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Zimmerman, Jonathan. "A Confederate Curriculum How Miss Millie taught the Civil War." November 6, 2017. Accessed December 7, 2017. https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/millie_rutherford.

“Miss Millie” was the popular nickname of Mildred Lewis Rutherford, one of the most important Southern figures that Americans know the least about. Born into a wealthy slave-owning family in 1851, Rutherford became the principal of a female academy in Athens, Georgia. She was an early and active member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, working her way up to become the organization’s “historian general” in 1911.

From that perch, Rutherford led the effort to purge Southern school textbooks of “Yankee” sentiment. That meant eliminating any books that tried to strike a balanced or neutral stance, “on the order of ‘we thought we were right,’ rather than ‘we were right,’” wrote one Confederate military veteran in 1902. “We did know we were right then, and we do know it now,” he added. “And we have the right, therefore, to insist that our children shall be told the truth about it, and we should be content with nothing less.”

Rutherford sent hundreds of women into classrooms and school offices to make sure their truth remained unqualified into the next generation. They came armed with her pamphlet, A Measuring Rod to Test Textbooks. It provided a handy checklist to help them define and defend Confederate orthodoxy.

“Reject a book that speaks of the Constitution other than [as] a compact between Sovereign States,” Rutherford instructed, “that calls the Confederate soldier a traitor or rebel, and the war a rebellion…that says the South fought to hold her slaves…that speaks of the slaveholder of the South as cruel and unjust to his slaves…that glorifies Abraham Lincoln and vilifies Jefferson Davis.”

To Rutherford, the first point was the most important one. If the Constitution was an agreement between states rather than a national bond of citizens, then each state retained the right to leave the nation when it so chose. So it was the North—and not the South—that had violated America’s founding compact, by using force to prevent secession. “There was a rebellion,” Rutherford told her assembled aides at a UDC convention, “but it was north of Mason and Dixon’s line.”

Nor was the war about slaves, who, according to Rutherford, “were the happiest set of people on the face of the globe, free from care or thought of food, clothes, home.” Why, then, did the North invade the South? Rutherford’s pamphlet blamed it all upon Lincoln, whose imperious and vengeful character led him into a war of conquest. Hardly a suitable model for young children, Lincoln used uncouth language and once even denied the divinity of Christ. By comparison, the Confederacy’s president was a paragon of virtue, she argued. Davis “never stood for coarse jokes, never violated the Constitution, never stood for retaliation. Lincoln,” Rutherford wrote, “stood for all of these.”

But wherever Rutherford and her lieutenants looked, Southern textbooks flouted these Confederate truths. Angry correspondents reported that some history books still praised Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation, which Rutherford called unconstitutional. Nor were other school subjects immune from the “Yankee” virus. One observer found that New Orleans schools taught music from a book that included “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” the iconic fight song of the Union Army. In Texas, an arithmetic textbook asked children to calculate Union general Ulysses S. Grant’s age on the day he captured Vicksburg.

After Confederate veterans petitioned Texas governor Thomas M. Campbell in 1908 to remove the math book from the state’s list of approved texts, its publisher issued a new edition that replaced the offending “Yankee word problem” with a more regionally appropriate one. The revised version asked students to determine the amount of time that elapsed between Texas’ independence from Mexico and its annexation into the United States.

The Texas episode illustrated a common pattern: when Confederate organizations complained, textbook publishers altered their wares. Some book companies issued so-called mint julep editions to satisfy the Southern market, expunging words such as treason and rebellion. But Rutherford and her aides found that many districts continued to use “Yankee” versions, which included the hated language of shared valor and responsibility.

In response, the UDC sponsored essay contests that exposed children to Confederate mythology in case their textbooks failed at the task. State and local chapters offered prizes to the best essays drawing on interviews with ex-slaveholders, who presumably would teach youngsters about the benign nature of the institution. Slavery was “the happiest time of the negroes’ existence,” read a winning entry in 1915 by one Virginia high school student. “The slave was a member of the family, often a privileged member. He was the playmate, brother, exemplar, friend, and companion of the white man from cradle to grave.”