Decoration Day

Decoration Day

In researching the story of the Confederate Monument in Oak Woods Cemetery for the Hyde Park Herald, I was reminded of the origins and meaning of Decoration Day as I read accounts of the ceremonies there every year until they just faded away, the Confederate mound and GAR resting places nearly forgotten.

Today, outside the Hyde Park Trader Joe’s, an older man sat, with a cup. As people walked past him, ignoring him as they do so many of the people begging at the shopping center, he said, “the price of freedom is not free.” He was collecting and honoring the day that honors that price.  

An origin of Decoration Day happened in the last days of the Civil War. After the Emancipation Proclamation, prisoner exchanges ended because the Confederates refused to release Black soldiers. Conditions in the prison camps deteriorated, some quite deliberately appalling. One such was the Planters’ Racecourse in Charleston, South Carolina, where Union prisoners were crowded, without shelter, without adequate food. As they died, they were buried without coffins in unmarked graves. As the war was ending, white Charlestonians fled. Black Charlestonians, newly free, turned the racecourse into a proper graveyard and posted a sign that identified the men as the “Martyrs of the Racecourse.” A procession brought flowers to cover the newly redug graves. There were speeches, prayers, and song, honoring the martyrs. A full brigade of Union infantry marched around the graves. Memory of the event was erased until David W. Blight recently uncovered the history.

Rumors of the event reached the Grand Army of the Republic, a veterans organization, which declared May 30 as Decoration Day. It wasn’t about a particular battle. It was about the sacrifice. It was about remembering the comrades and relatives lost. Everyone had lost someone. The outline of remembrance with a procession or parade, speeches, prayers, song, and flowers was set.

At first it was to decorate the graves of Union men who died during the war. Then it served to remember those who had served, who had been willing to die. In May 1872, in Oak Woods Cemetery, a special train arrived after the grand parade in downtown Chicago. A parade of Hyde Park Police and the Great Western Light Guard marched to a hymn to visit the scattered graves in the private cemetery. The newspaper listed all of the graves, including that of Perah B. Farnsworth, who had fought in the Revolutionary War. The speaker said, “We are a nation because of these sacrifices.” Another said, by honoring these men, “we give to posterity the strongest possible guaranty that our nation and institutions shall live forever.”

The GAR erected a statue of Abraham Lincoln giving the Gettysburg Address over the plot where the south side members were buried. The Gettysburg Address is in a sense the first Decoration Day speech, giving meaning to the sacrifice.

In 1880, the speaker pointed out that the day was a time when for one day the “hum of traffic ceases and the pure air of historic memories sweeps through the crowded hives of industry.” In the “quiet tenting grounds of the dead” we remember those who died for principle against treason.

It was sad to trace the event through time as the men who had fought aged, their numbers dwindled. The war became exciting stories and then vague memories of a few battles. The places where thousands died were forgotten. The last member of the GAR died in 1956.

Even in 1894, the Inter Ocean was noting that the generation of veterans was passing away, though some were able enough to march in the parade. Many of the people watching were the children of recent immigrants who scarcely know the meaning of the war. As one of the speakers, Dr. Caldwell, said at Oak Woods Cemetery that year, “in the public schools we scarcely go into the events of the war and their meaning for fear of hurting the feelings of demagogues.”

When I was a girl, Decoration Day still meant a parade. I marched as a Girl Scout. I swear there was a tank from the local armory. Then our little family drove into the countryside, into the past, driving to a series of small rural cemeteries, adding red geraniums to the headstones, noting if some cousin had gotten there first. It kept those my folks had known and loved a little bit alive, to have their names said aloud. Maybe Egyptian pharaohs had that right.

The American Battle Monuments Commission on Facebook has the same thought. As fewer and fewer Americans bother to visit the World War II cemeteries, the commission started naming one of the men buried overseas each day.  

I have been to the quiet tenting grounds of the dead. My father and mother are buried in the national cemetery in Bushnell, Florida. For a while it was very busy. But their section filled and grew quiet. But these are the dead who went on to live full lives. I’ve also been to some of the Battle Monument cemeteries in Europe, where men my father knew never got to become old men.

In Normandy, I found the grave of a man Dad probably knew in boot camp. He was from Dad’s unit. Dad said that if he’d stayed in the 28th Regiment, 8th Division, he wouldn’t have made it through the war. In St. Avold, we found Lieutenant Banko, who had been relatively safe in headquarters, censoring the men’s letters home, until he asked to be assigned more active duty. His jeep ran over a mine.

In Epinal, we found Sergeant Garfield, who was trying to demonstrate how to disarm a new type of land mine so that his men could stay safe. But the mine was unstable in the bitter cold of January 1945. It blew up. One of my father’s Army buddies, a man from rural Georgia, teared up, forty years later, remembering Garfield and marveled at how close he had become with a Jewish fella from New York. Combat had brought them together.

And along a lonely railroad track where on New Year’s Eve, a man in my Dad’s combat team fought to his last breath to keep the Germans from taking a town in France, we visited the marker where the remains of Maurice Lloyd were found thirty years later, still guarding Lemberg, whose patron saint was Maurice.

One thing I learned in Europe is that the Europeans take remembrance very seriously. They come out to tend the graves of those who paid the ultimate price.

In 1971, Congress changed the name to Memorial Day and made it a Monday holiday along with all the others. We celebrate it now as the start of summer. There’s a lot of happiness shaming happening on social media. My point isn’t that we shouldn’t take joy away from picnics. My point is that we should also remember. Maybe also pause to recall the greatest of remembrance day speeches: