If the last few generations of Americans understood the origin and meaning of Memorial Day, we might have avoided the trauma of division and corruption that now threatens the United States as never before.
Memorial Day was founded on the biblical ideals of forgiveness and reconciliation shortly after America’s most divisive and bloody conflict, the Civil War, which extended from 1861 to 1865. That conflict cost at least 620,000 men, more casualties than all of America’s other wars combined — the two World Wars, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and the Middle East wars.
The United States was so mercilessly divided at the time of the Civil War that many thought reconciliation impossible. And yet, it began with humble and virtuous actions from the vanquished South, not the victorious North.
Memorial Day, originally called Decoration Day, was established to honor the dead from the Civil War. The holiday’s origin dates to April 25, 1866, when a former chaplain in the Confederate Army accompanied a group of women from Columbus, Mississippi, to Friendship Cemetery — the burial ground for about 1,600 men who died in the Battle of Shiloh — for the purpose of honoring the dead with decorations of flowers. At that time, Union Army forces occupied Columbus, like the rest of the South, and some townspeople feared they would create new animosity if the decorations favored Confederate over Union graves.
The prayerful Columbus women had no such intention despite having heard about the Union’s cavalier burial treatment of
