Civil War Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

How Memorial Day Was Stripped of Its African-American Roots

the first Decoration Day has unfortunately been whitewashed from the modern Memorial Day

**Major Martin R. Delany was a surgeon and the highest-ranking black soldier serving in the Civil War.**

How Memorial Day Was Stripped of Its African-American Roots is a link that an old blogger buddy named Demeur left as a comment on my May 2013 blog post. Unfortunately, the link is dead.

FORTUNATELY, I can retrieve it via the Wayback Machine. Written by Ben Becker. Tags: CC, fair use, trending

What we now know as Memorial Day began as “Decoration Day” in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. Civil War. It was a tradition initiated by former slaves to celebrate emancipation and commemorate those who died for that cause.

These days, Memorial Day is arranged as a day “without politics”—a general patriotic celebration of all soldiers and veterans, regardless of the nature of the wars in which they participated. This is the opposite of how the day emerged, with explicitly partisan motivations, to celebrate those who fought for justice and liberation.

The concept that the population must “remember the sacrifice” of U.S. service members, without a critical reflection on the wars themselves, did not emerge by accident. It came about in the Jim Crow period as the Northern and Southern ruling classes sought to reunite the country around apolitical mourning, which required erasing the “divisive” issues of slavery and Black citizenship. These issues had been at the heart of the struggles of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Return to politics?

To truly honor Memorial Day means putting the politics back in. It means reviving the visions of emancipation and liberation that animated the first Decoration Days. It means celebrating those who have fought for justice, while exposing the cruel manipulation of hundreds of thousands of U.S. service members who have been sent to fight and die in wars for conquest and empire.

As the U.S. Civil War came to a close in April 1865, Union troops entered the city of Charleston, S.C., where four years prior the war had begun. While white residents had largely fled the city, Black residents of Charleston remained to celebrate and welcome the troops, who included the Twenty-First Colored Infantry. Their celebration on May 1, 1865, the first “Decoration Day,” later became Memorial Day.

Yale University historian David Blight retold the story:

During the final year of the war, the Confederates had converted the planters’ horse track, the Washington Race Course and Jockey Club, into an outdoor prison. Union soldiers were kept in horrible conditions in the interior of the track; at least 257 died of exposure and disease and were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand. Some 28 black workmen went to the site, re-buried 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.”

Unforgettable parade

Then, black Charlestonians, in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, staged an unforgettable parade of 10,000 people on the slaveholders’ race course. The symbolic power of the low-country planter aristocracy’s horse track (where they had displayed their wealth, leisure, and influence) was not lost on the freed people. 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.”

At 9 a.m. on May 1, the procession stepped off, led by 3,000 black schoolchildren carrying armloads of roses and singing “John Brown’s Body.” The children were followed by several hundred black women with baskets of flowers, wreaths, and crosses.

Then came black men marching in cadence, followed by contingents of Union infantry and other black and white citizens. As many as possible gathered in the cemetery enclosure; a children’s choir sang “We’ll Rally around the Flag,” the “Star-Spangled Banner,” and several spirituals before several black ministers read from scripture.

The Battle Over The Memory of the Civil War

Blight’s award-winning Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001) explained how three “overall visions of Civil War memory collided” in the decades after the war.

The first was the emancipationist vision, embodied in African Americans’ remembrances and the politics of Radical Reconstruction, in which the Civil War was understood principally as a war for the destruction of slavery and the liberation of African Americans to achieve full citizenship.

The second was the reconciliationist vision, ostensibly less political, which focused on honoring the dead on both sides, respecting their sacrifice, and the reunion of the country.

The third was the white supremacist vision, which was either openly pro-Confederate or at least despising of Reconstruction as “Black rule” in the South.

Over the late 1800s and the early 1900s, in the context of Jim Crow and the complete subordination of Black political participation, the second and third visions largely combined. The emancipationist version of the Civil War, and the heroic participation of African Americans in their own liberation, was erased from popular culture, the history books, and official commemoration.

