In 1899, the Ladies’ Memorial Association of Jefferson County, Florida, honored the fallen dead as examples of woman’s lasting fidelity and men’s imperishable valor. Their words praised Florida soldiers as a living human wall that stood through four long years of pitiless war between their homes and an invading foe, and urged later generations of the South to remember how gloriously Florida’s sons fought on bloody fields. They declared that memory of these dead would outlast stone or bronze and celebrated them as devoted to their state, heroic in duty, steadfast through pestilence, unsubdued by prison hardships, and obedient to God alone.