Memorial Day
Memorial Day is set aside for the brave dead who lost their lives in the
noble struggle for our freedom. It was observed for the first time on May 30,
1863, during the Civil War at Gettysburg, and since that time the gravestones
at Arlington National Cemetery are graced by the American flag on the last
Monday in May. Memorial Day is a federal holiday formerly known as Decoration
Day. It was first enacted to honor Union and confederate soldiers following the
American Civil War and was extended after World War I to honor Americans in all
wars.
Memorial
Day marks the start of the summer vacation season and Labor Day its end. Begun
as a ritual of remembrance and reconciliation after the Civil War, by the early
20th century, Memorial Day was an occasion for more general expressions of
memory, as ordinary people visited the graves of their deceased relatives,
whether they had served in the military or not making it a long weekend
increasingly devoted to shopping, family get-togethers, fireworks, trips to the
beach and national media events such as the Indianapolis 500 and the Kentucky
Derby.
From
Gettysburg in, 1863, forward the practice of decorating soldiers' graves was
widespread. By 1870, the remains of nearly 300,000 Union dead had been buried
in seventy-three national cemeteries, located mostly in the South, near the
battlefields. The most famous national cemetery was the sixty acre Arlington
National Cemetery, near Washington. It was confiscated from the loosing
confederate General E. Lee.
The
Memorial Day speech became an occasion for the blabber mouths, politicians and
ministers, to commemorate and mention atrocities. They mixed religion and politics
that provided a means for the people to make sense of their history in terms of
sacrifice for a better nation, one closer to God. People of all religious
beliefs joined together. By the end of the 1870s the rancor was gone and the
speeches praised the brave soldiers both Blue and Gray. By the 1950s, the theme
was American exceptionalism and duty to uphold freedom in the world.
The fact
that there is one day given up to the memory of those dead does not mean that
they are forgotten after the day. The first parade was held In the Southern
Charleston, South Carolina in 1865,
freedmen (freed enslaved Africans) celebrated at the Washington Race Course ,
today the location of Hampton Park. The site had been used as a temporary
Confederate prison camp for captured Union soldiers in 1865, as well as a mass
grave for Union soldiers who died there. Immediately after the cessation of
hostilities, freedmen exhumed the bodies from the graves and place them in
individual graves. They built a fence around the graveyard with an entry arch
and declared it a Union graveyard. On May 1, 1865, a crowd of up to ten
thousand, mainly black residents, including 2800 children, preceded to the
location for events that included sermons, singing, and a picnic on the grounds,
creating maybe he first decoration day celebration.
Author Karl Wallace
