Our Heroic Dead

Modern Memorial Day's Civil War and Reconstruction roots

In January 1866, eight months after the end of the Civil War, a writer for the Augusta Chronicle described the City Cemetery, where the iron gates swung open with a “deep, mournful sound,” and “heaps of earth” rose beside grand monuments. Honeysuckle grew thickly around tombstones beneath the shade of Georgia pines. In the cemetery, “in a common square,…