On Memorial Day those who have died serving in the U.S. military are honored and mourned. The holiday grew out of the Civil War (1861-65) and early remembrances of those who lost their lives in that tragic conflict. The first national observance was on May 30, 1868, and for a hundred years that was the official commemoration date. Today, Memorial Day is celebrated annually on the last Monday in May.
Origin of the holiday is generally attributed to a widow from Columbus, Georgia, whose Confederate officer husband died early in the war. Following the surrender, she wrote a letter to the editors of two newspapers in her hometown to appeal that a day certain be set aside to decorate soldiers’ graves. She signed the letter, “Southern Women.”
The letter was re-published in more than a dozen other southern papers, including ones in Mississippi, and her proposal was unofficially adopted. However, no specific date was agreed upon. In Columbus, Mississippi, the holiday was first observed on April 25, 1866. Documented contemporaneously, those Mississippi ladies chose to decorate the graves of both Confederate and Union soldiers. (“Editorial and Other Items,” New Orleans Times, May 1, 1866, as shown in Wikipedia article titled, “Mary Ann Williams” (retrieved May 20, 2023).)
Memorial Day’s purpose was to honor deceased Union soldiers when it was proclaimed a national holiday in 1868 at the instance of a Union Army veterans’ organization. Thus, in the United States there was a “Confederate Memorial Day” and a “Union Memorial Day.” Actually, there still is – Mississippi commemorates the former day on April 24 by state law and the latter by federal law.
Not all soldiers die on the field of honor; every war has its surviving veterans. And, depending on the war, uniqueness of the action, and population of surviving veterans, there have been, and are, other anniversary commemorations of significant battles and events that call for special remembrance. Think of D-Day and Pearl Harbor.
One such occasion was a reunion of veterans held in 1938 on the 75th anniversary of Gettysburg. Northern and Southern armies had fought there for three days in July, 1863. “The struggle was probably as significant to the outcome of the Civil War as D-Day was to the Second World War.” (“Remembering Last Reunion of Civil War Veterans,” by John McDonough, NPR broadcast “All Things Considered,” July 3, 2009. Transcript at npr.com.) In 1913, 50,000 veterans of those armies had returned there for the 50th reunion.
By 1938, 10,000 were still surviving of which 1,900 returned to Gettysburg. Twenty-six trains were leased to bring them from all across the country to that Pennsylvania battlefield. They were housed in 3,800 tents; the average age being 94, each attendee was individually accompanied. (Ironically, three of those old soldiers died while at the reunion.) Twenty-seven cases of whiskey were provided for the occasion. The transportation and accommodations were sufficient, but the whiskey ran out.
Many of the veterans showed up in their ancient uniforms. (Id.) (Personally, I remember my grandmother describing Perrin family reunions held in Madisonville, Louisiana, at which her Uncle Jules (1843 – 1931; Louisiana Co. E, Cavalry, Edwards Battalion CSA) would show up in his tattered uniform.)
National radio networks and major newspapers of the day reported the historical story. President Roosevelt arrived on the last day of the commemoration to dedicate a battlefield monument “in the spirit of brotherhood and peace.” In the concluding ceremonies, two feeble veterans, long-past being enemies, jointly lowered the American flag while the Star-Spangled Banner played. Two veterans came to the 1952 commemoration. Both old Confederates were aged 106 years.
In 2011, the last surviving American veteran of World War I died. (“Frank Buckles, Last U.S. World War I Vet, Dies at 110,” by Jennie Cohen, updated September 1, 2018, at history.com.) I once met a gentleman who was a veteran of both world wars. Awarded the French Croix de Guerre for bravery, Mr. Elmer Kincaid had been in the Army medical corps with Pershing’s American Expeditionary Forces in WW I. During World War II, he was a Navy chief pharmacist’s mate with whom my father served in the South Pacific. Also, when I was a boy, word was that many of the old men living at the Willard Bond Home across from the Madison County Airport were veterans of the Spanish-American War. The last survivor of that war died in 1992. (“Nathan E. Cook, 106; America’s Oldest Known War Veteran,” latimes.com>archives [etc.].)
The American Cemetery overlooking Omaha Beach contains the graves of 9,386 soldiers who died fighting on D-Day and in the operations that followed during liberation of Europe from the Nazis. (“Joy, Sadness Intertwine at Normandy’s D-Day Commemorations,” by Sylvie Corbet and Jeff Schaeffer, AP June 6, 2022.) In 2022, only a few dozen veterans of the Allied Forces invasion were able to attend the 78th anniversary ceremonies. Similar to the battle commemorated in 1938, all were in their nineties.
Patriotism, patriarchy, and tradition are currently condemned and labeled “nationalistic.” If a patriot is one who loves his country, I am for patriotism. In Greek, a patriarch is a father who rules. If patriarchy means a man who devotedly protects his family or a country that guarantees its citizens’ rights, I am for patriarchy. I believe in national survival and survival of the traditional family. May they forever flourish.
“There never was a land that better deserved the love of her people than America. [I]t is the duty of the good citizen not to be silent . . . and with sober counsel to maintain the everlasting validity of the principles of the moral law.” Charles Eliot Norton (1827-1908) “True Patriotism” (speech delivered 1898). “[W]hen you feel her great, remember that this greatness was won by men with courage, with knowledge of their duty, and with a sense of honor in that action.” For those who gave their lives, “now it remains [with us] to rival what they have done and, knowing the secret of happiness to be freedom and the secret of freedom a brave heart, not idly to stand aside from the enemy’s onset.” Thucydides (460-400 B.C.) Peloponnesian War (Funeral Oration of Pericles).
Ancient is the love of freedom, to the point of sacrificing one’s life to gain it and preserve it. That is why America honors her dead, including on Memorial Day.
Chip Williams is a Northsider.
