The Memorial Day holiday was an outgrowth of “Decoration Day”, a commemoration of the Civil War.
The Civil War is now over 150 years old. In that stretch of time, the ways in which we have remembered and memorialized it have changed, and those changes have reflected the way our own views of our past have evolved over the years.
The first of the Civil War commemorations were cemeteries. The fighting produced thousands of dead, which littered the battlefield. The art of mortuary embalming had just appeared, and some of the remains, especially the officers, were embalmed and sent home for burial on their family plots. But most of the dead from both sides were simply gathered up and buried near where they fell on the battlefield, often in unmarked mass graves.
These cemeteries were then designated as national memorials, and became the setting for orations and commemorations. The most well-known of these was at Gettysburg, which in November 1863 became the site of the most famous speech in history when President Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address on the occasion of the cemetery’s official dedication. National cemeteries were also established at Antietam, Shiloh, Vicksburg, and Chickamauga.
After the war ended, veterans on both sides formed national organizations: the Grand Army of the Republic contained former Union soldiers, and the South had the United Confederate Veterans. In 1868, the Commander of the GAR named May 30 as “Decoration Day”, when the graves of fallen Civil War soldiers would be set with flowers. The Confederate veterans had their own “Heroes Day”, which was celebrated on different dates by different states. In 1919, after the end of World War One, both organizations agreed to celebrate a joint “Decoration Day” as a memorial to the fallen in all US wars, not just the Civil War, and in 1971 Congress established “Memorial Day” as an official holiday.
By the 1890s, the passionate emotions over the Civil War and Reconstruction had begun to fade as the country reunited. With both the Confederate and Union troopers now growing old and dying, attention turned to commemoration. Veterans’ organizations from both sides, as well as state governments, began to take an interest in memorializing the battles that their soldiers had fought rather than just honoring their dead, and battlefields began to be viewed as historical sites to be preserved for future generations. At the major battlegrounds, the US War Department began establishing National Military Parks, which combined the cemeteries with preserved areas of the hills and fields at which the soldiers had fought.
It became common for veterans groups and state governments to raise money to put up ornate memorial stone markers on these battlefields, locating them at the positions that each of their regiments had held during the fighting. Soon more of these monuments appeared, honoring fallen commanders and famous participants. By 1922, the Gettysburg battlefield alone had over 800 stone monuments, cannon displays, memorial statues, and commemorative plaques and tablets, marking out the original battle lines and signifying crucial events.
In 1916, the National Park Service was established, and the United States began the process of setting up one of the largest national park systems in the world. This helped to establish the idea of “public lands”, which soon spilled over into historical preservation. By the 1930s, Civil War sites, along with other historically significant locations, began to be viewed as a public resource to be shared and used by everyone for the common good. Across the country the Federal Government set up National Parks, National Monuments, and National Historic Sites, either purchasing the land from its private owners or exercising its power of eminent domain to obtain the sites for public use. In 1933, the War Memorials and Military Parks being run by the War Department were transferred to the National Parks Service. At smaller battlefields and historic sites, this process was echoed by state or local governments.
But already there were problems. Much of the Civil War fighting had taken place near what were then small towns, often on rivers or near railroad junctions. In the decades after the War, however, many of these small towns had grown into major cities, and their relentless outward expansion had already overrun many of the old battlefields, covering them with factories, homes, and roads. In some areas, such as Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Franklin, the town itself had formed part of the battleground.
Few cities or states had given any thought to protecting and preserving these historic sites—especially in areas of the old Confederacy, where nobody was particularly interested in keeping the memory of battles that they had lost in a disastrous war. So, unfortunately, many significant battlegrounds (including Nashville, Westport, Atlanta, and others) were lost before they could be preserved.
In many of the still-remaining areas, moreover, practical problems multiplied. During the four years of Civil War there had been over 10,000 battles, skirmishes, raids and encounters of all sizes, and it would be simply impossible to obtain this many sites and commemorate them all. So priorities had to be set about which locations were important enough to be protected, and which would be abandoned to their fate.
