It's Memorial Day weekend, and as Americans prepare to mark the holiday, rural communities in the south have been gathering to clean and decorate cemeteries.
It would occur anytime in the late spring or early summer. The first national celebration of Decoration Day took place May 30, 1868, at Arlington National Cemetery, where both Confederate and Union soldiers were buried. “Forgetting Why We Remember” by David W. Blight, New York Times, May 29, 2011.Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory by David W. Blight (Harvard University Press, 2002) offers a full chapter on the history of Memorial Day.
Sometimes the terms "Decoration Day" and "Homecoming" are used synonymously. The holiday is now observed on the last Monday of May, having been observed on May 30 from 1868 to 1970. 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.
One big difference: Memorial Day is on a set date, while Decoration Day, which can also be found in the north, varies by community.
In its place is a park honoring Confederate General and White supremacist Wade Hampton.
On 30 May 1868 he made a stirring speech at Arlington National Cemetery explaining the purpose of the day and why commemoration was important. of Veterans Affairs states, “By the end of the 19th century, Memorial Day ceremonies were being held on May 30 throughout the nation.”. Its focus, though, still lingered on the Civil War. Among the full brigade of Union infantry participating was the famous 54th Massachusetts and the 34th and 104th U.S. For two weeks prior to the ceremony, former slaves and black workmen exhumed the soldiers’ remains from a hastily dug mass grave behind the race track’s grand stand and gave each soldier a proper burial.
BROWN: Alan Jabbour says many younger people make long trips to their families' ancestral mountain homes for a holiday they call their favorite. Writings of a Union soldier, unearthed by Blight at the Harvard University library, referenced the 1865 event in Charleston. In the South this time of year, rural communities gather to clean and decorate their local cemeteries. They say that history is written by the victor. “African Americans across the South clearly helped shape the ceremony in its early years,” he says.
The ensuing decades witnessed the triumph of a culture of reunion, which downplayed sectional division and emphasized the heroics of a battle between noble men of the Blue and the Gray. ALAN JABBOUR: But on that day, everybody who's connected to each other and to the people underground convene and have in effect a religious service in the cemetery.
And as NPR's Paul Brown reports, a folklorist research indicates that it could be the predecessor to this weekend's commemorations. 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. On May 30, 1868, when flowers were plentiful, funeral ceremonies were attended by thousands of people in 183 cemeteries in twenty-seven states. Memorial Day, as Decoration Day gradually came to be known, originally honored only those lost while fighting in the Civil War. In. Because the burial sites were “spruced up” and flowers were placed on the graves as “decorations,” the day was called Decoration Day. They scrape the ground, trim the grass, make new plantings, and prune old ones.
However, homecoming instead can be the equivalent of a founder's day for individual churches. 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.
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. Those attending placed small flags on the graves of veterans.
Designed by Improvboy Online & Print Marketing, List of Plants by Common & Botanical Name, DIY Gardening Articles & Landscaping Articles. Known to some as “Decoration Day,” mourners honored the Civil War dead by decorating their graves with flowers.
NPR's Paul Brown reports.
It turns out "Decoration Day" is about one of those families and that it is an entirely true and interesting story that gives us a glimpse into the rural South in the early 1980s. Wikipedia states that it is believed that the Decoration Day tradition “began before the American Civil War and thus may reflect the real origin of the ‘Memorial Day’ idea.” It was much more widely observed in the South than similar traditions in the Northern States. Three years after the Civil War ended, in 1868, General John A. Logan—the head of the Grand Army of the Republic, an organization of Union veterans—established that May 30 should be set aside as Decoration Day, so-called from the tradition of decorating graves with flowers. In the war’s aftermath, Americans had to embrace and cast off a traumatic past. Even before the Civil War, the Southern U.S. held a grassroots custom, or tradition, each spring as an event in many public and private circles to honor their deceased loved ones at their final resting places. which included a detailed account of that 1865 Decoration Day ceremony in Charleston. Americans, north and south, faced an enormous spiritual and logistical challenge of memorialization. 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. Copyright © 2011 NPR.
More than five thousand participants gathered for the first Decoration Day in Arlington National Cemetery and …
It wasn’t until after World War II that the holiday was more commonly called Memorial Day, but federal law didn’t formally recognize the day by that name until the late 1960s. Commander in Chief John A. Logan of the Grand Army of the Republic issued the 1868 proclamation declaring the first Decoration Day, which was celebrated with a large memorial observance at Arlington National Cemetery, with about five thousand attending.
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