[5] Maury and the eight other founding members donated family papers, books, and artifacts to the society to form its initial collection.

The society was officially organized on May 1, 1869; signatories included Braxton Bragg, J. E. Austin, Dabney H. Maury, B. M. Harrod, Simon Bolivar Buckner, S. H. Buck, A. L. Stuart, George Norton, and C. L. C.

[6][7] The first officers were Benjamin Morgan Palmer, president; Braxton Bragg, vice–president for Louisiana; Robert E. Lee, vice–president for Virginia; John C. Breckinridge, vice–president for Kentucky; and Alexander H. Stephens, vice–president for Georgia.

[2] The society's objective was "to collect reliable data of the workings of the late Confederate Government, and the battles, sieges, and exploits of the war.

The society's president, Benjamin Morgan Palmer, wrote in July 1873:[1] It is due to the noble men who fell martyrs to the "Lost Cause" that a faithful history of the events of the four years of bloody war be truthfully recorded, and an impartial view of the motives that actuated them be handed down to posterity with the seal of an impartial and unbiased history… The country has been flooded with partisan histories, in many of which the pretended historian has wandered as far from truth as if he had been writing a work of fiction, and in all of these every incident favorable to the Southern character has been suppressed, and the plainest facts so warped that the actors themselves would not recognize them.

On August 25, 1873, a letter from a writer in Charlottesville, Virginia to the editor of The New York Times said:The meeting of the Southern Historical Society might seem like a harmless affair.

…As a mere nursery of military vanity, and a desperate effort to write the Confederacy and its leaders into some measure of posthumous fame, it might be permitted to pass with a sneer at its folly.

[3] Starting in January 1876, the Southern Historical Society Papers eventually comprised 52 volumes of articles written by former Confederate soldiers, officers, politicians, and civilians.

[3] He added, "Sometimes, the documents were altered as part of the society's campaign to construct a Southern historical memory and in an effort to protect its own leadership.

Historian Alan T. Nolan quotes from the advertisement for subscriptions to the organization's publication, and comments, "Writing whose purpose is to 'vindicate' the 'name and fame' of the South's 'great struggle' plainly proceeds from an advocacy premise".

[11] Historian Gaines Foster said it was an "avowedly" historical organization, which "eventually became important in the Confederate tradition" and, through their publications, a group of Virginian pro-Confederacy writers "refought the war,".

Historians use the society's journal as a source for Civil War research and an example of how historical memory can be shaped to serve external goals.