Memorial Day

The Southern Roots of a National Holiday

“And I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Write, Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth: Yea, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labours; and their works do follow them.” ― Revelation 14:13

Confederate Decoration Day in Hollywood Cemetery Richmond, Virginia, 1867.

On this Memorial Day it seems fitting to honor the fallen by honoring those who first honored the fallen.  What we have come to celebrate as Memorial Day had its official first observance on May 30, 1868.[1] However, the holiday that we set aside to remember America’s military members who never returned from conflict began in the American South to honor the Confederate soldier who gave his “last full measure” to a cause larger than himself. 

In relation to the origin of Memorial Day, the first recorded decoration of the grave of a fallen soldier was that of Confederate soldier John Quincy Marr who was killed on July 1, 1861, at Fairfax Courthouse in Virginia.  Most notably and undeniable due to sheer numbers of participants was Decoration Day held in Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia, the first official one being held in 1867.  The North held a remembrance after Gettysburg in 1863 to dedicate the cemetery.  Here Lincoln gave his Gettysburg Address which prompted the claim early on that it was he who inaugurated a National Decoration Day.  However, the dedication of the cemetery at Gettysburg was just that and not the first Memorial Day.  The United States at large took up the practice of setting aside a national day to remember those killed in war upon the urging of Union General John A. Logan on May 5, 1868, adopting the Memorial Day practice held in the South that had begun two years earlier.[2] [3]             

At the close of the, as Paul Harvey use to say, Un-Civil War, there was an almost immediate effort by the women of the South to create social organizations to collect the bodies of their fathers, husbands, and sons and bring them home from the many scattered battlefields that littered the South and the few that left their scars on the North.  These women, largely widows and the now fatherless, formed ‘Ladies Memorial Associations’ throughout the South.  In recent years the work of these ladies has met with denigration and accusation that the primary purpose of such associations was to reinvent the South through pro-Southern propaganda creating “The Lost Cause mythos” for popular public consumption all the while orchestrating their efforts with proponents of “Jim Crow laws” designed to smother former slaves under foot and maintain “white superiority” in the post-Antebellum world. [4]

People are people and neither I nor any historian, professional or amateur, can peer across 160 plus years into the hearts of individuals to know their frame of mind when engaging in various causes or activities.  All we can do is look at the times, the framework in which our story is set, and strive, not only to interpret within the context, but attempt to know the “context of the context” in our effort to understand a time we are centuries removed from.  With this in mind, I am comfortable in rejecting such post-modern claims made by an increasingly nervous cadre of ideological historians and social activist commentators that are losing their monopoly on “truth” through the ever-widening access to primary source documentation made possible by developing technology.  In short, the Jenie is out of the bottle, and people all over the world are questioning the narrative they have been spoon fed for the last 50 to 100 years.  The established narrative regarding the American Civil War is no different. When one dares to look at the Constitution, and the damage done to it during and after the war, a murky image begins to materialize that reveals, perhaps in a supposed effort to “Save the Union”, the government actually made a herculean attempt to destroy it.  At least as it was founded.  That is something, even after 162 years, Americans are not ready to accept or even attempt to understand.  So, in a protectionist's mindset, those who defend the accepted historical narrative, have lately felt the need to circle the wagons via YouTube and other social media platforms in a campaign to destroy, or at least discredit, the Ladies Memorial Associations of post-war efforts and the Lost Cause they are accused of single-handedly crafting in southern parlors from Richmond to New Orleans and everywhere in between. 

The Virtuous Woman

Mourners at the grave of Stonewall Jackson.

In a time when women fulfilled the role as a Biblical “help meet”, the loss of your husband was devastating.  Life was hard and the days were long and the life of a Yeoman Farmer was not suited for your average woman.  The role of the 19th century woman in a largely Christianized culture was to emulate that of the Virtuous woman of Proverbs 31.  She was to run the home, tend the children, and support her husband in his efforts to support the larger family.  This is not a “sexists” view, it was life and reflective of society for thousands of years.  In this environment, with the man of the house now absent, the women set about to do what they could to bring a sense of closure to the immediate trial that afflicted their lives, that of burying their dead. 

