The Texas Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) organized in 1896 primarily to care for aging veterans and their families. In addition to this original goal, members attempted to reform Texas society by replacing the practices and values of their male peers with morals and behavior that UDC members considered characteristic of the antebellum South, such as self-sacrifice and obedience. Over time, the organization also came to function as a transition vehicle in enlarging and empowering white Texas women's lives. As time passed and more veterans died, the organization turned to constructing monuments to recognize and promote the values they associated with the Old South. In addition to celebrating the veteran, the Daughters created a constant source of charity for wives and widows through a Confederate Woman's Home. As the years went by, the organization turned to educating white children in the “truth of southern history,” a duty they eagerly embraced. The Texas UDC proved effective in meeting its primary goal, caring for aging veterans and their wives. The members' secondary goal, being cultural shapers, ultimately proved elusivenot because the Daughters failed to stress the morals they associated with the Old South but because Texans never embraced them to the exclusion of values more characteristic of the New South. The organization proved, however, a tremendous success in fostering and speeding along the emergence of Texas women as effective leaders in their communities. The UDC was an important middle ground for women moving from an existence that revolved around home and family to one that might include the whole world.

The dissertation examines administrative institutions and practices established to support the civil government of the Confederate States of America (1861-1865). Public administration at the national level in the Confederacy was characterized by administrative dualism (deference to state administrative norms and policy imperatives), restrained national level policy prerogatives, a normative orientation which emphasized responsiveness to public interest, and an overriding goal of achieving legitimacy in the eyes of the public. Confederate administrative invention and experimentation developed into a responsive mechanism for governance; many of the Confederate innovations served as precursors to new administrative practices in the government of the United States. Thus, the study of modern public administrative history begins not at the civil service reforms of 1883, or the Progressive era, but more properly, can be seen as including the norms of government administration debated during the founding period of the United States and which appeared subsequently in the Confederacy. / Ph. D.

This thesis describes the difficulties of the Confederacy in dealing with prisoners during the Civil War.

This investigation resulted from a pilot research paper prepared in conjunction with a graduate course on the Civil War. This study suggested that the Federal blockade of the Confederacy may not have contributed significantly to its defeat. Traditionally, historians had assumed that the Union's Anaconda Plan had effectively strangled the Confederacy. Recent studies which compared the statistics of ships captured to successful infractions of the blockade had somewhat revised these views. While accepting these revisionist findings as broadly valid, this investigation strove to determine specifically the effectiveness of Admiral Farragut's West Gulf Blockading Squadron. Since the British Foreign Office maintained consulates in three blockaded southern ports and in many Caribbean ports through which blockade running was conducted, these consular records were vital for this study. Personal research in Great Britain's Public Record Office disclosed valuable consular reports pertaining to the effectiveness of the Federal blockade. American consular records, found in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. provided excellent comparative reports from those same Gulf ports. Official Confederate reports, contained in the National Archives, various state archives and in the published Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies revealed valuable statistical data on foreign imports. Limited use was made of Spanish and French consular records written from ports involved in blockade running. Extensive use was made of Senate and House documents in determining Federal blockade policy during the war. The record of the Navy's enforcement of the blockade was found in The Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies. The contemporary reports of Union and Confederate governmental officials was found in James D. Richardson's respective works on The Messages and Papers, and in the published diaries of Gideon Welles and Gustavas Fox. Contemporary newspapers and first hand accounts by participants on both sides provided color and perspective. In evaluating the performance of the West Gulf Blockading Squadron, a review of the international laws governing blockading was undertaken, emphasizing America's traditional posture regarding the blockades of other nations. Under Gideon Welles, the Federal navy became a powerful and efficient force, although the navy's enforcement of the blockade often resulted in serious diplomatic embarrassment, especially from maritime incidents occurring near the mouth of the Rio Grande River. Nearby Matamoros, Mexico virtually became an international trade mart for Confederate cotton and imports. However, much contraband trade was conducted through blockaded Gulf ports such as Galveston, Texas. It is concluded that the West Gulf Blockading Squadron performed only satisfactorily at best. This did not result so much from innate limitations as from outside factors. Among the latter were the open door at Matamoros, the Lincoln administration's diplomatic timerity and national policies that authorized a type of cotton trade with the south. Further, the better vessels were assigned land campaign priorities. The statistics of the cotton trade in this portion of the Confederacy show that cotton exports were significantly high. Most of these exports egressed via Matamoros, but a high percentage existed through blockaded Gulf ports. The fact that 10,000 bales of cotton left the heavily guarded port of Galveston in the last six months of the war indicates the inefficiency of the West Gulf Blockade. It appears that the West Gulf Blockade was effective enough to create scarcity but never effective enough to seriously interdict the flow of trade. That the Trans-Mississippi Confederacy was largely sustained by imports underscores the blockade's limited effectiveness.

