The Lost Cause in the Golden State: The California UDC and the Erasure of California's Civil War History

Abstract: This article identifies a previously overlooked mode of operation of Confederate memory beyond the South. Focusing on the United Daughters of the Confederacy in California, it argues that the organization did not simply transplant the Lost Cause narrative westward or revive a dormant pro-Confederate tradition. Instead, it helped facilitate the displacement of California's own pro-Confederate and proslavery past by a form of transplanted Southern commemoration. Although California was deeply entangled in the sectional crisis and included significant pro-Confederate networks and leaders, the California Division largely bypassed this history. As a diasporic institution serving white Southern migrants, it emphasized attachment to a distant Southern homeland while detaching the Civil War from California's historical experience and by selective commemoration and reinterpretation recast the conflict as external to the state, reinforcing a durable narrative of California's supposed detachment from the sectional crisis.