The end of Reconstruction

In 1877, the Northern capitalist establishment decisively turned its back on Reconstruction, striking a deal with the old slavocracy to return the South to white supremacist rule in exchange for the South’s acceptance of capitalist expansion. This political and economic deal was reflected in how the war was commemorated. Just as the reunion of the Northern and Southern ruling classes was based on the elimination of Black political participation, the way the Civil War became officially remembered—through the invention of Memorial Day—was based on the elimination of the Black veteran and the liberated slave.

The spirit of the first Decoration Day—the struggle for Black liberation and the fight against racism—has unfortunately been whitewashed from the modern Memorial Day.

As Blight explains, “With time, in the North, the war’s two great results—black freedom and the preservation of the Union—were rarely accorded equal space. In the South, a uniquely Confederate version of the war’s meaning, rooted in resistance to Reconstruction, coalesced around Memorial Day practice.” (“Race and Reunion,” p. 65)

The Civil War Whitewashed

In the statues, anniversary parades, and popular magazines, the Civil War was portrayed as an all-white affair, a tragic conflict between brothers. To the extent the role of slavery was allowed in these remembrances, Lincoln was typically portrayed as the beneficent liberator standing above the kneeling slave.

The mere image of the fighting Black soldier pierced through this particular “memory,” which in reality was a collective and forced “forgetting” of the real past. Portraying the rebellious slave or Black soldier would unmask the Civil War as a life-and-death struggle against slavery, a true social revolution, and a reminder of the political promises that had been betrayed.

While African Americans and white radicals continued to uphold the emancipationist remembrance of the Civil War during the following decades—as exemplified by W.E.B. DuBois’ landmark “Black Reconstruction”—this interpretation was effectively silenced in the “respectable” circles of academia, mainstream politics, and popular culture. The white supremacist and reconciliationist retelling of the war and Reconstruction was only overthrown in official academic circles in the 1950s and 1960s as the Civil Rights movement shook the country to its core, and more African Americans fought their way into the country’s universities.

While historians have gone a long way to expose the white supremacist history of the Civil War and uncover its revolutionary content, the spirit of the first Decoration Day—the struggle for Black liberation and the fight against racism—has unfortunately been whitewashed from the modern Memorial Day.

So let’s use Memorial Day weekend to honor the fallen fighters for justice worldwide, to speak plainly about this country’s historic crimes, and rededicate ourselves to take on those of the present.

This article originally appeared in LiberationNews.org.

5th Massachusetts (Colored) Cavalry

Let me see your passes!

I was looking for information about my great-great-grandfather, James Archer, who fought in the Civil War in the 26th New York (colored). Or perhaps his brother-in-law, Henry Bell, who fought in the 54th Massachusetts (colored).

But I came across this document from the 5th Massachusetts (Colored) Cavalry:

“THE Fifth Cavalry Regiment, composed of colored men, was organized during the autumn of 1863 and the following winter; but the first company, A, was not ready for muster until the 9th of January, 1864; three other companies were mustered on the 29th, E on the 10th of February, F on the 23d; three companies were filled during March, and two in April, but it was not till the 5th of May that Company M was ready for the mustering officer.

“On that day, the First Battalion of four companies under Major Weld left camp en route to Washington; the Second Battalion followed next day under the command of Major Adams, and the Third Battalion, under Major Bowditch, on the 8th. The organization at this time numbered 930 officers and men, the commissions issued being as follows:”

Officers

There’s a recitation of the colonel, Henry S. Russell of Boston; three majors; a surgeon and two assistant surgeons; an adjutant; a quartermaster, a sergeant major, Alfred Froman, all of Boston; quartermaster sergeant; commissary sergeant; a hospital steward; and, to my joy, a principal musician. Most of them were from the Boston area.

Then there was a listing of the captains, first lieutenants, and second lieutenants for Companies A-I and K-M. Most were from the Boston metro, though one captain and three lieutenants were from San Francisco.

“The various battalions as they reached Washington reported at Camp Casey, near Fort Albany, on the Virginia side of the Potomac, some two miles from Long Bridge, Colonel Russell being placed in command of a provisional brigade of colored troops assembling there for instruction and discipline.” I’ve read elsewhere that black soldiers captured in Confederate territory were more likely to be executed than captured.

