Frederick Douglass thought Decoration Day — the original name for Memorial Day — was the nation’s most significant holiday. On May 30, 1871, the day’s fourth annual observance, he honored the unknown Union dead at Arlington National Cemetery, addressing President Grant, members of his cabinet and a crowd of dignitaries surrounded by graves adorned with spring flowers. The Civil War’s losses were still raw, and the presence of the conflict’s victorious commander at the Arlington property that was once the home of Robert E. Lee, the recently deceased rebel general, could only have deepened the war’s shadow.
Yet Douglass worried that the lives and purposes of the approximately 400,000 Northern soldiers who died in the war and even the meaning of the war itself might be forgotten. If the nation did not keep the memory of the conflict alive, he implored, “I ask in the name of all things sacred, what shall men remember?” The Union dead must not be honored only for their bravery or their sacrifice, he insisted. It mattered what they died for. It mattered what the nation chose to remember.
“They died for their country. … They died for their country,” Douglass repeated. They had fought against the “hell-black system of human bondage” and for a nation that embodied “the hope of freedom and self-government throughout the world.” Americans must not forget that this was why the dead had laid down their lives in numbers no one had anticipated or could even have imagined.
Decoration Day honored those who had fought for the promise of America — the “new birth of freedom” that Lincoln envisioned in his Gettysburg Address, delivered to dedicate a soldiers’ cemetery while the conflict still raged. Eight years later, Douglass echoed the words of a president who had himself become a casualty of the war. Lincoln and hundreds of thousands of Union soldiers had died to defend and preserve what the president described in 1863 as a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Douglass devoted the remainder of his life to ensuring those men did not die in vain.
Decoration Day gradually assumed a firm place in the calendar of national celebrations. The commander in chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, a politically powerful organization of Union veterans, first proclaimed the observance in 1868. By 1890, all the Union states had officially adopted it. In the aftermath of World War I, it came to encompass the dead of all American wars. In 1967 Congress changed its name to Memorial Day, and four years later, as part of the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, moved its date from May 30 to the last Monday of the month, to create a three-day weekend. Somewhere along the way Memorial Day came to be celebrated by many as the start date for summer, a holiday to spend at the beach, not to reflect on history, decorate graves or honor the dead.
“What shall men remember?” Douglass asked. We need this year more than ever to be reminded of the meaning of the day. At a moment of national crisis that is frequently compared to the divisiveness and destructiveness of the Civil War era, we should look anew at the responsibilities Douglass and Lincoln handed down to us. Between 1861 and 1865, some 2.7 million men, almost all volunteers, took up arms to preserve the Union as a beacon of democracy at a time when representative government seemed to be fading from the earth. Today democracy is once again under worldwide threat, assailed as disorderly and inefficient by autocratic leaders from Budapest to Moscow to Beijing, leaders our own president openly admires. Yet in 1861, ordinary men from even the remotest corners of the Union risked their lives because they believed, as Lincoln articulated for us all, that “government of the people, by the people, for the people should not perish from the earth.”
Lincoln regarded secession as lawless, as a direct assault upon the principle that defined the American nation: the belief in a government of “a majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations.” Those structured checks and the rule of law that embodies and enacts them are once again at risk as we confront the subservience of Congress, the defiance of judicial mandates and the arrogation of presidential power in a deluge of unlawful executive orders.
The “new birth of freedom” Lincoln promised in the Gettysburg Address all but faded with the overturning of Reconstruction and the re-establishment of white supremacy in the era of Jim Crow. Only a century later, with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, did the United States at last fully commit itself to multiracial democracy and the war’s emancipationist vision. But even this belated progress is now being reversed with voter suppression efforts, challenges to the 14th Amendment’s establishment of birthright citizenship and the evisceration of the Civil Rights Act, most recently with an executive order abandoning the regulations that have been central to its enforcement. The unfinished work of freedom seems to be in full-throttle reverse.
Douglass invoked the “eloquence” of the dead. We should listen to them. As a historian, I have read dozens of these men’s letters and diaries, windows into why they fought, into what and whom they loved and what they hoped for at the end of a war they knew they might not survive. Together they did save the Union, the nation that has given me and so many others opportunities that the war-born imperative of ever-expanding freedom has offered. These men made our lives possible. They were impelled to risk all by a sense of obligation to the future. We possess a reciprocal obligation to the past. We must not squander what they bequeathed to us.
This debt and this duty should be at the forefront of our minds this Memorial Day. We must honor these men, their bravery, their sacrifice, and especially their purposes. We are being asked not to charge into a hail of Minié balls and artillery fire but only to speak up and to stand up in the face of foundational threats to the principles for which they gave the last full measure of devotion. We have been entrusted with their legacy. Can we trust ourselves to uphold it?
Drew Gilpin Faust is the author of “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War” and a former president of Harvard University.
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