Memorial Day has a traditional place in American history. Everyone who grew up in this country sees it as a celebration of war sacrifice and patriotic valor. It is a holiday with its origins in the Civil War, a time of immeasurable division, death and disease – but also the supposed triumph of equality (in theory if not in practice) over slavery.
Most people probably don’t think about the origins of Memorial Day when planning their long weekend getaways and family cookouts, but the general story goes something like this: A year after the war ended, in 1866, a group of women started themselves to remember Memorial Day 620,000 soldiers and civilians killed in conflict or fallen by disease while battling them by laying wreaths on graves in the hospital city of Columbus, Mississippi. The annual memorial day was born in 1868 and has been celebrated on the last Monday in May since then. General John A. Logan, a Union Veterans Leader, declared Decoration Day a national holiday.
While all of this is true, technically it is a bit of revisionism (as the multitude of cities that lay claim to the first show shows Honors on Memorial Day) and one that puts whites at the forefront of a cherished American pastime. Official history erases what Yale historian David W. Blight has long argued, Memorial Day’s original roots – a tribute orchestrated by black members of the Union Infantry who, so to speak, through time and whitewashing history by color was released.
Why do we celebrate Remembrance Day?
Unlike Veterans Day, which pays homage to all members of the military at home and abroad, Memorial Day is specifically for the Civil War. It is hard to imagine that the US used to be separated from two independent governments, separated not only by opposing ideologies, but also by the agrarian economy of the South and the rising industrialism of the North. (Although admitted it’s getting easier and easier to imagine.)
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The civil war remains the deadliest conflict in US history. Between the start of the war in 1860 and the liberation of the slaves in 1865, over 620,000 civilians and soldiers died as a result of battle or illness. The death toll was exacerbated by the Union and the Confederation, which both technically fielded American troops and 19th century methods of war that resulted in a much more direct confrontation on the battlefield.
The extent of the destruction is almost unfathomable today: The total population was around 31 million people in 1860, which means that the death toll was 2 percent. Cities lay in ruins in the south viscerally described by historian David W. Blight for the Pewter Educational Project in 2011.
By the end of the Civil War, the dead were everywhere, some in half-buried coffins and some only visible as unidentified bones scattered around the Virginia or Georgia battlefields. Americans in the north and south faced a tremendous spiritual and logistical challenge for the commemoration.
Traditionally, Memorial Day is a day of mourning for the lives lost on both sides of the conflict. However, according to Blight’s research, its foundation is based on the actions of freed slaves and their symbolic tributes to fallen Union soldiers.
It all started in Charleston, South Carolina
In a way, the Charleston Civil War is booked: this is where the first shots of the conflict rang out at Fort Sumter in 1861, and in this city thousands of freed slaves paid tribute to the fallen war amid rubble streets about four years later.
The city had been evacuated from most of its white residents in the last days of the war, but many of its black residents remained. One of the first Union forces to enter Charleston was the twenty-first colored U.S. infantry, who were quick to accept the city’s surrender, writes Blight.
In the past few days, these liberated men and women have “held a series of memorial services to explain their sense of the importance of the war,” but none have been as poignant or indicative of the immeasurable suffering of the conflict as a tribute to the Washington Race City Square and Jockey Club. The grounds were converted into a prison by the Confederation during the war. At least 257 Union soldiers were exposed to disease and exposure there, and their bodies were piled in mass graves.
Many of the bodies still uncovered were duly buried by a number of black workers who erected a fence around the tomb and an archway decorated with “Martyrs of the Circuit”. This was followed by several attempts to commemorate the dead, including a massive parade of 10,000 people on the racetrack grounds and another march on May 1st, led by a procession of 3,000 black school children, the “John Browns Body,” a procession sang in honor of the famous abolitionist.
Blight describes the following scenes:
Several hundred black women followed the children with baskets of flowers, wreaths and crosses. Then came black men marching at a cadence, followed by contingents of Union infantry and other black and white citizens. As many as possible gather on the cemetery grounds; A children’s choir sang “We will gather around the flag,” the “Stars and Stripes,” and several spirituals before several black ministers read from the scriptures.
The parade dispersed, giving way to picnics and social gatherings – exactly what we now recognize as the lifeblood of Memorial Day. These were the beginnings of the annual celebration, which two years later, in 1868, was first baptized as a nationally recognized celebration. The roots of the day in tribute to the recently liberated black men and women of the south have been erased over a century of objections from ancestors of Confederate families. However, tracing the first attempts to remember the civil war dead tells a different story.
