United States Army troops guarded the streets of Richmond, Virginia, on May 31, 1867, but the former Rebel capital teemed with Confederate spirit. Businesses through­out the city closed that Friday as if for a Sabbath, and nearly 60,000 people trekked by foot, horse or carriage to Hollywood Cemetery. By 10 a.m., well-dressed citizens filled the paths and avenues of the burial ground while women and children placed freshly cut buds and garlands of evergreens on the 6,000 mounded but as yet unsodded graves of Confederate soldiers. Veterans attended the services, but clearly the day was under the auspices of the Hollywood Ladies’ Memorial Association. Richmond resident James Henry Gardner observed that had the affair “not been under the control of the Ladies,” then a “thousand bayonets would have bristled to prevent the celebration.”

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How was it that a defeated people could conduct such an extravagant affair in the name of a lost cause even as the war’s victors occupied their city?

The 1867 Hollywood Memorial Day service had originated with Confederate women more than two years ear-lier. The spring of 1865 brought tenuous peace to Virginia, but four years of war had left the remains of more than 260,000 white Southerners (proportional to more than 14 million of today’s population) scattered in graves across the South, most of them within the Commonwealth of Virginia.
Most of these fallen soldiers would eventually be buried in Confederate cemeteries. But these cities of the dead were not to be furnished by the federal or state governments; neither were they to be organized by Southern veterans. Rather, approximately 80 percent of the Confederate dead would be interred in cemeteries created by locally organized groups of Southern white women known as Ladies’ Me-morial Associations.

As former soldiers returned to their fields to resume farming after the war, they routinely uncovered the decomposing bodies and bleaching bones of their comrades and enemies alike. Mary Williams of Winchester, Va., was especially horrified by the lack of proper burials for the Confederate soldiers who had defended her Shenandoah Valley town, and along with her sister-in-law, Eleanor Boyd, called a meeting of the town’s women in May 1865. At this gathering, several of the women who had volunteered in the hospitals during the war agreed to organize a memorial society whose purpose was to gather the dead soldiers within a 15-mile radius of the town and inter them in a single graveyard. Once that task had been completed, they hoped to establish an annual tradition of placing flowers and evergreens on the graves. Less than a month after General Robert E. Lee surrendered his army, the first Ladies’ Memorial Association (LMA) in Virginia organized to honor the memory of the Con­federacy’s fallen soldiers. Within a year, white women from Virginia to Alabama followed suit, establishing no fewer than 70 LMAs throughout the South.

These organizations did much more than simply provide centralized resting places for fallen Confederates. Many of the same women who had sewn battle flags, volunteered in hospitals and snubbed Yankee soldiers during the war turned to the LMAs so they might continue to display their Con­federate patriotism.

Relying on the mid-19th-century assumption that women were nonpolitical by nature, ex-Con­federate men recognized that the ladies might be best suited to take the lead in memorializing the South’s Lost Cause—because after all, if women were not political, their actions could not be construed as treasonous to the U.S. government.

While the ladies of Winchester were busy creating their Confederate cemetery during the summer and fall of 1865, federal burial crews began recovering the remains of their own soldiers from the Southern battlefields. Roused by reports of Union grave desecration throughout the South, the Northern public had demanded that their dead be provided proper burials. As early as February 1866, officers and work crews from the U.S. Burial Corps began arriving in Richmond to gather the remains of Northern prisoners who had been buried at Hollywood and Oakwood Cemeteries and at Belle Isle. Modeled after the national cemetery at Gettysburg, the grounds were arranged so that each grave was of equal importance and had an individual headstone. From Richmond, the Union detail moved on to Cold Harbor, Seven Pines, Hampton, City Point, Fredericksburg and Winchester. By 1870, 300,000 Union soldiers had been reinterred in 73 national cemeteries—at least 17 of them in Virginia.

But as the U.S. Burial Corps worked to bury Union dead, Southerners became increasingly angry about the lack of provisions for Confederate soldiers—and the atrocities they believed were being committed by the burial crews. An article in the Richmond Daily Examiner opined that “the nation condemns our dead” leaving them “in deserted places to rot into oblivion.” Newspapers in Petersburg reported that the crews were “digging up skeletons of [Confederate] soldiers” and “selling them to be ground for manure.” Even though the Winchester women had begun preparing Confederate cemeteries in the spring of 1865, the Union practice of expressly ignoring the Confederate dead during elaborate reburial efforts prompted the further organization of Ladies’ Memorial Asso-ciations. By mid-June 1866, several of Virginia’s most influential and active LMAs had organized, including groups in Fredericksburg, Petersburg, Lynchburg and three separate associations in Richmond.
Theoretically, any woman in the community could join these associations. Those who pledged to join the association were expected to provide their “subscription,” or dues, which in Petersburg, for example, ranged from 50 cents to $5.50 annually. Despite the claim that “every person [woman] of good character properly vouched for” could become a member, the membership rolls reflected an obvious bias toward the elite. Not surprisingly, women who joined LMAs between 1865 and 1870 overwhelmingly were the wives and daughters of the cities’ civic leaders, physicians, insurance agents, merchants, tobacco manufacturers and lawyers. Most had been born between 1830 and 1850 and had supported the war effort in local aid societies or otherwise. All had experienced the hardships of war in some fashion.

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