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General John Logan, credited with establishing Memorial Day, and his Civil War career
John A. Logan is credited with establishing Memorial Day as a national day of remembrance for those who died in the Civil War. As head of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), a fraternal organization of Civil War veterans, he issued General Order Number 11 in 1868, which set May 30 as a day for decorating the graves of soldiers with flowers. It is believed May 30 was chosen because flowers would be in bloom nationwide. He was also a politician at the local, state and national levels and an effective military leader in many Civil War engagements.
Library of Congress.
Before the Civil War
Logan was born February 9, 1826, in what is now Murphysboro, Illinois, then a pro-slavery part of southern Illinois. He and his father, a local politician elected three times to the Illinois General Assembly, were staunch Jacksonian Democrats. In the Mexican-American War he served from 1847 to 1848 in Co. H, 1st Regiment Illinois Volunteers, marching from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, to Santa Fe, New Mexico. He saw no combat but nearly died of measles.
He won a county clerkship in 1849, became prosecuting attorney of Illinois's Third Judicial District after graduating from the University of Louisville in 1851, and was elected to the Illinois General Assembly a year later. There he was responsible for a bill to keep free Black people out of Illinois, echoing his constituents' views, and made a statement that whites and Black people were never meant to stand as equals. Statewide voters backed the law two to one, but it cost him with anti-slavery residents. He won a seat in the U.S. House as a Democrat in 1858 with nearly 80 percent of the vote and was re-elected in 1860. He opposed secession and worked for compromise, which led some fellow Democrats to accuse him of disloyalty.
The Civil War
Three months after the Confederacy fired on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, Logan was among Washington's congressmen who went out to Manassas Junction, Virginia, on July 21 with picnic baskets to watch what was expected to be a quick Union victory. It was a bloody defeat, with over 2,800 Union casualties. Logan joined the fighting as an unattached volunteer with a Michigan regiment, then went home and raised the 31st Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiment as its colonel. His August 1861 speech in Marion, Illinois, which Ulysses S. Grant later said helped persuade southern Illinois to stay with the Union, was followed by his resignation from Congress in 1862.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| November 1861 | Belmont, Missouri: the 31st's first engagement; Grant praised its bravery |
| February 1862 | Fort Donelson, Tennessee: Logan was wounded three times |
| June to July 1863 | As a Major General on Grant's recommendation, commanded a division in the Vicksburg campaign |
| July 22, 1864 | After General James McPherson was killed at Atlanta, took command of the Army of the Tennessee and turned a rout into a victory, but was later replaced by Major General Oliver O. Howard; the page says it was presumed Sherman distrusted politicians in uniform |
| April 1865 | In Raleigh, North Carolina, when Lincoln was assassinated, he stood in the way of a mob of 2,000 angry federal soldiers and threatened to fire if they did not disperse; North Carolinians still celebrate him for saving their capital |
| May 24, 1865 | Rode at the head of the Army of the Tennessee in the Grand Review in Washington, DC |
Grand Review of the Troops, Washington DC, 1865. Library of Congress.
A change of mind and a return to politics
After Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863, Logan urged fellow soldiers to accept African American volunteers. By the fall of 1864 his switch from Democrat to Republican was official, as he campaigned for Lincoln's re-election. After the war he voted for the constitutional amendments to abolish slavery and grant citizenship and voting rights to African Americans and supported women's suffrage. He was elected to the House in 1866 and the Senate in 1871, managed the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson, ran for vice president on the 1884 Republican ticket with James Blaine, which lost narrowly to Grover Cleveland, and won a third Senate term in 1885. His stature made him a likely Republican presidential nominee in 1888, but he died before then, on December 26, 1886.
1884 campaign card for the Blaine-Logan presidential ticket. Library of Congress.
Decoration Day
During the war, Southern residents began decorating the graves of their dead with flowers, fabric and flags, and the practice grew into an annual Decoration Day that spread across the country. Logan, a founding member of the GAR, America's first national veterans' organization, formalized it in 1868. After World War I the day came to honor the dead of all American wars, and in 1971 Congress declared Memorial Day a national holiday and moved it to the last Monday in May.
Decoration Day, 1876. Library of Congress.
Logan Circle
Congress renamed Iowa Circle in Logan's honor in 1930. His home at 4 Logan Circle still stands. The surrounding eight-block area has over 100 residences built between 1875 and 1900 in Late Victorian and Richardsonian styles, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1972, and is managed by the National Park Service. It is the city's last remaining fully residential traffic circle. A bronze equestrian statue of Logan stands in its center, its base showing Peace and War and scenes from his life of public service. The same site was Camp Barker during the war, a military barracks turned into a refugee camp for people newly freed from slavery, near Lincoln's route to the Old Soldier's Home.
Sources
- National Park Service, "John Logan: War Hero, Public Servant, Founder of Memorial Day", https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/john-logan-war-hero-public-servant-founder-of-memorial-day.htm; rewritten in hubnx's own words. Photographs of the family, the statue and children at Camp Barker are left out.