This paper crafts a narrative about how elite, white Richmond women experienced the fall and rebuilding of their city in April and May 1865. At first, the women feared the entrance of the occupying army because they believed the troops would treat them as enemies. However, the goal of the white occupiers was to restore order in the city. Even though they were initially saddened by the occupation, many women were surprised at the courtesy and respected afforded them by the Union troops. Black soldiers also made up the occupying army, and women struggled to submit to black authority. With occupation came the emancipation of slaves, and this paper also examines how women adjusted to new relationships with freed blacks. By the end of May, white women and white Union soldiers bonded over their attempt to control the black population, with some women and soldiers even beginning to socialize.

Thesis advisor: Seth Jacobs / The most decisive campaign of the American Civil War was waged in neither Virginia, nor Pennsylvania, nor along the Mississippi River, but rather in Great Britain. Northern military advantages in the prosecution of the war effort could have been completely negated by a serious diplomatic setback in Great Britain. In order to win the Civil War, the North had to prevent Great Britain from entering the conflict. British intervention (which would have also included France), whether in the form of actually entering the war on the side of the South, official recognition of the Confederacy, foreign mediation, or a call for an armistice followed by peace negotiations, would have been a diplomatic disaster for the North and a fatal blow in its attempt to re-unify the nation. Military setbacks on the battlefield were not nearly as threatening as diplomatic setbacks abroad. The North had greater manpower, a stronger and more balanced economy, an industrial infrastructure, and a better equipped army; yet, in order for these advantages to translate into military victory at home, the North first needed to ensure that the domestic conflict did not spread to an international war. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2003. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History. / Discipline: College Honors Program.

Mildred Lewis Rutherford, as one of the most prominent members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, has been scantly researched in the past, however her speeches and writing had a profound impact on southern historical consciousness during the New South Period. Her influence, interestingly, was not entirely based in reality. A poststructural analysis of her speeches reveals that she strategically fabricated and excluded information in order to create a specific memory of the past in the minds of southerners. Rutherford had difficulty discerning whether or not the economic benefits of industrialization outweighed the accompanying social consequences. Yet, she used the power of text in an attempt to recreate the Old South social structure based on a racial hierarchy that was bound to be defeated by the rising tide of indu-strialization.

Many books have been written on the battles of the Civil War. Most of these deal only with engagements between the armies; little has been written concerning the Confederate Navy. Yet the struggles of the Confederate Navy cannot be overlooked in determining why, after so many victorious battles in the field, the Confederacy still failed to defeat the Union.

Using Kehinde Wiley’s Rumors of War as a starting point, this thesis seeks to craft and engage in a larger dialogue about the complex global entanglements of art, trade, slavery, war, commemoration, and race that have existed since the first contacts between Europe and Africa. In September 2019 in New York’s Time Square, Wiley unveiled the monument to be permanently installed outside of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, Virginia. This large work shows a black man in contemporary dress on a horse, created to counterbalance the ubiquitous Confederate equestrian monuments of the south. While this is an important step in the ongoing debate about public monuments of the United States, the equestrian depiction of rulers and warriors has not always been limited to white men. In the sixteenth century, the Edo peoples of Nigeria depicted their ruler, Oba Esigie, atop a horse in the bronze plaque Equestrian Oba and Attendants, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Through material and iconographical analysis, I will show how the Benin plaque signifies peaceful relations and trade with the Portuguese. This interaction also marks the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade, which informed the dehumanizing beliefs of the commissioners of Confederate monuments as well as the colonizers who ultimately removed the plaque from Africa altogether. In this way, the histories embedded within the plaque can serve to enhance the new monument’s meaning. This pairing shows the continued stakes of the history of exploration in the Early Modern period, as the encounters in Nigeria that made the plaque possible and placed it in the Met makes necessary the monument by the Nigerian-American artist in the former Confederate capital. / Art History

Between 1914 and 1919, elite white people erected monuments across Virginia, permanently transforming the landscape of their communities with memorials to the Confederacy. Why did these Confederate memorialists continue to build monuments to a conflict their side had lost half a century earlier? This thesis examines this question to extend the study of the Lost Cause past the traditional stopping date of the Civil War semicentennial in 1915 and to add to the study of memorialization as a historical process. Studying the design and language of monuments as well as dedication orations and newspaper coverage of unveiling ceremonies, this thesis focuses on Virginia's Confederate memorials to provide a case study for the whole South. Memorialization is always an act of the present as much as an honoring of the past. Elite white Virginians built memorials to speak to their contemporaries at the same time they claimed to speak for them. Memorialists turned to the Confederacy for support in an effort to maintain their status at the top of post-Reconstruction Southern society. Confederate monuments served as permanent physical role models, continuing sectional reconciliation, encouraging women to maintain prescribed gender roles, and discouraging African Americans from standing up for their rights. American involvement in World War I exacerbated societal changes that threatened the position of the traditional white ruling class. As proponents of the Lost Cause squared off against the transformations of the Progressive era, Virginia's Confederate memorialists imbued monuments throughout the Commonwealth with messages meant to ensure their continued dominance. / Master of Arts