In Our Youths, Our Hearts Were Touched With Fire...

This weekend our nation pauses to honor the memories of the thousands who have bled and died on battlefields foreign and domestic. While the holiday is commemorated with parades and barbeques, we would do well to remember the true meaning of Memorial Day and how it all got started.

The first Memorial Day was officially proclaimed by General John Logan, national commander of the Grand Army of the Republic on 5 May 1868. Logan arranged for flowers to be placed on the graves of Union and Confederate soldiers who were buried at Arlington National Cemetery. New York was the first state to officially recognize Memorial Day in 1873 and by the 1890's nearly all of the Northern states were celebrating the holiday. The Southern states refused to recognize the holiday until after the completion of World War I, when the act of honoring war dead became truly a national holiday.

One of the most famous Memorial Day addresses is one by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, given in Keene, New Hampshire on 30 May 1884. Holmes, who would later become a Supreme Court justice, was a veteran of the Civil War. He fought in the Wilderness Campaign and was wounded at Ball's Bluff, Antietam, and Fredericksburg. His remarks resonate with us today as he remembered the many young men in the prime of their lives who fell on the battlefields of The Civil War some twenty years earlier:


"I see them now, more than I can number, as once I saw them on this earth. They are the same bright figures, or their counterparts, that come also before your eyes; and when I speak of those who were my brothers, the same words describe yours.
I see a fair-haired lad, a lieutenant, and a captain on whom life had begun somewhat to tell, but still young, sitting by the long mess-table in camp before the regiment left the State, and wondering how many of those who gathered in our tent could hope to see the end of what was then beginning. For neither of them was that destiny reserved. I remember, as I awoke from my first long stupor in the hospital after the battle of Ball's Bluff, I heard the doctor say, 'He was a beautiful boy'.
I see another quiet figure, of virtuous life and quiet ways, not much heard of until our left was turned at Petersburg. He was in command of the regiment as he saw our comrades driven in. He threw back our left wing, and the advancing tide of defeat was shattered against his iron wall. He saved an army corps from disaster, and then a round shot ended all for him.
But, nevertheless, the generation that carried on the war has been set apart by its experience. Through our great good fortune, in our youths our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing."


We can never repay the brave men and women who have given their lives over the past two and a half centuries so that we may enjoy this great land of liberty. No, we can never repay them. But we can honor and remember them--those whose youths were touched with fire.