United Confederate Veterans

Confederate Veterans

Prior to 1889, Confederate veterans had no national organization similar to the Grand Army
of the Republic. Several separate fraternal and memorial groups existed on a local and regional level. Meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1889, several of these groups united and formed the United Confederate Veterans Association.
The organization was founded to serve as a benevolent, historical, social and literary association. The UCV was active well into the 1940s. Its final reunion was held in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1951.

The primary functions of the organization were to provide for widows and orphans of former Confederate soldiers, preserve relics and mementos, care for disabled former soldiers, preserve a record of the service of its members, and organize reunions and fraternal gatherings. At its height, membership in the organization was approximately 160,000 former Confederate soldiers organized into 1,885 local camps. A privately produced magazine called Confederate Veteran was popular with UCV members, with articles about events during the war and providing a forum for lost comrades to locate one another.

The organizational structure of the UCV was based on a military-style hierarchy with a national headquarters, three departments, divisions within those departments, and finally the local camps. The national officers were at first known as "Generals Commanding" and later as "Commander-in-Chief." Commanders were not based on the actual rank of the veteran while in service. Commanders-in-Chief ranged from former generals to former privates. Former Confederate General John Brown Gordon was the first commander of the UCV in 1890, holding this position until his death in 1904, when he was succeeded by Stephen D. Lee. Later commanders included former generals Clement A. Evans, William L. Cabell and George W. Gordon.

Contrary to the example of the older and larger Union veterans' organization, the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), the UCV asked surprisingly little from the state governments during its period of greatest growth and political power (1890–1910) while maintaining a general policy that Confederate veterans would not accept financial assistance of a personal nature from the U.S. government. Nevertheless, it supported the congressional acts of 1900 and 1906 for the inclusion in the federal cemetery system of the care of 30,152 Confederate graves near Northern battlefields and military prisons.

Between 1892 and 1899 the UCV waged throughout the South a successful campaign against the use of public school textbooks that they deemed pro-Northern or anti Southern. In particular, the UCV promoted histories of the Civil War that portrayed secession as a constitutional measure and that described the Confederacy as an honorable effort to preserve American liberty. In the decades following Reconstruction, the UCV and its sister organization, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, stood as the preeminent champions of the Lost Cause. The UCV insisted that slavery had not been a cause of the Civil War (or War Between the States, as the UCV typically described the conflict), and it adamantly defended the racial order of the Old South.

United Confederate Veterans Reunion

Confederate Veterans

Veterans Benefit Aid
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