Memorial Day’s tangled roots and why it’s celebrated
Memorial Day weekend is one of the busiest for travel in the United States and the unofficial start of summer; a day for cookouts, beach trips and car races. But how did Memorial Day, held on the last Monday in May in honor of American war dead, begin?
Here’s a quick refresher:
Honoring the dead of the Civil War
The holiday grew out of the Civil War, when Americans — Northern, Southern, Black and White — struggled to honor the staggering number of dead soldiers, at the time at least 2 percent of the U.S. population. Several places claim to be the birthplace of Memorial Day. One of the earliest accounts comes out Boalsburg, Pa.where, in October 1864, three women are said to have laid flowers and wreaths on the graves of men who had died in Union service during the Civil War.
In May 1865, just after the end of the war, a great procession was held in the devastated city of Charleston, SC. There, thousands of black Americans, many of whom had been enslaved until the city was liberated several months earlier, commemorated the lives of Union prisoners buried in a mass grave at a former racetrack. The service was led by some 3,000 school children who carried roses and sang the Union marching song “The Body of John Brown.” According to historical accounts, hundreds of women followed with baskets of flowers, wreaths and crosses.
Cities in the north and south began to honor their war dead. May 1866, Waterloo, New York, was decorated with flags at half-mast, “draped with evergreens and mourning black,” according to the village. In Columbus, Mrs.that same year, women are said to have placed flowers on the graves of both Confederate and Union soldiers.
What’s in a name?
Whatever the beginning, historians agree that the first widespread commemoration was in 1868, when General John A. Logan, the commander-in-chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, an organization of Union veterans, called for a national holiday to remember the dead of the Civil War. Their bodies, he said, lay in nearly every town, village, and graveyard.
On May 30, Mr. Logan wrote in a order, should be “designated for the purpose of showering with flowers or otherwise adorning the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country.”
For many years, the commemoration was commonly referred to as “Decoration Day”. But as it evolved to honor not just Civil War soldiers, but all troops who had fallen in the service of the country, Americans began to refer to the celebration as “Memorial Day.” An article was published among the first references to the commemoration in The New York Times on June 7, 1868. It describes a note, with an accompanying wreath, from “a little girl about 10 years old” asking an official to place the wreath on the grave of an unknown rebel soldier. Her father, she explained, was buried in Andersonville, Georgia, and she hoped “some little girl” would do the same on his grave.
Another article published on May 31, 1870, describes processions in New York City and Brooklyn (then still separate cities). The story noted that, apart from Independence Day, there was “no day more evoking the patriotic sentiments of our people than ‘Memorial Day'”, which, according to the article, was a national holiday not by a legislature, but by “the general consent of the people”.
Congress formally changed the name of the memorial in 1967. A few years later, the government decided that Memorial Day should not be held on May 30, but on the last Monday of that month.
The change was part of a broader effort to create three-day weekends, said Sarah Weicksel, the director of research and publications at the American Historical Association, “They wanted it to be an opportunity for people to come together.”
What about Veterans Day?
Though Memorial Day has evolved, it remains a day to honor the nation’s war dead. However, Veterans Day honors everyone who has served in the United States military.
Veterans Day, held annually on November 11, was originally called Armistice Day and marked the end of World War I in 1918. The holiday was first commemorated in the United States in 1919, but was extended to all veterans in the 1950s.
Both holidays honor those who have served the country, and the way they are commemorated now may seem similar. But after World War I, veterans “wanted their own commemoration, which North and South could celebrate together,” Henry W. Brands, a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote by email.
A controversial history
Nearly 160 years after the end of the American Civil War, the true origins of Memorial Day remain unclear, experts say. But the black history of the holiday has not been universally embraced. In 2021, the microphone of a veteran who had attempted to credit black Americans was silenced during an American Legion service in Hudson, Ohio.
“Charleston forgot about this story because it didn’t fit,” said David W. Blight, a historian at Yale University, in the emerging story in the defeated South. In the 1990s, he discovered the details of the racecourse procession, which took place in a place once popular with plantation owners. Of the black protesters, he added, “They rewrote it, as a place to commemorate their freedom.”
According to dr. Blight, white Southerners used Memorial Day to uphold their Lost Cause mythology, the idea that the Rebellion was an honorable rebellion against Northern tyranny that had little or nothing to do with slavery.
The idea that both sides of the war had fought for a noble cause was early rejected by Frederick Douglass, who said on Memorial Day in 1871 at Arlington National Cemetery: “We must never forget that the victory of the rebellion was the death of the Republic. We must never forget that the loyal soldiers resting under these sods have thrown themselves between the nation and the destroyers of the nation.