If you aren’t planning to attend a Memorial Day Ceremony this year, I’ll skip the usual sermon scolding you for viewing the holiday as the kickoff to summer fun and not the solemn occasion it should be. Instead, I’ll share the history of Memorial Day. As is too often the case, it never made the history books that it was women who were most instrumental in creating this patriotic exercise embedded in our national identity.
Three years after the Civil War ended, Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Army of the Republic General John A. Logan issued a proclamation calling for a nationwide Decoration Day. As leader of a group of Union veterans, Logan directed May 30 to be set aside as a day for the nation to decorate the graves of the war dead with flowers.
With his proclamation, Logan adopted a practice begun three years earlier by southern ladies mourning the Confederate dead, but it was Logan’s wife, Mary, who deserves credit for persuading her husband to declare a national commemoration honoring all of the fallen.
Mary had good reason to support honoring all soldiers killed in the Civil War. As a volunteer Union Army nurse, she held the hand of many a dying bluebelly and grayback. After hearing that ladies in Columbus, Mississippi, had placed flowers on the graves of both Union and Confederate soldiers in the city’s cemetery on April 25, 1866, she watched as the custom caught on all across the South. Though not observed on any particular date, it was always a simple and somber ceremony for veterans and their families.
Mary envisioned the ritual as a template for a national celebration to help heal the country. John agreed, selecting May 30 as the day Americans should lay flowers and decorate the graves of more than 620,000 soldiers killed in the Civil War. Legend says John picked May 30 because it was a rare day that didn’t fall on the anniversary of a Civil War battle.
Perhaps, but many historians think that date was chosen to ensure that flowers across the country would be in full bloom, important because Logan’s proclamation contained a tragic truth: “These are men whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village and hamlet churchyard in the land.”
The American people embraced John and Mary Logan’s notion immediately, and Decoration Day enjoyed a century of popularity. In fact, in its first year, on May 30, 1868, more than 27 states held a ceremony. Over 5,000 people gathered at Arlington National Cemetery. By 1890, every former state of the Union had adopted it as an official holiday reserved for commemorating those killed in the Civil War. When America entered World War I in 1918, the tradition was expanded to include those killed in all U.S. wars.
From 1868 to 1970, Decoration Day was celebrated on May 30. In 1971, the name was changed to Memorial Day, a newly minted national holiday to be celebrated on the last Monday in May. At the time, a deeply divided United States was still embroiled in the Vietnam War, and Americans were tending thousands of fresh graves all over the country. I remember my parents being upset about the changes, and many older folks I knew called it Decoration Day for the rest of their lives.
However, changing the name and date did not alter the commemoration itself. Official Memorial Day celebrations have remained somber ceremonies ever since; with music, speeches and tributes to the fallen, delivered via a mixture of religion and celebratory national pride. The passage of time proves Mary Logan was right. Memorial Day gives us a way to make sense of our history in terms of the personal sacrifice required to build a better nation.
One hundred and fifty-six years after General Logan’s proclamation, we continue to celebrate Memorial Day. The commemoration has become a heartfelt way to not only pay tribute to the war dead but to tend all graves at local cemeteries. Small towns to mega-cities hold events, and many include parades. Doylestown, Pennsylvania, has run an annual Memorial Day parade since 1868, claiming to be the nation’s oldest such public display of patriotism. That is not correct. It’s actually the Village of Rochester in Racine County, whose parade predates Doylestown’s by one year.
So, if you don’t usually attend a ceremony, please go this year, and take the kids or grandkids. With our country more divided than since the Civil War, it’s an opportunity to join together with fellow Americans in honor of those who paid the ultimate price. I’ll be at the annual ceremony at Veterans Park in Wabeno at 9:30 a.m. on May 27. Join me. I guarantee the holiday will mean a lot more if you do.
Kathleen Marsh is a lifelong educator, writer, and community advocate. She has published eight books, four on the history of Townsend, where she and husband Jon are happily retired on the beautiful Townsend Flowage.
