If the last few generations of Americans understood the origin and meaning of Memorial Day, we might have avoided the trauma of division and corruption that saps Americans from living in peace, trust, and joy. Memorial Day was founded on the biblical ideals of forgiveness and reconciliation shortly after America’s most divisive and bloody conflict, the Civil War, which extended from 1861 to 1865. That conflict cost at least 620,000 men, more casualties than all of America’s other wars combined—the two World Wars, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and the Middle East wars.

The United States was so mercilessly divided at the time of the Civil War that many thought reconciliation impossible. And yet, it began with humble and virtuous actions from the vanquished South, not the victorious North.

Memorial Day was originally called Decoration Day and was established to honor the dead and buried from the Civil War. The holiday’s origin dates back to April 25, 1866, when a former chaplain in the Confederate Army accompanied a group of women from Columbus, Mississippi, to Friendship Cemetery—the burial ground for about 1600 men who died in the Battle of Shiloh—for the purpose of honoring the dead with decorations of flowers. At that time, Columbus, like the rest of the South, was occupied by Union Army forces, and some townspeople were fearful of creating new animosity if the decorations would favor Confederate over Union graves.

The prayerful Columbus women had no such intention despite having heard about the Union’s cavalier mass burial treatment of Confederate army fatalities on Northern battlefields. Their equal decoration of the graves of both sides became a catalyst for a national reconciliation movement. The New York Herald editorialized: “The women of Columbus, Mississippi, have shown themselves impartial in their offerings to the memory of the dead...strew[ing] flowers alike on the graves of the Confederate and of the Union soldiers.”

A second claimant for the origin of Decoration Day was Belle Isle, located on the James River in Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the Confederacy. On May 30, 1866, women placed bouquets of........

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