[ A precursor to Memorial Day occurred in 1865 when thousands of
freed slaves marched in Charleston, South Carolina to declare their
sense of the meaning of the Civil War, that it was about their
emancipation over a slaveholders republic.]
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THE FIRST DECORATION DAY  
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David W. Blight
May 29, 2011
Zinn Education Project
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_ A precursor to Memorial Day occurred in 1865 when thousands of
freed slaves marched in Charleston, South Carolina to declare their
sense of the meaning of the Civil War, that it was about their
emancipation over a slaveholders' republic. _

Memorial Day, illustration , (c) Owen Freeman

 

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 we
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.

1865 view of the Union soldiers graves at Washington Racecourse.
Prints and Photographs Collection, Library of Congress.

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 freedpeople.
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 a.m. 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, funeral 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.

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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
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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 is professor of American history at Yale
University and director of the Gilder-Lehrman Center for the Study
of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition [[link removed]]. Blight
has won major historical awards, including the Bancroft Prize and
the Frederick Douglass Prize. He is the author of many books on U.S.
history, including Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom
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Zinn Education Project Teach Reconstruction campaign
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* Memorial Day
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* Civil War
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* Emancipation
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