 The Boyd chair is named for Thomas Duckett Boyd, a former LSU president during the peak of the post-Civil War mythology of The Lost Cause of the Confederacy.Boyd was a brother of David French Boyd, a Confederate officer who had served on the original LSU faculty when the school was based in Alexandria and under the first LSU president and subsequent Union Army General William Tecumseh Sherman.During his career, Williams did much to debunk the premises and defenders of The Lost Cause.