By Drew Gilpin Faust in the NYT
Ms. Faust is the author of “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War” and a former president of Harvard University.
Frederick Douglass thought Decoration Day — the original name for Memorial Day — was the nation’s most significant holiday. On May 30, 1871, the day’s fourth annual observance, he honored the unknown Union dead at Arlington National Cemetery, addressing President Grant, members of his cabinet and a crowd of dignitaries surrounded by graves adorned with spring flowers. The Civil War’s losses were still raw, and the presence of the conflict’s victorious commander at the Arlington property that was once the home of Robert E. Lee, the recently deceased rebel general, could only have deepened the war’s shadow.
Yet Douglass worried that the lives and purposes of the approximately 400,000 Northern soldiers who died in the war and even the meaning of the war itself might be forgotten. If the nation did not keep the memory of the conflict alive, he implored, “I ask in the name of all things sacred, what shall men remember?” The Union dead must not be honored only for their bravery or their sacrifice, he insisted. It mattered what they died for. It mattered what the nation chose to remember.
“They died for their country. … They died for their country,” Douglass repeated. They had fought against the “hell-black system of human bondage” and for a nation that embodied “the hope of freedom and self-government throughout the world.” Americans must not forget that this was why the dead had laid down their lives in numbers no one had anticipated or could even have imagined.
Decoration Day honored those who had fought for the promise of America — the “new birth of freedom” that Lincoln envisioned in his Gettysburg Address, delivered to dedicate a soldiers’ cemetery while the conflict still raged. Eight years later, Douglass echoed the words of a president who had himself become a casualty of the war. Lincoln and hundreds of thousands of Union soldiers had died to defend and preserve what the president described in 1863 as a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Douglass devoted the remainder of his life to ensuring those men did not die in vain. (continued)