John Brown's Body

On Memorial Day and Historical Correctives

In 1996, Yale historian David Blight learned about a Memorial Day commemoration organized by a group of black people freed from enslavement in Charleston, South Carolina less than a month after the Confederacy surrendered in 1865. The story goes like this: In the late stages of the Civil War, the Confederate army in Charleston transformed a country club race track into a makeshift prison for Union captives. More than 260 Union soldiers died from disease and exposure while being held in the race track’s open-air infield. Their bodies were hastily buried in a mass grave. When Charleston fell and Confederate troops evacuated city, the former slaves remained. One of the first things they did was give those fallen Union prisoners a proper burial. They exhumed the mass grave and reinterred the bodies in a new cemetery with a tall whitewashed fence inscribed with the words: “Martyrs of the Race Course.” On May 1, 1865, a crowd of 10,000 people, mostly former slaves with some white missionaries, staged a parade around the race track. Three thousand Black schoolchildren carried bouquets of flowers and sang “John Brown’s Body.” Members of other black Union regiments were in attendance and performed double-time marches. Black ministers recited verses from the Bible. When people say that African-Americans created Memorial Day and the U.S. tradition of honoring dead soldiers, this is what they’re referring to.

This commemoration predated the first national observance of Memorial Day, which didn’t occur until May 30, 1868. It also predated Mary Ann Williams’s gathering of Southern women to inaugurate an annual holiday of decorating the graves of both Union and Confederate soldiers with flowers in April 1866, yet it is Williams’s gathering which the Department of Veterans Affairs has chosen to credit with originating Memorial Day. When people say that black people’s contribution to the existence of Memorial Day has been erased, this is what they’re referring to. But more consequential than the historical corrective of black people as Memorial Day’s true architects is the historical corrective that black people did not create Memorial Day as a nationalist celebration of service in the armed forces. It was, instead, a celebration of death in service of abolition democracy. It would have been nonsensical to decorate the graves of both Union and Confederate soldiers. There is a reason thousands of black schoolchildren were singing “John Brown’s Body”:

He captured Harper's Ferry with his nineteen men so true
He frightened old Virginia till she trembled through and through
They hung him for a traitor, they themselves the traitor crew
But his soul goes marching on

Glory, Glory, Hallelujah
Glory, Glory, Hallelujah
Glory, Glory, Hallelujah
His soul goes marching on

To be clear on exactly who John Brown was - in October 1859, he led a raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, intending to start a slave liberation movement that would spread south. He had planned to arm slaves with weapons from the armory. He had prepared a Provisional Constitution for the revised, slavery-free United States that he hoped to bring about. He seized the armory, but seven people were killed and more were injured. Those of Brown's men who did not flee were killed or captured by local militia and U.S. Marines, and Brown, subsequently, became the first person executed for treason in the history of the United States. This is what John Brown is most famous for, but, even years earlier, he led anti-slavery volunteers and his own sons in a state-level civil war over whether Kansas would enter the Union as a slave state or a free state. He did this because he couldn’t stand abolitionist pacifism - "These men are all talk. What we need is action – action!".

So, Memorial Day as a black political expression was not an appeal for recognition or inclusion. It was an abolitionist practice of honor and mourning for those who accomplished the death of a national policy of enslavement by being forced into death themselves. Memorial Day, even in the current sanitized form, is one of the more honest U.S. holidays in its grim pronouncement that freedom involves death. That it demands some sort of existential sacrifice. But those former slaves made clear that not all deaths are honorable. That it does, in fact, matter what you die for, and that sacrifices do not end with the dead. That they had been left to retrieve their dead by digging up the graves of those who white supremacy intended to leave forgotten and dishonored was an indication of the work that remained.

The recovery of archival information locating black people in the origins of American nationalist traditions presents a different problem than the whitewashing of black historical observances like MLK day or Juneteenth. Highlighting that black people were the first to observe Memorial Day without thinking more seriously about what they gathered to memorialize creates a narrative of these ancestors as uniquely loyal allies in the U.S.’s militarist project and, on that basis, uniquely deserving of equal treatment in American life. But that isn’t what’s reflected in the historical record. Their gathering was inapposite to Memorial Day as it’s presently observed and that is the reason for its erasure. Black people’s reclamation of Memorial Day may eventually become widely acknowledged, but only because its abolitionism has been abandoned. Today, the nation does not memorialize those who died for a slavery-free nation, but an indivisible allegiance to the flag, which has no such commitment to a slavery-free nation.