Kids: Write an essay about the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, and win $50!

Local kids, if you’re bored over your Thanksgiving break, the local chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy – “Ladies Who Appreciate Our Southern Heritage” – has something to keep you busy, and can make you a few bucks, if you’re lucky.

“Enter this essay contest and win $50!” the J.E.B. Stuart chapter of the UDC, which is based in Staunton, advertised in a Facebook post that is showing up in folks’ feeds this week.

The essay topics:

• General Robert E. Lee: Character Makes a Leader
• The Charisma of Cavalry General J.E.B. Stuart
• General Stonewall Jackson: From Orphan to General
• A Lady Spy in the War Between the States
• Horses of the Confederacy

Kids who are so inclined can submit more than one, so, no worries there, if you want to write about how great Robert E. Lee was in terms of being a man of character, and also about the horsies, go for it.

The mission of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which was founded in 1894, a generation after the end of the Civil War, includes “informing as to events leading to the War Between the States and our ancestors who so gallantly gave of themselves for the Cause.”

There it is – “the Cause,” known by the rest of us by the more complete term, “the Lost Cause.”

The UDC didn’t give birth to the Lost Cause, but the Lost Cause is still with us 160 years after the Civil War because the ladies took it on as their own.

The high-society types in the UDC took the notion that the Civil War wasn’t actually about Southern elites trying to preserve their system of cheap labor, but was actually about folks from up north trying to upset their agrarian way of life, and gave it legs – most notably, by presenting public programs and getting the Lost Cause into schools, to indoctrinate the young’uns into buying the lie and making it part of the South’s collective DNA.

The UDC approach is sound – come on, they’re just polite, high-falutin’ ladies putting markers on graves, having teas and giving out prizes to kids who write essays about General Lee, they’re no harm.

They’re not the KKK, wearing robes and hoods on horseback, burning crosses – they’re the White Citizens Council, the proper types who just want to preserve their heritage.

Advice to kids who want to win the $50 – don’t write about how Robert E. Lee, J.E.B. Stuart, Stonewall Jackson or the lady spies owned slaves in your essays about character and charisma.

Them having owned slaves is also part of your heritage, but we don’t talk about such things in polite society.