The Long Renaming of Decoration Day

Peonies come in heavy the last week of May, the white ones already gone to yellow at the heart, and for a long time that was the only calendar the day kept. Before the Monday law, before the travel forecast, the thirtieth of May meant the cemetery. The grass had come up thick and wet through the cold spring, the tulips had given over, the lilacs held a ragged blue along the fence, and the women had cut the flowers the night before and stood them in canning jars in the pantry so the heads would open by morning.

The word for the day said exactly what the work was. Decoration. Not memory, not honor, not saluting from a car window. A whole town carrying baskets up a hill. The children held the jars two-handed. The men carried the shovels and the flags. The soldiers among them walked without being told. And afterward the same families sat on the same quilts under the maples, the lemonade went around, the chicken came out of the same baskets, and summer, for the first time that year, behaved as if it meant it.

The Spring the War Stopped

Every region has a grandmother who swears her town did it first, and there is truth in most of those claims: the putting of flowers on a grave is older than the Republic and belongs to no single plot of ground. But one beginning keeps returning in the histories, and it happens to be in the month of May, in the year the war stopped, at a horse track outside Charleston.

Charleston had fallen in February, and the city was still gray with its ruin. Behind the grandstand of the race course, in a long trench, lay Union prisoners who had died there — hundreds of men who had gone in young and never seen the surrender. No one had marked the place. The work fell to the city's Black people, most of them freed only by the arrival of the Union guns. They opened the trench. They gave the dead a single grave apiece, a decent bed, a yard enclosed by a whitewashed fence. Then, on the first of May, they came back and spent the day.

The account survives in the letters that northern teachers and missionaries sent home from the ruined city. They wrote about the children of the freedmen's schools carrying blossoms, about the hymns, about the crowd that covered the infield. It was not yet a holiday. Nothing had been signed. It was a congregation deciding that the dead behind the grandstand should not sleep in an unmarked trench, and it began the tradition in the month when flowers were free.

A Date That Belonged to No Battle

Three years passed. On the fifth of May, 1868, John A. Logan, the Illinois general who commanded the Grand Army of the Republic, signed the order that named the day. He called for the thirtieth of May and told the veterans' posts what the day was for.

The 30th day of May, 1868, is designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers, or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country.

The date he chose was late enough that the ground had softened and every garden north of the Ohio was coming into bloom, and early enough that it belonged to no battle. The order went out by telegram and by mail with three weeks and four days to spare, and the towns used them. Nobody had to be told twice.

Not every place got the word in time. Not every place believed in it; the South kept to its own Aprils and Junes and its own dead. But where the telegram arrived, the work began. Women's relief corps went door to door gathering flowers and asking for the jars back. Veterans practiced the slow step. Children rehearsed the same song until it fell apart and was tried again. On the thirtieth, the small towns of the North and the West walked up their hills and laid the whole blooming month on the graves.

The first observance was uneven. Some cities held enormous ceremonies; some villages sent one old man and a child. But the next year was larger, and the year after that larger still, and within a generation the thirtieth of May was the fixed point of the Northern year — the one day when the men of the prison pens and the big battles were names on stone and somebody in the crowd said those names out loud. The graves were covered, not one stem shy of full. When the reading ended, the veterans fell back into the old habit: they called the roll of the dead, and the crowd answered for them.

The Last Monday

The name changed the way a town's speech changes: slowly, grudgingly, one old man at a time. The Grand Army posts aged and closed, and their widows kept the word Decoration Day on the cemetery gate until the gate itself was replaced. The newspapers, meanwhile, had moved on to Memorial Day, and the holiday drifted toward summer. After the wars of the new century it belonged no longer to the blue and the gray but to every American who had died in uniform, in every war, on every patch of ground.

Congress finished the renaming on paper. An act of 1967 made Memorial Day the official name, and the Monday holiday law of 1968 pulled the anchor off the thirtieth, a change that took hold in 1971. The old men who had known the other name called it an insult to order and a convenience for the department stores. The change held. A man born in the decade of Logan's order could have watched his holiday renamed twice — first by usage, then by statute — and would still have recognized the morning of it: the buckets under the maples, the roses opened overnight, the town pouring itself up the hill.

What survived the move was the act that started it. A town can rename a holiday and move its date, but it cannot stop the peonies, and the peonies bloom when they bloom. The present Memorial Day has grown into a thing of coolers and traffic and the first lake swim, and none of that is a betrayal; the cookout came streaming out of the old cemetery picnic. Beneath it, in the small towns, the genuine article still runs: the color guard, the folded flags, the families come home to stand together in the May sun. The national moment of remembrance, set for three o'clock in the afternoon, lands in the small towns exactly where the old prayers used to.

May ends in the wake of it. The peonies that were tight buds on Friday lie flat by the week after, and there is a particular sweetness in that quickness — it is why the flowers went up the hill in the first place, because the whole month is a bouquet that does not keep. The dead of the race course were the first to receive that work, in Charleston, in 1865: a handful of flowers in a ruined spring. Long after the dates moved and the name changed, the act is still the act. A family stands at a stone, sets the jar in the cool grass, and stays a while in the company of the ones it came with and the ones it came to see.