Immediately after the Civil War, white women across the South
organized to retrieve the remains of Confederate soldiers. In
Virginia alone, these Ladies' Memorial Associations (LMAs)
relocated and reinterred the remains of more than 72,000 soldiers.
Challenging the notion that southern white women were peripheral to
the Lost Cause movement until the 1890s, Caroline Janney restores
these women as the earliest creators and purveyors of Confederate
tradition. Long before national groups such as the Woman's
Christian Temperance Union and the United Daughters of the
Confederacy were established, Janney shows, local LMAs were earning
sympathy for defeated Confederates. Her exploration introduces new
ways in which gender played a vital role in shaping the politics,
culture, and society of the late nineteenth-century South.