Originally a Confederate holiday, Union general took Memorial Day
In the years following the bitter Civil War, a former Union general took a holiday originated by former Confederates and helped spread it across the entire country.
The holiday was Memorial Day, and this year’s commemoration tomorrow marks the 150th anniversary of its official nationwide observance. The annual commemoration was born in the former Confederate States in 1866 and adopted by the United States in 1868. It is a holiday in which the nation honors its military dead.
Gen. John A. Logan, who headed the largest Union veterans’ fraternity at that time, the Grand Army of the Republic, is usually credited as being the originator of the holiday.
Yet when Gen. Logan established the holiday, he acknowledged its genesis among the Union’s former enemies, saying, “It was not too late for the Union men of the nation to follow the example of the people of the South.”
During 1866, the first year of this annual observance in the South, a feature of the holiday emerged that made awareness, admiration and eventually imitation of it spread quickly to the North.
During the inaugural Memorial Day observances which were conceived in Columbus, Ga., many Southern participants — especially women — decorated graves of Confederate soldiers as well as, unexpectedly, those of their former enemies who fought for the Union.
Although not known by many today, the early evolution of the Memorial Day holiday was a manifestation of President Abraham Lincoln’s hope for reconciliation between North and South.