It’s never wrong to thank a veteran or active- duty military personnel for their service, but even they will tell you that officially Memorial Day is not for them.
The official day to thank our veterans is Veterans Day; Armed Forces Day is set aside for active-duty military. Memorial Day is specifically reserved for those who gave their “last full measure” in service to our nation. We must understand that the holiday began as a day to decorate the graves of those who died fighting during the Civil War.
The holiday originally known as Decoration Day got its start the year after the Civil War ended in April of 1865. By the spring of 1866, Southern women were still dealing with the physical effects of the destruction of the South. but just as strongly struggling from the mental effects of having lost the war.
One way to cope with the loss was the creation of what is known as the “Lost Cause,” which maintained that Southern soldiers were heroic men who only lost because of the overwhelming strength and size of the Northern army and the North’s industrial output.
As a way to honor these Southern men, women’s clubs organized to maintain cemeteries and also to establish Decoration Days to adorn the Confederate graves with flowers.
While there are several examples of graves being decorated as early as 1861, the first organized event is still debated. The two cities that seem to have the best claim of the first official Decoration Day were both named Columbus, one in Georgia and the other in Mississippi. The best evidence seems to exist that Mary Ann Williams of Georgia first thought of a national day to decorate graves with flowers and chose April 26 as it marked the end of the war the previous year.
Williams sent letters from page A4
to newspapers across the South asking for others to join her. It seems as if the women of Mississippi liked the idea and had their own celebration but had theirs a day earlier.
Years later Pennsylvania and New York both claimed it was women in their states who held the first Decoration Days, but there is little evidence to support these claims. It should be noted that with both Columbus’ Decoration Days the patrons cleaned and decorated graves of both Confederate and Union soldiers. These women had greater reason to hate the other side than we do today. Yet they honored soldiers who were willing to die for their cause even if it was something Southern women disagreed with. We might profit from their example.
While it seems that Williams was the first to call for a day, the idea really took off the following year when Maj. Gen. John A. Logan, head of the Grand Army of the Republic, a Union veterans’ organization, issued General Order 11 establishing Memorial Day as a day to celebrate those who had given their lives by having programs and decorating graves with flowers.
The date was decided on May 30 so that flowers would have time to bloom. The first official day was held at Arlington Cemetery on May 30, 1868.
Arlington, the home of Robert E. Lee, was confiscated and the land turned into a national cemetery in 1864 and it seemed the fitting place for the first Memorial Day Celebration.
The keynote speaker was general turned congressman James Garfield. After the speech and songs, the participants placed flowers and small American flags by each grave, something that continues today.
For the next several decades women’s and veterans’ groups continued to celebrate Memorial Day to honor the dead from the Civil War. Some states formalized the days with state laws. It was not until after WWI that the day was changed to honor the dead from all American wars and not just the Civil War.
It was not until 1966, 100 years after the first celebration, that President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law Memorial Day as a national holiday on the last Monday in May to make a threeday weekend.
While the case seemed closed as to the start of Memorial Day, one twist occurred in 1996 when Professor David Blight, was researching at Yale for his excellent book “Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory” published in 2001.
Blight found a handwritten source and newspaper evidence that in 1865 right after the South surrendered that a large group of former slaves in Charleston, South Carolina, went to the Washington Racecourse and Jockey Club that had been turned into a prisoner of war camp. They dug up the soldiers that had been buried in mass graves and reinterred them into separate graves.
Then on May 1, 1865, more than 10,000 people, mostly former slaves and members of the Massachusetts 54 Colored Regiment, held a parade before decorating the graves with flowers. What Blight found was evidence that the first Memorial Day was done by freedmen honoring those who gave their lives for their freedom.
Today Memorial Day for most marks the first day of summer and a day off work to hold a BBQ. However, its roots were a day to honor the 700,000 who gave their lives for a cause. On this Memorial Day it’s perfectly fine to smoke up some ribs or barbecue some chicken, but also take time to remember the reason for this day.
President Abraham Lincoln said it best when he said, “It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
In a nation as divided as ours, let’s do as Lincoln suggested: honor those who died for us and ensure they did not die in vain, but instead honor them by working together and making sure this nation long endures.
Happy Memorial Day everyone and thank you to those who have given their life for freedom. May you never be forgotten.
James Finck is a professor of history at the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma. He can be reached at HistoricallySpeaking1776@ gmail.com.