“The Third Battalion had been in camp only two days, however, when the regiment was ordered to report to General Butler at Fortress Monroe, reaching City Point on the 16th of May, where the regiment formed part of the Third Division, Eighteenth Corps. Being armed as infantry, the command was industriously drilled in that branch of tactics, performing guard and picket duty meanwhile, and taking part in various expeditions.

Casualities

“These were without serious engagement or loss till the 15th of June, when the division, under the command of General E. W. Hincks, moved toward Petersburg and the battle of Baylor’s Farm was fought. This was the only conflict in which the Fifth took an active part, and its loss was not severe: three killed and 19 wounded. Among the latter were Colonel Russell and Major Adams, leaving the regiment under the command of Major Bowditch.

“During the latter portion of the 15th, the command was in support of a battery, and the following day was held in reserve… Most of the remainder of the month was passed in picket duty on the north side of the Appomattox, where Hincks’s Division relieved troops of the Tenth Corps, but toward the close of the month, the regiment was assigned to duty at Point Lookout, Md., as garrison for the camp of Confederate prisoners of war at that place. Arriving there on the 1st of July, the regiment remained during the balance of the year, being at first under the command of Major Weld…

After a realignment of officers, “the regiment took the field for the closing campaign of the war, and was on duty in front of Petersburg till the fall of that stronghold.”From here: ” One of the most significant contributions of the Regiment… was its participation in the Appomattox Campaign in Virginia. The regiment played a vital role in the final days of the Civil War, engaging Confederate forces and contributing to the ultimate victory of the Union Army. The bravery and skill of the regiment’s soldiers were instrumental in securing this crucial triumph.”

Richmond

From here:” The Fifth participated in the occupation of Richmond after the surrender of Lee. The all-white electorate chose former Mayor Joseph Mayo as the new mayor. Incredibly, Mayo reinstated the pass system that had been used under slavery, under which blacks on the streets had to have passes signed by their white employers. When the men of the 5th demanded that whites also produce passes, they provoked outrage among the city’s white residents! Col. Charles F. Adams was placed under arrest for allowing his men to straggle and ‘maraud.’ The charges were dismissed after two weeks.”

[They were] subsequently encamped in the vicinity till sometime in June, when they were ordered to Texas. [Recently promoted] “Colonel Chamberlain at once joined his new command, which had been heavily taxed in the construction of fortifications, and like work, and was suffering severely in health. He warmly interested himself in the welfare of his men, and an improvement in their sanitary condition was soon apparent.

“The prospect of complications with the French troops in Mexico having disappeared, the regiment was finally mustered out of the United States service on the 31st of October, 1865, and set out for Massachusetts, making most of the journey by steamer; on reaching Boston it went into camp at Gallop’s Island where it remained till late in November, when the men were paid and discharged.”

Here’s a book on the topic.

Stealing Sunday Stealing

UREC Interpretive Center

I’m stealing Sunday Stealing. It was off for December 2024, so I went back to the questions from March 2013. Why that month? Because that’s when I turned 60 and for no other reason. I took questions from the four posts.

Do you think we will move completely from traditional books to digital ones, and if we do, are you OK with that?

I have difficulty listening to books and don’t enjoy reading books online on a tablet or computer screen. I like the tactile and emotional sense of holding a book.

Do you learn best by reading, listening, or experiencing?

It is experiencing. When I’m given a task, and somebody’s trying to instruct me, telling me stuff, it doesn’t usually take. If I read the manual, I have a better chance, but doing it side by side is almost always more successful.

Do you think teenagers are weird?

Well, duh. I used to be a teenager. They’re definitely weird.

How fast does your mood change?

It depends. I can go from being ticked off to being melancholy about getting ticked off pretty quickly.

What do you always take with you?

It’s a mantra going out of the house: wallet keys, phone.

Is your bed comfortable?

I don’t know. It doesn’t seem to be when I first lie down, but I fall asleep quickly, so there’s that.

Would you say you’re an understanding person?

