Every American knows that we now designate the last Monday in May as Memorial Day, a day when we pay solemn tribute to our country's fallen soldiers. Some of us, particularly some old-timers, know that Memorial Day used to be called Decoration Day.
But what few realize is that the first Decoration Day event was held on May 1, 1865, when ten thousand African-American former slaves gathered to honor the Union war dead in Charleston, South Carolina.
The story, lost for generations, was reconstructed fairly recently by David W. Blight, a history professor at Yale University, who credits "some extraordinary luck in my recent research."
Professor Blight happened upon some uncatalogued writings by a Union soldier in an archive at Harvard. One referred to the events in Charleston on May 1, 1865. Blight's further research revealed the essential pieces of the story.
In the last year of the Civil War, a prison camp for captured Union soldiers was erected on the grounds of Charleston's Washington Race Course, where wealthy slave-holding plantation owners had previously enjoyed horse racing and games of leisure. Toward the end of the war, many of the Union soldiers held in the prison camp died of malnutrition, exposure and disease. Their bodies were interred in a shallow mass grave inside the camp.
In mid-April 1865, groups of freed former slaves in Charleston decided to dig individual graves for each of the 257 Union dead in the camp, give them proper burials and markings, and prepare a day to honor their service and their sacrifice. For two weeks the Freedmen worked ceaselessly and selflessly. Around the new cemetery they built a high fence, whitewashed it, and constructed an archway at the entrance inscribed with the words "Martyrs of the Race Course." On May 1st they held the first Decoration Day event.
Professor Blight picks up the story:
Then, black Charlestonians in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, staged an unforgettable parade of 10,000 people on the slaveholders' race course. The symbolic power of the low-country planter aristocracy's horse track (where they had displayed their wealth, leisure, and influence) was not lost on the freedpeople. A New York Tribune correspondent witnessed the event, describing "a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before."
At 9 am on May 1, the procession stepped off led by three thousand black schoolchildren carrying arm loads of roses and singing "John Brown's Body." The children were followed by several hundred black women with baskets of flowers, wreaths and crosses. Then came black men marching in cadence, followed by contingents of Union infantry and other black and white citizens. As many as possible gathering in the cemetery enclosure; a childrens' choir sang "We'll Rally around the Flag," the "Star-Spangled Banner," and several spirituals before several black ministers read from scripture. No record survives of which biblical passages rung out in the warm spring air, but the spirit of Leviticus 25 was surely present at those burial rites: "for it is the jubilee; it shall be holy unto you... in the year of this jubilee he shall return every man unto his own possession."
Following the solemn dedication the crowd dispersed into the infield and did what many of us do on Memorial Day: they enjoyed picnics, listened to speeches, and watched soldiers drill. Among the full brigade of Union infantry participating was the famous 54th Massachusetts and the 34th and 104th U.S. Colored Troops, who performed a special double-columned march around the gravesite. The war was over, and Decoration Day had been founded by African Americans in a ritual of remembrance and consecration. The war, they had boldly announced, had been all about the triumph of their emancipation over a slaveholders' republic, and not about state rights, defense of home, nor merely soldiers' valor and sacrifice.
On May 2 the Charleston Daily Courier published a news report, excerpted here:
The source for the above is a wonderful piece in the The Post and Courier published just last year, which also reports how Blight's information came to the attention of Charlestonian Judith Hines:
While talking about the Decoration Day event on National Public Radio, Blight caught the attention of Judith Hines, a member of the Charleston Horticultural Society. She was amazed to hear a story about her hometown that she did not know.
"I grew up in Charleston and I never learned about the Union prison camp," Hines said. "These former slaves decided the people who died for their emancipation should be honored."
Hines eventually wrote a history of Hampton Park — the site of the former Race Course — as part of the society's "Layers of the Landscape" series, and included the story. Since then, she has advocated public recognition of the event.
It is a story, she said, that needs to be told.
And in a beautiful 2-minute video here, she does.
Professor Blight offers this in conclusion:
Over time several American towns, north and south, claimed to be the birthplace of Memorial Day. But all of them commemorate cemetery decoration events from 1866. Pride of place as the first large scale ritual of Decoration Day, therefore, goes to African Americans in Charleston. By their labor, their words, their songs, and their solemn parade of flowers and marching feet on their former owners' race course, they created for themselves, and for us, the Independence Day of the Second American Revolution.
The old race track is still there — an oval roadway in Hampton Park in Charleston, named for Wade Hampton, former Confederate general and the white supremacist Redeemer governor of South Carolina after the end of Reconstruction. The lovely park sits adjacent to the Citadel, the military academy of South Carolina, and cadets can be seen jogging on the old track any day of the week. The old gravesite dedicated to the "Martyrs of the Race Course" is gone; those Union dead were reinterred in the 1880s to a national cemetery in Beaufort, South Carolina. Some stories endure, some disappear, some are rediscovered in dusty archives, the pages of old newspapers, and in oral history. All such stories as the First Decoration Day are but prelude to future reckonings. All memory is prelude.