Memorial Day was born out of generous gestures after the Civil War: Southerners decorated graves of Confederate soldiers as well as those of former Union enemies.
Memorial Day was born out of generous gestures after the Civil War: Southerners decorated graves of Confederate soldiers as well as those of former Union enemies.
Preparing to decorate graves, May 1899 Library of CongressIn the years following the bitter Civil War, a former Union general took a holiday originated by former Confederates and helped spread it across the entire country. The holiday was Memorial Day, an annual commemoration was born in the former Confederate States in 1866 and adopted by the United States in 1868. It is a holiday in which the nation honors its military dead. Gen. John A. Logan, who headed the largest Union veterans’ fraternity at that time, the Grand Army of the Republic, is usually credited as being the originator of the holiday. Yet when General Logan established the holiday, he acknowledged its genesis among the Union’s former enemies, saying, “It was not too late for the Union men of the nation to follow the example of the people of the South.” I’m a scholar who has written – with co-author Daniel Bellware – a history of Memorial Day. Cities and towns across Americ