Long after he had done his part at Gettysburg to help save the Army of the Potomac, and win the battle, and probably preserve the United States of America as the United States of America, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, a soldier and a gentleman and a scholar, wrote about how best to memorialize what he had done, and what had been done by all the less-famous souls, some gone off to glory and some not, with whom he had served.

He wrote:

Those who will may raise monuments of marble to perpetuate the fame of heroes. Those who will may build memorial halls to remind those who shall gather there in after times what manhood could do and dare for right, and what high examples of virtue and valor have gone before them. But let us make our offering to the ever-living soul. Let us build our benefactions in the ever-growing heart, that they shall live and rise and spread in blessing beyond our sight, beyond the ken of man and beyond the touch of time.

Perhaps it was too much to hope that Memorial Day would continue to be a day of mourning and of contemplation—an “occasion of sacred bereavement,” as historian David Blight called it. In truth, its origins are a matter of some dispute and for years, it was an occasion to re-fight the Civil War over the bones of the people who’d died in it. Like Blight, however, I choose to place its beginnings on May 1, 1865.

Dead soldiers lie on the battlefield at Gettysburg, where 23,000 Union troops and 25,000 Confederate troops were killed during the Civil War. July 1863. (Getty) Getty Images

During the war, the Confederate government had turned the racetrack in Charleston, South Carolina into an open-air prison. Hundreds of Union prisoners died there from disease and mistreatment. They were buried without ceremony behind the grandstand. Blight picked up the story from there in a piece for The New York Times:

After the Confederate evacuation of Charleston black workmen went to the site, reburied the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on which they inscribed the words, “Martyrs of the Race Course.”. The symbolic power of this Low Country planter aristocracy’s bastion was not lost on the freedpeople, who then, in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, staged a parade of 10,000 on the track. A New York Tribune correspondent witnessed the event, describing “a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before.”

The procession was led by 3,000 black schoolchildren carrying armloads of roses and singing the Union marching song “John Brown’s Body.” Several hundred black women followed with baskets of flowers, wreaths and crosses. Then came black men marching in cadence, followed by contingents of Union infantrymen. Within the cemetery enclosure a black children’s choir sang “We’ll Rally Around the Flag,” the “Star-Spangled Banner” and spirituals before a series of black ministers read from the Bible. After the dedication the crowd dispersed into the infield and did what many of us do on Memorial Day: enjoyed picnics, listened to speeches and watched soldiers drill. Among the full brigade of Union infantrymen participating were the famous 54th Massachusetts and the 34th and 104th United States Colored Troops, who performed a special double-columned march around the gravesite.

That’s the way to remember how Memorial Day began—memorializing not only the dead, but also the righteous cause for which they died. No both sides. No Lost Cause gilding of history. There was one right side in the Civil War, and it was the side of abolition and national union, and that’s what the African-American citizens of Charleston took it upon themselves to do. The deaths of the prisoners at of the racetrack, and the torrents of blood expended in the war, as historian Barbara Fields memorably put it in Ken Burns’s series on the war, “had to be for something higher than Union and the free navigation of the Mississippi River.”

Marines recovering body of comrade while under fire during N. Vietnamese/US mil, conflict over DMZ, w. photog. Catherine LeRoy in rear. (Getty) Getty Images

Maybe we’ve lost the plot on this holiday because we’ve lived through so many wars now whose causes were anything but righteous. Maybe we’ve lost the plot on this holiday because so many of our fellow citizens have died fighting for reasons that were hazy at the time and look even more inscrutable in retrospect. Maybe we’ve lost the plot on this holiday because our wars have killed so many people for such dubious reasons all over the planet. We have made Shilohs and Gettysburgs in jungles and in deserts and in the mountains and in the trenches along the Somme. Sherman marched to the sea, destroying everything in his path. It took months. We took out two cities with two bombs three days apart, killing 150,000 people instantly. That is the way wars are now.

What has remained clear is the feeling, best expressed by Barbara Fields, that all the bloodshed and all the death has to be for something. And maybe, ultimately, that’s why we’ve lost the plot on this holiday, because we all have failed to maintain our faith in the institutions of free government that we say, once or twice a year, that all of these people died to preserve.

An American flag drapped coffin is taken to a burial at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia on March 7, 2016. (Getty) Getty Images

They did not risk, they did not bleed, they did not die for what this country is at the moment: a republic of mummery, numb and stupid, drunk on unreality and unreason, and, by its own public choice, led by a ridiculous and dangerous man. They did not risk, they did not bleed, and they did not die for what we have now, and that is on us, not them, and not on the people who sent them to war. It is this country at this moment that has squandered the peace and that has profaned the sacrifice because it has made a mocker's game of both of them. This is not what they died for.

Happy Memorial Day.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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