In the United States, textbooks have always been chosen by local and state authorities rather than by a centralized national agency. So book selections are also heavily influenced by citizen organizations, which can apply strategic force upon the relevant officials. When I encountered the Confederate interpretation in Southern textbooks, I went looking for the pressure group behind it. And that’s what led me to Miss Millie.
“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.”