Center Point ISD

During the civil war years of 1861-1865 an estimated 530,000 Americans died on the battlefield, or in theater. Three years following the conclusion of the war, to better honour the American dead, General Order 11 was issued by General John A. Logan, Commander-in-Chief of the veterans group Grand Army of the Republic (GAR). General Order 11 designated the Thirtieth of May, 1868, as the day to nationally strew with “the choicest flowers of spring-time,” or to place garland wreaths upon the graves of comrades, family, friends, strangers who died in the defense of the Union. To this date, the exercise of post volunteers and/or the general public on a spring day, then known as collectively known as Decoration Day, was held in the cemeteries of various cities, townships, villages, and hamlet church-yards across the nation to pay tribute to the Civil War dead.

Such an occurrence took place several years prior on the First of May, 1865, in Charleston, South Carolina, the city where the bombardment of Fort Sumter served as the opening salvo of a war to preserve the Union just four years earlier. On this day, according to reports from The New York Tribune and The Charleson Courier in 1865, a crowd of ten thousand, mostly made of emancipated slaves, convened on the site of a former prisoner of war camp to pay tribute to the two hundred-sixty Union soldiers buried in mass there. The site before the war was The Washington Race Course and Jockey Club, a race track that was later used by the Confederacy to hold Union captives who would later die from disease and exposure to the elements infield. The commencement on this open field consisted of three thousand black schoolchildren, who carried bouquets of flowers, and sang “John Brown’s Body.” Soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts, and other Union Regiments made of black soldiers, performed double-time marches, while ministers recited verses from the Bible. The congregation of assembled people on this day then gave the Union soldiers a proper burial.

Almost a year later, on the Twentieth of April, 1866, a group of southern women of the Ladies of Columbus, who had come to decorate the graves of Confederate soldiers in Friendship Cemetery, noticed the neglected Union graves. Columbus, Mississippi served as a hospital and arsenal town for the Confederacy during the war, mostly untouched by destruction brought to other towns and cities. Townhouses and churches became hospitals in order to nurse the thousands mortally wounded at Shiloh. Distraught by the sight of the neglected graves, the women went on to strew with flowers the graves of these Union soldiers, as well. This act in a nation still divided represented reconciliation following the conclusion of the war.

Logan’s Proclamation on May 30th, 1865, called for no ceremonies to take place on Decoration Day, rather veteran posts and comrades were to arrange fitting services, and testimonials, to respect the sacred remains in permanent residence in cemeteries across the nation. Before a crowd of more than five thousand present at the Arlington Cemetery, James A. Garfield, Congressmen from Ohio in the House of Representatives, and former Union Major General, explained why Decoration Day should be commemorated. On the former estate of General Robert E. Lee, across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., Mr. Garfield proclaimed from the mourning-draped veranda of the mansion that no one knows not of the dead buried there individual final moments and thoughts but only of their “...love of country they accepted death, and thus resolved all doubts, and made immortal their patriotism and their virtue.”

After several more speeches were delivered by other Washington officials, including General Ulysses S. Grant, and his wife, the children of the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Orphan Home, and veteran members of the GAR, advanced on the national cemetery, strewing flowers on the 20,000 graves of both Union and Confederates buried there, reciting prayers and singing hymns as they went along. Mr. Garfield set the standard of how Decoration Day should be commemorated going forward.

So that posterity visiting these gravesites would know “...the cost of a free and undivided republic,” Logan’s order placed emphasis not only the services and adornment of the graves of comrades with appropriate decorations but also on the importance of maintaining the graves and paths through cemeteries hosting civil war soldiers forever interned in silence so that visitors would not forget them. The first national commemoration that took place at Arlington Cemetery galvanized efforts throughout the Union going forward to honour and remember the fallen soldiers yearly on or around May 30th. Continuing to be observed locally in the states on any given late spring day, in 1873 Decoration Day in the State of New York became an officially recognized legal state holiday, becoming Memorial Day in the state.