From Decoration Day to a Federal Holiday: How Memorial Day Was Made

In May 1865 — three weeks after Lee surrendered at Appomattox, two weeks after Lincoln was buried in Springfield — formerly enslaved residents of Charleston, South Carolina, gathered at the site of the Washington Race Course. The racecourse had been used by Confederate forces as an open-air prison camp in the final months of the war. More than 250 Union soldiers had died there, most of them from disease and exposure. Their bodies had been buried in unmarked graves at the rear of the property.

In the weeks after the city’s fall, a group of Black Charlestonians — some of them formerly enslaved, some of them clergy, some of them members of the Union army’s 21st U.S. Colored Infantry then occupying the city — exhumed the prisoners’ remains and reburied them in a proper cemetery they constructed at the site. They built a wooden fence around it. They labeled it, in white lettering on the arch over the entrance: Martyrs of the Race Course.

On May 1, 1865, an estimated ten thousand people processed through the new cemetery. Schoolchildren carried roses and sang Union songs. Black ministers read scripture. A choir performed John Brown’s Body. The participants placed flowers on the graves. The historian David W. Blight, in his 2001 book Race and Reunion, documented the event from contemporary newspaper reporting and described it as “the first Memorial Day.”

This is not the origin story most Americans were taught.

The origin story most Americans were taught

The story most Americans grew up with locates Memorial Day in the years after the Civil War, attributes it to General John A. Logan, and dates it to 1868. That version is true, as far as it goes. It is just not the only true version.

Logan, then commander-in-chief of the Grand Army of the Republic — the largest Union veterans’ organization and one of the most powerful political institutions in postwar America — issued General Order No. 11 on May 5, 1868. The order called for May 30 of that year to be set aside “for the purpose of strewing with flowers, or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion.” That observance was called Decoration Day.

The choice of May 30 was deliberate and pragmatic. It was a date on which no major Civil War battle had been fought, so no community could claim the day as a particular battle anniversary. By choosing a neutral date, Logan was making the observance national rather than local — and giving every GAR post in the country a single day on which to organize.

The first national Decoration Day was observed May 30, 1868. Major General James Garfield delivered the principal address at Arlington National Cemetery — the cemetery that had been established six years earlier on the grounds of Robert E. Lee’s confiscated Arlington estate. Some 5,000 people attended. Schoolchildren placed flowers on the graves of both Union and Confederate soldiers buried there. The mixed-decoration practice was controversial. It would remain controversial for decades.

The plural record

More than two dozen American towns have at one time or another claimed to have originated Memorial Day. Some of those claims survive in living municipal memory. Boalsburg, Pennsylvania, ties its claim to October 1864 — a local observance organized by three women, including one whose son had been killed at Gettysburg. Columbus, Mississippi, claims April 25, 1866, when a group of women decorated the graves of both Union and Confederate soldiers in their local cemetery. Waterloo, New York, claims May 5, 1866, and that claim was singled out for federal recognition by Congress and President Lyndon Johnson in May 1966, who declared Waterloo the “birthplace of Memorial Day.” The Johnson proclamation has been criticized by historians for resting on a thin documentary record while ignoring the better-documented Charleston ceremony of a year earlier.

The honest historical statement is that the practice of decorating Civil War graves emerged spontaneously and in multiple locations in the immediate postwar period. Communities — Black and white, North and South — were burying their dead, in some cases discovering each other’s dead, and were looking for ways to mark the loss. The custom existed before any single act of congressional or military authority codified it. Logan’s 1868 order did not invent the practice. It nationalized one version of it.

The Charleston ceremony of May 1865 is older than any of the others. It was also written out of the country’s institutional memory for nearly a century and a half — first by the conscious choice of postwar white Southerners who maintained their own competing Confederate Memorial Day observances, then by the gradual reconciliation narrative that turned the Civil War into a story of brothers’ shared sacrifice rather than a war of secession over slavery, and finally by historians’ loss of access to the local newspaper record that documented it. Blight’s Race and Reunion recovered the Charleston story from that record in the late 1990s. The recovery did not displace the Logan story. It expanded it.