Probably. I feel as though I am empathetic; I can relate to experiences others have gone through

Talk, Talk

Are you talkative?

It depends on my comfort level and the situation. I can be fairly chatty when I feel part of the entity. But where I don’t, I can say nothing and observe a lot.

Do you sleep with the bedroom door open or closed?

Closed, but that’s pretty much a function of the fact that I go to bed after my wife does, and the hall light, which I need to get to our bedroom, is on until shortly before I go to sleep. I suppose I could leave the door open after she’s already closed it, but I haven’t habituated to that.

How many social media sites are you registered with?

I have an Instagram account, which I have seldom used, but I can see other people’s Instagram stuff. Instagram is not often in my headspace. I have Facebook, which I post daily, usually my blog post, and my wife’s and my NYT Connections. I’m on BlueSky, and sometimes I post my blog there if I think of it. I’m new there, though.

What are you listening to at the moment?

Shawn Colvin’s album A Few Small Repairs. That’s the one that has Sunny Came Home and Nothing On Me.

Do you believe in Karma?

Oh no, if there had been karma, there wouldn’t have been a person who committed felonies and managed to get elected President, essentially negating those felonies and other potential prosecutions. There is no karma.

I Wish

If you could have three wishes…but none of them could be for yourself, what would you wish for?

Sufficient money for certain organizations to do the projects they’re working on: for the Underground Railroad Education Center in Albany, that would be money to build the Interpretive Center, and for FOCUS churches to have a sufficient amount of enough money to feed everybody they want to feed in the Capital District. And to pay off the house my parents owned in Charlotte, NC.

Have you ever been on the radio or on TV?

Radio: When I was in college in New Paltz, NY, I used to read the news on WNPC for a semester, mostly wire service news.

TV: I was kiddy shows thrice. My church choir was on a local telethon several times. I was interviewed for a news segment on a racial reconciliation event in he 1990s. In 2017, five years after I wrote about the surprise October 4, 1987 snowstorm, I was interviewed by Spectrum News. I think that’s it. Oh, wait; I was on JEOPARDY twice.

Have you ever won a lottery or sweepstakes?

I won $50 in a lottery fifty years ago.

Have you ever won a contest or competition?

I won a Class B racquetball tournament at the Albany YMCA. It was the only statue I ever won. In the 1970s, I was pretty good at winning radio contests, usually records, but once won $48.

Is there anything really interesting in your family history?

My mom’s mother’s mother’s father was James Archer.

My dad’s mother’s mother’s father was Samuel Patterson.

And my mom’s father’s father’s father was Daniel Williams.

All of them fought in the American Civil War, and all of them survived.

Their bones

Do they matter?

Frank S. Robinson wrote an interesting, though chilling, book review of “We Carry Their Bones: A Florida Horror Story.”

“This book by anthropologist/archeologist Erin Kimmerle relates her authorized official investigations at the site of the Dozier School, a “reform school” in Florida’s panhandle, operating from 1900 to 2011. Actually a prison. Incarcerating thousands of boys, sentenced for mostly minor notional offenses, some as young as five, mostly Black.

The resolution caught my attention: “Kimmerle made great efforts not only to find burials but then to identify whose. Generally, the bodies had been interred unceremoniously, hence with little left to exhume. But the team was able to extract DNA even from bone fragments and thereby identify many victims. Amazing modern science…” So it is.

“Yet, though we are embodied in our physical selves while alive, afterward the dead corporeal remains should lose meaning. Our connections to our dead reside in our hearts and minds, our remembrance, not in their disintegrated bones.

“Those families already knew, basically, what had befallen their kin. Receiving a box of remains really adds nothing. I think we’re too fixated on such physicality; it’s a kind of superstition.”

I agree with about half of that. It is a bit of superstition, I suppose. But the box of remains does signify something significant.

Civil War

I saw this piece on CBS News Sunday Morning: Honoring a Civil War veteran lost to history.

“There is an unmarked African American burial ground on their farm [in Tennessee]. ‘They took me there, and for that, I’m eternally grateful,’ said Cheryl. “Because we had no idea it was there. We only had a hunch.”

