The first Decoration Day

The modern day Memorial Day was first observed as Decoration Day, a day to honor and put flowers on the graves of Union soldiers who perished during the Civil War..

In 1868, President James Garfield’s text read this at Arlington Cemetery read in part:

I am oppressed with a sense of the impropriety of uttering works on this occasion. If silence is ever golden, it must be here beside the graves of fifteen thousand men, whose lives were more significant than speech, and whose death was a poem, the music of which can never be sung. With words we make promises, plight faith, praise virtue.

Promises may not be kept; plighted faith may be broken; and vaunted virtue be only the cunning mask of vice. We do not know one promise these men made, one pledge they gave, one word they spoke; but we do know they summed up and perfected, by one supreme act, the highest virtues of men and citizens.

For love of country they accepted death, and thus resolved all doubts, and made immortal their patriotism and their virtue. For the noblest man that lives, there still remains a conflict. He must still withstand the assaults of time and fortune, must still be assailed with temptations, before which lofty natures have fallen; but with these the conflict ended, the victory was won, when death stamped on them the great seal of heroic character, and closed a record which years can never blot.

By the early 1900s, Memorial Day became a more popular title for the day.. Eventually several other war dead were included with the decoration and memorials, well beyond the war dead from the Civil War..

It may be the unofficial start of summer.. but give pause for honor and respect to those who fell in battle and perished in war for the United States..