The Humble Origins of Memorial Day

How spontaneous acts of love became a national holiday

One hundred, fifty-five years ago this May 30, the United States began to celebrate Decoration Day. Initiated originally by Civil War veterans, the friends and family of servicemen who had died in the war, and local governments, Decoration Day was an occasion to honor the soldiers who had fallen in the Civil War, America’s deadliest conflict.   

At first, there was no official national commemoration. But immediately after the war’s end, Americans in different cities and localities began to pay tribute by placing flowers on the graves of the fallen. In one example, one year after the end of the war, a group of southern women decorated graves belonging to soldiers from both the north and south, demonstrating how Americans could bind the war’s wounds ar by paying tribute to the fallen on both sides. 

Arlington Cemetery. Alan Kotok/Flickr.

Regardless of which city or state can claim to be Memorial Day’s birthplace, 1868 marked the beginning of the first nationwide commemoration. General John A. Logan, head of the Grand Army of the Republic, “an organization of former Union sailors and soldiers,” proclaimed May 30 as the first national day of remembrance. Thousands of Americans came together at Arlington National Cemetery to decorate the 20,000 soldiers’ graves. 

It wasn’t until the First World War that Decoration Day went from honoring just the Civil War fallen to paying tribute to all those who perished in all of America’s wars. In 1971, Congress officially declared the last Monday of each May as Memorial Day and codified the commemoration as a federal holiday. 

In 1868, General Logan called on Americans to place the “choicest flowers of springtime” on Civil War graves, and emphasized the importance of “Cherishing tenderly the memory of our heroic dead, who made their breasts a barricade between our country and its foes . . . We should guard their graves with sacred vigilance.” To this day, many Americans spend Memorial Day following Logan’s call: visiting and decorating the graves of family members and ancestors who gave their lives in war, or otherwise attending a flag-placing ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery or going to a Memorial Day parade. 

Welker's Battery H, 1st Missouri light artillery at Shiloh. Allen Gathman/Flickr.

In the novel Starship Troopers, his paean to the fighting man, Robert Heinlein perhaps channeled Logan when he wrote: “The noblest fate that a man can endure is to place his own mortal body between his loved home and the war’s desolation.” Memorial Day offers us a chance to remember the soldiers who, time and again in history, have risked their “own mortal bodies” to defend home and family. 

In the century following the Civil War, hundreds of thousands of American troops fought and died in two world wars, Korea, Vietnam, and the Middle East defending  Western civilization from the murderous ideologies of fascism, communism, and jihadism—in the skies and on battlefields, on land and at sea, as infantrymen, airmen, and sailors. This Memorial Day, remember those who paid the ultimate sacrifice to safeguard our freedoms and Western civilization. May we never take their memory and their courage for granted.