NONFICTION       
"May 30 was chosen in 1868 to be Decoration Day, in part,
because the end of May was thought to be when the greatest
variety of flowers would be in bloom throughout the United States."

​                                   Photo by Weebly.com                                    

The Making of a Long Holiday Weekend
by  Monika Trobits

​It all began in 1865 which, as it turned out, evolved into a year of significant endings. These included the American Civil War in the spring, followed by the deaths of President Abraham Lincoln, his assassin John Wilkes Booth, and four of Booth’s co-conspirators. The existence of the Confederate States of America ended and, in December, slavery was officially abolished in the United States. Several of those events led to a holiday we now know as Memorial Day.
 
For just about a century, Memorial Day was known as Decoration Day. That name came from the tradition of decorating the graves of fallen Civil War soldiers. More than 600,000 soldiers died during the four years of the Civil War (1861-65); approximately 360,000 for the Union, approximately 285,000 for the Confederacy.
 
Various cities and towns in both the North and the South have claimed to be the birthplace of Decoration Day. The tradition likely began in the South in large part because the Civil War was mainly fought there. During the war years, Southern women began tending the graves of Confederate soldiers buried in their local cemeteries, particularly after a battle had occurred nearby. These cemeteries sometimes housed burials for Union soldiers as well. But Union graves were often neglected because they were viewed by many as housing the enemy. While attitudes towards Union burials differed throughout the South, in some Southern communities the women would graciously leave flowers on the Union graves as well, feeling that every soldier was someone's son. 
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​The news of Confederate Army General Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Union Army General Ulysses S. Grant in Appomattox Court House, Virginia, followed by Lincoln’s assassination and the beginning of the end of the war rapidly spread throughout the South. That included South Carolina which had been the first state to secede from the Union in December 1860. When news of those events reached Charleston, many of its wealthy white residents fled the city, abandoning their property. Their former black slaves, who had been left behind, decided to honor the more than 260 Union soldiers who had died miserably in a nearby, makeshift Confederate prison camp. That prison camp had been established on the grounds of the Washington Race Course and Jockey Club. There, Union soldiers had died from disease and exposure while being held in the race track’s open-air field. Those soldiers had then been hastily buried in a shallow mass grave behind the grandstands. The freedmen properly reburied the Union soldiers, erecting a fence around the site. A sign was hung on the fence reading: Martyrs of the Race Course. A May Day procession and ceremony took place there on May 1, 1865, attracting thousands of participants. That event has been cited as the first Memorial Day commemoration in the United States.
 
(Thanks to a gift from a wealthy Northerner, the Union soldiers’ graves were eventually moved approximately 70 miles southwest to the Beaufort National Cemetery in Beaufort, South Carolina. That cemetery had been established in 1863 for the reinterment of Union soldiers and sailors who had died in the area during the Civil War years and had been buried here and there. Today, the cemetery contains more than 14,000 burials, a mixture of direct burials and reinterments from other makeshift cemeteries. Included are the remains of more than 100 Confederate soldiers.)
 
May 30 was chosen in 1868 to be Decoration Day, in part, because the end of May was thought to be when the greatest variety of flowers would be in bloom throughout the United States. The first official national observance of Decoration Day was held at Arlington National Cemetery in northern Virginia on that date. It began with a ceremony on the veranda of the house located on the hill that overlooked the cemetery. For 30 years that house, known as Arlington House (aka the Custis-Lee Mansion), had been the home of former Confederate Army General Robert E. Lee and his family. Ulysses S. Grant, Commanding General of the U.S. Army and his wife Julia, joined other Washington officials for the 1868 Decoration Day ceremony. Six months later, Grant would be elected the 18th president of the United States.
 
Approximately 5,000 people were also in attendance in Arlington on that late-May day. Afterwards, many of them walked through the grounds of the cemetery strewing flowers on both Union and Confederate graves, each of which had already been decorated with a small American flag. 
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​The first observance of Decoration Day in San Francisco similarly occurred on May 30, 1868 and was held at the Presidio overlooking San Francisco Bay and, very aptly, Alcatraz Island. The island housed a fort that had been built in 1859 for the main purpose of guarding Golden Gate Strait. During the Civil War years, the fort housed Confederate prisoners of war as well as private citizens accused of treason. Local, overzealous Confederate sympathizers and agitators were also imprisoned there. 
 
In the San Francisco Bay Area, several cemeteries contain the remains of soldiers and various individuals (including several women) who fought for or publicly supported either the Union or the Confederacy during the first half of the 1860s. Among them are the National Cemetery in San Francisco’s Presidio, Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland, Cypress Lawn Memorial Park in Colma, Golden Gate National Cemetery in San Bruno and the Union Cemetery near Highway 84 in Redwood City.    
 
Many Southern states continue to observe a separate Confederate Memorial Day to honor their Confederate dead. Confederate Memorial Day is observed in Mississippi on the last Monday of April, in Alabama on the fourth Monday of April, in Virginia on the last Monday in May and in Georgia on April 26. May 10 is Confederate Memorial Day in North and South Carolina. In Louisiana and Tennessee, June 3 is the designated day. The state of Texas celebrates Confederate Heroes Day on January 19.
 
Decoration Day was officially renamed Memorial Day in 1967; it was designated as a national holiday that same year. In 1971, Congress chose the last Monday in May for the national Memorial Day observance, thereby creating a three-day weekend.
 
In 2024, Memorial Day falls on Monday, May 27, marking the 156th year that Americans honor the 600,000 soldiers and 50,000 civilians who died during the four long years of America’s Civil War. 
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​​In the early 1980s, Monika Trobits, a New York native, moved west, contentedly settling into the City by the Bay. For several decades, she held various positions in the corporate world, mainly to pay the bills, contemplate the views and accrue vacation days. She was inspired by her personal interests, including arts and culture, especially literature and film, along with politics, current events and, particularly, local history. About 14 years ago, Monika earnestly began writing, developing several ideas that had long been rolling around in her head into nonfiction articles and books; each was published. Her transition to the creative world of historic fiction is underway. Monika earned a BA in political science/history from SFSU and has never stopped learning.
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Vistas & Byways Review is the semiannual journal of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and photography by members of Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at San Francisco State University​.​
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