History Of 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, an 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 General 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.” It may come as a surprise that Memorial Day, in its current form, has only existed in the United States since 1968. On June 28th of that year Congress passed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, which moved four holidays, Memorial Day among them, from specific days of the month to set Mondays. That way, people and businesses could more easily observe and enjoy them. But the tradition of spending a day honoring those who gave their lives in the service of our country started over a century before.

The first official call for a nationally acknowledged day came on May 5th, 1868 from John A. Logan, then a Congressman (later a Senator) from Illinois and former Major General in the US Army. Logan, also head of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), a massive organization of Union veterans, proposed that a National Decoration Day occur on the 30th. The reason for him picking that day is unclear, though the two most common explanations are that it was not the anniversary of any specific battle or because it was a day the flowers would usually be in full bloom across the country.

Regardless, the date was adopted as Decoration Day after the decorations traditionally placed on the graves of war dead to honor their sacrifice. Ohio Congressman and former Major General in the Union Army James A. Garfield, who would later become president, gave a speech at Arlington National Cemetery. Thousands of people participated, laying decorations on 20,000 graves of Americans from both sides buried there.

As the decades went on, the holiday grew in importance and expanded to honor all those who died in the uniform of the US Armed Forces. Its alternate name, Memorial Day, became more and more widely used during the twentieth century and finally became its official designation in 1967. With the passage of the aforementioned Uniform Monday Holiday Act and the holiday’s move from the 30th to the last Monday in May, Memorial Day became what we know it as today.