Elizabeth M. Collins at the Defense
Media Activity offers piece on the history of Memorial Day:
1. Memorial Day is not a new
idea: Societies have celebrated and honored their war dead since time
immemorial. The Greeks and Romans, for example, held annual days of remembrance
each year, decorating gravesites and holding feasts and festivals. The Greeks
also held public funeral processions after major battles, to honor all of their
fallen. Legendary General Pericles memorialized the heroes of the Peloponnesian
War during one such funeral in 431 B.C., according to the Department of
Veterans Affairs and History.com, saying "Not only are they commemorated
by columns and inscriptions, but there dwells also an unwritten memorial of
them, graven not in stone but in the hearts of men."
2.Memorial Day was known as
Decoration Day for more than a century, after the flowers and flags used to
decorate graves. Until World War I, the holiday solely recognized those killed
during the Civil War - some 625,000 men. The number, historian David W. Blight
pointed out in a New York Times op-ed, was so staggering that if the same
percentage of Americans had died in Vietnam, some 4 million names would be on
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall.
3. According to the VA, about
25 cities claim to be the site of the first Memorial Day celebration, although
President Lyndon B. Johnson officially recognized Waterloo, New York, as the
birthplace in a 1966 presidential proclamation. The city hosted its first
commemoration, May 5, 1866, after a local druggist suggested it would be nice
for the city to honor its war dead. Boalsburg, Pennsylvania, claims the honor
as well, as do Carbondale, Illinois; Richmond, Virginia; Macon, Georgia, and
two separate towns named Columbus.
4. In 1865, a group of newly
freed slaves dug up a mass grave in a Charleston, South Carolina, race course,
where at least 257 mistreated Northern prisoners of war had been thrown after dying
of disease, according to Blight. To recognize the Soldiers' sacrifices in the
name of freedom, the former slaves buried each man properly and built a fence
around the new cemetery to honor the "Martyrs of the Race Course."
They then staged a 10,000-person parade on the racetrack, complete with
flowers, crosses and music, May 1. A brigade's worth of Union Soldiers
participated, including the 54th Massachusetts and the 34th and 104th United
States Colored Troops.
5. At the same time, the
holiday has distinctly Confederate roots. Even before the war was over,
Southern women gathered in cemeteries to decorate the graves of their fallen
with flowers. In the spring of 1866, Mary Ann Williams wrote to the Columbus
Times on behalf of the Ladies Memorial Association of Columbus, Georgia,
suggesting a "certain day to be observed, from the Potomac to the Rio
Grande, and be handed down through time as a religious custom of the South to
wreath the graves of our martyred dead with flowers." She recommended
April 26, the anniversary of Gen. Joseph E. Johnston's surrender of the largest
remaining Confederate army to Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman in North Carolina.
Newspapers nationwide reprinted her letter, although at least one used the
wrong date. As a result, Columbus, Mississippi, held its celebration a day
early.
6. Major Gen. John A. Logan,
commander in chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, an early veterans service
organization, reportedly spoke at one such ceremony in his hometown of
Carbondale that year. He later declared May 30, 1868 a day for "strewing
with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense
of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost
every city, village and hamlet churchyard in the land. ... Their soldier lives
were the reveille of freedom to a race in chains and their deaths the tattoo of
rebellious tyranny in arms. We should guard their graves with sacred
vigilance." He selected the date because it wasn't the anniversary of a
major Civil War battle, but also, historians believe, so the "choicest
flowers of springtime" would be available in the North.
7. The first national
Decoration Day observance took place at the fledgling Arlington National
Cemetery that May 30 in response, featuring a keynote address by Union Maj.
Gen. and future President James A. Garfield: "Here are sheaves reaped in
the harvest of death, from every battlefield of Virginia. ... The voices of
these dead will forever fill the land like holy benedictions," he told
about 5,000 people, including another future president, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant.
The 3rd U.S. Infantry Division (The Old Guard) began placing small flags on
each grave at the cemetery a few days before the holiday in 1948, a tradition
that continues today.
8. Every state had adopted
Memorial Day as an official holiday by the turn of the century, but it didn't
become a federal holiday until 1971. The observance also moved from May 30 to
the last Monday of the month, according to the VA.
9. Congress further enshrined
the importance of Memorial Day in December 2000 with "The National Moment
of Remembrance Act," which encourages all Americans to pause at 3:00 p.m.
local time for a moment of silence to honor and remember those who have given
their lives in service to the United States.
