YEAR: 1865Decoration Day
As the U.S. Civil War came to a close in April 1865, Union troops entered the city of Charleston, SC, where four years prior the war had begun. While white residents had largely fled the city, Black residents of Charleston remained to celebrate and welcome the troops, who included the Twenty First Colored Infantry.
What we now know as “Memorial Day”, Decoration Day was a tradition initiated by former slaves to celebrate emancipation and commemorate those who died for that cause. Soon after its creation, the old Texas aristocracy was able to co-opt and rebrand the holiday into a time to celebrate all lives lost during the Civil War. The concept that the population must “remember the sacrifice” of U.S. service members, without a critical reflection on the wars themselves, did not emerge by accident. In the Jim Crow period, both the Northern and Southern ruling classes sought to reunite the country around apolitical mourning, which required erasing the “divisive” issues of slavery and Black citizenship. These issues had been at the heart of the struggles of the Civil War and Reconstruction.
The development of Memorial Day, as a day “without politics” and a general patriotic celebration of all soldiers and veterans, regardless of the nature of the wars in which they participated, was the beginning of a longstanding American tradition to support and commemorate American wars with no exception. This is the opposite of the revolutionary origins of how Decoration Day emerged.
