MAY 30, 1868: DECORATION DAY

In my midwestern childhood, Decoration Day honored members of the military who had died defending our country.  Neighbors, kids, and a scattering of veterans followed the high school band to the local cemetery, where we put flags and flowers on the graves of the war dead.   Small town and national cemeteries still stage these civic ceremonies, which conclude with rifle salutes and a bugler playing “Taps.” 

Arlington National Cemetery (Public domain)

The history of Memorial Day is rooted in the Civil War, in which 600,000 Union and Confederate soldiers, thousands of horses, and hundreds of bystanders died.  America’s deadliest conflict destroyed property, families and livelihoods, mostly in the South.  It left behind a nation of widows, many of whom played a role in memorial commemorations.  The National Cemetery Administration identifies Mary Ann Williams, the widow of a Confederate officer, as its originator.  She volunteered with the Soldiers Aid Society in Columbus, Georgia. 

Merging with local groups across the South, it became the Ladies’ Memorial Association. Serving as secretary, in March 1866, Williams sent an open appeal to newspapers across the South.  Signed “A Southern Woman,” it recounted that women were cleaning and decorating the graves of “our gallant Confederate dead,” but it was “unfinished work unless a day be set apart annually for its especial attention.”  Southerners had “flowered graves” long before the war.  The availability of blooms was one factor in determining the timing. 

In Columbus, Mississippi, ladies decorated both Confederate and Union graves, inspiring a poem by abolitionist Francis Finch.  “The Blue and the Gray,” published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1867, urged forgiveness and reconciliation.  Instead, Southern women used commemorations to enshrine ante-bellum culture.  In 1874, the Georgia legislature established the first Confederate Memorial Day; other states followed.

In Waterloo, NY, pharmacist Henry Welles suggested that the town honor both living and dead veterans.  His 1865 proposal was ignored until a local hero, General John Murray, enthusiastically endorsed it, hosting an event on May 5, 1866.  A century later, in 1966, the US Congress recognized Waterloo as “the birthplace of Memorial Day.”

Yale historian David Blight argues that formerly enslaved Black workmen held the first memorial observation.  They reinterred and decorated the graves of 200 Union prisoners of war in Charleston, SC.  The African American population was protected on May 1, 1865, by Union infantry, including three regiments of US Colored Troops.  Soon after, white leaders in Augusta, Georgia, barred African Americans from decorating Union graves.  That prohibition prevailed. 

There was no uniform founding or commemoration date.  Southerners chose April 26, the day General Joseph Johnston surrendered to Sherman; May 10, the day Stonewall Jackson died; or June 3, Jefferson Davis’s birthday.  In 1868, Union General John A. Logan, an abolitionist and commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, a fraternal organization of veterans, called for a northern Decoration Day on May 30, a date with no historic associations. 

Speaking to the GAR, Logan reported that “traitors in the South . . . day after day . . . [mark] the graves rebel soldiers.”  He called for a public holiday, “for the purpose of 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.”

General John Logan (Library of Congress)

On the first Decoration Day, 183 communities in 27 states held events on May 30, 1868.  General and Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant presided at Arlington National Cemetery.  Union General, Ohio Congressman and future president James Garfield spoke, asking the 5000 guests to decorate its 20,000 graves.  Today the military puts flags in front of 400,000 white headstones and presidents lay wreaths.

The more immediate postwar issue was identifying dead bodies.  As Drew Gilpin Faust described in her groundbreaking This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, there was no system.  There were no dog tags or official burial records.  The scale of the carnage was unimaginable.  The National Cemetery System was established in 1865 to create cemeteries for Union dead.  Among the first was Arlington, built on a plantation Robert E. Lee’s family had inherited from George Washington’s heirs.

Arlington House, Robert E. Lee’s home (National Park Service)

Until then, disposal was a local problem.  It took four malodorous months in 1863 to bury 7000 corpses at Gettysburg in shallow graves that President Lincoln would dedicate, and consecrate: “that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion . . . ”

Animosity between Union and Confederate veterans over the causes and consequences of the war remained fierce into the twentieth century.  Former Confederate states refused to commemorate their dead on May 30 until after the Great War, when Decoration Day expanded to honor all American war dead.  Regional resentment was fueled by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, an 1894 outgrowth of the Ladies’ Memorial Association.  It spread the myth of the “Lost Cause” and erected hundreds of Confederate memorials.

