Forgetting Why We Remember: David Blight on Memorial Day in Charleston, May 1, 1865

Paul Harvey

From historian David Blight (HT John Fea), an essay on Memorial Day in Charleston, South Carolina, on May 1, 1865, an event of enormous symbolic significance at the time but forgotten afterwards in the "national reconciliation" mode of late 19th-century Memorial Days following their semi-official beginnings in 1868. Blight begins by describing how the "Lost Cause tradition thrived in Confederate Memorial Day rhetoric; the Southern dead were honored as the true 'patriots,' defenders of their homeland, sovereign rights, a natural racial order, and a 'cause' that had been overwhelmed by 'numbers and resources" but never defeated on battlefields."

But before the Civil War was over, black soldiers had established a meaning for that day consonant with their experience of fighting for freedom:

But for the earliest and most remarkable Memorial Day, we must return to where the war began. By the spring of 1865, after a long siege and prolonged bombardment, the beautiful port city of Charleston, S.C., lay in ruin and occupied by Union troops. Among the first soldiers to enter and march up Meeting Street singing liberation songs was the 21st United States Colored Infantry; their commander accepted the city’s official surrender.

Whites had largely abandoned the city, but thousands of blacks, mostly former slaves, had remained, and they conducted a series of commemorations to declare their sense of the meaning of the war.

The largest of these events, forgotten until I had some extraordinary luck in an archive at Harvard, took place on May 1, 1865. During the final year of the war, the Confederates had converted the city’s Washington Race Course and Jockey Club into an outdoor prison. Union captives were kept in horrible conditions in the interior of the track; at least 257 died of disease and were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand.

After the Confederate evacuation of Charleston black workmen went to the site, reburied the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on which they inscribed the words, “Martyrs of the Race Course.”

The symbolic power of this Low Country planter aristocracy’s bastion was not lost on the freedpeople, who then, in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, staged a parade of 10,000 on the track. A New York Tribune correspondent witnessed the event, describing “a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before.”

The procession was led by 3,000 black schoolchildren carrying armloads of roses and singing the Union marching song “John Brown’s Body.” Several hundred black women followed with baskets of flowers, wreaths and crosses. Then came black men marching in cadence, followed by contingents of Union infantrymen. Within the cemetery enclosure a black children’s choir sang “We’ll Rally Around the Flag,” the “Star-Spangled Banner” and spirituals before a series of black ministers read from the Bible.

After the dedication the crowd dispersed into the infield and did what many of us do on Memorial Day: enjoyed picnics, listened to speeches and watched soldiers drill. Among the full brigade of Union infantrymen participating were the famous 54th Massachusetts and the 34th and 104th United States Colored Troops, who performed a special double-columned march around the gravesite.

The war was over, and Memorial Day had been founded by African-Americans in a ritual of remembrance and consecration. The war, they had boldly announced, had been about the triumph of their emancipation over a slaveholders’ republic. They were themselves the true patriots.

Despite the size and some newspaper coverage of the event, its memory was suppressed by white Charlestonians in favor of their own version of the day. From 1876 on, after white Democrats took back control of South Carolina politics and the Lost Cause defined public memory and race relations, the day’s racecourse origin vanished....

Comments

Anonymous said…
Thanks, Paul, for this post. My historical knowledge of memory and the South has been so deeply enriched by the work of David Blight.

Curtis J. Evans
Tom Van Dyke said…
Wow. Thank you, Paul. Clearly, for the blacks of the South, the Civil War was indeed all about slavery. That the freed slaves of the South "invented" Memorial Day deepens its meaning.

I have always thought of "John Brown's Body" [sung by Union troops, as well as "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" to the same tune] as evidence for that sentiment. That the blacks of the South knew the song---kept as they were from knowledge of the outside world---is stunning, and speaks to the power of the song, its message, and its resonance in the hearts of men.

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