Confederate Memorial Day
From Dixiepedia: The PC-Free Encyclopedia
Mrs. Charles J. Williams, of Columbus, Georgia, instituted the custom of decorating soldiers' graves with flowers, a custom which has been adopted throughout the United States. Mrs. Williams was the daughter of Maj. John Howard, of Milledgeville, Georgia and married Maj. C. J. Williams on his return from the Mexican War. As colonel of the First Georgia Regulars, of the Army in Virginia, he contracted the disease from which he died in 1862, and was buried in Columbus, Georgia. Mrs. Williams and her daughter visited his grave daily, and often comforted themselves by wreathing it with flowers. While the mother sat thinking of the loved and lost one, her daughter would pluck the weeds from the unmarked soldiers' graves near her father's and cover them with flowers, calling them her soldiers' graves.
After a short time while the daughter died. The bereaved mother then took charge of these unknown graves for the child's sake, and as she cared for them thought of the thousands of patriot graves throughout the South, far away from home and kindred, and in this way the plan was suggested to her of setting apart one day in each year, that love might pay tribute to valor throughout the Southern States. In March of 1868, she addressed a communication to the Columbus Times: "We beg the assistance of the press and the ladies throughout the South to aid us in the effort to set apart a certain day to be observed from the Potomac to the Rio Grande, and to be handed down through time as a religious custom of the South, to wreathe the graves of our martyred dead with flowers, and we propose the 26th day of April as the day."
She then wrote to the Soldiers' Aid Societies in every Southern State, and they readily responded and reorganized under the name of Memorial Associations. She lived long enough to see her plan adopted all over the South, and in 1868 throughout the United States. Mrs. Williams died on 15 April 1874, and was buried with military honors. On each returning Memorial Day the Columbus military march around her grave, and each deposits a floral offering. The Legislature of Georgia, in 1874, set apart the 26th day of April as a legal holiday in obedience to her request.
Confederate Memorial Day is a day set aside in the South to pay tribute to those who served with the Confederate forces during the War Between the States. The founder of the Federal Memorial Day, Gen. John A. Logan, Commander in Chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, was so impressed with how the South honored their dead with a special day, became convinced that such a day must be created to honor Union dead. The battlefield graves all around Richmond could be seen "marked with little white flags, faded wreaths of laurel" where family and friends of Confederate soldiers had placed them. Logan is reported to have been "deeply touched" and said "it was most fittting; that the ancients, especially the Greeks, had honored their dead, particularly their heroes, by chaplets of laurel and flowers, and that he intended to issue an order designating a day for decorating the grave of every soldier in this land, and if he could he would have made it a holiday." This of course was done at a later date, thus becoming our National Memorial Day.
Source: "The Origin of Memorial Day," Confederate Veteran, May 1893
