Sunday, November 15, 2015
Sunday, October 18, 2015
Monday, May 25, 2015
Memorial Day 2015
Here is an interesting article from the NYTimes from 2011 on the history of Memorial Day:
The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor
Forgetting Why We Remember
MOST
Americans know that Memorial Day is about honoring the nation’s war
dead. It is also a holiday devoted to department store sales,
half-marathons, picnics, baseball and auto racing. But where did it
begin, who created it, and why?
At
the end of the Civil War, Americans faced a formidable challenge: how
to memorialize 625,000 dead soldiers, Northern and Southern. As Walt
Whitman mused, it was “the dead, the dead, the dead — our dead —
or South or North, ours all” that preoccupied the country. After all,
if the same number of Americans per capita had died in Vietnam as died
in the Civil War, four million names would be on the Vietnam Veterans
Memorial, instead of 58,000.
But
the practice of decorating graves — which gave rise to an alternative
name, Decoration Day — didn’t start with the 1868 events, nor was it an
exclusively Northern practice. In 1866 the Ladies’ Memorial Association
of Columbus, Ga., chose April 26, the anniversary of Gen. Joseph
Johnston’s final surrender to Gen. William T. Sherman, to commemorate
fallen Confederate soldiers. Later, both May 10, the anniversary of Gen.
Stonewall Jackson’s death, and June 3, the birthday of Jefferson Davis,
were designated Confederate Memorial Day in different states. Memorial
Days were initially occasions of sacred bereavement, and from the war’s
end to the early 20th century they helped forge national reconciliation
around soldierly sacrifice, regardless of cause. In North and South,
orators and participants frequently called Memorial Day an “American All
Saints Day,” likening it to the European Catholic tradition of whole
towns marching to churchyards to honor dead loved ones.
But
the ritual quickly became the tool of partisan memory as well, at least
through the violent Reconstruction years. In the South, Memorial Day
was a means of confronting the Confederacy’s defeat but without
repudiating its cause. Some Southern orators stressed Christian notions
of noble sacrifice. Others, however, used the ritual for Confederate
vindication and renewed assertions of white supremacy. Blacks had a
place in this Confederate narrative, but only as time-warped loyal
slaves who were supposed to remain frozen in the past. The
Lost Cause tradition thrived in Confederate Memorial Day rhetoric; the
Southern dead were honored as the true “patriots,” defenders of their
homeland, sovereign rights, a natural racial order and a “cause” that
had been overwhelmed by “numbers and resources” but never defeated on
battlefields.
Yankee
Memorial Day orations often righteously claimed the high ground of
blood sacrifice to save the Union and destroy slavery. It was not
uncommon for a speaker to honor the fallen of both sides, but still lay
the war guilt on the “rebel dead.” Many a lonely widow or mother at
these observances painfully endured expressions of joyous death on the
altars of national survival.
Some
events even stressed the Union dead as the source of a new egalitarian
America, and a civic rather than a racial or ethnic definition of
citizenship. In Wilmington, Del., in 1869, Memorial Day included a
procession of Methodists, Baptists, Unitarians and Catholics; white
Grand Army of the Republic posts in parade with a black post; and the
“Mount Vernon Cornet Band (colored)” keeping step with the “Irish
Nationalists with the harp and the sunburst flag of Erin.”
But
for the earliest and most remarkable Memorial Day, we must return to
where the war began. By the spring of 1865, after a long siege and
prolonged bombardment, the beautiful port city of Charleston, S.C., lay
in ruin and occupied by Union troops. Among the first soldiers to enter
and march up Meeting Street singing liberation songs was the 21st United
States Colored Infantry; their commander accepted the city’s official
surrender.
Whites
had largely abandoned the city, but thousands of blacks, mostly former
slaves, had remained, and they conducted a series of commemorations to
declare their sense of the meaning of the war.
The
largest of these events, forgotten until I had some extraordinary luck
in an archive at Harvard, took place on May 1, 1865. During the final
year of the war, the Confederates had converted the city’s Washington
Race Course and Jockey Club into an outdoor prison. Union captives were
kept in horrible conditions in the interior of the track; at least 257
died of disease and were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the
grandstand.
