On May 30, the nation will observe another Memorial Day dedicated to the memory of members of the military who have died.
Originally, the day was supposed to encourage the decoration of the graves of Civil War soldiers with flowers, thus the holiday’s original name, Decoration Day.
The idea for the holiday seems to have begun when young ladies began quietly marking the graves of dead Union soldiers during the war. There were other such spontaneous observances. In May 1864, Black residents of Charleston, South Carolina, decorated the graves of the Union prisoners of war who had died there. On May 5, 1868, John Logan, a U.S. Senator from Illinois, a former Civil War Union general and the commander of the post-war Union veterans’ organization, the Grand Army of the Republic, issued a proclamation declaring May 30 to be Decoration Day.
The observance remained confined to women and girls decorating the graves of dead soldiers in local cemeteries for several years. On June 2, 1870, the Kendall County Record’s Oswego correspondent reported, “The decoration of the soldiers’ graves yesterday was of a private nature.”
Early on, there were attempts to make it a day to honor all dead, not just Civil War dead, but the idea was vigorously opposed by the war’s veterans. A note in the Record on May 22, 1879, read, “Please remember and teach your children that Decoration Day is the soldiers’ day. You have 364 days in which to wreath the graves of your loved and lost, but May 30th belongs to the loyal dead and to them alone.”
By 1881 in Oswego, the observance had grown to include a parade to the cemetery, choral music and speeches by dignitaries, although women and girls still decorated the graves. But that same year, a more formalized organization of local Civil War veterans was formed to organize the observance. The organization eventually was taken over by the members of the Grand Army of the Republic. After many years, responsibility for the annual observance was handed off to the Oswego American Legion Post.
The progression was the same in most communities, although not all were comfortable with former soldiers organizing the observance. An anonymous Oswego letter writer in the June 8, 1898, Record recalled of the observance’s early days, “The spirit that then moved the decorators was that of pity; a pity that these young lives should have been sacrificed; that kind of practice would have tended towards aversion to war. But a regular day was appointed for it; the affair was taken out of the hands of the women by the soldiers, especially by the organized G.A.R. To secure a band was the first move towards decoration; the procession in military order was made the great imposing feature; the oration the more bombastic the better; in short, the spirit of pity was changed to that of glory, and the affair made to stimulate militarism. ... The question now is: Which disposition for a people is the best, the civil or military?”
Although Decoration Day has turned into Memorial Day to honor all of the nation’s war dead, not just those who died during the Civil War, it’s still a day to recall those young men who marched off to fight to save the Union, and then to stamp out slavery. In that effort, three of those young men, Alfred X. Murdock (his friends called him Ax), 19; William “Billy” Pooley, 25; and Robinson B. Murphy, 13, fought in Oswego’s Company A, 127th Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiment. Murdock and Pooley were infantry soldiers, young Murphy a drummer whose politically-connected father got him a staff appointment on the brigade general’s staff.
On July 28, 1864, what was left of Company A was holding the far side of the Union line at a hamlet named Ezra Church. Confederate Gen. John Bell Hood’s troops tried to break the Union line by striking the position held by Pooley, Murdock, and their fellow soldiers. The Union commander sent for reinforcements and young Murphy, just 15 at the time, was given the job of guiding reinforcements to the far end of the American line held by the friends and neighbors in the company he’d grown up with. The sights and sounds horror of that day stayed with him the rest of his life. As Murphy put it in a letter published in the Sept. 7, 1898, Kendall County Record:
“As you all know, the most of the time my position was such that I could look on and see what was being done and oh! how I always turned towards my own regiment, and how it grieved me to see them stricken down either from disease or the rebel bullet. I shall never forget that 28th day of July in front of Atlanta, when ‘Billy’ Lawton came running out of the woods and said ‘Bob, for God’s sake get us some reinforcements; they are cutting us all to pieces,’ and a little later as I rode up near the line with the reinforcements, there I found our comrades, Ax. Murdoch [sic] and ‘Billy’ Pooley, both shot dead; they were our Oswego boys. Do you wonder I was deeply touched and the tears rolled down my face?”
In bringing the Union reinforcements into the line of battle, young Murphy had one horse shot out from underneath him, but he did his duty. For his heroism that day, he was granted a brevet promotion to lieutenant and was eventually awarded the Medal of Honor, the only Kendall County soldier to ever win the nation’s highest award for valor.
Murdock, Pooley and Murphy can be stand-ins for all the young men who have gone off to all the nation’s wars, some of whom never came home, as we observe another Memorial Day. And while we’re enjoying the parades, family gatherings, picnics and other activities, why not take a couple of minutes to send some quiet thanks those who gave their lives so we could enjoy the freedoms that we do.
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