Reprint from Newark Star Ledger
"The First Decoration Day"
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 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 freed people. 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.
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, funereal 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.
David W. Blight teaches American History at Yale University
where he is the director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery,
Resistance, and Abolition, the author of the Bancroft prize-winning Race and
Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, and the forthcoming A Slave
No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation.
