Origins of Memorial Day from American Experience PBS

Memorial Day Origins in the Civil War

The generation of Americans that survived the Civil War lived the rest of their lives haunted by its terrible toll. Contending with death on an unprecedented scale during the four-year conflict forced Americans to improvise new solutions, new institutions, and new ways of coping with the unimaginable loss.   There was no effective ambulance corps to transport wounded soldiers from the battlefields to aid locations. As late as August 1862, a Union division took the field at the Second Bull Run without a single ambulance. After numerous pleas to the government by public health advocates such as Henry Bowditch, an ambulance corps was finally established in 1864.   Soldiers did not wear dog tags or have any system of personal records. Hundreds of thousand of bodies remained unidentified, leaving families with no knowledge of how their loved one died, or where they might be buried. When officials did attempt identification, it was often unreliable, resulting in live soldiers being recorded as deceased and dead soldiers being marked as only slightly wounded. By World War I, soldiers were wearing official ID badges.   There was no official system for notifying next of kin. If a body was identified, a fellow soldier might take it upon himself to write to the family of the deceased explaining how their loved one died and offering words of condolence. In the spring of 1865, Clara Barton established the Missing Soldiers Office in Washington, D.C. Her organization eventually helped provide information for about 22,000 soldiers who would have otherwise remained unknown.   There was no Memorial Day. After the burial of many Union and Confederate soldiers, "decoration day" rituals began to spring up, which included placing fresh flowers on soldiers' graves.   One of the earliest known celebrations took place in Charleston, South Carolina on May 1, 1865, when the city's freed Black residents organized a proper burial for hundreds of Union soldiers who had died in a Confederate prison, followed by a parade to honor their memory.   In the spring of 1868, General John Logan officially designated May 30th "for the purpose of strewing flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in the defense of their country," and Memorial Day as we know it today was established.