battlefield that Reconstruction represents? The photo at the top for this article reminds me of how Lenin rests on his catafalque in Moscow – viewed in the days after his day with the same reverance ..
Good comparison. Partially it is the result of Davis’s reputation before the South surrendered. Lee was at his high point throughout 1862 to 1865, but Davis was in steady decline from 1862 onward. Also, many of the questions of slavery can be brushed aside when discussing Lee, on the other hand Davis was a ready defender of slavery going back to the 1840s.
I wonder if the Sons of Union Veterans would have like published/awarded an essay by a like youth in the Deep South about how Ulysses S. Grant admitted he’d fought for slavery in the Mexican American War.
Not likely, as they’d most likely read the essay prior to voting on it. Plus, that wasn’t the nations goal (entirely anyway) for the Mexican-American War…
I realise the point of this post is the irony, the ‘sprung!’ aspect of the UDC rewarding/publishing an essay about Robert E. Lee in Lost Cause literature w/o reading it first.
But fighting to protect/expand slavery was clearly was the main goal according to the primary records of the MA War.
Now if you want to get into a debate on that topic, I’m happy to disclose the evidence here.
Shall we start by reading Grant’s own ‘Memoirs’ from pages 54-56?