After Years Of Research, Confederate Daughter Arises

Via Jamey

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War. It's of particular importance to the United Daughters of the Confederacy, an organization for female descendants of Confederate soldiers.

The group includes 23 elderly women who are the last living daughters of those who served. One of them is black.

Mattie Clyburn Rice, 88, spent years searching through archives to prove her father was a black Confederate. As she leafs through a notebook filled with official-looking papers, Rice stops to read a faded photocopy with details of her father's military service.

"At Hilton Head while under fire of the enemy, he carried his master out of the field of fire on his shoulder, that he performed personal service for Robert E. Lee. That was his pension record," Rice says.

Rice's father, Weary Clyburn, applied for a Confederate pension in 1926, when he was about 85. Rice was 4 years old then, the daughter of a young mother and an elderly father who regaled her with stories of his time spent in South Carolina's 12th Volunteer Unit. But when Rice repeated those stories as an adult, she was accused of spreading tall tales.

"Nobody believed me. Nobody. Not even the children," she says. "They are just beginning to believe, 'cause now they see it in print."

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