On June 4th, 1884, The Rockland County Journal reported that the Silliman Post joined other veterans to march and adorn the graves of fallen soldiers at Rockland Cemetery. The Silliman Post was the local Black chapter of the fraternal organization of Civil War veterans, the Grand Army of the Republic. Its members included William Henry Myers, a Union veteran born into slavery; Myers likely became the first Black person to run for public office in Rockland County by running for Constable in 1886. When Myers and his post joined other veterans in memorializing their fallen comrades, their presence reminded Rockland County residents of Black people’s role in the Civil War. They had not only earned their freedom from it. They had risked life and limb, and on many occasions died, to secure their freedom and reunite the nation. They did so in celebration of what was then known as Decoration Day.
Decoration Day was a precursor to Memorial Day. It emerged after the Civil War in part to reckon with the vast numbers of deceased people. (The holiday’s distant origins remain unclear. One possible source may lie in Appalachia, in which families and church congregations long gathered to decorate graves, and this practice may date back to older rituals in Britain.) According to the historian David Blight in Race and Reunion, sixty percent of Union soldiers and forty percent of Confederate soldiers died in the war, including twenty percent of the 180,000 African Americans who served. Perhaps unsurprisingly, people began honoring the dead well before the war’s end. Soldiers buried deceased comrades and those on the home front held funereal rituals. In time, many began depositing flowers at graves or monuments. This latter ritual provided the foundation for Decoration Day.
The first modern Decoration Day took place in Charleston, South Carolina in 1865. At the time, the war had reduced much of Charleston to ruins. In February of 1865, the Confederates evacuated the city. After the Union took control, Black soldiers regularly assembled in its streets, including one parade including a sign announcing the “death of slavery.” As Blight writes, “In such collective performances, blacks in Charleston proclaimed their freedom and converted destruction into new life. In richly symbolic parades and other ceremonies, they announced their rebirth.” In the months before the holiday itself, Black people in Charleston had already prepared its remaining denizens for Black people’s public assemblies and rituals.
Still, the size of the first Decoration Day on May 1st, 1865, must have been staggering. Its celebrants included about ten thousand people, many of whom had been enslaved. The festivities began with a march around a horse racing track. About three thousand Black children headed the parade, followed by three hundred Black women representing a mutual aid organization, Black men in another such organization, and crowds of unaffiliated black and white people. Many carried flowers, which had recently bloomed across the region. Their procession marched to a recently constructed burial ground, where celebrants covered the graves in so many flowers that one participant claimed the ground was hard to see. After, ministers of Charleston’s Black churches read Bible passages and led songs. Later, Union officers, Black ministers, and abolitionists gave speeches. Finally, Union infantry marched around Union graves. “The war was over,” Blight writes of the festivities, “and Memorial Day had been founded by African Americans in a ritual of remembrance and consecration.”
From that first May, the holiday spread across the country. Memorial Day officially began in 1868, when the leader of the Grand Army of the Republic assigned Union veterans to decorate the graves of fallen soldiers. By 1873, New York made May 30th its official holiday, and by 1890, every Northern state followed suit. The holiday’s spread depended upon new infrastructure. In 1865, one Union official claimed that they had identified about one-third of deceased Union soldiers in internable graves. In the years following the war, the federal government created new national cemeteries across the south, located deceased soldiers’s bodies, and reinterred many in those cemeteries. Whether through creating new cemeteries, making the holiday official, or decorating graves, the holiday quickly became cemented in the American fabric.
The flowers at the center of Decoration Day provided women an opportunity to participate in the ritual. One reason to celebrate the holiday in May was that it was a month when spring made flowers plentiful. Women often bore the burden of collecting those recent arrivals. One organization, the Northern Women’s Relief Corps, grew from this practice into an organization that counted as many as one hundred thousand members by 1890. Though a holiday revolving around fallen soldiers might seem a strictly masculine endeavor, the practice of collecting flowers reminds that Decoration Day was a mixed gender affair.
As the practice continued, Decoration Day became central to conflicting efforts to shape the memory of the Civil War. As Blight points out, in the South, the memorial movement lamented deceased Confederate soldiers. Former Confederate generals like Jubal Early and Daniel Hill used the holiday’s occasion to contest the framing of themselves as traitors and instead represented Confederate soldiers as heroic. Though Confederate and Union soldiers began participating in Decoration Day ceremonies together as early as the 1870s, the questions of whom they were memorializing, for what reasons had they died, and what value was placed upon their death remained.
When Black people participated in Decoration Day, they entered a contest over the meaning of the Civil War and its continued relevance to American society. By marching alongside other soldiers, by decorating the graves of fallen Black soldiers, and by recounting their stories of wartime service, they did not only fraternize across racial lines among veterans. They also reminded other veterans and the public that Black people had served in the war. In so doing, they insisted that they earned their freedom and that the public ought to remain committed to their freedom so as to properly honor the death of other Union soldiers. In short, when Black people celebrated Decoration Day, they reminded that the Civil War was a war to end slavery and they sought to secure their freedom in the present.
That the Silliman Post participated in Decoration Day in Rockland County, moreover, foregrounds that the war and its effects reached far beyond the battlefield and the south. Following the 1884 observance of Decoration Day with white soldiers, in 1885, the Silliman Post decorated the graves of Black soldiers at the Black cemetery in Clarkstown. They continued to do so for years. Many spoke publicly about their service when the occasion called for it. (Myers regularly spoke about his service at GAR gatherings.) In so doing, they sought to secure the memory of the Civil War and of Black people’s freedom even in Rockland County. In this light, Memorial Day developed not only to honor deceased veterans—Black and white—but also to fasten Black people’s place in American society, whether in Southern cities like Charleston or Northern regions like Rockland County.
The efforts of people like William Henry Myers and organizations like the Silliman Post continue today in Rockland County. Each year, the Friends of Mount Moor Cemetery, several of whom are veterans, lay wreaths at the headstones of Black veterans of the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, World Wars I and II, and the Korean War at Mount Moor Cemetery. In so doing, the Friends of Mount Moor Cemetery carry forward the tradition of those Black veterans who celebrated the Civil War more than a hundred and fifty years ago.
