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’s call. The Ladies Memorial Association of Appomattox, founded like so many of its sister organizations in the spring of 1866, gathered the bodies of nineteen southern soldiers from the war’s last campaign into a Confederate cemetery. The Petersburg Ladies Memorial Association oversaw the reinterment of thirty thousand dead Confederates in the Blanford Cemetery. The entire population of Petersburg in 1860 had been only 18,266, 50 percent of whom were black. The Spotsylvania Ladies Memorial Association procured five and a half acres of ground about a half mile northeast of Spotsylvania Court House for more than five hundred Confederates who lay scattered across the field of the 1864 battle. In Fredericksburg the Ladies Memorial Association (which is still thriving at the outset of the twenty-first century) acquired land on which they reinterred 3,553 Confederates from fourteen states. They were inspired in these efforts by a poem penned in their honor by Father Abram Ryan, author of the popular Lost Cause ballad “The Conquered Banner,” who urged them to

Gather the corpses strewn

O’er many a battle plain;

From many a grave that lies so lone,

Without a name and without a stone,

Gather the Southern slain.

They had fallen, Ryan insisted, in a “cause, though lost, still just.”56

For all the politics that inevitably surrounded the care and reinterment of the Confederate dead, the movement was also profoundly personal, for it provided bereaved families with bodies and graves on which to fix their sorrow. John Palmer of South Carolina had lost the first of two sons to die in the war at Second Bull Run in 1862. In the summer of 1869 he began a correspondence with Mary J. Dogan of the Manassas Memorial Association, who had identified James Palmer’s grave near those of thirteen comrades. She wished to remove it to what became the Groveton Confederate Cemetery, where 266 southern soldiers are buried.

John Palmer readily forwarded funds for a walnut coffin and a four-foot marble stone—$32 to acquire and $1.86 to haul and install—inscribed with the details of his son’s life and death. “The mere removal of the body will cost nothing,” Dogan assured him, as that would be the responsibility of the association. In James’s original grave Dogan had found a cross and a locket, and she removed the “fatal ball,” now readily visible beneath his breastbone. Knowing the Palmers would value these relics “very highly,” she shipped them to South Carolina. John Palmer carried the bullet with him for the rest of his life.57

Dogan expressed her condolences and wished “that all who have friends buried on this field could as easily and surely identify the spot where they be as you could that of your beloved son. But, alas, so few comparatively could.” James Jerman Palmer’s grave is one of only two at Groveton that are identified. The project on which the Manassas Association had embarked was daunting, and Dogan confessed to Palmer in 1871 that “I feel very much discouraged at times in regard to our accomplishing our objective of burying all our dead but yet hope when the spring opens we may be able to resume the work and if possible finish it this summer.”58

In the early 1870s the attention of a number of southern memorial associations turned to the thousands of Confederate soldiers who still lay neglected on northern soil. Gettysburg seemed particularly critical, not just as the supposed “high-water mark” of Confederate fortunes. A sizable number of southern dead were scattered in unprotected and unmarked locations throughout the Pennsylvania countryside, subject to desecration by northerners hostile to the South. Several southern legislatures offered funds for moving bodies to the South, and memorial associations urged prompt action. Warning that yet another spring plowing might entirely destroy the bodies of Georgians still buried in Pennsylvania, the Savannah Memorial Association, for example, called for “her sister associations in the State to come forward at once and assist her in removing these remains.”59

At Gettysburg,