‘The choicest flowers of springtime’: Memorial Day is a tradition of honor and remembrance

VICKSBURG, Miss. (VDN) — Memorial Day and Veterans Day are the two major U.S. holidays dedicated exclusively to military service members, but they are by no means interchangeable. One is for the living, and one for the dead.

The modern Memorial Day proclamation calls on Americans “to observe Memorial Day by praying, according to their individual religious faith, for permanent peace.”

As a former vet, I struggle with the well-meaning “Thank you for your service,” on this particular holiday. While it is always well intended, this is not the day for those of us who served and made it back. This holiday is to honor and remember those who didn’t make it home. Those who were our brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, husbands and wives who paid with their very lives in serving our country.

The origin of the holiday—then known as “Decoration Day”—began in the later years of the Civil War, when the graves of fallen soldiers, both Union and Confederate, were adorned with flowers each spring. However, no official date was set during those early years.

One of the earliest recorded Memorial Day events took place on May 1, 1865, at the “Martyrs of the Race Course” cemetery in Charleston, South Carolina. A crowd of 10,000 people—mostly freed slaves and some white missionaries—staged a parade around the Washington Race Course and Jockey Club, where more than 200 Union soldiers had been buried in a mass grave during the war. The soldiers were later exhumed and given proper burials.

In Columbus, Georgia, a Ladies Memorial Association was formed to improve the local cemetery. Mary Ann Williams, the group’s secretary, wrote a letter published March 11, 1866, in a local newspaper advocating “to set apart a certain day to be observed… and be handed down through time as a religious custom of the country, to wreathe the graves of our martyred dead with flowers.” The group selected April 26, 1866.

In Columbus, Mississippi, an observance on April 25, 1866, gained national attention. The New York Tribune reported how the women of Columbus “strewed flowers alike on the graves of the Confederate and of the National Soldiers.” That account inspired Francis M. Finch to write the poem “The Blue and the Gray,” published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1867.

On May 5, 1868, the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR)—an organization of Union veterans led by Maj. Gen. John A. Logan—issued General Orders No. 11, also known as the “Memorial Day Act.” It formally established Memorial Day as a Decoration Day to remember war dead and to decorate their graves.

According to the memoirs of Logan’s wife, Mary S. Cunningham Logan, the general believed it was “not too late for the Union men of the nation to follow the example of the people of the South in perpetuating the memory of their friends who had died for the cause which they thought just.”

The GAR designated May 30 as the official day of remembrance to ensure the availability of “the choicest flowers of springtime” across the country. The order stated: “In this observance, no form or ceremony is prescribed, but posts and comrades will in their own way arrange such fitting services and testimonials of respect as circumstances may permit.”

Memorial Day was officially recognized as a national holiday with the passage of the Uniform Monday Holiday Act in 1968. The legislation, effective in 1971, moved the observance from May 30 to the last Monday in May.

So, on this hallowed day, don’t thank us who made it back, but remember them. Lay flowers amongst the graves of those who died and and make sure they are “the choicest flowers of springtime.”