Originally Posted by gregory
didnt know thats how the holiday came about ric...
Thank Blacks and the women of the South....
Following President Abraham Lincoln's assassination in April 1865, there were a variety of events of commemoration. The first well-known observance of a Memorial Day-type observance after the Civil War was in Charleston, South Carolina on May 1, 1865. During the war, Union soldiers who were prisoners of war had been held at the Charleston Race Course; at least 257 Union prisoners died there and were hastily buried in unmarked graves. Together with teachers and missionaries, blacks in Charleston organized a May Day ceremony in 1865, which was covered by the New York Tribune and other national papers. The freedmen had cleaned up and landscaped the burial ground, building an enclosure and an arch labeled, "Martyrs of the Race Course." Nearly ten thousand people, mostly freedmen, gathered on May 1 to commemorate the dead. Involved were 3,000 schoolchildren newly enrolled in freedmen's schools, mutual aid societies, Union troops, and black ministers and white northern missionaries. Most brought flowers to lay on the burial field. Today the site is used as Hampton Park. Years later, the celebration would come to be called the "First Decoration Day" in the North.
David W. Blight described the day:
"This was the first Memorial Day. African Americans invented Memorial Day in Charleston, South Carolina. What you have there is black Americans recently freed from slavery announcing to the world with their flowers, their feet, and their songs what the War had been about. What they basically were creating was the Independence Day of a Second American Revolution.”Professor Blight admitted, however, that there is no evidence that this event in Charleston led to the establishment of Memorial Day across the country.
Evidence exists showing that John Logan "adopted" for the North a pre-existing annual Memorial Day custom that had already been in place in the South since 1866. This separate tradition of Memorial Day observance which emerged earlier in the South was linked to the Lost Cause and served as the prototype for the national day of memory. Historians acknowledge that the Ladies Memorial Association played a key role in that development. Starting in 1866, the Southern states established Confederate Memorial Day. Various dates ranging from April 25 to mid-June were adopted in the different Southern states. By 1916, the June 3 birthday of Confederate President Jefferson Davis was observed as a state holiday in 10 southern states. Across the South, associations were founded after the War, many by women, to establish and care for permanent cemeteries for Confederate soldiers, organize commemorative ceremonies and sponsor impressive monuments as a permanent way of remembering the Confederate cause and tradition. The most important was the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which grew from 17,000 members in 1900 to nearly 100,000 women by World War I. They were "strikingly successful at raising money to build Confederate monuments, lobbying legislatures and Congress for the reburial of Confederate dead, and working to shape the content of history textbooks."
On April 25, 1866, women in Columbus, Mississippi laid flowers at the graves of both the Union and Confederate casualties buried in its cemetery. The early Confederate Memorial Day celebrations were simple, somber occasions for veterans and their families to honor the day and attend to local cemeteries.
Memorial Day was officially proclaimed on 5 May 1868 by General John Logan, national commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, in his General Order No. 11, and was first observed on 30 May 1868, when flowers were placed on the graves of Union and Confederate soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery. The first state to officially recognize the holiday was New York in 1873. By 1890 it was recognized by all of the northern states. The South refused to acknowledge the day, honoring their dead on separate days until after World War I (when the holiday changed from honoring just those who died fighting in the Civil War to honoring Americans who died fighting in any war). It is now celebrated in almost every State on the last Monday in May (passed by Congress with the National Holiday Act of 1971 (P.L. 90 - 363) to ensure a three day weekend for Federal holidays), though several southern states have an additional separate day for honoring the Confederate war dead: January 19 in Texas, April 26 in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and Mississippi; May 10 in South Carolina; and June 3 (Jefferson Davis' birthday) in Louisiana and Tennessee.
When flow'ry Summer is at hand,
And Spring has gemm'd the earth with bloom,
We hither bring, with loving hand,
Bright flow'rs to deck our soldier's tomb.
Gentle birds above are sweetly singing
O'er the graves of heroes brave and true;
While the sweetest flow'rs we are bringing,
Wreath'd in garlands of red, white and blue.
With snowy hawthorn, clusters white,
Fair violets of heav'nly blue,
And early roses, fresh and bright,
We wreathe the red, and white, and blue.
"Soldier's Memorial Day,"
words by Mary B. C. Slade and music by W. O. Perkins, 1870.