Best Memorial Day post

Caleb presents the historical context for Memorial Day. I include part here (emphasis mine):

Mode for Caleb: On Memorial Day: "As historian David Blight shows in Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, the earliest Memorial Days were concerned primarily with making sense of the unprecedented death and destruction that the Civil War had wrought. In those earliest celebrations, with memories of the war's wounds still fresh and open, Northerners and Southerners had different ways of making sense of their scarred battlefields, ruined cities, and over 600,000 deaths. For many Northerners, the death and destruction were made meaningful by the ideals that had been championed by the Union--loyalty, nationalism, and emancipation. Southerners had their own mythical ways of making meaning out of defeat, and former Confederates quickly assembled the major components of what would later be known as the Lost Cause ideology. In Southern Memorial Days, soldiers were portrayed as chivalrous defenders of their homes and families, and secession became coded as a valiant movement of resistance to Northern tyranny and aggression. In the immediate aftermath of the War, Memorial Day therefore served as a convenient index of how different memories of the war and its meanings could be. How Americans chose to make sense of the war, to themselves and to others, depended on how they viewed the war in the first place.

Blight also shows, however, that over time the rituals of Memorial Day became less sectional and divergent. In the 1870s, as resistance to radical Reconstruction became more organized and virulent in the South, and as commitment to Reconstruction became more disparate and lax in the North, Memorial Day increasingly became a ritual of reconciliation. Northerners and Southerners celebrated the day together, staging patriotic displays of national reunion. The Blue and the Gray were both praised for their valor and sacrifice, and both colors faded into red, white, and blue.

But that blurring of the lines between blue and gray went hand in hand with the retrenchment of color lines in the South, as state governments and paramilitary chapters of the KKK disfranchised black citizens and terrorized African American communities. From the perspective of the dwindling number of Radical Republicans in the North, the sentimental pathos of Memorial Day was dangerous because it covered the secessionism and racism of the South with a patina of respectability. Reconciliation became a code word for retreat from the promises of Reconstruction and racial egalitarianism."