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3 days ago · The man who ordered the first nationwide “Decoration Day” holiday was responding to reports of Southern towns decorating the graves of dead Confederates. By Gillian Brockell. May 25, 2024 at 6 ...
May 28, 2011 · In the South this time of year, rural communities gather to clean and decorate their local cemeteries. It's a tradition called "Decoration Day," and not surprisingly, it's thought to be the...
Memorial Day, itself, once popularly called “Decoration Day” by many, grew out of the older observance of southern Christians remembering deceased family and church members. Parts of the rural South still celebrate Decoration Day in its traditional southern form.
May 26, 2023 · Decoration Day is a tradition that involves cleaning a community cemetery, decorating it with flowers, holding a religious service, and having dinner on the ground in late-spring, early summer.
- Overview
- The First 'Decoration Day'
- A Forgotten Ceremony
- HISTORY Vault: The Secret History of the Civil War
At the close of the Civil War, people recently freed from slavery in Charleston honored fallen Union soldiers.
Memorial Day was born out of necessity. After the American Civil War, a battered United States was faced with the task of burying and honoring the 600,000 to 800,000 Union and Confederate soldiers who had died in the single bloodiest military conflict in American history. The first national commemoration of Memorial Day was held in Arlington National Cemetery on May 30, 1868, where both Union and Confederate soldiers are buried.
Several towns and cities across America claim to have observed their own earlier versions of Memorial Day or “Decoration Day” as early as 1866. (The earlier name is derived from the fact that decorating graves was and remains a central activity of Memorial Day.)
But it wasn’t until a remarkable discovery in a dusty Harvard University archive the late 1990s that historians learned about a Memorial Day commemoration organized by a group of Black people freed from enslavement less than a month after the Confederacy surrendered in 1865.
Back in 1996, David Blight, a professor of American History at Yale University, was researching a book on the Civil War when he had one of those once-in-a-career eureka moments. A curator at Harvard’s Houghton Library asked if he wanted to look through two boxes of unsorted material from Union veterans.
“There was a file labeled ‘First Decoration Day,’” remembers Blight, still amazed at his good fortune. “And inside on a piece of cardboard was a narrative handwritten by an old veteran, plus a date referencing an article in The New York Tribune. That narrative told the essence of the story that I ended up telling in my book, of this march on the race track in 1865.”
The race track in question was the Washington Race Course and Jockey Club in Charleston, South Carolina. In the late stages of the Civil War, the Confederate army transformed the formerly posh country club into a makeshift prison for Union captives. More than 260 Union soldiers died from disease and exposure while being held in the race track’s open-air infield. Their bodies were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstands.
The clubhouse at the Charleston racetrack where the 1865 Memorial Day events took place.
When Charleston fell and Confederate troops evacuated the badly damaged city, those freed from enslavement remained. One of the first things those emancipated men and women did was to give the fallen Union prisoners a proper burial. They exhumed the mass grave and reinterred the bodies in a new cemetery with a tall whitewashed fence inscribed with the words: “Martyrs of the Race Course.”
And then on May 1, 1865, something even more extraordinary happened. According to two reports that Blight found in The New York Tribune and The Charleston Courier, a crowd of 10,000 people, mostly freed slaves with some white missionaries, staged a parade around the race track. Three thousand Black schoolchildren carried bouquets of flowers and sang “John Brown’s Body.” Members of the famed 54th Massachusetts and other Black Union regiments were in attendance and performed double-time marches. Black ministers recited verses from the Bible.
Once the war was over and Charleston was rebuilt in the 1880s, the city’s white residents likely had little interest in remembering an event held by former enslaved people to celebrate the Union dead. “That didn’t fit their version of what the war was all about,” says Blight.
In time, the old horse track and country club were torn down, and thanks to a gift from a wealthy Northern patron, the Union soldiers' graves were moved from the humble white-fenced graveyard in Charleston to the Beaufort National Cemetery. By the time Blight was rummaging through the Harvard archives in 1996, the story of the first Memorial Day had been entirely forgotten.
Or perhaps not entirely.
After his book Race and Reunion was published in 2001, Blight gave a talk about Memorial Day at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, and after it was finished, an older Black woman approached him.
A sketch of the Union Soldiers cemetery, reading the "Martyrs of the Race course," in Charleston, South Carolina.
“You mean that story is true?” the woman asked Blight. “I grew up in Charleston, and my granddaddy used to tell us this story of a parade at the old race track, and we never knew whether to believe him or not. You mean that’s true?”
The American Civil War is one of the most studied and dissected events in our history—but what you don't know may surprise you.
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May 23, 2014 · On both sides of that conflict, north and south, families and brothers-in-arms of the fallen came together in grassroots commemorations to lay flowers on the graves of the dead, in honor of their sacrifice. This day of remembrance was initially known as Decoration Day.
3 days ago · For many years, the commemoration was widely referred to as “Decoration Day.” But as it evolved to honor not only Civil War soldiers but all troops who had fallen serving the country, Americans...
