Freed Slaves Arranged One of the Earliest Memorial Day Ceremonies

Memorial Day is a day which was born out of necessity. A battered United States was faced with the job of burying and honoring the 600,000 to 800,000 Union and Confederate soldiers after the American Civil War who had lost their lives in the single bloodiest military conflict in the history of America. The primary national commemoration of Memorial Day was held in Arlington National Cemetery on 30^th May, 1868, where both Union and Confederate soldiers are buried.

Many towns and cities across America have claimed to have analyzed their own earlier versions of Memorial Day or “Decoration Day” as early as 1866. But this wasn’t until a renowned and remarkable finding in a dusty Harvard University archive the late 1990s which historians have learned about a Memorial Day commemoration which is organized by a group of freed black slaves less than a month after the Confederacy surrendered in 1865.

David Blight, back in 1996, was a professor of American History at Yale University. He was researching a book on the Civil War when he got the opportunity of one of those once-in-a-career eureka moments. A curator at Houghton Library of Harvard asked if he wished to look through the two boxes of unsorted material from Union veterans.

Blight remembered that there was a file which was labeled ‘First Decoration Day,’. He is still amazed at his good fortune. There was a narrative handwritten by an old veteran on the inside of a piece of cardboard, along with a date referencing an article in The New York Tribune. That narrative revealed the essence of the story which he ended up telling in his book, of this march on the race track in 1865.

The Washington Race Course and Jockey Club in Charleston, South Carolina was the race track in question. In the later stages of the Civil War, the Confederate army modified the formerly posh country club into a makeshift prison for Union captives. More than 260 Union soldiers lost their lives from disease and exposure while being held in the open-air infield of race track. The bodies of those were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstands.

When Charleston fell and troops of Confederate evacuated the heavily damaged city, freed slaves remained. One of the primary things those emancipated men and women did was to provide the fallen Union prisoners a proper burial. They dig out the mass grave and reinterred the bodies in a new cemetery with a tall whitewashed fence inscribed with the words: “Martyrs of the Race Course.”

After that, on May 1st, 1865, something more than extraordinary happened. As per the two reports which Blight found in The New York Tribune and The Charleston Courier, a crowd of 10,000 people, mostly freed slaves along with some white missionaries, staged a parade across the race track.

By: Preeti Narula

Content: https://www.history.com/news/memorial-day-civil-war-slavery-charleston