May We Never Forget The Fallen – Memorial Day 2023

Celebrated on the last Monday in May every year, Memorial Day is one of the most important memorial holidays recognized in the United States.

It is the day to remember all those who gave their lives in military service to protect America’s freedom in the many conflicts that United States troops have fought.

From as early as the Civil War to present-day conflicts, it is a day for American citizens to say thanks and recognize the ultimate sacrifice that U.S. military members have made.

Memorial Day this year falls on Monday, May 29, 2023.

The Early Days of Memorializing The Civil War

Though Memorial Day would not be recognized as an official federal holiday until 1971, memorial events remembering the war dead have been happening in the United States since 1866, shortly after the end of the Civil War.

The practice of decorating the graves of Civil War soldiers started in the South and became a slowly-spreading tradition among the people in small southern towns, eventually being called Decoration Day and then Memorial Day by the 1900s.

To date, numerous small towns and cities all claim to be the “birthplace” of the tradition that eventually became Memorial Day, but in all likelihood, many of these towns started their traditions around the same time.

Since most of the fighting had occurred in the southern states, it was the deceased soldiers from the Confederate Army who received attention from the family members and townspeople that initiated the tradition of decorating graves in their memory.

Deceased Union Army soldiers were buried in separate sections of the same private resting grounds and were generally ignored because they had been the enemy fighting against the Confederate soldiers.

The Battle of Shiloh and the Start of A Broader Memorial Tradition

The Battle of Shiloh was one of the major and bloodiest battles of the Civil War that left approximately 23,700 soldiers from both sides of the conflict dead or wounded.

Though many of those deceased were buried in mass graves at the battle site and others would eventually make their way to the Shiloh National Cemetery in Tennessee years later, those deceased who made it to their hometowns were among those celebrated the years following the battle that happened in 1862.

The acceptance of celebrating all the war dead began to spread in 1866 when a group of women in Columbus, Mississippi began decorating the graves of Confederate soldiers killed during the Battle of Shiloh.

Upon seeing the ignored and unvisited graves of some Union soldiers buried in their own section of the burial ground, these women took pity and laid some flowers for them as well.

Though the way the Union graves had been ignored for many years was a known practice, one woman named Augusta Sykes Cox had petitioned the women’s committee that handled the grave decorating that the Union soldiers should be recognized as well.

On April 25, 1866, she convinced them to also drop a flower on each of the Union graves while they decorated the Confederate ones for the sake of the mothers and wives of the Union war dead who weren’t there to do that themselves.

Like other traditions, this one also spread as the Decoration Day remembrance of all soldiers became more ingrained in both the North and the South.