The port city of Charleston, South Carolina, where the war had begun in April, 1861, lay in ruin by the spring of 1865. The city was largely abandoned by white residents by late February. Among the first troops to enter and march up Meeting Street singing liberation songs was the Twenty First U. S. Colored Infantry
on May 1, 1865. The Confederates had converted the Washington Race Course and Jockey Club, into an outdoor prison. Union soldiers were kept in horrible conditions ,at least 257 died of exposure and disease and were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand. Some twenty-eight black workmen went to the site, re-buried the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on which they inscribed the words, "Martyrs of the Race Course."
Among the full brigade of Union infantry participating was the famous 54th Massachusetts and the 34th and 104th U.S. Colored Troops, who performed a special double-columned march around the gravesite. The war was over, and Decoration Day had been founded by African Americans in a ritual of remembrance and consecration. David W. Blight
The annual Decoration Day on top of Cold Spring Mountain, above Horse Creek Park in Greene County, Tennessee. The event is held each year at the site of the graves of William and David Shelton and Millard Haire. The three men were killed there during the Civil War.
David Shelton and his nephew William had enlisted in the Union army and were returning home during the war to a cabin on Cold Spring Mountain. However, the Sheltons and Haire, who was 13 years old at the time and was acting as a scout, were ambushed by Confederate soldiers. The families buried the three atop the mountain.
