Remembering another perspective on ‘Memorial’ origins

David C. Rankin

In his column Sunday ( “Waterloo and Moina’s red poppies”), Peter

Buffa correctly emphasizes the Civil War origins of Memorial Day.

He is also correct in pointing out that hundreds of towns have

claimed to be the birthplace of what was originally known as

Decoration Day.

After surveying the contenders, Buffa has apparently joined former

President Lyndon Johnson in choosing Waterloo, N.Y., as home to the

nation’s first Memorial Day service. But it is worth noting that in

recent years a number of historians have given pride of place in this

debate to Charleston, S.C. There, on May 1, 1865, nearly 10,000

African Americans and a handful of Northern whites held a ceremony

commemorating the lives of some 250 dead Union soldiers. The service

consisted of parades, prayers, speeches, hymns and the decoration of

graves with freshly cut spring flowers.

Buffa rightfully stresses that Memorial Day should be a time of

remembering “all those who lost their lives defending ours.” But

surely Memorial Day should also be a time of reflecting upon the

causes and consequences of the wars in which America’s youth have

been cut down like fresh spring flowers.

In the case of the Civil War, Memorial Day actually contributed to

forgetting what Lincoln had emphasized in his Gettysburg Address,

Second Inaugural and other speeches -- that a barbarous slave system

had caused the war, that 180,000 black soldiers had contributed

decisively to Union victory, and that the war had inaugurated a “new

birth of freedom” for all Americans. These themes, never accepted in

the South, had faded in the North as well by the last quarter of the

19th century.

As David Blight and several other leading historians have

suggested in probing discussions of Memorial Day services during the

half-century following Appomattox, it was easier for Americans to

celebrate and sometimes sentimentalize the death of 620,000 Civil War

solders than to confront the legacy of slavery and fulfill the

promise of equality.

Beginning in the mid-1870s, Memorial Day ceremonies increasingly

focused on forgetting and forgiveness, on the heroism of Confederate

as well as Union soldiers. Memorial Day became a major event in the

healing of deep sectional wounds. To be sure, the reunification of

North and South was essential to the nation’s future, but it came at

a heavy price, especially for black Americans, who where pretty much

erased from the national Civil War narrative, sacrificed on the altar

of sectional reconciliation and white supremacy.

Memorial Day itself has encouraged forgetting as well as

remembering. Engaged in a war that has produced a growing list of

dead American soldiers, we should not let that happen again.

* DAVID RANKIN teaches American history at UC Irvine. He recently

published a book with Cambridge University Press titled “Diary of a

Christian Soldier: Rufus Kinsley and the Civil War.” He is a resident

of Newport Coast.