Time Periods: Civil War Era: 1850 - 1864, 19th Century | Themes: Wars & Related Anti-War Movements | Reading Levels: Adult, High School
The First Decoration Day
The people’s history of Memorial Day.
2011. http://zinnedproject.org
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.
1865 view of the Union soldiers graves at Washington Racecourse. Library of Congress.
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.”
At
9 a.m. 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.
According
to a reminiscence written long after the fact, “several slight
disturbances” occurred during the ceremonies on this first Decoration
Day, as well as “much harsh talk about the event locally afterward.” But
a measure of how white Charlestonians suppressed from memory this
founding in favor of their own creation of the practice later came
fifty-one years afterward, when the president of the Ladies Memorial
Association of Charleston received an inquiry about the May 1, 1865
parade. A United Daughters of the Confederacy official from New Orleans
wanted to know if it was true that blacks had engaged in such a burial
rite. Mrs. S. C. Beckwith responded tersely: “I regret that I was unable
to gather any official information in answer to this.” In the struggle
over memory and meaning in any society, some stories just get lost while
others attain mainstream dominance.
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. On May 30, 1868, when flowers were plentiful, funeral
ceremonies were attended by thousands of people in 183 cemeteries in
twenty-seven states. The following year, some 336 cities and towns in
thirty-one states, including the South, arranged parades and orations.
The observance grew manifold with time. In the South, Confederate
Memorial Day took shape on three different dates: on April 26 in many
deep South states, the anniversary of General Joseph Johnston’s final
surrender to General William T. Sherman; on May 10 in South and North
Carolina, the birthday of Stonewall Jackson; and on June 3 in Virginia,
the birthday of Jefferson Davis.
Over
time several American towns, north and south, claimed to be the
birthplace of Memorial Day. But all of them commemorate cemetery
decoration events from 1866. Pride of place as the first large scale
ritual of Decoration Day, therefore, goes to African Americans in
Charleston. By their labor, their words, their songs, and their solemn
parade of flowers and marching feet on their former owners’ race course,
they created for themselves, and for us, the Independence Day of the
Second American Revolution.
The
old race track is still there—an oval roadway in Hampton Park in
Charleston, named for Wade Hampton, former Confederate general and the
white supremacist Redeemer governor of South Carolina after the end of
Reconstruction. The lovely park sits adjacent to the Citadel, the
military academy of South Carolina, and cadets can be seen jogging on
the old track any day of the week. The old gravesite dedicated to the
“Martyrs of the Race Course” is gone; those Union dead were reinterred
in the 1880s to a national cemetery in Beaufort, South Carolina. Some
stories endure, some disappear, some are rediscovered in dusty archives,
the pages of old newspapers, and in oral history. All such stories as
the First Decoration Day are but prelude to future reckonings.
All memory is prelude.
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Related Resources
Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory
by David W. Blight (Harvard University Press, 2002) offers a full
chapter on the history of Memorial Day. Here is the publisher’s
description of the book, which also helps to explain why the Memorial
Day story shared in this article has been hidden from public memory: “No
historical event has left as deep an imprint on America’s collective
memory as the Civil War. In the war’s aftermath, Americans had to
embrace and cast off a traumatic past. David Blight explores the
perilous path of remembering and forgetting, and reveals its tragic
costs to race relations and America’s national reunion.
In 1865,
confronted with a ravaged landscape and a torn America, the North and
South began a slow and painful process of reconciliation. The ensuing
decades witnessed the triumph of a culture of reunion, which downplayed
sectional division and emphasized the heroics of a battle between noble
men of the Blue and the Gray. Nearly lost in national culture were the
moral crusades over slavery that ignited the war, the presence and
participation of African Americans throughout the war, and the promise
of emancipation that emerged from the war.
Race and Reunion is a
history of how the unity of white America was purchased through the
increasing segregation of black and white memory of the Civil War.
Blight delves deeply into the shifting meanings of death and sacrifice,
Reconstruction, the romanticized South of literature, soldiers’
reminiscences of battle, the idea of the Lost Cause, and the ritual of
Memorial Day. He resurrects the variety of African-American voices and
memories of the war and the efforts to preserve the emancipationist
legacy in the midst of a culture built on its denial.” Read more here.
“Forgetting Why We Remember” by David W. Blight, New York Times, May 29, 2011.
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David W. Blight is
professor of American history at Yale University and director of the
Gilder-Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and
Abolition. Blight has won major historical awards, including the
Bancroft Prize and the Frederick Douglass Prize. He is the author of
manybooks on U.S. history.
Posted at the Zinn Education Project website with permission of the author fromThe First Decoration Day.
Posted at the Zinn Education Project website with permission of the author fromThe First Decoration Day.
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