Why Memorial Day?

A card from 1907, when the holiday was really about Civil War dead.

In the half-century after the Civil War, the American calendar swelled with more than 25 new holidays. At a time when the country felt disjointed at almost every level—the sectional divisiveness of the war lingered, huge numbers of immigrants splintered cities, and freed blacks encountered bitter hostility—civic leaders designed days of ritual and shared remembrance to try to bind the nation together. Few of the new festivals stuck: Have you thrown any Constitution Day barbecues lately? But today—Memorial Day—we observe one of the survivors, although not in quite the way its inventors intended.

Many ancient cultures observed festivals of the dead. The Romans had Parentalia, for example, and the Japanese the Feast of the Lanterns. Colonial Puritans, however, deplored all holidays as an invitation to drunkenness and sin. They allowed just a few festivals on their calendar—even Christmas and Easter passed unobserved—and bred a phobia of idleness in the early United States. Virtuous Americans worked six days a week and spent the Sabbath in prayer and Bible study, leaving little time for mischief.

But as the industrial revolution allowed the country to produce goods with greater efficiency in the 1800s, businessmen began to fear that the United States might create more than its workers could buy. To encourage spending, the developing economy of the 1800s celebrated leisure in a way alien to earlier generations. Increasingly, Americans defined themselves not only by their labor but by how they spent their time off.

At the same time, the burgeoning Romantic movement infused the idea of death with a newfound sentimentality. This was the era of the Fox sisters and Spiritualism, when Americans gobbled up books like Agnes and the Key of Her Little Coffin and Stepping Heavenward. In the eighteenth century, graveyards were cramped, weed-forested morasses suffocated with the stench of rot. But as poets, novelists, and painters of the 1800s began to associate death with beauty, the rural cemetery movement transformed burial grounds into meticulously landscaped cities of the dead, beautified by the living with graveside bouquets.

The massive death toll of the Civil War forced the new ideas about mortality to the forefront. In just four years the United States lost a fiftieth of its population, the equivalent of 6 million people today. Death was everywhere, and Americans sought out ways to soothe their grief over a fallen generation of men. A new profession, undertaking, rose to spare families the trouble of preparing and burying corpses, while books on proper mourning behavior (what to wear, when to begin to socialize again) codified informal practices. And, inspired by a German All Saints’ Day custom brought to America by immigrants, in the spring of 1865 Confederate women began scattering flowers over entire battlefield cemeteries in what a year later would be hailed as the prototype for Memorial Day.

It’s impossible to say which Southern town held the earliest formal Civil War cemetery decoration. The title most often goes to Columbus, Georgia, which observed its first Memorial Day on April 12, 1866. Mrs. Charles J. Williams, whose husband had died in the war, had published a letter in the Columbus Times a month earlier, proposing that “we can keep alive the memory of the debt we owe [our deceased soldiers] by dedicating, at least one day in each year, to embellishing their humble graves with flowers.” The day should “be handed down through time as a religious custom of the South to wreathe the graves of our martyred dead with flowers. . . . The veriest radical that ever traced his genealogy back to the deck of the Mayflower could not refuse us the simple privilege of paying honor to those who died defending the life, honor and happiness of the Southern women.”

The idea rippled across the South. Ladies’ memorial associations, founded to rebury their dead in local cemeteries, turned their energy to orchestrating elaborate Memorial Day rituals. As Williams had hoped, Southerners treated the day as sacred. After a church service, townsfolk would proceed to the cemetery, where, after a prayer from a clergyman, decorated veterans delivered speeches on the meaning of the war and its sacrifices. Then a column of women and girls, dressed in white, placed flowers on the Confederate graves. (Even though the organizational muscle behind the ceremonies came, somewhat uncharacteristically, from women, the ceremonies themselves followed the strict gender rules of nineteenth-century America. Women were the emotive caretakers, men their valiant defenders.) To end the tribute a bugler played taps and militia fired a 21-gun salute.

Several Northern towns claim to have celebrated Memorial Day before Williams proposed it; in 1966 Congress even designated Waterloo, New York, as the birthplace of Memorial Day. But more likely is the story told by Mrs. John Logan, wife of the commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, a Union veterans’ association. During a trip to Virginia in 1868, she saw graveside Memorial Day rites and “wished there could be concerted action of this kind all over the North for the decoration of our own soldiers’ graves.” Her husband agreed that honoring the Union dead should not be entrusted to the whims of the public. In ”the proudest act of his life,” on May 5, 1868, Logan issued General Orders 11, “With the hope that it will be kept up from year to year, while a survivor of the war remains to honor the memory of his departed comrades.“ He designated May 30, 1868, “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.”

“We should guard their graves with sacred vigilance,” Logan wrote. “All that the consecrated wealth and taste of the nation can add to their adornment and security is but a fitting tribute to the memory of her slain defenders. . . . Let no vandalism of avarice or neglect, no ravages of time testify to the present or to the coming generations that we have forgotten as a people the cost of a free and undivided republic. If other eyes grow dull, other hands slack, and other hearts cold in the solemn trust, ours shall keep it well as long as the light and warmth of life remain to us. Let us, then, at the time appointed gather around their sacred remains and garland the passionless mounds above them with the choicest flowers of spring-time; let us raise above them the dear old flag they saved from dishonor; let us in this solemn presence renew our pledges to aid and assist those whom they have left among us a sacred charge upon a nation's gratitude, the soldier's and sailor's widow and orphan.”

