There is nothing new about remembering. People have always grieved for the departed, but death became a bigger part of America 150 years ago. Freshly dug graves of some 500,000 soldiers marked the countryside where four years of fighting had claimed husbands, fathers, and brothers, many from the same family on different sides of the conflict. A grieving country needed hope that it could continue, once again united.
A glimmer of that hope appeared within weeks of fighting’s cessation, and it came in the guise of flowers.
It had been April when Civil War began, 11 of 34 states challenging the constitutional structure that bound them together. It was April, again, in 1865, actually Palm Sunday, when two generals sat together in a small Virginia courthouse to settle terms of surrender. Springtime witnessed the war’s beginning and its end.
A few weeks later, on May 1 in Charleston, S.C., formerly enslaved men from local churches re-interred 257 Union soldiers who had died as prisoners. Some 3,000 black children brought arm loads of roses to cover the graves and thousands more gathered to watch a brigade of Union infantry march at the newly constructed cemetery. When the day’s ceremonies ended, the scent-filled array of color left no bare earth visible.
All over the country, flowers were placed where soldiers were buried, nature’s new life offering hope that reunion could begin
A year later, in Columbus, Miss., four women led a procession to Friendship Cemetery, burial site for both Union and Confederate casualties from the battle at nearby Shiloh. As recorded in the New York Tribune, something unusual happened. “Impartial in their offerings … they strewed flowers alike on the graves of the Confederate and of the National soldiers.”
Two more anniversaries passed. South and North honored their dead, separately. In the nation’s new national cemetery at Arlington, Virginia, Confederates’ remains were relegated to special sections, unrecognized with proper headstones. It was there, however, that Major General John Logan, head of an organization of Union veterans, declared May 30 as a time for the nation to decorate graves of the war dead with flowers.
The United States survived the melee of Civil War. The question of secession was answered, but management, and mismanagement, of decimated lands and lives separated the war-torn South from an economic and cultural progression into the future that was already well underway in the rest of the country. Grief accelerated into resentment and anger that have haunted the generations that followed.
Healing did not happen quickly, but, as anniversaries passed, springtime offered hope.
When, in the next century, another 500,000 American military died, in battles on foreign lands, their names were added to the memorial roll call. The red poppy became a symbol “that the blood of heroes never dies.” Blue, gray, black and white, the living continue to honor the dead on the day set aside, by law, for Americans to remember.
What is Memorial Day about? Our soldiers; death; and, yes, about us. We converge at this moment, recognizing a larger purpose which is the Republic to which we pledge our allegiance. America belongs to all of us, large enough to contain and even celebrate our differences.
The former president of the Confederacy never acknowledged defeat, never rescinded his support of the South’s defense against what he saw as “aggression” of the North. But, as an old man, long after the war’s end, Jefferson Davis responded to a reporter who asked about his motivation for leading secession, “Tell the world that I only loved America.”
This is Memorial Day. We can use this anniversary to place some flowers on our common ground.
Harriet Freiberger lives in Steamboat Springs.
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