As the wife of US Senator Clement Claiborne Clay from Alabama, she was part of a group of young southerners who boarded together in the capital in particular hotels.

In the immediate postwar period, she worked to gain her husband's freedom from imprisonment at Fort Monroe, where Jefferson Davis, former president of the Confederacy, was also held.

[1] At the age of six, Virginia was taken to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where she lived with her maternal aunt and her husband Henry W. Collier, later appointed to the State Supreme Court.

[1] During this period, she became close to her father's brother, Thomas B. Tunstall, secretary of state for Alabama, who took her under his wing, introducing her to literature, poetry and music.

[1] Tunstall married Clement Claiborne Clay (1816-1882), an attorney and young legislator, whom she had met at her uncle Henry Collier's home.

When her husband was elected by the legislature as a U.S. senator in 1853, Virginia Clay moved with him to Washington, D.C. On the train they met numerous other people from the state who were going to be part of Congress and the administration, forming friendships that lasted.

In rounds of dinners, Virginia Clay met other congressmen and their wives as well as members of the diplomatic corps and President Franklin Pierce's administration.

Clement Claiborne Clay represented his state in the Confederate legislature, and the couple moved to the capital of Richmond, Virginia.

Clement Clay and his wife Virginia were among Southerners imprisoned at Fort Monroe after the war; they were suspected of being involved in the assassination plot against President Abraham Lincoln.

About this time, Jefferson Davis is believed to have fallen in love with Virginia Clay, carrying on a passionate correspondence with her for three years.

Beginning with women's groups arranging for burial and commemoration of the Confederate dead, the chapters grew rapidly into the 20th century, when membership reached into the hundreds of thousands.

[6] In the postwar years, some of the early books by Southern women had been histories or biographies of historical figures, such as that by Varina Davis of her husband.