Glory Stands Beside Our Grief: the Maryland United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Assertion of Their Identity

This project analyzes the position of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Maryland Division as a Lost Cause organization in a border state, and argues how the women sought respect from the national UDC chapter and divisions of former Confederate states. Women of the Maryland UDC believed strongly in their wartime support for the Confederacy and their identity as southerners; yet, they struggled for an equal voice within a national association predicated on the values of the Lost Cause and having been from a state that had not seceded. Southern sympathizing discourse among Maryland UDC women had to be reaffirmed in their actions in order to convince the national UDC and individual Confederate state divisions of their identity. Arguing that through the Daughters\u27 commemoration efforts in erecting the Maryland Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument, the monument to Confederate Maryland women, and the Jefferson Davis monument, the Maryland UDC sought to identify themselves as vital and distinct while seeking acceptance within the national organization. The Maryland Daughters vietheir monuments and projects as a means to commemorate and memorialize fallen soldiers, perpetuate southern antebellum ideologies for future generations, and to align themselves with their southern sisters