Decoration Day & Charleston’s Gullah Community: Honoring the Fallen First – Memorial Day

Memorial Day holds a special significance for the Gullah people of Charleston, South Carolina. While many places claim to have originated the holiday, historical evidence points to a powerful ceremony organized by freed Black residents in Charleston on May 1, 1865, marking the true roots of Decoration Day, the precursor to Memorial Day.

A chance discovery in 1996 at Harvard’s Houghton Library completely reshaped historian David Blight’s¹ understanding of Memorial Day’s origins. Browsing the archives, he stumbled upon a handwritten soldier’s account referencing a “First Decoration Day” in Charleston, 1865. This cryptic clue led him to a corresponding article in The New York Tribune at the Avery Research Center, solidifying the event’s historical significance. This single document became the cornerstone of Blight’s research, culminating in his 2001 book “Race and Reunion,” which highlighted the Charleston ceremony as a precursor to the national tradition of Memorial Day.

To truly understand the first Decoration Day, we need to explore the events that led up to it and the powerful motivations that sparked this act of remembrance. This deeper look will reveal not just the ceremony, but also the people, emotions, and struggles that shaped this budding tradition.

The American Civil War, one of the bloodiest conflicts in the nation’s history, erupted on April 12, 1861. Confederate shore batteries commanded by General Pierre G.T. Beauregard unleashed a barrage on Fort Sumter in Charleston’s harbor, a Union-held Confederate fort.

Over the next 34 hours, Confederate guns and mortars rained down over 4,000 rounds on the poorly supplied fort. Faced with overwhelming firepower, U.S. Major Robert Anderson² surrendered Fort Sumter to Beauregard, his former student at West Point. Two days later, President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation calling for 75,000 volunteer soldiers to subdue the Southern “insurrection,” formally initiating the Civil War.

Charleston, SC³, a crucial Confederate port city, finally fell after nearly two years of resisting a Federal siege. With Confederate forces elsewhere defeated and supply lines cut off, Lieutenant General William Hardee had no choice but to abandon the city. This marked a symbolic loss for the Confederacy on the 4th anniversary of Jefferson Davis’ inauguration (Feb. 18, 1861). (Davis was the first and only president of the shortlived Confederate States from 1861 to 1865.)

As the Union army approached Charleston, the white residents fled the city while the black residents remained.⁴ A haunting melody of “Hail, Columbia” played by a lone band echoed through the ruined streets, a bittersweet reminder of the Confederacy’s loss. However, this somber scene turned tragic as fleeing Confederates set fires across the city.

Once a bustling Confederate city, Charleston fell silent but not without a population. Before the war, the state’s Black residents outnumbered its white population. The 1860 census totaled 412,320 African Americans (including enslaved) in South Carolina and some 291,300 whites.

Three days after Confederate forces abandoned Charleston, Mayor Charles Macbeth surrendered the city to General Alexander Schimmelfennig (via Lieutenant-Colonel AG Bennett) at 9:00 am on February 18, 1865. This is the letter that was written to the Mayor, prompting surrender:

HEADQUARTERS U.S. FORCES,
Charleston, S.C., February 18, 1865.

Mayor CHARLES MACBETH,
Charleston:

MAYOR: In the name of the United States Government I demand a surrender of the city of which you are the executive officer. Until further orders all citizens will remain within their houses.

I have the honor to be, mayor, very respectfully, your obedient servant,

A. G. BENNETT,
Lieutenant-Colonel, Commanding U. S. Forces, Charleston.

The Confederate cause suffered a crippling blow as Columbia, Charleston, and Fort Sumter all fell within a short span. Lieutenant John Wilkinson, captain of the blockade runner C.S.S. Chameleon (formerly the Tallahassee), heard the news of Charleston’s capture while stationed in the Bahamas. His reaction was one of despair: “This terrible news extinguishes all our hopes,” he lamented. Confederate President Davis himself admitted the severity of the situation, stating:

“This disappointment is profoundly bitter for me.”

Marching into the liberated city alongside Lieutenant-Colonel A. G. Bennett, were the 21st U.S. Colored Troops⁵ (a regiment made up mostly of freedmen from Charleston), and the 55th Massachusetts Infantry, both Black regiments. The sight of former slaves marching in as victors must have been a powerful image and a hard pill to swallow. Their celebratory entry, marked by the song “John Brown’s Body,” held a strong significance as these soldiers fought for a nation that had yet to fully embrace their freedom.

Black Union Soldiers – Images courtesy of the Library of Congress

Prisoner exchanges kept Civil War prisons relatively empty at first. However, this system broke down in 1863. The Confederacy refused to honor black Union soldiers as prisoners of war and only saw and used them as slaves. Also, the Union grew frustrated with soldiers rejoining the Confederacy after release. As the war intensified and the Union adopted a “total war” strategy⁶, prisoner exchanges ceased entirely. General Grant officially ended the practice in 1864, leading to a surge in prisoner populations.

