-By Warner Todd Huston
A few years after the Civil War as the nation started upon its long road toward reconciliation, rebuilding, and healing the wife of one of the war’s union generals noticed the touching devotion of Confederate widows, wives and their children as each year they came together to place flowers and little flags at the graves of their fallen. Mary Simmerson Cunningham Logan was so moved by the devotion she witnessed that she urged her husband, Illinois General John A. “Blackjack” Logan, to look into creating what was to become Memorial Day.
General Logan was a Senator from Illinois and eventually became a candidate for Vice President on the 1884 Republican ticket, losing to Grover Cleveland and another Illinoisan, Vice President Adlai Stevenson. But before all that Logan was instrumental in creating Decoration Day, the celebration of the nation’s war dead that eventually became Memorial Day.
The following is the general order that Logan issued in 1868.
HEADQUARTERS GRAND ARMY OF THE REPUBLIC
General Orders No.11, WASHINGTON, D.C., May 5, 1868The 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.
Illinois General Helped Create Memorial Day”
The Confederate flag has a very long and controversial history, to be sure. But a recent CBS report on a flag dustup in a school in Missouri shows just how slipshod journalism is today.
If you favor the Tea Party way or you are a gun owner, Jesse Jackson wants you to know you are a racist, terrorist just like members of the old Confederacy.
Actor and hardcore progressive Danny Glover should add revisionist historian to his growing resume of left-wing activism after a recent visit to Texas A&M University where he told students that the Second Amendment was mainly meant to keep African Americans in slavery and to kill Native American peoples.
NBC’s David Gregory hosted the President on Sunday’s Meet the Press but compared to his last notable interview, when he verbally attacked his guest at every turn, Gregory was virtually asleep this weekend. Unfortunately, Gregory’s mostly timid questions and Obama’s rambling answers gave us nothing new.
Sadly, the debut of Director Steven Spielberg’s epic film about our 16th President is being used by many Old Media outlets as propaganda to push the concept that Barack Obama is in the same league or, worse, is somehow just like Abraham Lincoln. On November 15 it was CBS This Morning’s turn to couple one of our most famous presidents to the current resident of the White House.
On the Sunday, October 28 edition of ABC’s This Week, Andrew Sullivan of The Daily Beast claimed that Obama might lose this election because the whole south is filled with racists that are somehow just like the Old Confederacy. As George Will noted, according to Sullivan all the whites that were not racist in 2008 suddenly are racist in 2012.
As he unveiled his epic new movie based on Abraham Lincoln’s civil war era presidency, Steven Spielberg said he doesn’t want his film to become a “political football” in today’s presidential election. But as he talked about it further, it seemed as if he went on to say that today’s Republican party is somehow just like the slave-holding Democrats of the antebellum south.
Before we get any further into this story, I have to warn you that this is not satire. That having been said, Buzzfeed’s Zeke Miller perpetrated one of the worst attempts at guilt by association ever made. Miller attempted to intimate that Mitt Romney is a racist because his motorcade drove past private property that had a Confederate flag flying on it as he campaigned in Virginia.
After forty some years of prominently featuring the Southern Cross flag of the old Confederacy as part of its schtick, suddenly the southern rock band Lynyrd Skynrd is 
Sadly, ABC’s The View is what passes for as “intelligent” conversation on TV, these days. The View yacker Joy Behar’s blather is also indicative of the historical illiteracy of the far left in this country.
Well, maybe John Sexton and I both gave Obama a little too much credit on this “intercontinental railroad” gaffe? When he and I wrote about this little gaffe we both assumed that it was no big deal, that it was juts a slip of the tongue — and an easy one to make at that — but that it was evidence of how the Old Media gave Obama a free pass on mistakes. But now it is starting to look like Obama really doesn’t know the difference between the words “intercontinental” and “transcontinental.”
In keeping with the many dozens of gaffes that Obama has made over the years, Verum Serum 
The Atlantic’s Yoni Appelbaum has a troubled little mind. He seems to be an excitable sort, too. I say this because during this 150th anniversary of the American Civil War he strangely sees evil Confederate, German, Nazi, racists at Civil War events. He might want to see a therapist about this. Either that or he’s just another left-wing writer that is striving so hard to find something, anything, to write about that he’s put aside common sense and instead decided to illicitly impute any manner of absurd motivations to Germany’s Civil War reenactors. You know, because he wants to be considered the thoughtful type, because this sort of tripe is what passes for intellectualism in journalism.
Memorial Day Parade, Wheaton, Ill– Illinois Congressman Peter Roskam (R, 6th District) walked in the Wheaton Memorial Day Parade to some applause and ended the exercise by speaking to those assembled at the Wheaton Cemetery to commemorate those that have served us in peace and war and those who gave their last full measure so that we could remain the last best hope of the world.
Richard Cohen is what passes for an opinion editorialist in the Washington Post — not a learned one, just a bloviating one. Cohen’s latest, “
Here we go again. This sort of nonsense that passes for journalism rehashing our history, and badly at that, always comes up when there’s some sort of anniversary in the offing. This time it is the 150th anniversary of the Civil War which gave Discovery News an excuse to 
Virginia’s Junior Senator, Jim Webb, is already hanging up his senatorial career. One term was enough for the so-called moderate Virginia Democrat. He’s announced that he will not run for reelection. But the fact that he got elected at all shows the essential hypocrisy at the heart of the Democrat Party. Webb, you see, is what many might consider a “neo-confederate.”