Sunday Pages: "General Order No. 11"

The 1868 decree by Gen. John A. Logan that it is the origin of Memorial Day.

Dear Reader,

Southern Illinois, where John Alexander Logan was born on February 9, 1826, was known as “Egypt.” No one definitively knows why, but the SCRC Virtual Museum at Southern Illinois University’s Morris Library offers this Biblical detail:

“Egyptians” traced the origin to providing grain for northern Illinois after the horrible winter of 1831-1832. Northern Illinoisans (and the nation) connected it to the southern region’s “intellectual darkness” and pro-enslavement attitudes. Both explanations come from allusions to the Old Testament, the first from the story of Joseph and the second from the “darkness” which spread over the land in Exodus.

From this place of intellectual darkness, Logan initially emerged as what we would now call a white supremacist. His father was once a slaveholder. He was staunchly pro-slavery. He believed Black people were inferior, and wanted nothing to do with them. When he served in the Illinois legislature, as a Democrat (back when the Democrats were the racists), he introduced “Logan’s Black Law,” a bill that effectively prohibited freed Blacks from settling in “Egypt.” This is likely when he was bequeathed his nickname, “Black Jack.” He also moved to kill bills that would grant basic civil rights to Black people. “It was never intended that whites and blacks should stand in equal relation,” he said at the time.

Logan wasn’t just a racist—he was an active racist, using his privileged position to screw over African-Americans. After winning a Congressional seat in the midterm election of 1858, Logan went to Washington, where he served in the House of Representatives. He was a rock-ribbed Democrat, an adversary of the woke abolitionists—but also committed to the Union, and to compromise.

After Lincoln’s election in 1860, South Carolina bailed on the Union. As the Logan Museum explains:

To Logan’s dismay Abraham Lincoln, whom he detested as he did all abolitionists, won the Presidency. When Southern states began to secede he wrote an open letter to his constituents blaming “the President elect … drunken with victory” of pursing policies that would destroy the nation. His desire for compromise brought accusations of treason.

Although he sympathized with the enslavers, Logan did not go along with the Confederacy. He held the Union more dear. Instead, he joined the Army. He rose through the ranks, fighting bravely. He was wounded so badly on the battlefield that his wife heard that he had died. But Logan survived. He was a major general by 1863, and then, by the end of the war, Commander of the Army of the Tennessee.

And something else happened. In the crucible of the battlefield, Logan experienced his own “Road to Damascus” epiphany. Fighting side by side with Black soldiers, the author of “Logan’s Black Law” realized that his prejudice against people of color, an ugly vestige of his upbringing in hidebound “Egypt,” was ill-informed, ignorant, hateful, and wrong. He saw the light. And he wasn’t passive about it. He wound up befriending his former bugbear Abraham Lincoln—unthinkable in 1860. He switched parties, becoming a Radical Republican. And after the war ended, “Black Jack” Logan became a tireless advocate for the rights of Black Americans. The Southern Illinois University Library sums it up:

While serving during the Civil War, Logan experienced a change of heart and reversed his stance on Black people and enslavement. In 1865, Logan spoke in Louisville, Kentucky, in favor of ratifying the 13th amendment to the Constitution, which would abolish enslavement in the United States. Blaming the Civil War on enslavement, Logan asked how “any mortal man [could] desire to see such a cause of sorrow and suffering, injury and infamy, hypocrisy and hate” perpetuated in the United States, imploring them “to strike at once and deal [enslavement] a death blow” that liberty might be proclaimed “to the end of the earth”.

In 1866, Logan supported passage of the 14th amendment granting citizenship to blacks. At a gathering of Union veterans in Salem, Illinois, he remarked that the bravery of Black people during the Civil War had removed his prejudices and asserted that the 14th amendment would give them “the protection of the law”. He argued that “any Christian people” and any government should grant citizenship to all residents. However, as he had in Louisville, Kentucky, Logan promised that the 14th amendment would not give Black people the right to “enjoy the privilege of voting or holding office.” That same year he switched political parties, reentering politics as a Radical Republican and vigorously supporting equal rights for America’s formerly enslaved people.

By 1867, Logan was arguing for Black voting rights. In speeches across Ohio supporting Black suffrage, he challenged opponents to “give a reason why the Negro should not vote”, stating “I don’t care whether a man is black, red, blue, or white”, he has the right to choose the men who “control the Government”. The 15th amendment, which prohibits denying a citizen’s right to vote based on “race, color, or previous condition of servitude” was ratified in 1870.