One of the earliest occasions that seemed to be a harbinger of things to come was after Shiloh in April of 1862.  After the close of the two-day battle on April 7, Confederate General Beauregard sent a flag of truce through the lines on April 8 to General Grant informing him that the ladies of Corinth and the surrounding area had approached him with the desire to reclaim their loved ones from the field.  Grant promptly answered no.  He said owing to the immediate conditions he had already ordered them buried.  There is some controversy to this account, and we know in hindsight how the Southern soldiers were unceremoniously rolled into mass graves.  In a war among “Christian” adversaries this was a shock to the culture and a departure from expected convention.  The ladies would be left to grieve alone with no body, no grave, and no comfort of a family plot whereby they would eventually join their dearly departed. In a different age when Christian sensibilities ran high among the general population, the lack of a proper burial created an emotional and spiritual wound that ran deep and often never healed. It was simply viewed as mean-spirited.  A parting shot at the families of soldiers who had lost all including the grace to properly mourn that loss.

In this context, the Ladies Memorial Associations began to spring up throughout the South the first one on record as being in Winchester, Virginia.  As early as 1865 efforts were launched to collect and re-bury Confederate soldiers in their native soil.  Often bodies could not be located, collected or positively identified.  As a result, efforts to honor the fallen collectively through the dedication of monuments began to appear across the South.  These efforts were slow to produce the desired result due to the near impossible task of raising money among a people who had virtually nothing to give.  Before the war, the richest states in the United States of America were all Southern states all of which joined the Confederacy.  Mississippi, my home state, was the richest state in the Union ranking number 1 in “Free per capita wealth” at $2,128 while the richest Northern state, Connecticut, fell in way behind at $771 per capita.[5] After the war, such was the destruction and intentional persecution during Reconstruction, Mississippi has been the poorest state in America with its only saving contribution to society being Elvis Presley and Jerry Clower.  Oh, and cotton, still lots of cotton. In short, Mississippi was destroyed.  Along with the rest of the South.  Such destruction the United States of American has never wrought on its actual legally declared enemies in war, and what havoc we have wrought, the American tax payer funded a massive “foreign aid package” that attempted to indemnify our former foes from the destruction we visited upon them.  Not so with the Confederacy.  The South was largely left to rot on the vine after the war. 

The Confederate Memorial to 'Our Fallen Heroes' in Rose Hill Cemetery, Columbia, Tennessee.

Gardens of Stone

It was in this environment that the various Ladies Memorial Associations set about to do their work.  The challenge of scarcity of funds and the near impossibility of satisfactorily retrieving so many of their dead, was answered by erecting “common monuments” in town squares all over the South.  Those lone Confederate sentinels standing watch in so many Southern towns are not obelisks of intimidation to minorities or testimonies to hateful ideologies, they are grave markers.  They are the faithful attempts put forth by a hurting widow, a fatherless child, a mourning mother, to say goodbye to one they gave up to a cause before the cause was lost. - JLB  

[1] "Today in History - May 30". Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA. Retrieved May 30, 2022.

[2] Jabbour, Alan; Jabbour, Karen Singer (2010). Decoration Day in the Mountains: Traditions of Cemetery Decoration in the Southern Appalachians. Univ of North Carolina Press. p. 125. ISBN 978-0-8078-3397-1. Retrieved May 28, 2012.

[3] Jones, Michael (May 23, 2015). "Memorial Day's Roots Traced to Georgia". Northwest Herald.

[4] "Myth of the Lost Cause-America’s Most Successful Propaganda Campaign" History on the Net© 2000-2024, Salem Media.May 27, 2024 https://www.historyonthenet.com/myth-of-the-lost-cause

[5] Was the South Poor Before the War?, By William Cawthon, May 26, 2017, Blog, Was the South Poor Before the War? – Abbeville Institute