Abbeville Institute: The Confederate Origins of Memorial Day

Memorial Day was originally Decoration Day and got its start right up the road from where I am from in the Chattahoochee Valley after the War Between the States:

Abbeville Institute:

“Many Americans will pause today to honor the men and women who have given their lives in the United States armed forces. What most probably don’t know is that this holiday originated in the South after the War for Southern Independence. It was originally called “Decoration Day.”

Don’t tell the social justice warriors.

The monuments that these modern day Leninists believe represent “white supremacy” were a byproduct of a movement that began one year after the conclusion of hostilities to remember the over two hundred thousand men who died defending the Southern fight for independence.

It took decades to collect enough pennies to build the monuments that are now being toppled in hours.

Not even the Yankees who faced cannon and rifle fire from these Confederate soldiers were so bold to deny Southerners their memorials. Some, in fact, joined hands at dedication ceremonies across the South. If anyone should have hated Confederate soldiers, it was these men. But they didn’t.

Thousands of Union soldiers saluted their Confederate counterparts as they surrendered at Appomattox and wept with them when these Southern patriots gave up their flags. Not one Union soldier burned a Confederate flag or dragged it through the mud when the War was over. The immediate aftermath was magnanimous on both sides. …

The women who held the first “Decoration Day” in Columbus, Georgia in 1866 did so to honor the dozens of Confederate soldiers buried in Linwood Cemetery. This was soon replicated across the South. The Grand Army of the Republic copied the event in 1868, causing another Southern innovation to be coopted by Yankee do-gooders.

American soon honored Confederate dead as part of “Memorial Day” events, including those like President William McKinley who wore the blue.

Southerners eventually decided to hold separate “memorial day” remembrances in April as part of “Confederate Memorial Day.” They wanted as a people to reflect on the cost of war. Their newly gained poverty was a daily reminder, but these wives, brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, cousins, aunts, uncles, sons, and daughters of fallen heroes still burned with the flame of defiance. They put down their swords but did not concede that their men were “traitors.”

By the 1870s no one north of the Mason Dixon called them that anymore. They were as American as Lincoln. It was not unfashionable well into the late twentieth century–even for the Left–to honor Confederate soldiers as valiant and courageous men. That list includes every American president from Teddy Roosevelt to Bill Clinton. …”

The cultural cancer that we are all dealing with these days – North and South, East and West – has a very recent origin. Woke progressivism owes almost nothing to the original Progressive movement and it is ultimately descended from the people who broke with it around World War I, who embraced modernism and who opened up a new rift in our cultural fabric.

Note: As we have seen, the iconoclastic spirit that smashes Confederate monuments also topples monuments of Union soldiers, Abraham Lincoln and even Freddy Douglass who was knocked off his pedestal last summer. It goes after everyone from Christopher Columbus to St. Junípero Serra. It emanates from deracinated, cultureless, anti-traditional weirdos who hate the past in general.

About Hunter Wallace 12390 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

15 Comments

  1. @ beautiful.picture of the women at thee cemetery, yet sad also., but i swear. Thee cross of st.andrew , stands alone in beauty, without a peer, or contemporary, happy memorial day, od soldiers !

    • @Terry…

      There is a sadness, Sir, that accompanies all life, but, in the end, the joy of having witnesst those who stood for God and kin surpasses that.

    • Those “od soldiers” don’t appreciate praise from a waterhead who can’t even type a three-letter word correctly. On this day and every day, I praise the American soldiers and fighting officers of the Mexican War, the best one by far the U.S. waged. We got California and the Southwest, fair and double square! Sea to shining got-damn sea!

      • @ cap anson, i use the word thee and thy and thou, like thou art a ” yankee asshole ” cap anson , its thee ” king james ” influence, ignorant sir.

  2. Decoration Day, that’s a beautiful old name. I haven’t heard that name in years.

    Brad, Memorial Day will become Holocaust Memorial, and, Israel Appreciation Day in your lifetime. Seriously.

    • No, Dear Krafty, it will not be so.

      Jewish power has not only stoppt growing, it has begun to wane.

      You are applying what occurred during these decades of our lifespans to what will come and that is not good science.

      This is a new era, with new technologies, and new causes and effeckts.

  3. The only troops that should be honored today are those that fought for the South in the Civil War and those that fought in the Revolutionary War.

    Sad to see how the White Christian South became the backbone of ZOG Imperialism and stalwart defenders of BDS and Israel while being continuously ridiculed and mocked by Jewish Hollywood and Jewish pop culture as ignorant, inbreeding and backwards rednecks and hillbillies.

    When the White Christian South turns away from Israel, Christian Zionism, and Majorie Taylor Greene conservatard stupidity it will truly be a day to celebrate.

    • @Shogo…

      Thank you, Sir, for your kind and highly respectful comments towards The South.

  4. Thank you for the fine article, Dear Mr. Griffin – for it is very important, especially in these days, to have a proper frame of reference.

    Enjoyed the video performance, too!

  5. “””….The cultural cancer….. has a very recent origin….”””

    Information society is also recent thing. Now, the Big Truth is attacking Big Lie and Big Lie desperately fights back. So actually, cultural war is good thing. Enemy is not firmly in charge anymore but under fire and forced to fight back.

    Monuments and other looted stuff can be restored. Build back better like some people say 😀

    “””….In the countries of the former Soviet Union, in particular in Russia, Ukraine, Belorussia and Moldavia, an unprecedented religious revival is underway. In the Russian Orthodox Church over the past 25 years there have been built or restored from ruins more than 25,000 churches. This means that a thousand churches a year have been opened, i.e., three churches a day.

    —Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev, October 30…”””

    https://insidethevatican.com/news/newsflash/russians-coming/

  6. ” As we have seen, the iconoclastic spirit that smashes Confederate monuments also topples monuments of Union soldiers, Abraham Lincoln and even Freddy Douglass who was knocked off his pedestal last summer. It goes after everyone from Christopher Columbus to St. Junípero Serra.”

    And yet these “iconoclasts” never touch Jewish monuments, not even monuments to Confederate Jews. In fact, they built a new monument to a Jewish Confederate senator as recently as 2014.

    Our Jewish-supremacist ruling class is waging culture war against the European race and against the Christian religion. Why? Crude ancestral hatred.

    That is the entire story.

    I know it is depressing to acknowledge this banal reality – much less interesting than long winded dissertations on modernism – yet it is the truth.

    • @BTI…

      “Our Jewish-supremacist ruling class is waging culture war against the European race and against the Christian religion. Why? Crude ancestral hatred. That is the entire story. I know it is depressing to acknowledge this banal reality – much less interesting than long winded dissertations on modernism – yet it is the truth.”

      I agree, and, yes, it is so depressing that not only Gentiles would not wish to acknowledge it, Jews will not, either.

      It’s the 2,000 year war most refuse to see.

  7. As the degeneracy continues and the blacks get bolder and bolder, more and more people will come to see the South was right.

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