Gardiner says there’s enough primary evidence to prove that women in the Civil War hospital town of Columbus, Miss., celebrated the first Memorial Day because they followed what was written in March 1866 articles that appeared in the Memphis Daily Avalanche and the Pulaski Citizen. Those stories reported that Columbus, Ga., was urging people to celebrate April 25 instead of April 26 as Memorial Day. The fact that they celebrated a day before most people is why people such as President Barack Obama have given them the credit for celebrating Memorial Day, even if experts such as Gardiner say it wasn’t their idea.
Newspapers reporting on those early Memorial Day celebrations noted that ladies throughout the South were leaving flowers not only on the graves of Confederate soldiers, but also of Union soldiers. As a May 9, 1866, article in the New York Commercial Advertiser, described the gesture made by Columbus, Ga., attendees, “Let this incident, touching and beautiful as it is, impart to our Washington authorities a lesson in conciliation, forbearance, and brotherly love.” A May 30, 1866, Cleveland Plain Dealer article said of the gesture made by Columbus, Miss., attendees, “It kindles a spark of hope…We have one God; one language, on Government; and may we not hope that we shall eventually become indeed one people.”
After reading an account of the Columbus, Miss., celebration, Ithaca lawyer Francis M. Finch was inspired to write a poem “The Blue and the Gray,” published in the Atlantic Monthly in Sep. 1867, which is thought to have spread the word even further about Southern Memorial Day celebrations.
General John A. Logan, who ran the Union Army veterans organization the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), must have heard of the 1866 Memorial Day activities in Georgia. In a speech he delivered in Salem, Ill., that summer, he commented derisively on the “traitors in the South [who] have their gatherings day after day and strew garlands upon the graves of rebel soldiers.” Yet nearly two years later, on May 5, 1868, he issued a proclamation from his Washington, D.C., office urging members of the GAR to celebrate Memorial Day — “Decoration Day,” as he called it — on May 30. By then, he believed, the “choicest flowers of springtime” would have bloomed. The press reported on the proclamation, and it stuck.
So the women of Columbus pioneered the idea but Logan made it go national, Gardiner’s and Bellware’s research argues.