Memorial Day: Lessons from the Civil War

Memorial Day traces its origins to 1866 when a knot of women visited a cemetery to lay flowers on the graves of Confederate soldiers.  These were the mothers, widows and sisters of fallen heroes.  The graves in a patch of Columbus, Mississippi, were a stark reminder of the horrific Civil War.

As the women went about decorating the cemetery, they glimpsed the nearby barren graves of Union soldiers.  These courageous women, whose loved ones may have been killed by those union soldiers, put aside their feelings of grief and began spreading flowers on their graves.

This incident is recorded as one of the first local observances of what officially became known as Decoration Day in 1868, a time for honoring the nation's war dead.  Nearly a century later Decoration Day morphed into America's Memorial Day, established by Congress in 1971.

There is a lesson we can learn those Mississippi women.  Soldiers are remembered and honored for their service and sacrifice.  But the names of mothers, widows and girlfriends are forever lost.  Yet they are heroes too whose sufferings endured beyond the grave. They too deserve a day of respect.   

There are other lessons taught by the Civil War, the bloodiest conflict in American history.  Roughly two percent of the population, an estimated 620,000 men, lost their lives.  The number of Civil War causalities exceeds the combined totals of Americans killed in both world wars and Vietnam.

Historical sources today believe the causalities could have been much higher.  Some put the number at 750,000.  One reason for the estimate is there are no reliable resources to document the number of civilians who died in the conflict.  Lost of property was also catastrophic in the South.

The death and destruction were on a scale the country had never experienced.  The reunited states were ill prepared for the aftermath of the largest human calamity in American history.  There were no national cemeteries, no burial details and no one to deliver the somber news to survivors.

The massive toll forced Americans to deal with the cruel realities of a war fought on its homeland. It was a lesson that made the country's leaders realize that protecting America from invasion from foreign armies should be the top security priority.  That military precedent survives even today.

Today's political correctness crowd has rewritten history of the Civil War citing the moral issue of slavery as the major cause of the conflict.  There is no argument that the preservation of slavery became an economic and political issue for southern states dependent on slave labor for agriculture.

When President Abraham Lincoln was elected President in 1860 the slave states feared the lost of influence in Washington.  By 1861, eleven of the 34 states had seceded from the union, a political decision that ignited passions on both sides and hastened the bloody conflict that ensued.

Mr. Lincoln famously wrote: "If I could save the union without freeing a slave, I would do it." His sole goal was to keep America one nation.  The country was born of rebellion against its English masters but leaders understood another schism would forever alter the American destiny.

Imagine an Un-United States today.  It may resemble a conflagration such as the Middle East.  Or the patchwork quilted former Soviet Union where grudges and ethnic violence were inflamed after the dismemberment of the Communist state.  America would be a diminished nation.

Unity at all costs, even the lives of hundreds of thousands of young men, was the price Mr. Lincoln was willing to pay.  That should be remembered in these times when some boorish voices, such as those in California, call for the Golden State to resign from the United States in protest of an election.

There have been the similar grumblings in other states, including in Texas when President Obama occupied the White House.  Even if said in jest, cooler heads should demand that the notion of a state seceding from the union is never an acceptable remedy in these United States of America.

That day in a Mississippi cemetery more than 150 years ago is a warning that an intra-country war is indeed hell.  It ripped apart a nation, left hundreds of thousands of grieving people and decimated a generation.  Time heals wounds but it can never repair the needless deaths of fellow Americans.

That's why it is fitting that on this Memorial Day, the nation salute the sacrifice of the 110,100 Union soldiers who were killed on the battlefield fighting to preserve the American ideal of One Nation Under God.