Logan’s commitment to the cause was very real. No less an authority than Frederick Douglass was all-in on “Black Jack.” When Logan ran for Vice President in the election of 1884, Douglass wrote:

If there is any statesman on this continent, now in public life, to whose courage, justice and fidelity, I would more fully and unreservedly trust the cause of the colored people of this country, or the cause of any other people, I do not know him. Since [Charles] Sumner and [Oliver. P.] Morton, no man has been bolder and truer to the cause of the colored man and to the country, than has JOHN A. LOGAN. There is no nonsense about him. I endorse him to you with all my might, mind, and strength, and without a single shadow of doubt.

As I see it, Logan’s path from overt racist to champion of civil rights represents a hero’s journey. Here was a man, son of an enslaver, so set in his racist ways that he proposed legislation to expressly harm Black people. Then, by allowing his heart and his mind to be open, he saw the error of his ways, and spent the rest of his life on the righteous path, working to secure civil rights for Black people—as well as suffrage for women.

That is a model for how to live. What John Logan teaches us, ultimately, is that it’s never too late to change ourselves for the better. Indeed, it is our moral obligation to do so.

The Morris Library calls this transformation “a change of heart.” Now we might say that Logan got woke. He refused to allow his eyes to be closed to the “sorrow and suffering, injury and infamy, hypocrisy and hate” caused by slavery, and extended by racism.

This could not have been easy for him socially. No doubt he lost lifelong friends in the process. But Logan refused to look away. This is the kind of energy we need right now in our political leaders—and which is sorely lacking.

Logan and his family, photographed by Matthew Brady, ca. 1870. His mustache is something else!

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Logan’s most enduring legacy is the creation of Memorial Day—originally known as Decoration Day, which is what my grandmother, born in 1912, and her cohort called it. This year it falls on the 26th, the last Monday in May. But Memorial Day was originally observed on May 30th, no matter the day of the week. The reason why is the flowers. In late May, the flowers are at the fullest bloom, and it is “the choicest flowers of spring-time” that we are supposed to strew upon the graves of the soldiers who died in combat during the Civil War.

By 1868, Logan was the leader of a veterans organization of Union soldiers. He issued an order three years after Lee surrendered designating the penultimate day of May for the purpose of properly acknowledging our war dead. That’s how Memorial Day began—as a way to pay tribute to those who died saving the Union from the proto-Nazi enslavers, the MAGA antecedents, who formed the Confederacy. Here is Logan’s Order No. 11:

The 30th day of May, 1868, is designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet church-yard in the land. In this observance no form of ceremony is prescribed, but posts and comrades will in their own way arrange such fitting services and testimonials of respect as circumstances may permit.

We are organized, comrades, as our regulations tell us, for the purpose among other things, “of preserving and strengthening those kind and fraternal feelings which have bound together the soldiers, sailors, and marines who united to suppress the late rebellion.” What can aid more to assure this result than cherishing tenderly the memory of our heroic dead, who made their breasts a barricade between our country and its foes? Their soldier lives were the reveille of freedom to a race in chains, and their deaths the tattoo of rebellious tyranny in arms. We should guard their graves with sacred vigilance. All that the consecrated wealth and taste of the nation can add to their adornment and security is but a fitting tribute to the memory of her slain defenders. Let no wanton foot tread rudely on such hallowed grounds. Let pleasant paths invite the coming and going of reverent visitors and fond mourners. Let no vandalism of avarice or neglect, no ravages of time testify to the present or to the coming generations that we have forgotten as a people the cost of a free and undivided republic.

If other eyes grow dull, other hands slack, and other hearts cold in the solemn trust, ours shall keep it well as long as the light and warmth of life remain to us.

Let us, then, at the time appointed gather around their sacred remains and garland the passionless mounds above them with the choicest flowers of spring-time; let us raise above them the dear old flag they saved from dishonor; let us in this solemn presence renew our pledges to aid and assist those whom they have left among us a sacred charge upon a nation’s gratitude, the soldier’s and sailor’s widow and orphan.

I wrote about this once before, two years ago. In that piece, I focused on my own good fortune not to have had to go to war. But that was back when Biden was still president. Reading the Order aloud on The Five 8 on Friday, I found myself fighting back tears at this line in particular: Let no vandalism of avarice or neglect, no ravages of time testify to the present or to the coming generations that we have forgotten as a people the cost of a free and undivided republic.

