A 'Dear and Sacred' Memorial Day

By Bill Doughty–

Col. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., in a profound speech 236 years ago in Keene, New Hampshire, said he hoped generations of Americans would continue to remember and honor Memorial Day, a day of commemoration that arose over time from the ashes of the Civil War. Would a divided nation heal completely?

It took a while for the Union and Confederacy to agree on a national day of commemoration. Veterans steeped in the stench and sounds of battlefields often did not want to remember, according to author John Keegan in "The American Civil War: A Military History" (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009). "That was a dimension of the war never to be commemorated."

Less than a century later, Adm. Nimitz would have the same feeling about commemorating the attack on Pearl Harbor. He was at first against any commemoration.

USS Bennington (CVA-20) passes the wreck of USS Arizona (BB-39) in Pearl Harbor on Memorial Day, 31 May 1958. Bennington's crew is in formation on the flight deck, spelling out a tribute to Arizona's crewmen who were lost in the 7 December 1941attack on Pearl Harbor by Imperial Japan. (NHHC)

As for the Civil War, according to Keegan, "there was no catharsis after 1865." While "Decoration Day" started with gravesites, including those at Arlington, decorated with flowers on various days, "Memorial Day" eventually became a reality for northern states on May 30, yet the south could not agree and for a time continued to commemorate three different dates.

Keegan contends, rightly, that the Civil War was the crucible that cemented a nation in a commitment to harmony. Here's what it meant for the warriors who fought on the righteous side of the Constitution –– and ultimately against slavery:

"There was no more graphic means of apprehending the power of the state than to stand in the line of battle, a voluntary act with unintended consequences. Men who performed the act and survived the consequences were transformed as citizens. They became pillars of the republic and pillars of their communities. It is often overlooked that hundreds of thousands of Americans of the Gilded Age had been touched by fire and hardened by it. Antebellum American had been a gentle society. Postbellum America was a nation as well as a society and one hardened by the Civil War to embark on a rendezvous with greatness."

Marbury, Gilbert A., drummer, Company H, 22d New York Infantry. (Natl. Archives)

In "The Civil War: A Narrative III, Volume 3: Red River to Appomatix" (Random House, 1974), historian and author Shelby Foote writes that years later, veterans of the terrible Civil War would gather to honor their fallen comrades:

"Once a year at least –– aside, that is, from regimental banquets and mass reunions, attended more and more sparsely by middle-aged, then old, then incredibly ancient men who dwindled finally to a handful of octogenarian drummer boys, still whiskered for the most part in a clean-shaven world that had long passed them by –– these survivors got together to honor their dead."

Earlier in the book Shelby Foote reminds us that Holmes, as a young Army captain, brashly yelled at President Abraham Lincoln, "Get down, you damn fool" when 6-foot-4 Lincoln stood above the parapets observing the battle near Washington (D.C.).

Twenty years after yelling at the president, Holmes gave remarks on that Memorial Day in 1884. Foote tells us:

"He began by expressing his respect, not only for the veterans gathered to hear him, but also for the men they had fought, and he told why he felt it. 'You could not stand up day after day, in those indecisive contests where overwhelming victory was impossible because neither side would run as they ought when beaten, without getting at last something of the same brotherhood for the enemy that the north pole of a magnet has for the south, each working in an opposite sense to the other, but unable to get along without the other.' Such scorn as he felt he reserved for those who had stood aside when the call came for commitment. 'I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.' Memorial Day was for him and his listeners 'the most sacred of the year,' and he believed it would continue to be observed with pride and reverence. 'But even if I am wrong, even if those who are to come after us are to forget all that we hold dear, and the future is to teach and kindle its children in ways as yet unrevealed, it is enough for us that to us this day is dear and sacred.… For one hour, twice a year at least — at the regimental dinner, where the ghosts sit at table more numerous than the living, and on this day when we decorate their graves — the dead come back and live with us. I see them now, more than I can number, as once I saw them on this earth.' He saw them, and he saw what they stood for, even now in the midst of what Mark Twain had dubbed the Gilded Age. 'The generation that carried on the war has been set aside by its experience. Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing. While we are permitted to scorn nothing but indifference, and do not pretend to undervalue the worldly rewards of ambition, we have seen with our own eyes, beyond and above the gold fields, the snowy heights of honor, and it is for us to bear the report to those who come after us.”

Shelby Foote

Foote makes a powerful statement about the context of the Civil War, one which perhaps can be applied in this era of COVID and feelings of division:

"...But the pride remained: pride in the segment reabsorbed, as well as in the whole, which now for the first time was truly indivisible. This new unity was best defined, perhaps, by the change in number of a simple verb. In formal as in common speech, abroad as well as on this side of its oceans, once the nation emerged from the crucible of that war, 'The United States are' became 'the United States is.'"

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. as Supreme Court justice.

This is a "dear and sacred" concept for what the United States is and continues to be: e pluribus unum – out of many, one. Those Americans willing to sacrifice their lives in a commitment to defending the Constitution are honored on Memorial Day.

In his speech, Holmes said, in words that President John F. Kennedy would echo nearly one hundred years later: "...It is now the moment when by common consent we pause to become conscious of our national life and to rejoice in it, to recall what our country has done for each of us, and to ask ourselves what we can do for our country in return."

Holmes concluded his Memorial Day speech in 1884 this way: "I see beyond the forest the moving barriers of a hidden column. Our dead brothers still live for us, and bid us think of life, not death – of life to which in their youth they lent the passion and glory of the spring. As I listen, the great chorus of life and joy begins again, and amid the awful orchestra of seen and unseen powers and destinies of good and evil our trumpets sound once more a note of daring, hope, and will."

Naval Special Warfare Force Master Chief (SEAL) Bill King and his wife, Robin, lay a wreath on the Extortion 17 Memorial May 19, 2020, in observance of Memorial Day at the Naval Special Warfare Command Headquarters aboard Naval Amphibious Base Coronado. The Extortion 17 helicopter crash claimed the lives of 38 people, including 22 NSW personnel in Afghanistan Aug. 6, 2011. (MC1 Sean Furey)