How Immigration Shaped Memorial Day

The holiday’s origins are tied to immigrant soldiers and Civil War grief

He was only 17, but he knew enough to wait until nightfall. With the lantern light of Boston Harbor glimmering in the distance, a young Joseph Pulitzer slipped overboard, the cold waters of the Atlantic swirling around him. He swam hard, determined to make landfall before the Union Army recruiters on the ship noticed he was gone.

Pulitzer would change the course of history. But before that, in 1864, he was just one of hundreds of thousands of immigrants who fought in the Civil War.

An army of immigrants

Roughly one-quarter of the more than two million soldiers in the Union Army were immigrants, and even more were the children of immigrants. All told, more than 40% of Union soldiers were either foreign-born or had a foreign-born parent.

Many had just arrived in the US — from Ireland and Germany (the largest groups, at roughly 150,000 to 200,000 each), as well as Hungary, Italy, and other parts of Europe. Most were poor, spoke little or no English, and had come in search of a better life.

The Union needed soldiers, and they were willing to pay, offering cash bounties to foreigners who enlisted. At first, these payments were just a few dollars. But as the war dragged on and enthusiasm waned, the bounties soared up to $1,500 (about $31,000 today). That kind of money could change a new immigrant’s life.

But as the war dragged on, paying foreigners to fight still wasn’t enough. So the Union began conscripting men into military service. If you were drafted, you could pay a $300 fee to the government or hire someone to take your place — an option that only the wealthy could afford. Often, the replacements for the conscripted wealthy men were poor immigrants like Pulitzer.

The recruits didn’t always get the payout they expected. Sometimes the recruiting agents were honest. Too often, they weren’t. They’d take a big cut of the bounty and leave recruits with almost nothing. Pulitzer refused to let that happen to him — which is why he leapt into Boston Harbor to claim his bounty directly, bypassing the recruiting station in Boston and leaving town before anyone from the ship recognized him.

Despite corruption and danger, many immigrant soldiers became heroes. Entire units were formed around shared language or national identity: there were German regiments that gave orders in German, Hungarian units, Irish brigades, and Italian companies. These groups brought their cultures and languages into the war effort and often suffered heavy losses.

No one knows exactly how many immigrant soldiers gave their lives and died during the war. The military didn’t track the country of birth very carefully. But we know the number is likely in the tens or even hundreds of thousands — a reminder that many who fought and died for the US weren’t even citizens yet.

From Civil War to Memorial Day’s beginnings

That brings us to Memorial Day.

The Civil War tore apart families, as they grieved the deaths of more than 700,000 of their loved ones. Remembering the dead happened organically at first as people marked the end of the war by decorating the resting places of fallen soldiers. But by 1868, it became official, when James Garfield (a congressman who would later become president) spoke to an assembled crowd of 5,000 on the first official Decoration Day.

“If silence is ever golden,” he said, “it must be here beside the graves of fifteen thousand men, whose lives were more significant than speech, and whose death was a poem, the music of which can never be sung.”

By 1873, New York was the first state to officially declare May 30 as a day of remembrance. By 1890, all of the other states in the Union had followed suit. Over the following decades, the US government and private cemeteries around the country installed Memorial Day Order plaques to commemorate the dead.

After the dust settled from WWII, there was a renewed interest in formalizing Memorial Day as a national holiday — in 1950, Congress approved a joint resolution that asked the president to “issue a proclamation calling upon the people of the United States to observe each Memorial Day as a day of prayer for permanent peace and designating a period during each such day when the people of the United States might unite in such supplication.”

During the Lyndon Johnson presidency, Congress passed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, moving some federal holidays, like Memorial Day, to a designated Monday as opposed to a fixed date. Memorial Day used to be celebrated on May 30, but the act changed it to the last Monday in May.

What about Joseph Pulitzer?

After his service as an immigrant in the army, Pulitzer became a famous newspaperman, purchasing the failing New York World and turning it into the most profitable newspaper in the country at the time. In its editorial pages, he dedicated space to fighting for ordinary people, challenging corruption, and championing free speech. His name is still known today because of the Pulitzer Prizes, which honor the best work in journalism, literature, and music.

But he began his time in America as a teenage immigrant who owned nothing more than a white handkerchief, which he sold to try and avoid starvation. His story, like the stories of the thousands of immigrants and Americans we memorialize this year, reminds us that America has always depended on people from other places — not just to build a nation, but to defend it.