Curiously, our official recognition of Memorial day began not with Union Soldiers or Confederate soldiers, for that matter. But rather with liberated slaves who wished to honor the Union Dead, According to the Charleston Post and Courier, on a Monday morning, May, 1865, nearly 10,000 former slaves marched onto the grounds of the old Washington Race Course, where wealthy Charleston planters and socialites had gathered in old times. During the final year of the war, the track had been turned into a prison camp. Hundreds of Union soldiers died there and were buried in mass graves. For two weeks in April, former slaves had worked to re-inter the Union soldiers in proper individual graves. On May 1, 1865, they sought to give them a proper funeral
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