In 1898, the ten-week Spanish-American War was the first engagement by the US troops in an international conflict since before the Civil War.  To secure support for ratification of the treaty to end the war, among Southerners who controlled the Senate, President McKinley traveled 2,000 miles across the Deep South.  In Atlanta, the Union veteran announced that the federal government would maintain Confederate cemeteries, since “these heroic dead” represented “American valor.”  Perhaps McKinley anticipated the nation’s need for unified armed forces in the new century.

White Civil War dead became a means to reconnect the nation.  Two years later Congress approved the internment of Confederate dead in a separate section in Arlington, despite opposition by Southern women.  They wanted the graves removed from federal property.  Next, they lobbied for a Confederate memorial inside the national cemetery.  Authorized by Congress in 1906, the monument was unveiled by President Woodrow Wilson in 1914, on Jefferson Davis’ birthday. 

Sculptor Moses Ezekial, a Confederate veteran, put a woman holding a victor’s wreath and a plowshare on a pedestal surrounded by figures representing Southern sacrifice. (Public domain)

On the recommendation of the Pentagon’s 2022 Naming Commission, the monument was removed from Arlington in December 2023.  The Commission renamed ten US Army bases named for Confederate generals, most of them created during World War I.  Such historical reconsideration followed the police murder of George Floyd, on Memorial Day, May 25, 2020. 

The history of Memorial Day chronicles regional rather than racial reconciliation.  In July 1913, on the fiftieth anniversary of Gettysburg, 50,000 frail and failing white veterans held a four-day Blue and Gray Reunion at the Pennsylvania battleground.  Sectional animosities lingered.  Confederates in uniform carried battle flags, while the winners wore civilian attire.

Speakers described a gathering unified by respect for the bravery of the dead, whether they were traitors, enslavers, conscripts or heroes.  President Wilson addressed “what it costs to make a nation – the blood and sacrifice of multitudes. . . ,” but was, according to reporters, “not once . . . interrupted by a handclap or a cheer.”  There were no African American speakers.  With less fanfare, Black citizens marked fifty years since Emancipation.

On Decoration Day 1917, race riots in St. Louis prompted Republican Congressman Leonidas Dyer to draft the country’s first anti-lynching law.  On May 30, 1921, a white mob ransacked, burned and bombed the Black section of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and then blacked out news coverage of the massacre.  At the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial on Memorial Day 1922, Black guests were seated in a segregated section behind Confederate veterans.  Decoration Day remained a white event.

In 1968, Congress passed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, creating three-day weekends for major holidays.  In 1971, it renamed Decoration Day Memorial Day, now observed on the third Monday in May.  Only July 4 and November 11, Veterans Day, “the eleventh day of the eleventh month,” the date of the armistice at the end of World War I, remain sacrosanct.

Today fewer than one in ten Americans participate in a Memorial Day observation.  Veterans in 1913 were already alarmed by young people engaging in “games, races and revelry” rather than “a day of memories and tears.”  Now the holiday marks the start of summer.  To emphasize its meaning, the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars have lobbied to restore the May 30 date.  Others have suggested combining Memorial and Veterans days. 

In 2000, the National Moment of Remembrance Act called for a moment of silence at 3:00 pm on Memorial Day.  Few Americans know about it.  In 2015, retired Air Force bugler Jari Villanueva launched Taps Across America, asking volunteers to play “Taps” following the moment of silence.  It took off during the pandemic, when parades and picnics were cancelled.  More than 10,000 musicians joined the national salute, offering everyone “an opportunity to honor, reflect and remember” Memorial Day.

https://www.tapsacrossamerica.org/

SOURCES:

Richard Gardiner and Daniel Bellware, The Genesis of the Memorial Day Holiday (Columbus [GA] State University, 2014).

Gillian Brockwell, “Does Memorial Day Have Origins in the Decoration of Confederate Graves?” Washington Post (May 25, 2024) https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2024/05/25/memorial-day-start-origins-confederates/

“The History and Origin of Memorial Day in Waterloo, NY,” https://waterloony.com/memorial-day/history/

History.com Editors, “Memorial Day” (October 27, 2009) https://www.history.com/topics/holidays/memorial-day-history

Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War(Vintage/Random House, 2008).

John L. Hopkins, The World Will Never See Its Like:  The Gettysburg Reunion of 1913 (Savas Beatie, 2023).

Thomas R. Flagel, War, Memory and the 1913 Gettysburg Reunion (Kent State University Press, 2019).

Daniel Pink, “Why Not Redo Our Holiday Calendar?” Washington Post (May 24, 2024), https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/05/22/memorial-day-federal-holiday-overhaul/