The fate of the Charleston Race Course Prison is deeply intertwined with the horrors of the Andersonville, Georgia Confederate Prison⁷ (aka Camp Sumter). Camp Sumter was in operation for only fourteen months, yet, during that time 45,000 Union soldiers were held there, and nearly 13,000 died from disease, poor sanitation, starvation, overcrowding, and exposure. It has been described as the most notorious of Confederate atrocities inflicted on Union troops and had the highest mortality rate of any Civil War prison. (After the war, Captain Henry Wirz⁸, in charge of the prison, was tried and executed for war crimes and the deaths of 13,000 American soldiers. He was hung on November 10, 1865.)

Fearing the imminent liberation of Union prisoners by General Sherman’s forces, the Confederacy relocated thousands of captives in the late summer of 1864. Charleston became one destination, with the city’s former racecourse, the Washington Race Course⁹, serving as the primary holding area. Some prisoners were also housed in the jail yard and workhouse. These locations were intended to be temporary until a new stockade in Florence could be built.

The conditions for Union prisoners who arrived at the Charleston Race Course offered little improvement over Andersonville. While they lacked the suffocating stockade walls and benefitted from nighttime fires, they still faced the same problems of poor food and inadequate shelter. Diseases, particularly smallpox and yellow fever, spread rapidly upon their arrival.

Public outcry and the worsening situation prompted the relocation of most prisoners to Florence before a new stockade was even finished. However, the Race Course continued to be used, and even housed returning prisoners from Florence in December 1864. These returning soldiers, already in poor health, suffered further deaths at the Race Course.

At the war’s end, Potter’s Field (aka Race-Course Cemetery / Charleston National Cemetery) near the Charleston Race Course, held the remains of 257 Union soldiers. Most succumbed to disease or wounds while imprisoned at the Race Course or in Charleston hospitals. A small number, however, died from injuries sustained elsewhere in the city. The black community in Charleston was keenly aware of this mass grave and intended to do something about it, as we will soon see.

The Civil War left a sea of death, unlike anything America had ever witnessed. Unburied bodies, both in half-finished coffins and scattered bones, littered the battlefields of Virginia and Georgia. North and South, the nation faced a monumental task – how to memorialize these immense losses. The dead were present in their very absence. The war claimed an estimated 620,000 soldiers, a number surpassing all American war deaths combined up to that point.

In April of 1865 about twenty-eight black workmen went to the Potter’s Field at the Washington Race Course site to exhume the remains from the mass grave and rebury them with the dignity they deserve. The Union soldiers were given respectful burials with grave markers but without names, as there were none.¹⁰ A tall, whitewashed fence was built around the cemetery, about 100 yards long and 50 to 60 yards deep. An archway was built and the inscription was painted to read “Martyrs of the Race Course.”

A ceremony was attended by about 3,000 people and various dignitaries on Fort Sumter on April 14, 1865. General Anderson raised the US flag, four years almost to the day he had taken it down. William Lloyd Garrison, the great abolitionist from the North, was also present and wept uncontrollably when he heard a small black children’s choir sing “John Brown’s Body”. That very night, the Gullah community gave a sort of banquet in Charleston in a building with an intact roof still. This is also the same night that President Lincoln was assassinated at Ford’s Theater in Washington.¹¹

From the remarks of Reverend Henry Ward Beecher at the ceremony restoring the flag to Fort Sumter, South Carolina, April 14, 1865:

Slavery itself was cared for only as an instrument of power or of excitement. They (slave states) had unalterably fixed their eye upon empire, and all was good which could secure that, and bad which hindered it. Thus the ruling class of the South, an aristocracy as intense, proud and inflexible as ever existed, not limited either by customs or institutions, no(r) recognized and adjusted in the regular order of society, playing a reciprocal part in its machinery, but secretly disowning its own existence… ran in the blood of society like a rash not yet come to the skin; this political tapeworm, that produced nothing but lay coiled in the body, feeding on its nutriment, and holding the whole structure but a servant set up to nourish it; this aristocracy of the plantation, with firm and deliberate resolve, brought on the war that they might cut the land in two, and, clearing themselves from incorrigible free society, set up a sterner, statelier empire, where slaves worked that gentlemen might live at ease.

In the spring of 1865 and aligning with their culture of honoring the Ancestors and those passed on, the Gullah residents of Charleston began to have ceremonies all around the city and nearby areas, to celebrate their hard-earned freedom and to commemorate the fallen Union soldiers of the war. They gave a parade in late March or early April, which included two floats made by the community. One float showcased a mock slave auction with a woman and her baby being sold away. The next float had a coffin labeled “slavery” and it said, “Fort Sumter dug its grave April 12th, 1861.”

