Mark Rutte Selected as the Next Secretary General of NATO

 

The Discussion A former Union general helped popularize a festival started by former Confederates across the entire nation in the years after the bloody Civil War.

The occasion was Memorial Day, an annual celebration first observed in the former Confederate States in 1866 and became official US government policy in 1868. The country observes this holiday in remembrance of its military fallen.
The holiday's inception is typically attributed to Gen. John A. Logan, the commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, the largest Union veterans' fraternity at the time.
However, General Logan admitted that the holiday had its origins among the Union's erstwhile adversaries when he declared, "It was not too late for the Union men of the nation to follow the example of the people of the south.

Generous acts bore fruit During 1866, the first year of this annual observance in the South, a feature of the holiday emerged that made awareness, admiration and eventually imitation of it spread quickly to the North. During the inaugural Memorial Day observances which were conceived in Columbus, Georgia, many Southern participants – especially women – decorated graves of Confederate soldiers as well as, unexpectedly, those of their former enemies who fought for the Union.

Newspaper coverage in the North shortly after those first Memorial Day celebrations throughout the South was overwhelmingly positive for the former Confederates.

One editorial praised and commended the ladies for their behavior this time around, which was to bury any resentment or animosity that might have been harbored toward those who fought against them during the late war.
The Cleveland Daily Leader celebrated Southern women on May 9, 1866, the inaugural Memorial Day.
The deed will be valued in the North since it was both lovely and selfless.
The New York Commercial Advertiser echoed the sentiment, highlighting the selfless acts of the women of Columbus, Georgia. "Let our Washington authorities learn from this incident, which is heartwarming and beautiful."

"The grey and the blue"
It didn't take long for Northerners to decide to embrace both the Southern tradition of "burying the hatchet" and the Southern holiday of Memorial Day. On May 28, 1869, a group of Union soldiers wrote the Philadelphia Evening Telegraph to outline their plans:

"Post 19 has chosen not to walk past the graves of the Confederates lying in our trenches, but instead to split the first flower gifts of a shared nation annually between the blue and the grey in an effort to permanently bury the harsh sentiments sparked by the conflict. There are no helpless enemies. Post-19 views the deceased from the South only as valiant men.

  Other tales of mutual generosity spread throughout the North, such as the one about a 10-year-old who, on July 15, 1868, made a floral wreath and sent it to Colonel Leaming, the holiday's overseer in Lafayette, Indiana, along with the following note:

Would you kindly lay this wreath on the tomb of a rebel soldier? Maybe a little girl will be so sweet as to place some flowers on my darling papa's grave in Andersonville, Georgia.

During the first three years of Memorial Day observances, participants on both sides generously extended an olive branch, demonstrating President Abraham Lincoln's wishes for "malice toward none" and "charity for all."

Lincoln's goal for peace between the North and South was reflected in the early development of the Memorial Day celebration, despite the fact that few people today are aware of this.