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Posted 5/29/2005 10:19 PM     Updated 5/29/2005 10:41 PM
Memorial Day 2005
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Early history of Memorial Day closely tied to mourning rituals
Marta Vincent is preparing for the holiday, so she dresses herself, bonnet to floor-length skirt, in the dull black of an 1870s widow in "high mourning." Her jewelry is of lusterless black gutta percha. Even the fan she carries is black.

It's all in keeping with the occasion, which was once called Decoration Day, but is now known as Memorial Day.

Although the holiday now commemorates the fallen of all of America's wars, its birth in the grieving of the Civil War period still resonates.

"You can't talk about the Civil War or Memorial Day without talking about mourning," said Vincent, 64, of Hampshire, Ill., who with her husband, Henry Vincent, is a Civil War re-enactor and lecturer. "Almost every family, North and South, was touched by the war. And the holiday grew out of those families' efforts to honor their dead with spring flowers."

Official records indicate that the total of Union and Confederate dead from the battlefield, disease, accidents and other causes was higher than 498,000 — more than 1.5% of the nation's population in 1860.

The fact that the war ended during the flowering of springtime had much to do with the form the holiday eventually took. Some historians, including the one-time Chicago newspaper editor Lloyd Lewis, have also seen the day's roots in the North's elaborate grieving after the April 14, 1865, assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.

There are many theories as to where the day was originally observed. In 1966, Congress gave its official nod to Waterloo, N.Y., as the birthplace of Memorial Day, but there are many other claimants, including Boalsburg, Pa.; Decatur, Ill.; and the Mississippi cities of Vicksburg and Columbus. Lewis found that freed slaves had decorated Union graves in Charleston, S.C., as early as May 1, 1865.

Whatever its origin, the day began its march toward official status in May 1868, when Illinois' Gen. John A. Logan, first Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, issued General Order 11 to the membership of the influential veterans' group. In it, Logan wrote:


Logan's order intended to keep things simple, but elaborate ceremonials soon developed.

Floats and displays that had been created to greet Lincoln's funeral train were adapted to honor the war dead, parades became common, and special concerts featured marches and dirges. The mourning attire worn by the women became increasingly striking through the 1870s and 1880s. Many wore jewelry made from the hair of the deceased or incorporating their photographs.

"Many women had been too busy raising families or running businesses for their absent husbands to observe full mourning during the war itself," Vincent said. "But everything essentially got out of hand after the war. Mourning kept getting more and more elaborate. There were formal codes about how long a woman had to remain in each of the various stages of mourning for a husband, a child or a parent, what she could wear in each of those stages, and how much she could be seen in public."

"You must remember that 19th century Americans had a much more intimate relationship with death than you or I do," she said. "Death in childbirth was common, infant mortality was high, the infectious diseases were unconquered. We look back and we think they were death-obsessed, but maybe they were just being realistic. Death was all around them."

Mourning was simpler for a man at that time, said historian P. Seth Magosky of Joliet, Ill.: "He'd wear a black business suit if he had one — otherwise, he'd just wear a black armband for a few months, and that was it."

Magosky, who doubles as a John Wilkes Booth impersonator, thinks people used to be more comfortable with the idea of death.

"When they finished with the ceremonies, most families would have a picnic right there at the cemetery," he said. "We wouldn't think of doing that today, but it's what a lot of cemeteries were designed for."

Vincent makes her own period clothing but she began learning about early American mourning from her grandmother's belongings while growing up in New York State.

"Most people got rid of mourning attire when they were through with it because it was considered bad luck to keep it around, but I had a grandmother who was born in 1862 who never threw anything away," she said. "Going through her things taught me a lot about clothing. And when you learn about clothing, you learn about the culture it comes from."


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