05/25/2026
Happy Decoration Day (Memorial Day).
Decoration Day honored those who had fought for the promise of America — the “new birth of freedom” that Lincoln envisioned in his Gettysburg Address, delivered to dedicate a soldiers’ cemetery while the conflict still raged. Eight years later, Douglass echoed the words of a president who had himself become a casualty of the war. Lincoln and hundreds of thousands of Union soldiers had died to defend and preserve what the president described in 1863 as a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Douglass devoted the remainder of his life to ensuring those men did not die in vain.
Decoration Day gradually assumed a firm place in the calendar of national celebrations. The commander in chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, a politically powerful organization of Union veterans, first proclaimed the observance in 1868. By 1890, all the Union states had officially adopted it. In the aftermath of World War I, it came to encompass the dead of all American wars. In 1967 Congress changed its name to Memorial Day, and four years later, as part of the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, moved its date from May 30 to the last Monday of the month, to create a three-day weekend. Somewhere along the way Memorial Day came to be celebrated by many as the start date for summer, a holiday to spend at the beach, not to reflect on history, decorate graves or honor the dead.