Even at the major battlefields, choices had to be made. Many of these clashes had involved more than a hundred thousand men and stretched out over several miles, and there were not enough resources to obtain and preserve such large areas. As a result, the Federal Government decided on what was called the “Antietam Plan”, in which only the most significant and important segments of the total battleground would be obtained as a memorial park. In many cases, the National Park would consist of only a thin ribbon of land marking the actual battle lines: the rest of the site, such as rear areas, headquarters, hospitals and artillery sites, would be left in private hands. A significant landmark was reached when the Supreme Court ruled in the 1890s, in a case involving a proposed railroad through the Gettysburg Battlefield, that the Federal Government had the legal right to take land under eminent domain in order to safeguard historical sites of national importance.
Today, however, only about 20% of all the historically-significant Civil War areas are held by the public (only about half of the Gettysburg battlefield is actually inside the borders of the National Park, for example, and less than a third of the Vicksburg battlefield). This policy would have disastrous effects in later years, as areas that were once rural farmland became part of suburbia, and houses and roads began encroaching upon the borders of the battlefield parks.
After the Bicentennial celebrations in 1976, Americans took a renewed interest in their national history, including the Civil War, and this sparked a rekindled attention to the protection and preservation of historical sites. It came at just the right time. In 1980, plans were announced by a real-estate developer to build a shopping mall at the Manassas battlefield, on privately-owned land that was historically significant but was not actually part of the National Park. Over the years, other conflicts soon followed: a Walmart was planned at the Wilderness battlefield, a Disney theme park was proposed at Haymarket VA near several significant battlefields, a casino was intended near the Gettysburg National Park, and a motor racetrack was being considered at the Brandy Station battleground in Virginia. At Gettysburg, a large observation tower was erected on privately-owned land next to the park.
All of this sparked a massive backlash. In 1987, the Association for the Preservation of Civil War Sites, a nonprofit citizens group containing Civil War buffs, professional historians, and educators, was formed to both file legal challenges to the proposed developments and to raise money to buy and permanently protect historically significant tracts of land. In 1991, the Civil War Trust, another nonprofit organization, was formed with the same goals—it was intended to focus more on soliciting corporate donations. For several years the two groups clashed with each other over priorities, credit for successes, and personality-driven conflicts, but even though they had trouble getting along with each other, they scored a number of major successes that saved important areas from destruction. In 1999, the two groups finally worked out their differences and merged as the Civil War Trust Inc.
Since 1987, as the Federal national park system came under political assault with budget cuts and ideological attacks, private preservation efforts have safeguarded over 140,000 acres at 130 different Civil War battlefields. Using private donations and matching funds, the Trust purchases historically-significant pieces of land from private owners, paying market-value prices. Where possible, these tracts are then turned over to a “public steward”, either the National Park Service or a state or local park system: if this is not feasible, the Trust holds the land itself to protect it from commercial or residential development, and raises money to install walkways and interpretive signs at the site. The Trust has been so successful that in 2014 the National Park Service requested that the organization expand its scope to also help preserve and protect historical sites from the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, many of which were also under imminent threat from encroaching suburbia (including a proposed housing development at the Brandywine battlefield and a dormitory house at the Princeton battleground).
Our national history is worth saving: not only because it holds lessons for our present and warnings for our future, but because it is unique and irreplaceable. A shopping center or a highway or an apartment building can be put anywhere else without affecting its functionality. We have our choice of places where such things can be located.
But historical events are exceptional precisely because they are tied inextricably to a specific time and place. The Battle of Gettysburg or the raid on Harpers Ferry, for instance, through the contingencies and accidents of history, happened in a particular spot. We cannot relocate them elsewhere, nor can we rebuild the places where they happened if those locations are destroyed. Like history itself, once made, historical sites cannot be unmade. The “place” cannot be separated from the “event”. And that is why the “places” of our Civil War history must be protected, conserved, and remembered. History cannot be undone—but by remembering it, we can perhaps prevent ourselves from doing it all over again.