Battlefield at Dusk — Remembrance

The United States entered the war with no graves registration, no dog tags, no system for notifying a family and no national cemeteries. Around 750,000 men died. Roughly half were never identified. Soldiers took to pinning scraps of paper with their names inside their coats before a battle, because nobody else was going to do it for them.

What exists now was built out of that failure. The national cemetery system was created during the war and expanded afterwards into a programme that searched the old battlefields for years, moving hundreds of thousands of remains into marked ground. Clara Barton set up an office in Washington to answer letters from families asking where a son had gone, and worked through tens of thousands of cases.

Decoration Day began in the late 1860s with people walking out to those cemeteries in the spring to put flowers on the graves — by many accounts starting with freed men and women in Charleston honouring Union dead. It became Memorial Day. The habit of a nation formally remembering its war dead begins here, because before this war there was no need for one.