For the Black citizens of Charleston—newly freed, barely weeks into their emancipation—had laid claim not just to the bodies in those graves, but to the memory of the war itself. They had buried the Union dead with honor. And in so doing, they had given birth to what would one day be called Memorial Day.
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Image: Black American laborer between 1861-1865, known as contraband. These men worked as teamsters for the Union army.
And yet, as so often happens when the contributions of Black Americans intersect with the making of national memory, the record was altered. The act of founding—the first Memorial Day—was obscured, reattributed, covered over by another version.
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Image: General John A. Logan, Commander and Chief of the Grand Army of the Republic. Given official credit for establishing the first Memorial Day, May 30, 1868.
It would be white women in Columbus, Georgia, or Richmond, Virginia, who would be credited in the national record. It would be the Confederacy’s widows who were remembered for decorating graves.
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Image: Daughters of the Confederacy unveiling the "Southern Cross" monument at Arlington, VA, 1914.
The obscuring of the May 1 procession was not accidental. It was the result of a campaign—deliberate, organized, successful. That campaign had a name: the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
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Image: Members of the Margaret Jones Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy are pictured in Waynesboro, GA circa 1900.
And just as they built monuments to generals and named schools after secessionists, they also built a history—one where Black agency was minimized, and where white loss was sacralized. Decoration Day was theirs, they insisted—not born of Black mourning, but of white grief.
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Image: The Lanier of Glynn Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, pictured in 1979, decorate a monument in Brantley County dedicated to Confederate soldiers who died of yellow fever during the Civil War.
As textbooks and civic rituals adopted their version, the memory of Charleston’s Black commemorators faded. What remained was the myth.
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Image: The carving on Stone Mountain depicts the Confederate icons Robert E. Lee, Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, and Jefferson Davis. Commissioned by the president of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
3 years before the date Americans today are taught to mark as the origin of Memorial Day, the formerly enslaved had already done what the nation would only later begin: honor the dead, grieve the cost, lay claim to the republic’s moral promise.
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Image: Clubhouse at the race course where Union soldiers were held prisoner.Civil war photographs, 1861-1865, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
That their story was forgotten is no surprise. As David Blight has shown in Race and Reunion, the erasure was part of a larger pattern. From the very beginning, the freedom struggle of Black Americans—their courage, their initiative, their leadership—was not just resisted. It was rewritten.
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Image: An Alfred Waud illustration of the.Union soldiers cemetery known as "Martyrs of the Race course" in Charleston, S.C.Morgan collection of Civil War drawings at the Library of Congress.
And yet, the flowers were laid. The names were sung. The procession marched. The record may have been altered, but the memory endured.
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Image: memorial day for age with black Americans sometime in the early 20th century.Library of Congress
Primary Sources
“Decoration Day of May 1865.” New-York Tribune, May 1865.
“Union Soldiers Cemetery, ‘Martyrs of the Race Course,’ Charleston, S.C.” Harper’s Weekly, May 18, 1867.
https://www.loc.gov/resource/ppmsca.21659/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
National Archives and Records Administration. “Civil War Prisoner of War Records, 1861–1865.”
https://www.archives.gov/research/military/civil-war/resources
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More Primary Sources
Archives and Records Administration. “Records of the Field Offices for the State of South Carolina, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, 1865–1872.”
“Letters and Diaries from the Civil War.” University of Florida Digital Collections.
Blight, David W. “The First Decoration Day.” Newark Star Ledger, April 27, 2015.
Secondary Sources
Blight, David W. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.
Brundage, W. Fitzhugh. The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.
Cox, Karen L. Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2003.
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More Secondary Sources
Blight, David W. “Forgetting Why We Remember.” The New York Times, May 29, 2011.
Miller Jr., Edward A. Gullah Statesman: Robert Smalls from Slavery to Congress, 1839–1915. Columbia, SC: University of SC Press, 1995.
Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. New York: Harper & Row, 1988.
Gannon, Barbara. The Won Cause: Black and White Comradeship in the Grand Army of the Republic. Chapel Hill: University of NC Press, 2011.
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More Website Resources
https://www.history.com/news/memorial-day-civil-war-slavery-charleston
https://time.com/5836444/black-memorial-day/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/05/26/contested-confederate-roots-memorial-day/
https://amsterdamnews.com/news/2023/05/25/freed-slaves-started-first-memorial-day-in-the-us/
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