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The Martha's Vineyard Times is a weekly publication.
May 26 - June 1, 2005 Edition
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Editorial The spirit of the day The Martha's Vineyard Times May 26, 2005 It was the Civil War’s dead who were the first to be remembered on Memorial Day. In the South, the town of Columbus, Miss., held observances for fallen Union and Confederate soldiers in 1866. Waterloo, N.Y., is the birthplace of Memorial Day in the North. Officially, in 1868, Commander in Chief John A. Logan of the Grand Army of the Republic issued a general order designating May 30 of that year “for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion.” In July of 1863, at Gettysburg, more than 50,000 died on the battlefield that President Abraham Lincoln would dedicate a few months later. That summer, Gettysburg was strewn not with flowers but with dead horses and dead men, Southerners and Yankees. Lincoln knew what a battlefield looked like: “It breathed forth famine, swam in blood, and rode on fire; and long, long after, the orphan’s cry and the widow’s wail continued to break the sad silence that ensued.” The Gettysburg Address November 19, 1863 Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that this nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate — we cannot consecrate — we cannot hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. - Abraham Lincoln What good could be made of this horror with just words and memories and the invocation of the Declaration of Independence? On Nov. 19, 1863, at Gettysburg, Lincoln set out to reinterpret what had occurred and transform Americans’ understanding of their Constitution while he was at it. As historian Gary Wills puts it, “Lincoln is here [at the dedication ceremony] not only to sweeten the air of Gettysburg, but to clear the infected atmosphere of American history itself, tainted with official sins and inherited guilt. He would cleanse the Constitution — not … by burning an instrument that countenanced slavery. He altered the document from within, by appeal from its letter to the spirit, subtly changing the recalcitrant stuff of that legal compromise… he performed one of the most daring acts of open-air sleight-of-hand ever witnessed by the unsuspecting…” In his brief address, composed by his own hand on the train to Pennsylvania from Washington, just 272 words, Lincoln transcended the Constitution and the dead. He asked his listeners to reclaim and rededicate themselves to the spirit of the Declaration in which the nation was conceived. Absent Lincoln, Monday will nevertheless be meaningful. Even at this bitter moment, uncivilly divided as we seem to be, when history’s hold on us has weakened, Memorial Day can be about absent fathers and brothers and sons, but there’s more. Memorial Day recalls the founding principles and the ideas for which so many have sacrificed so utterly.

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