Memorial Day, perhaps more than any other holiday, was born out of human grief and human necessity. While American soldiers fell in the Revolutionary War, in the War of 1812, and in the various conflicts of our young nation, the great bloodletting that defines us as a people and that forged modern America was the Civil War.
President Abraham Lincoln pondered why this calamitous war that literally pitted brother against brother had engulfed the nation. Lincoln struggled with the fact that both the North and the South believed God was on their side. Yet both sides couldn’t be right; perhaps neither side was completely right. And, Lincoln thought, it may be that God sent this terrible war, with all of its tragic loss of life, as a judgment against the nation for having profited from and allowed human bondage for two centuries or more. Yet that realization didn’t paralyze Lincoln.
In his second inaugural address he said,
“With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”
At the time, The London Spectator said of the March 4, 1865, address,
“We cannot read it without a renewed conviction that it is the noblest political document known to history, and should have for the nation and the statesmen he left behind him something of a sacred and almost prophetic character.”
And indeed you can hear Lincoln’s anguish as he came in the late fall of 1863 to one of the most momentous of Civil War battlefields, Gettysburg, where in many ways, the fate of the Union was decided. It’s clear one of Lincoln’s darkest fears was that he might well be the last President of the United States, a nation that was embroiled in the self-destruction of a great civil war as he put it in his speech at Gettysburg:
“… testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.”
That’s how he began his remarks as the battlefield was dedicated. That short speech that has become known as the Gettysburg Address turned really into what might be called the first observance of Memorial Day. He said, “… that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause, [for] which they gave the last full measure of devotion … that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.”
It was said of his address,
“The world noted at once what he said, and will never cease to remember it. The battle itself was less important than the speech.” (Senator Charles Sumner, June 1, 1865)
About the same time, shortly before the end of the Civil War in 1865, Henry Wells, a druggist in Waterloo, New York, began promoting the idea of decorating the graves of Civil War veterans. He gained the support of others including General John Murray, who was at that time the county clerk. The two formed a committee to make wreaths, crosses, and bouquets for each veteran’s grave. On May 5, 1866, war veterans marching to martial music led processions to each of the three cemeteries where the graves were decorated and speeches were made. As the Civil War was coming to a close, women’s auxiliaries in both the North and the South were decorating and honoring the graves of Union veterans and Confederate veterans. They began to coalesce around May 30th as the day to do that.
In 1868, General John A. Logan, the first commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, regarded as a forerunner of the American Legion, issued a general order establishing May 30th as an official memorial day to pay respect to all those who had died in war or peace.
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