The momentous occasion first known as “Decoration Day”, came on Monday, May 1, 1865, just weeks after the end of the Civil War. The procession began at 9 am; a parade of 10,000 people on the racetrack of the Washington Race Course led by 3,000 Gullah children carrying armloads of roses and singing “John’s Brown’s Body”, women bearing flowers and wreaths, and men marching.

Various black organizations and Associations that participated include 100 members of the “Patriotic Association of Colored Men”, as well as members of “The Mutual Aid Society” and contingents of Union troops. They fit as many as they could into the grave site for the burial ceremony, black preachers read from scripture, and a children’s choir sang the National Anthem, American the Beautiful, and several spirituals.

The event concluded with the mass of attendees returning to the racetrack infield to enjoy a picnic and observe a series of speeches including words from Samuel Dickerson, Vanderhorst, Dart R. Duncan, and Peter Miller. There were performances by black and white Union regiments. General Hartwell’s brigade, consisting of the famed 54th Massachusetts Regiment alongside the 34th, and 104th, U.S. Colored Troops. These regiments performed a special double-columned march around the gravesite.

By the time dusk painted the sky, all words had been exhausted, and all actions completed for the day. With a sense of weary finality they walked away toward their homes, each person free in their own right and aware of the immense task of rebuilding the city that lay ahead.

“The war was over, and Memorial Day had been founded by African-Americans in a ritual of remembrance and consecration. The war, they had boldly announced, had been about the triumph of their emancipation over a slaveholders’ republic. They were themselves the true patriots.”

Newspapers like the Charleston Daily Courier and the New York Tribune documented the event, describing a “procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before.” D. Blight states that Memorial Day belongs to Charleston’s freed men and women who:

Decades after the fact, recollections surfaced about the very first Decoration Day in Charleston. These accounts mentioned minor disruptions during the ceremony and local criticism afterward by white folks. A more telling detail emerged much later, highlighting how white residents downplayed or outright denied this event had occurred. Fifty-one years after the original parade, a Confederate group from New Orleans contacted the Charleston Ladies Memorial Association to inquire about the black-led procession. The president, Mrs. S. C. Beckwith responded dishonestly: “I regret that I was unable to gather any official information in answer to this.”

According to Blight, Hampton Park replaced the gravesite of the Martyrs of the Race Course. With the support of a generous benefactor from the North, the Union soldiers’ final resting place was relocated in the 1870s. Their graves now found a more permanent home in the beautiful Beaufort National Cemetery. Historian David Blight concludes:

“by their labor, their words, their songs and their solemn parade created for themselves, and for us the Independence Day of the Second American Revolution.”

Today Hampton Park is a sprawling 60 acres, bordered by The Citadel. and holds the title of the largest park on the peninsula. This captivating park has different sentiments and implications for some black and white residents who share it. In true Southern fashion, the namesake of the park, General Wade Hampton III, was a Confederate leader and is honored despite his ownership of one of the South’s largest slaveholdings during the war.

After the war and the remains of the Union soldiers were removed, the land endured a short-lived endeavor with the South Carolina Inter-State and West Indian Exposition, also known as the Charleston Exposition or the West Indian Exposition. It was held in Charleston, South Carolina from December 1, 1901, to June 20, 1902.

Originally designed by a famous landscape firm in the early 1900s, the park was envisioned as a sprawling green space with parkways along the Ashley River. However, those plans were disrupted when part of the land was sold to The Citadel for expansion. At one time Hampton Park served as the football playing field for the Citadel. In the mid-20th century, a zoo was a popular attraction within the park. Opened in the 1930s, the zoo eventually fell into disrepair and closed in the 1970s with its animals relocated to a new state park.

Since the 1980s, the city has focused on revitalizing Hampton Park, improving landscaping, and adding amenities like a snack stand (now the Rose Pavilion). The park’s popularity continues today, especially among walkers, joggers, and cyclists. It is common to see Citadel cadets and residents jogging on the racetrack of the old Washington Race Course.

For over a century, this key event in Charleston’s history was largely forgotten. However, thanks to the work of historians like David Blight, the Gullah community’s role in birthing Memorial Day is being rightfully recognized. This act of remembrance wasn’t just about honoring fallen soldiers; it was a mighty symbol of freedom and a reclaiming of space. The racetrack, a place of former oppression, became a ground for celebrating liberation and mourning those who fought for it.

This Memorial Day, as we eat our feasts, and enjoy one another, let us recall all those who died in service to our country, known and unknown. Remember the Gullah people of Charleston, who, very early in their freedom, took it upon themselves to honor the fallen and plant the seeds of a national tradition.

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