<P> In April 1865, following President Abraham Lincoln's assassination, commemorations were ubiquitous . The more than 600,000 soldiers of both sides who died in the Civil War meant that burial and memorialization took on new cultural significance . Under the leadership of women during the war, an increasingly formal practice of decorating graves had taken shape . In 1865, the federal government began creating national military cemeteries for the Union war dead . </P> <P> On May 1, 1865, in Charleston, South Carolina, recently freed African - Americans held a parade of 10,000 people to honor 257 dead Union Soldiers, whose remains they had reburied from a mass grave in a Confederate prison camp . Historian David W. Blight cites contemporary news reports of this incident in the Charleston Daily Courier and the New - York Tribune . Although Blight claimed that "African Americans invented Memorial Day in Charleston, South Carolina", in 2012, Blight stated that he "has no evidence" that the event in Charleston inspired the establishment of Memorial Day across the country . Accordingly, investigators for Time Magazine, LiveScience, RealClearLife and Snopes have called this conclusion into question . </P> <P> In 1868, copying a southern annual observance, General John A. Logan of the Grand Army of the Republic, an organization of Union veterans founded in Decatur, Illinois, established Decoration Day as a time for the nation to decorate the graves of the Union war dead with flowers . By the 20th century, various Union and Confederate memorial traditions, celebrated on different days, merged, and Memorial Day eventually extended to honor all Americans who died while in the military service . </P> <P> On May 26, 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson designated an "official" birthplace of the holiday by signing the presidential proclamation naming Waterloo, New York, as the holder of the title . This action followed House Concurrent Resolution 587, in which the 89th Congress had officially recognized that the patriotic tradition of observing Memorial Day had begun one hundred years prior in Waterloo, New York . The village credits druggist Henry C. Welles and county clerk John B. Murray as the founders of the holiday . Scholars have determined that the Waterloo account is a myth . Snopes and Live Science also discredit the Waterloo account . </P>

The u.s. holiday that eventually became memorial day was first known as what