Art credit: vintagevisions27.blogspot.com
by David W. Blight, Yale University
Americans understand that Memorial Day, or
"Decoration Day," as my parents called it, has something to do with
honoring the nation's war dead. It is also a day devoted to picnics, road
races, commencements, and double-headers. But where did it begin, who created
it, and why?
As a nation we are at war now, but for most
Americans the scale of death and suffering in this seemingly endless wartime
belongs to other people far away, or to people in other neighborhoods.
Collectively, we are not even allowed to see our war dead today. That was not
the case in 1865.
At the end of the Civil War the dead were
everywhere, some in half buried coffins and some visible only as unidentified
bones strewn on the killing fields of Virginia or Georgia. Americans, north and
south, faced an enormous spiritual and logistical challenge of memorialization.
The dead were visible by their massive absence. Approximately 620,000 soldiers
died in the war. American deaths in all other wars combined through the Korean
conflict totaled 606,000. If the same number of Americans per capita had died
in Vietnam as died in the Civil War, 4 million names would be on the Vietnam
Memorial. The most immediate legacy of the Civil War was its slaughter and how [we]
remember it.
War kills people and destroys human creation; but
as though mocking war's devastation, flowers inevitably bloom through its
ruins. After a long siege, a prolonged bombardment for months from all around
the harbor, and numerous fires, the beautiful port city of Charleston, South
Carolina, where the war had begun in April, 1861, lay in ruin by the spring of
1865. The city was largely abandoned by white residents by late February. Among
the first troops to enter and march up Meeting Street singing liberation songs
was the Twenty First U. S. Colored Infantry; their commander accepted the
formal surrender of the city.
Thousands of black Charlestonians, most former
slaves, remained in the city and conducted a series of commemorations to
declare their sense of the meaning of the war. The largest of these events, and
unknown until some extraordinary luck in my recent research, took place on May
1, 1865. During the final year of the war, the Confederates had converted the
planters' horse track, the Washington Race Course and Jockey Club, into an outdoor
prison. Union soldiers were kept in horrible conditions in the interior of the
track; at least 257 died of exposure and disease and were hastily buried in a
mass grave behind the grandstand. Some twenty-eight black workmen went to the
site, re-buried the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the
cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on
which they inscribed the words, "Martyrs of the Race Course."
Then, black Charlestonians in cooperation with
white missionaries and teachers, staged an unforgettable parade of 10,000
people on the slaveholders' race course. The symbolic power of the low-country
planter aristocracy's horse track (where they had displayed their wealth,
leisure, and influence) was not lost on the freedpeople. A New York
Tribune correspondent witnessed the event, describing "a procession
of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw
before."
At 9 am on May 1, the procession stepped off led
by three thousand black schoolchildren carrying arm loads of roses and singing
"John Brown's Body." The children were followed by several hundred
black women with baskets of flowers, wreaths and crosses. Then came black men
marching in cadence, followed by contingents of Union infantry and other black
and white citizens. As many as possible gathering in the cemetery enclosure; a
childrens' choir sang "We'll Rally around the Flag," the
"Star-Spangled Banner," and several spirituals before several black
ministers read from scripture. No record survives of which biblical passages
rung out in the warm spring air, but the spirit of Leviticus 25 was surely
present at those burial rites: "for it is the jubilee; it shall be holy
unto you… in the year of this jubilee he shall return every man unto his own
possession."
Following the solemn dedication the crowd
dispersed into the infield and did what many of us do on Memorial Day: they
enjoyed picnics, listened to speeches, and watched soldiers drill. Among the
full brigade of Union infantry participating was the famous 54th Massachusetts
and the 34th and 104th U.S. Colored Troops, who performed a special
double-columned march around the gravesite. The war was over, and Decoration
Day had been founded by African Americans in a ritual of remembrance and
consecration. The war, they had boldly announced, had been all about the
triumph of their emancipation over a slaveholders' republic, and not about
state rights, defense of home, nor merely soldiers' valor and sacrifice.
. . .
Officially, as a national holiday, Memorial Day
emerged in 1868 when General John A. Logan, commander-in-chief of the Grand
Army of the Republic, the Union veterans organization, called on all former
northern soldiers and their communities to conduct ceremonies and decorate
graves of their dead comrades.
Read the rest here.
