Memorial Day

You of the North have had drawn for you with a master's hand the picture of your returning armies. You have heard how, in the pomp and circumstance of war, they came back to you, marching with proud and victorious tread, reading their glory in a nation's eyes. Will you bear with me while I tell you of another army that sought its home at the close of the late war-an army that marched home in defeat and not in victory, in pathos and not in splendor?-from "The Southern Solder" by Henry W. GradyWhen the American Civil War was over and the devastation only begun to be tallied, the widows, mothers, and children of the Confederate dead went out across the battlefields and graveyards and scattered flowers across the resting places not only of their husbands, sons, and fathers but on the unmarked and unknown resting places of the Northern dead as well. That custom grew into the holiday of Memorial Day.This volume honors the day-and the war dead it commemorates-with a collection of poetry, essays, and speeches by such American luminaries as Walt Whitman, Theodore Roosevelt, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Tecumseh Sherman, Herman Melville, and many others. First published in 1911, within living memory of the Civil War, this is a secular and nonpartisan American celebration of Memorial Day, a true memorial to the spirit of service and sacrifice of those true Americans who gave their lives in defense of liberty.OF INTEREST TO: readers of American history, poetry fansAUTHOR BIO: Austrian-American author, poet, and biographer ROBERT HAVEN SCHAUFFLER (1879-1964) edited numerous collections of prose and verse dedicated to American holidays, including Armistice Day, Christmas, and Independence Day. His other works include Peter Pantheism (1925) and Beethoven: The Man Who Freed Music (1929).