The New York Times concurred, warning Northerners that the "Southern spirit" was continuing to grow "with wonderful rapidity" and noting that its "most fruitful feeders are the Memorial Associations." The paper reminded its readers that these seemingly "noble" Memorial Days pro-
vided forums for ex-Confederate men to make speeches, "wherein [they] adroitly inculcat[e] hatred of the North.…These memorial days have now become painfully frequent, and on every one of them recruits are gathered to the Democratic banner." The Chicago Tribune denounced the Ladies of Richmond for strewing flowers on the graves of the Confederate dead, charging that these women sought "to keep alive the political feeling of hostility to the Union."
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But couched safely in the shroud of motherly and sisterly undertaking, former Confederates defended these floral tributes. The Richmond Whig contended that "political significance is not attached to these funeral ceremonies in the South," as it was not the habit of Southern women to form political conspiracies. Rather, the paper proclaimed, "if the men of the South contemplated treason and 'civil war,'" they would not put "forward their wives and daughters to do the dangerous work."
White Southerners argued that the festivities in Winchester on June 6, 1866, were free of treasonous spirit. Businesses closed that day while thousands of locals and visitors filled the town's streets for the dedication of the Stonewall Section of the Mount Hebron Cemetery. Three hundred former Confederates, primarily survivors of the Stonewall and Arnold Elzey Brigades, were followed by 14 young girls wearing white dresses and black sashes, accompanied by other citizens in a procession traveling from the Episcopal Church to the new section of the cemetery. Upon reaching the site, the women and young girls decorated every grave with wreaths and garlands of fresh flowers and greenery. Finally, the crowd gathered to hear three speakers, all former Confederate majors, pay tribute to the fallen soldiers. Surely Northern troops stationed in Winchester would have frowned upon the large gathering of Southern sympathizers, not to mention the hundreds of ex-Confederate soldiers who pa-raded through town only a year after the war's end.
"The mothers and daughters of Virginia are the chief mourners and actors in these touching obsequies," proclaimed one of the day's speakers, Major Uriel Wright. For Wright and other former Confederates, the language of mourning and feminine virtue was virtually synonymous when justifying tributes to their "Lost Cause."
Wright made sure white Southerners, as well as any Northerners who might be watching, understood that despite Confederate veterans' support, these ceremonies were solely the work of the South's women. "Mothers and daughters of Virginia," he exclaimed, "this noble enterprise is your work. They took their origin in the brains of no politician, no schemer, seeking individual distinction or plotting the renewal of strife." Because this tribute had been born in the heart of women, he argued, it could only be interpreted as true and pure. According to his reasoning, these women they were simply exhibiting the qualities 19th-century Victorian ideology attributed to women: sentiment, emotion and devotion to their menfolk. In fact, Wright declared that Southern white women "were not political casuists." They had not paused "to enquire whether the teachings of Jefferson, Madison, or Mason furnished the true interpretation of the Constitution, and correctly marked the boundaries of State and Federal powers."
Within a year of Appomattox, Southern white women had successfully launched an effort to venerate the defeated Confederacy. Hundreds of Virginia's leading daughters had transformed their wartime aid societies into memorial associations and had initiated campaigns to raise funds for their national Confed-erate cemeteries, furthering the sense of Southern solidarity and sectional animosity.
LMAs had created a permanent reminder of the Confederate war effort through their cemeteries and had provided a forum through Memorial Days that allowed Southern white men to expound on the virtues of the Confederacy and advocate resistance to Reconstruction.
Although challenges awaited the women after implementation of more rigid Reconstruction policies in 1867, using the cloak of feminine mourning, the Ladies' Memorial Associations had set in motion Lost Cause traditions that would continue into the next century.
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