“Cheryl hired an archeology team with experience finding America’s missing-in-action from more recent wars. Of the 38 graves they found here, they zeroed in on one – its size, date, and fragmentary remains matched every known detail of her ancestor.

“‘Sunday Morning’ was there with the families and local veterans when Private Sandy Wills’ remains were placed in a casket, and solemnly marched from the knoll, through green fields, to a waiting hearse.”

WWII

The Operation 85 project aims to identify unknown servicemen who perished aboard the USS Arizona during the attack on Pearl Harbor.

“In September 1947, after the pressures of war had subsided, 170 unknown servicemen were exhumed from their graves in Hawaii and brought to the Schofield Barracks Central Identification Laboratory, where over 100 were identified and their families subsequently notified. The disinterment was a remarkable success despite the remaining 70 men being declared ‘unrecoverable.’ Those men were reburied at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu (unofficially known as Punchbowl Cemetery because of its location at Punchbowl Crater).

“It is these ‘unrecoverable’ men that Kevin Kline, grandnephew of Gunner’s Mate Second Class Robert Edwin Kline, who perished aboard the Arizona, wants the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) to identify and return to their families.”

9/11

In January 2024, the “1,650th victim of 9/11 was named after 22 years. More than 1,100 remain unidentified.”

With the amazing advancement of technology, we’ll likely be able to find more victims of airplane crashes, weather disasters, and terrorist activities. Is it worth it? Worth, as a subjective term, is difficult to encapsulate.

I support the efforts because it completes the line from their death for whatever tragic reason to burial by their families, who, even if they are generations removed, still feel a sense of pride and dignity. If that is a superstition, then so be it.

The Civil War is not over

163 years and counting

The Civil War is not over. I’ve known this for a while, but something triggered this reaction. Doug, the Weekly Sift guy, gave a sermon at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois on May 5, 2024, titled Hope, Denial, and Healthy Relationship with the News.

I related to this part particularly. “Today… I’m talking about an experience that I know is personal, but I’m only guessing about its universality… The experience is an intense spiraling downward that gets triggered not by anything in my personal life, but from my interaction with the news. I hear about something in the outside world, the public world that we all share, and then the walls come tumbling down.”

Frank’s trigger was Robert Hur’s investigation of “President Biden’s unauthorized retention of classified documents.” While he “found nothing that would justify pressing charges,… along the way, he took a swipe at Biden’s mental competence,” and others piled on.

“And that’s when the bottom fell out of my mood. The effect lasted for several days. I would seem to be coming out of it, but then something would remind me and I’d sink back down again… that experience, that sudden mood collapse touched off by something in the news. The something doesn’t have to relate to politics or elections. It could be about climate change, the Supreme Court or what corporate capitalism is doing to our culture or whatever else you happen to worry about.

“One minute, you’re sailing along calmly, thinking, ‘Yeah, there are problems, but we’ll be OK.’ And then you hear or see something…
And in an instant, the bottom falls out… I experience this as depression and despair, but I know other people for whom it manifests as anger: How can so many people be so stupid, self-centered, or short-sighted?”

Mine

For me, it was something that, in the grander scheme of things, isn’t desperately consequential. But it hit me. A Virginia school board votes to restore Confederate names to two schools.

There had been an acknowledgment that the war was fought over the issue of slavery. And oh, and by the way, slavery was BAD, despite the attempt of some to put lipstick on a pig; “They learned marketable skills!”

But the “school board members who voted to restore the Confederate names said the previous board ignored popular sentiment and due process when the names were stripped.” Yeah, their “heritage” was intruded upon.

So that war which killed over six hundred thousand Americans, the deadliest military conflict in US history, is still being litigated. In the Gettysburg Address, Abe Lincoln noted, “Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

Shortly after that awful war, Memorial Day was established, “honoring and mourning the U.S. military personnel who died while serving in the United States Armed Forces.”

As we relitigate voting rights and other issues of once-settled policy, it makes me feel what Doug feels, “depression and despair.” The mourning isn’t for the dead per se as much as it is a feeling that in some substantial way that I would not have expected twenty years ago, the fight continues.