Few public places in the early nineteenth century offered men and women from different regions of the United States the opportunity to socialize with each other. At the resorts of Virginia's western mountains and upstate New York's Saratoga Springs, the nation's social, economic, and political leaders gathered to relax and to recuperate, and in the process they began to form a fledgling aristocracy. As Thomas Chambers reveals, at these resorts the boundaries of class and region were defined, tested, solidified, and broken by the Civil War, but eventually repaired in its aftermath.