After
the Confederate evacuation of Charleston black workmen went to the
site, reburied the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around
the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an
entrance on which they inscribed the words, “Martyrs of the Race
Course.”
The
symbolic power of this Low Country planter aristocracy’s bastion was
not lost on the freedpeople, who then, in cooperation with white
missionaries and teachers, staged a parade of 10,000 on the track. 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.”
The
procession was led by 3,000 black schoolchildren carrying armloads of
roses and singing the Union marching song “John Brown’s Body.” Several
hundred black women followed with baskets of flowers, wreaths and
crosses. Then came black men marching in cadence, followed by
contingents of Union infantrymen. Within the cemetery enclosure a black
children’s choir sang “We’ll Rally Around the Flag,” the “Star-Spangled
Banner” and spirituals before a series of black ministers read from the
Bible.
After
the dedication the crowd dispersed into the infield and did what many
of us do on Memorial Day: enjoyed picnics, listened to speeches and
watched soldiers drill. Among the full brigade of Union infantrymen
participating were the famous 54th Massachusetts and the 34th and 104th
United States Colored Troops, who performed a special double-columned
march around the gravesite.
The
war was over, and Memorial Day had been founded by African-Americans in
a ritual of remembrance and consecration. The war, they had boldly
announced, had been about the triumph of their emancipation over a
slaveholders’ republic. They were themselves the true patriots.
Despite
the size and some newspaper coverage of the event, its memory was
suppressed by white Charlestonians in favor of their own version of the
day. From 1876 on, after white Democrats took back control of South
Carolina politics and the Lost Cause defined public memory and race
relations, the day’s racecourse origin vanished.
Indeed,
51 years later, the president of the Ladies’ Memorial Association of
Charleston received an inquiry from a United Daughters of the
Confederacy official in New Orleans asking if it was true that blacks
had engaged in such a burial rite in 1865; the story had apparently
migrated westward in community memory. Mrs. S. C. Beckwith, leader of
the association, responded tersely, “I regret that I was unable to
gather any official information in answer to this.” Beckwith
may or may not have known about the 1865 event; her own “official”
story had become quite different and had no place for the former slaves’
march on their masters’ racecourse. In the struggle over memory and
meaning in any society, some stories just get lost while others attain
mainstream recognition.
AS
we mark the Civil War’s sesquicentennial, we might reflect on Frederick
Douglass’s words in an 1878 Memorial Day speech in New York City, in
which he unwittingly gave voice to the forgotten Charleston marchers. He
said the war was not a struggle of mere “sectional character,” but a
“war of ideas, a battle of principles.” It was “a war between the old
and the new, slavery and freedom, barbarism and civilization ... and in
dead earnest for something beyond the battlefield.” With or against
Douglass, we still debate the “something” that the Civil War dead
represent.
The
old racetrack is gone, but an oval roadway survives on the site in
Hampton Park, named for Wade Hampton, former Confederate general and the
governor of South Carolina after the end of Reconstruction. The old
gravesite of the Martyrs of the Race Course is gone too; they were
reinterred in the 1880s at a national cemetery in Beaufort, S.C. But
the event is no longer forgotten. Last year I had the great honor of
helping a coalition of Charlestonians, including the mayor, Joseph P.
Riley, dedicate a marker to this first Memorial Day by a reflecting pool
in Hampton Park. By
their labor, their words, their songs and their solemn parade on their
former owners’ racecourse, black Charlestonians created for themselves,
and for us, the Independence Day of a Second American Revolution.
Friday, May 1, 2015
Happy Law Day May 1, 2015
Check out the following sites to learn more:
History.com:
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/president-eisenhower-proclaims-law-day
United States Courts:
http://news.uscourts.gov/law-day-2015-us-courts-honor-magna-carta-rule-law-today
American Bar Association:
http://www.americanbar.org/groups/public_education/initiatives_awards/lawday_2015.html
Library of Congress:
A Magna Carta MOOC
http://blogs.loc.gov/law/2014/10/a-magna-carta-mooc/
law.gov
http://loc.gov/law/http://loc.gov/law/
Wednesday, April 22, 2015
Happy Earth Day!! Check out the following links!
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