Petersburg lies at the head of navigation on the Appomattox River, twenty-three miles south of the Confederate capital at Richmond. Its role as a port contributed to its growth in the eighteenth and early in the nineteenth centuries. Railroads arrived in Petersburg in the 1830s, and by 1860 five lines converged in the city, making it one of the South’s leading transportation hubs. Petersburg also developed a vibrant manufacturing economy, with twenty tobacco factories, four cotton mills, and a number of iron foundries and flour mills.
Petersburg’s 18,266 residents in 1860 were divided almost equally between blacks and whites. No Southern city on the eve of the Civil War (Petersburg would be the seventh-largest municipality in the Confederacy) boasted a higher percentage of African Americans among its free population. Voters in Petersburg cast their ballots for the Constitutional Union candidate in the 1860 presidential election, John Bell of Tennessee, and sent a conditional Un
SUMMARY Ladies’ Memorial Associations were locally organized groups of southern white women who, following the American Civil War (1861–1865), tracked down the scattered remains of Confederate soldiers and reinterred them in Confederate cemeteries. Following Robert E. Lee‘s surrender in April 1865, more than 260,000 Confederate war dead were buried throughout the South, a majority of them in Virginia. Most of these soldiers would not be returned home; instead, they eventually would be placed 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 Confederate veterans. Instead, the associations created Confederate cemeteries, which served as final resting places for approximately 80 percent of the fallen soldiers.