Memorial Day, also called “Decoration Day,” was celebrated throughout the North on May 30, 1870. Just five years after the Civil War the day was, according to the New York Times, only second to the 4th of July in calling forth people’s patriotic feelings. The day was first celebrated in 1865 by freed enslaved people in Charleston honoring the “Racecourse Martyrs,” Union soldiers who had died while prisoners at a local racecourse. Other days honoring the Union dead were held over the next three years, but the day took on a national character in 1868 when former Union General John Logan pronounced May 30 as the nationwide day to decorate the graves of Union soldiers.
Two years later, the New York Times reported that all over New York there were ceremonies to recall those lost during the Civil War. Nearly the entire front page of the May 31 paper were filled with reports of the parades, speeches, and the decoration of the dead soldiers’ graves.
The newspaper said that while the holiday had strong patriotic appeals, it was also a time of mourning for the men so recently killed.
After extensive coverage of the day’s ceremonies at the Academy of Music, the parade in Union Square in Manhattan, the observance at Cypress Hills Cemetery on the border of Brooklyn and Queens, and services by the Robert Gould Shaw Post of the Grand Army of the Republic in Staten Island, the New York Times covered other observances in New Jersey, Washington, D.C., and at a graveyard for United States Colored Troops in Virginia.
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