Why was I getting choked up? Because in that sentence, Logan is addressing us, here, right now. And we have forgotten, as a people, the cost of a free and undivided republic. We have become effete, soft. We have forgotten how to fight—and, even worse, what to fight for.

Our national cognitive dissonance is off the charts. Consider:

• John Logan, who knew well the horrors of war, having voluntarily fought in the Civil War, demanded we honor those who died for the country.

• Donald Trump, who is ignorant of the horrors of war, having had his daddy’s podiatrist excuse him from military service in Vietnam, said that soldiers killed in action are “suckers and losers.”

And yet it was Trump, in garish red MAGA hat and clashing magenta(!) tie, giving the commencement speech—if we can call the indecipherable word vomit in which he cited trophy wives, Al Capone, golf, and how great a job he’s doing a “speech”—at West Point yesterday. The United States Military Academy is highly selective and objectively hard to get through. The cadets there have every reason to be proud, and deserve better than having to listen to the mad ramblings of a draft-dodging sociopath who thinks they’re all being led by the nose.

In an era when Black people were still enslaved, John Logan evolved as a person, allowing himself to become enlightened. Donald, on the other hand, an impressionable 18 in 1964, the year of the Civil Rights Act, has not changed one bit in eight decades. He espouses the same hateful, racist worldview espoused by his bigoted old man. (Just because the Putin-fluffing traitor Mark Burnett hasn’t released the Apprentice footage of Trump saying the n-word on set doesn’t mean Trump didn’t say the n-word on set.) He is a failed human being.

Worst of all his many faults, Donald is a black hole of empathy, constitutionally incapable of understanding even the concept of sacrifice for the greater good. According to the bombshell Atlantic story by Jeffrey Goldberg—the same well-sourced journalist added to the Pete Hegseth Signal chat in which the Secretary of Defense disclosed top secret war plans—Trump stood by the grave of Gen. John Kelly’s son, who lost his life in Afghanistan, and remarked to his then-chief-of-staff, in a rare moment of candor: “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?”

For once, Donald wasn’t lying. He really didn’t get it. He could not not see the world transactionally, as a long series of “deals.” It’s sad, really. (Or, as he would put it: SAD!!!)

When Trump made the “suckers and losers” comment—and he really did say that, despite his bullshit denial at the debate that feckless company man Jake Tapper let him get away with—he was channeling his fellow mobster Sonny Corleone in Godfather II, who says, of soldiers and sailors, “They’re saps. They risked their lives for strangers.”

(The O.G. gangsters, incidentally, hated the Nazis.)

Back in 2023, writing on the Sunday before Memorial Day, I closed with this:

For me, it is an enormous privilege not to know firsthand the hell of war. It is a historical anomaly, a piece of good fortune—and it was made possible by those who died fighting the Confederates, the Fascists and Nazis, the Soviet Empire by proxy, and all the enemies of democracy. And it may not last. Peace is a fragile thing. That’s what I will think about today and tomorrow, as I look out upon all the pretty flowers.

Two years later, and four months into the Trump Redux, there is no more peace. There is no peace because there is no justice, and without the latter we cannot enjoy the former. Democracy requires active maintenance, especially when the forces seeking to destroy it have been given the power and the opportunity to do so.

Today I think of John Logan’s former nemesis turned friend, Abraham Lincoln, who gave a famous speech at Gettysburg, site of one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War, honoring the men who died there—the same fallen soldiers Logan would pay homage to five years later. It was beyond his power, Lincoln said in November 1863, to “dedicate—consecrate—hallow—this ground” because “the brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.”

He concluded:

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Let us all, now, in this moment, highly resolve that those honored dead, in whose distant memory we have tomorrow off, shall not have died in vain. Let us refuse to allow Trump and his minions to Make America “Egypt” Again. Let us not go quietly. Let us defend what is ours—and what is right.

If we don’t remember the cost of a free and undivided republic, we shall presently have to pay it.

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ICYMI

Emotional and powerful episode of The Five 8. Our guest was Martha Swan, executive director of John Brown Lives!

And I finally put links to all my various projects in one place:

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Photo credit: Yours Truly. A paper poppy given to me by a veteran raising money for the American Legion, surrounded by flowers in my backyard.