In 1868, a Civil War general named John Logan wrote an order calling on the country to set aside a day to place flowers on the graves of those who died "in defense of their country… and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village and hamlet churchyard in the land."
On that first official day of remembrance, 5,000 people came to Arlington and placed flowers on the graves of 20,000 soldiers.
Back then it was called Decoration Day. A hundred and fifty-eight years later, we call it Memorial Day, and most of us spent yesterday grilling something and staying up a little too late.
Good. I mean it.
The people those 5,000 volunteers and loved-ones were honoring in 1868 didn't die so their descendants could spend every late May feeling appropriately somber. They died so their kids and grandkids could have ordinary Mondays—a yard, a grill, the freedom and prosperity that allows a day of leisure with nothing in particular pressing down on them.
Memorial Day becoming a holiday synonymous with backyard grilling, and time with family and friends to just hang out is, in a real sense, the whole point.
At Arlington right now, a soldier keeps watch over the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
The monument was established in 1921 for a WWI soldier whose remains couldn’t be identified. His grave became a stand-in for every death the records couldn't account for, and for every person who gave something the country never got to individually thank them for.
In September 2003, Hurricane Isabel barreled through DC with Category 2 winds, and cemetery officials gave the guards permission—for the first time in the monument's history—to seek shelter. Sergeant Christopher Holmes was there that day.
"That's never an option for us," he said. "It went in one ear and right out the other."
A tree snapped and fell a few dozen yards from where Sergeant First Class Fredrick Geary was standing post. He watched it hit the ground, and kept walking.
What people like Holmes and Geary are standing watch over, what General Logan was trying to name, and what those 5,000 people in 1868 were trying to honor, isn’t just a set of graves. It’s a set of ideas. Ideas written down and defended from their beginning with life, honor, and treasure, about what a government can and cannot do to the people it governs.
Those ideas have been under pressure for almost as long as they've existed.
The Founders knew this was coming. Some of them even contributed to it personally. Hamilton built a national bank, Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts, and Jefferson bought Louisiana—all constitutionally questionable actions.
The gap between what the founding document says and what the government actually does has been there from the very beginning, and it hasn't closed on its own in the last two and a half centuries.
Spending the day at the lake yesterday was right. Having a careless Monday with your friends and family, enjoying the ordinary freedom of a beautiful spring—that's exactly what those soldiers gave their lives hoping we’d be able to do.
But there's a whole lot of work to do if we want to preserve this way of life for the coming generations.
“A republic,” Franklin quipped, “if you can keep it.”
And that work doesn't happen in cemeteries or memorials.
It happens in families, in what kids learn before they've been told what to think by someone with their own agenda, and at dinner tables where parents teach the most important lessons of life.
That's what our America's History series is built for.
Volumes 1 and 2 take your kids from 1215 through the ratification of the Bill of Rights. They teach the real ideas, the real stories, and more importantly, the philosophy behind why the Founders did what they did, and what they were afraid of getting wrong.
Volume 3, (1791 to 1849) is open for pre-order now.
It’s where you find out how right they were to be afraid. It covers the first presidencies, the first constitutional crises, and the first times the government did things everyone knew the constitution probably didn't allow because the justifications seemed good enough at the time.
The Family Starter Pack (which includes America’s History Volumes 1 and 2) is 68% off in honor of Memorial Day.
It includes everything your family needs to start learning the foundational principles of freedom, self-reliance, personal responsibility, free enterprise, and the proven-true ideas that lead to the best chance at human flourishing and prosperity.
They’re the ideas that countless men and women have sacrificed their time, talents, and even their lives to preserve and promote.
The best way to honor their efforts and keep their memories alive is by teaching these things to our kids.
And the best teacher is you.
— Connor
