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Well, some claim that former Confederates came up with the idea:
Quote:
In the years following the bitter Civil War, a former Union general took a holiday originated by former Confederates and helped spread it across the entire country. The holiday was Memorial Day, an annual commemoration was born in the former Confederate States in 1866 and adopted by the United States in 1868. It is a holiday in which the nation honors its military dead.
Gen. John A. Logan, who headed the largest Union veterans’ fraternity at that time, the Grand Army of the Republic, is usually credited as being the originator of the holiday.
Some say that former enslaved people started it first:
Quote:
On May 1, 1865, thousands of newly freed Black people gathered in Charleston, S.C., for what may have been the nation’s first Memorial Day celebration. Attendees held a parade and put flowers on the graves of Union soldiers who had helped liberate them from slavery.
The event took place three weeks after the Civil War surrender of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee and two weeks after the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. It was a remarkable moment in U.S. history — at the nexus of war and peace, destruction and reconstruction, servitude and emancipation.
But the day would not be remembered as the first Memorial Day. In fact, White Southerners made sure that for more than a century, the day wasn’t remembered at all.
In the south it was Decoration Day, a time for cleaning up the graves from the winter. Often, May 30, 1868 is noted as the first time it was observed at Arlington and one of the speeches was made by James Garfield who later became president.
There is a twist to this tying it to Martha and George Washington. Arlington House was of course, Lee's home, he had married into the Custis family and his wife's property under VA law at the time became his. It was first purchased by Martha Washington's son, George Washington's stepson. After the Civil War, Lee's widow sued to get the land back. SCOTUS ruled in US v. Lee (1882) that the land rightfully belonged to the Lee family which then sold it to the federal government (tax law and sovereign immunity issues).
Decoration Day can trace its origins to the Ladies Memorial Associations formed after the Civil War. The Hebrew Ladies Memorial Association was formed in 1866 to take care of the graves of the Hebrew Confederate Cemetery in Richmond, though I can't find where they actually dedicated a day for it. The Hebrew Confederate Cemetery in Richmond is one of two - the other is in Germany - Jewish military cemeteries located outside of Israel.
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