Memorial Day

In 1868, the Grand Army of the Republic's (GAR) national commander, John Logan, proclaimed May 30 of that year a day when all GAR posts throughout the country would pay tribute to the fallen soldiers of the Civil War. Logan's pro-nouncement established Memorial Day (initially known as Decoration Day) as a semiofficial day of remembrance throughout the North, but the practice of decorating Union and Confederate soldiers' graves with flowers and flags pre-dated his proclamation. In 1866, for instance, the women of Columbus, Mississippi, decorated both Union and Confederate graves, an act praised by New York Tribune edi-tor Horace Greeley as a sign that the South was ready to reunite. Several other northern and southern towns claimed that their local rituals inspired Logan to make his declara-tion. Not until 1966 did the federal government declare Waterloo, New York, as the birthplace of Memorial Day.

The emphasis on honoring the average citizen–soldier departed from the past practice of primarily honoring national heroes, such as George Washington or the Marquis de Lafayette. On the first national Decoration Day cere-mony, 5,000 attendees at Arlington National Cemetery tried to strike a tone of reconciliation by decorating the graves of both Union and Confederate troops with the American flag. The tone struck by GAR posts throughout the land was less conciliatory, reflecting the increase in sectional bitterness caused by Reconstruction policies that required the South to recognize the rights of freedmen before gaining readmis-sion in the Union.

The official GAR ceremony called on all post members to attend church in uniform the Sunday before Memorial Day. On May 30, posts assembled and marched to their town ceme-teries where they decorated soldiers' graves and then con-ducted short services filled with patriotic speeches and music, including selections such as “God Save Our Union.” As one GAR commander from Massachusetts explained in 1874: “Memorial Day is the day on which we commemorate the memory of our fallen comrades, and let it be forever under-stood that we distinguish between loyalty and disloyalty.” The question of which flag to use in commemorating the dead also caused a rift between the North and South that hurt efforts to organize shared commemorative rituals. GAR members bris-tled at the thought of Southerners decorating graves or march-ing with Confederate flags on Memorial Day. In response, several southern states, in alliance with local Ladies Memorial Associations, began organizing their own rituals to honor their fallen heroes, creating Confederate Memorial Days that are still observed on different dates throughout the South.

Celebration of Memorial Day took on particular signifi-cance in the African American community, offering a time to celebrate the contribution of black soldiers to the Union vic-tory and to comment on the current state of race relations. The fraternity between black and white Union veterans, as evidenced by the willingness of the GAR to welcome black posts, received special mention during many Memorial Day commentaries in the black press. In addition, African American celebrants focused on Memorial Day as a moment to reaffirm the cause of emancipation and equal rights as well as union. In Boston, for instance, black veterans decorated the graves of William Lloyd Garrison and Charles Sumner on Memorial Day. In 1878, Frederick Douglass underscored the abolitionist purpose of the war in a Memorial Day address, insisting that the war had been “between the old and new, slavery and freedom, barbarism and civilization.”

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