The History of Memorial Day

[babsbunny]

Originally called Decoration Day. Memorial Day was officially proclaimed on May 5, 1868 by General John Logan, national commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, and was first observed on May 30, 1868, when flowers were placed on the graves of Union and Confederate soldiers at Arlington National Cemetary. The first state to officially recognize the holiday was New York in 1873.

In 1915, inspired by the poem "In Flanders Field," Moina
Michael replied with her own poem:

We cherish too, the Poppy red
That grows on fields where valor led,
It seems to signal to the skies
That the blood of our heroes never dies

She then conceived of an idea to wear red poppies on Memorial Day in honor of those who died serving the nation during war. She was the first to wear one, and sold poppies to her friends and co-workers with the money going to benefit the servicemen in need.


I got this from Suzane Northrop's newsletter, and I was really moved. :patriot:

[RoyGBiv]

1. More History ...

"Black South Carolinians and their white Northern abolitionist allies were primarily responsible for the founding of Decoration Day. In Charleston, South Carolina, where the war had begun, the first collective ceremony, involving a parade and the decoration of the graves of the dead with spring flowers, took place on May 1, 1865. . . ."

"In such collective public performances, blacks in Charleston proclaimed their freedom and converted destruction into new life . . . The freedpeople of Charleston had converted Confederate ruin into their own festival of freedom. They provided the images and metaphors, even the objects and places with which to establish the earliest 'theaters of memory' for the transition from slavery to freedom. . . ."

"The 'First Decoration Day," as this event came to be recognized in some circles in the North, involved an estimated ten thousand people, most of them black former slaves. During April, twenty-eight black men from one of the local churches built a suitable enclosure for the burial ground at the Race Course <which had been used by Confederate authorities during the last year of the war as a prison camp and where many died of disease and starvation and remain buried in unmarked graves>. . .On the arch, painted in black letters, the workmen inscribed 'Martyrs of the Race Course.' At nine o'clock in the morning on May 1, the procession to this special cemetery began as three thousand black schoolchildren (newly enrolled in freedmen's schools) marched around the Race Course, each with an armload of roses and singing 'John Brown's Body.' The children were followed by three hundred black women representing the Patriotic Association, a group organized to distribute clothing and other goods among the freedpeople. The women carried baskets of flowers, wreaths, and crosses to the burial ground. The Mutual Aid Society, a benevolent association of black men, next marched in cadence around the track and into the cemetery, followed by large crowds of white and black citizens. All dropped their spring blossoms on the graves in a scene recorded by a newspaper correspondent: 'when all had left, the holy mounds --- the tops, the sides, and the spaces between them -- were one mass of flowers, not a speck of earth could be seen as the breeze wafted the sweet perfumes from them, outside and beyond , , , there were few eyes among those who knew the meaning of the ceremony that were not dim with tears of joy.' While the adults marched around the graves, the children were gathered in a nearby grove, where they sang 'America,' 'We'll Rally around the Flag,' and 'The Star Spangled Banner' . . . ."

A "measure of how white Charlestonians suppressed from memory this founding in favor of their own creation of the practice a year later came fifty-one years afterward, when the president of the Ladies Memorial Association of Charleston received an inquiry for information about the May 1, 1865 parade. A United Daughters of the Confederacy official wanted to know if it was true that blacks and their white abolitionist friends 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 Southern and national memory, the first Decoration Day was nearly lost in a grand evasion."

-- Blight, David W. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

[bennywhale]

2. Touching though that is, it ain't true.

Poppies are worn by the British on "rememberance day", originally in memory of the million British soldiers who were killed in WW1. The poppy is worn because when the fighting stopped, over the coming months in no mans land, poppies began to grow, and the more superstitious among the soldiers believed each one represented one of their fallen comrades who were still buried under the mud. The poppies grew because poppy seeds can last for hundreds of years underground. The churning up of no mans land through war brought them to the surface and the killing fields became a sea of red.

Poppies for memorial day came much later, although still possibly inspired by Flanders field, where many hundreds of thousands of British were killed.