Tomorrow is Memorial Day in the United States.
In the US, the practice of placing flowers and other decorations on the graves of soldiers and sailors who had died in war is generally thought to have begun during the United States Civil War (1861-65). Because soldiers fighting on both sides were Americans, the American death toll in the Civil War is the largest of any any war in American history, estimated to be 618,222, 360,222 from the North and 258,000 from the South.
The Civil War began in Charleston, South Carolina, on April 12, 1861, when Confederate artillery opened fire on a Federal fort in Charleston Harbor. Fort Sumter surrendered 34 hours later.
The first large land battle was fought on July 21, 1861, in Prince William County, Virginia, just north of the city of Manassas and about 25 miles west-southwest of Washington, D.C. It would later be called the First Battle of Bull Run (the name used by Union forces), also known as the First Battle of Manassas (the name used by Confederate forces).
Sullivan Ballou was a lawyer and politician from Rhode Island, and a Major in the Union Army. Following is from the text of a letter he wrote to his wife one week before he was killed in the First Battle of Bull Run.
PG, those look like bison or elk teeth on his shirt?
That was from Ken Burns’ CIVIL WAR. It always makes me blink tears.
The NPR station in Garden City KS always played the letter as part of “Western Swing and Other Things” on the Saturday before memorial Day and before Veterans Day. I ended up pulling over out of traffic more than once until my vision cleared.
To put the number of deaths during that war in perspective, of the Confederate units I’ve researched (admittedly only a handful), approximately one in three of the men who enlisted and served never came back.