Logan never explained why he chose May 30. To take advantage of May flowers? Or to commemorate the coming of peace around that time three years earlier? Towns in the South observed Memorial Day on several different spring dates, including April 26, the anniversary of Confederate Gen. Joseph Johnston’s surrender to Union Gen. William Sherman; May 10, the anniversary of Stonewall Jackson’s death; and June 3, Jefferson Davis’s birthday. Logan’s decision to schedule a holiday for the dead in a season of rebirth may seem odd, but it resonated. The first national Memorial Day ceremony took place at the new Arlington National Cemetery, resting place of both Union and Confederate dead, on Logan’s appointed date, May 30, 1868.

Decoration Day, as it came to be called in the North, proved as popular as in the South—by 1869, 336 Northern towns observed it—and Northern ceremonies followed the same basic script as their Southern counterparts. In the North, as in the South, visiting soldiers’ graves on Memorial Day was a sacred responsibility for veterans, family, and all whose honor the slain had fought for. But that similarity belied the seething contempt between the victors and the vanquished. Each region used Memorial Day as an opportunity to stake its claim as the true heir to the American ideal, and speakers at Memorial Day functions made sure to instruct audiences that justice had been on their side.

By 1869, the GAR banned the decoration of Confederate burial plots, because “to throw flowers on Confederate graves would be a desecration of the graves of loyal Union soldiers.” After the GAR sent armed guards to enforce the measure at Arlington Cemetery, The New York Times commented, “Decoration Day, as it has been inaugurated, is a day that can never become national. . . . It is an appeal to the patriotism of one section at the expense of the pride and feeling due the other section. . . . It is a method of reminding the North that it is a conqueror, and the South that it is conquered.”

But when Reconstruction drew to a close, many Americans grew eager to put the rift behind them. The common bond of bereavement allowed the United States to conceive of itself as one nation again, and Memorial Day served as a rehearsal for reunion. Surveying the graves of Union and Confederate soldiers in his city on Memorial Day in 1869, the mayor of Charleston, South Carolina, asked, “Cannot we who survive catch the inspiration which swells the chorus of these who, once estranged, are now forever glorified?” As the passage of time soothed the initial agony of millions of mourners, some of the sectional hatred faded, too.

Beginning in the 1870s, Federals and Rebels came together in Northern and Southern cemeteries for joint Memorial Day ceremonies. President Rutherford B. Hayes attended one such exercise in Tennessee in 1877, and members of one Richmond veterans’ organization traveled to observances in at least seven Northern cities in the 1880s and hosted delegations from four more. Financial leaders rejoiced as commerce between Northern and Southern states began to free up. As a former Confederate major announced at a Memorial Day ceremony in Chicago in 1895, “We invite you to invade us again, not this time with your bayonets, but with your business.”

After a full century of sectional strife, however, reconciliation required some strenuous philosophical gymnastics. Southerners promoted the idea of the Lost Cause—the Confederacy had been a noble experiment, defeated not by a lack of competence or morals but by a shortage of resources—which allowed them to return to the Union on an equal footing with the North, emotionally at least. Politics, they held, not slavery, had started the war. Northerners, as a whole never particularly supportive of full equality for blacks, swallowed that line so the country could move on. The new, non-contentious Memorial Day depended upon a nationwide amnesia. On a day consecrated to remembering, most Americans chose to forget.

It made for some strange joint ceremonies—like the dedication of a monument to Confederate prisoners of war in Chicago, once called by a Richmond newspaper “the greatest South-hating city in all the country.” And reconciliation also sacrificed justice for African-Americans. “If this war is to be forgotten . . . in the name of all things sacred, what shall men remember?” Frederick Douglass asked at a Memorial Day celebration at Arlington Cemetery in 1871. As both sides downplayed slavery as a cause of the war (a position belied by one veterans group’s explanation of its refusal to attend a Union commemoration in New York: “We could not as a Confederate Survivors’ Association consent to parade with any organization to whom our flag would be objectionable and who recognize negroes on equality with us”), the social and economic inequality of blacks worsened. Memorial Day services were segregated across the South—particularly after the Jim Crow laws of the 1880s—and the North. Northern white commemorations ignored the contributions of black soldiers to the Union cause. Like so much after the Civil War, reconciliation would be for whites only.

The same original impulse that made way for reconciliation—the lessening of grief—transformed Memorial Day from somber duty to carnival of national recreation. But when the public, no longer so acutely despondent over Civil War casualties, began to show less interest in Memorial Day ceremonies, local veterans’ chapters relied on an old standby to draw crowds. Richmond held its first Memorial Day parade in 1875, and Chicago followed suit three years later. Observers now celebrated the war itself, rather than the dead, through these parades, showing what the Chicago Tribune in 1893 called “the inbred delight the American citizen has for the pomp and circumstance of war.”

By then, Chicago’s annual Memorial Day bicycle race drew more viewers than the cemetery services did. Five years earlier, President Grover Cleveland had gone fishing on Memorial Day rather than visit Civil War graves. Veterans excoriated him for it, but he was really just riding the cutting edge of a national trend. After Congress declared Memorial Day a federal holiday, in 1887, more and more Americans took the opportunity to enjoy the fine May weather with picnics and baseball games. The officers at GAR headquarters fumed. Decrying “indulgences in public sports, pastimes and all amusements on Memorial Day,” they urged local posts to “let no idle merry-making mar its consecrated hours.”

On a weekend so redolent of charcoal briquettes and hot dogs, need we spell out which side won?

—Christine Gibson is a former editor at American Heritage magazine.