From Decoration Day to Memorial Day

The transition in name from “Decoration Day” to “Memorial Day” was gradual rather than legislated. The two names ran in parallel through the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The American Legion, founded 1919, used “Memorial Day” in its observance language from the start. The Veterans of Foreign Wars also adopted the name early. By the time of the Second World War, “Memorial Day” had effectively displaced “Decoration Day” in popular usage. Federal usage shifted accordingly.

The expansion of the day’s scope was also gradual. The 1868 order narrowly referenced “comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion” — a Civil War observance for Civil War dead. The First World War, the largest American military deployment to date, demanded a wider observance. By the 1920s, Memorial Day was understood as a remembrance of American war dead from all American wars. The Second World War cemented that understanding. The Korean War and Vietnam expanded it further. The post-9/11 wars added a new generation of names.

The Uniform Monday Holiday Act and the long weekend

The shift to the modern observance pattern came in 1968. The Uniform Monday Holiday Act, Public Law 90-363, signed by President Lyndon Johnson, moved four federal holidays — Memorial Day, Washington’s Birthday, Columbus Day, and Veterans Day — from their traditional fixed dates to designated Mondays, in order to create three-day weekends. The act took effect in 1971.

The change was controversial at the time and remains controversial in some circles. Veterans Day was eventually moved back to its traditional November 11 date by Public Law 94-97 in 1975, after a coalition of veterans’ organizations and several state governors objected to the holiday being decoupled from its historical Armistice Day moment. Memorial Day was not moved back. The last-Monday-in-May observance has held since 1971.

The American Legion, the VFW, and several Gold Star organizations have at various times since the 1980s introduced legislation to return Memorial Day to its traditional May 30 date. The argument has been that the three-day-weekend framing weakens the day’s solemnity. The legislation has not passed. The current pattern persists.

The Moment of Remembrance

In December 2000, President Clinton signed Public Law 106-579, the National Moment of Remembrance Act. The act calls on all Americans, voluntarily and informally, to pause for one minute at 3:00 p.m. local time on Memorial Day to remember those who have died in service. The act created the White House Commission on the National Moment of Remembrance, which has operated since under successive administrations.

The 3:00 p.m. choice was deliberate. By that hour on a Memorial Day afternoon, the morning ceremonies are over, the visits to the cemeteries are largely done, and the country is at the cookouts and the family gatherings that define the modern long weekend. The moment was designed to live inside the long weekend rather than outside of it — to give the country a quiet pause it could observe wherever it happened to be.

What the record teaches

The history of Memorial Day is messier than the standard telling allows. The day was not invented by a single general’s order. It emerged in multiple places, organized by multiple communities — including the Black freedmen of Charleston whose 1865 ceremony has only recently been restored to the record. It was nationalized through the institutional weight of the Grand Army of the Republic and the legislative work of postwar Congresses. It grew from a Civil War observance into a remembrance of every American war dead. It was reshaped by the long-weekend politics of the 1960s. It now carries a federal moment of silence the country built for itself in 2000.

What ties every chapter of that history together is the basic act the day exists for: people standing in cemeteries, placing flowers on graves, reading names out loud. That practice has been continuous, in some form, for more than 160 years. The names of the months and the legislative acts have changed around it. The practice has not.

Sources

• General John A. Logan, General Order No. 11, Grand Army of the Republic, May 5, 1868.
• David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2001 — Chapter 2 on the Charleston ceremony of May 1, 1865.
• Uniform Monday Holiday Act of 1968, Public Law 90-363, effective 1971.
• Public Law 94-97 of 1975, returning Veterans Day to November 11.
• National Moment of Remembrance Act of 2000, Public Law 106-579, December 28, 2000.
• Presidential Proclamation of May 1966, recognizing Waterloo, New York, as “birthplace of Memorial Day” (President Lyndon Johnson).
• Historical reporting on the 1868 Decoration Day observance at Arlington — Washington Evening Star, May 30–31, 1868.
• Library of Congress, Veterans History Project archives on the Grand Army of the Republic.