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NEWS AND VIEWS THAT IMPACT LIMITED CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT

"There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with
power to endanger the public liberty." - - - - John Adams

Monday, May 30, 2016

Happy Decoration Day (Memorial Day)



Least We Forget Where it Started


Memorial Day is a federal holiday in the United States for remembering the people who died while serving in the country's armed forces. 

The holiday, which is observed every year on the last Monday of May, originated as Decoration Day after the American Civil War in 1868, when the Grand Army of the Republic, an organization of Union veterans founded in Decatur, Illinois, established it as a time for the nation to decorate the graves of the Union war dead with flowers. 

By the 20th century, competing Union and Confederate holiday traditions, celebrated on different days, had merged, and Memorial Day eventually extended to honor all Americans who died while in the military service. It typically marks the start of the summer vacation season, while Labor Day marks its end.
The first widely publicized observance of a Memorial Day-type observance after the Civil War was in Charleston, South Carolina, on May 1, 1865. During the war, Union soldiers who were prisoners of war had been held at the Hampton Park Race Course in Charleston; at least 257 Union prisoners died there and were hastily buried in unmarked graves. 
Together with teachers and missionaries, black residents of Charleston organized a May Day ceremony in 1865, which was covered by the New York Tribune and other national papers. The freedmen cleaned up and landscaped the burial ground, building an enclosure and an arch labeled "Martyrs of the Race Course". Nearly 10,000 people, mostly freedmen, gathered on May 1 to commemorate the war dead. Involved were about 3,000 school children, newly enrolled in freedmen's schools, as well as mutual aid societies, Union troops, black ministers and white northern missionaries. Most brought flowers to lay on the burial field.
David W. Blight described the day:
This was the first Memorial Day. African Americans invented Memorial Day in Charleston, South Carolina. What you have there is black Americans recently freed from slavery announcing to the world with their flowers, their feet, and their songs what the war had been about. What they basically were creating was the Independence Day of a Second American Revolution.

Footage of Civil War Veterans at 50yr Anniversary in 1913 & 75yr Anniversary in 1938




GAR fife & drum





Grand Army of the Republic James R. Carnahan
Department Commander 1882-1883.

Grand Army of the Republic parade

Click to Enlarge
Grand Army of the Republic Post, Cazenovia, NY, c. 1900.
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In this, and the photo below, Black Union vets stand side by
side with their white brothers in the same GAR Post.

Click to Enlarge
Grand Army of the Republic Dumont Post No. 18

A GAR Black Post

Former slave and GAR Member Charles H. Anderson, age 92, 
Photo about 1936-38.


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