Sacrifices Made for Freedom

Reflecting on Memorial Day

Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day in 2023. (Photo by Samuel Corum via Getty Images).

Every Memorial Day we are provided an opportunity to pause and reflect on the ultimate sacrifice made by Americans throughout our history. Every loss is a tragedy, and the numbers tally into the millions.

It’s impossible to fully comprehend the loss of about 420,000 Americans in World War II and at least 620,000 Americans in the Civil War. Add to that the loss of over 25,000 American soldiers who died during the Revolutionary War, which represented about one percent of the colonies’ total population (equivalent to 3.4 million in America’s current population).

I focus on these three wars because of the clarity of mission—indeed the moral clarity—that defined their sacrifice and deepened the idea of what it means to be American and uphold our democratic ideals and principles. From the the fight to liberate America from an oppressive British monarchy, to the fight to end slavery, to the fight against Nazism and fascism, we can only hope the Americans who lost their lives understood their profound role in providing us today the promise of democracy and freedom.

Over this weekend, I visited Newport, Rhode Island, once a significant commercial port until the British occupation forced trade and traders elsewhere. The city is home to the oldest Jewish synagogue in the United States, dating to 1763 and providing a place of worship for Jewish families who first came to Newport in 1658 to escape religious persecution in Spain and Portugal.

America’s newly elected first President George Washington came to Newport in 1790, not long after Rhode Island was the last of the original 13 colonies to ratify the U.S. Constitution. There’s a famous letter that he wrote to the “Hebrew Congregation” in Newport in which he articulated his dedication to freedom and the goals of a newly born nation—something that he proved again and again on the battlefield.

Washington began broadly after noting “the days of difficulty and danger which are past” and his hope for prosperity and security. “If we have the wisdom to make the best use of the advantages with which we are now favored,” he wrote, “we cannot fail, under the just administration of a good government, to become a great and happy people.”

Then he addressed more directly what the notion of freedom means. This America has “given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy—a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.”

And more: “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people…for, happily, the Government of the United States…gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance…[and] every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

“May the father of all mercies scatter light, and not darkness, upon our paths,” he concluded.

I won’t dwell on this day on our current malady and the despotism that Washington would presciently describe in his farewell address in 1796 that could exploit the “ruins of public liberty.” Rather, this Memorial Day remains an opportunity to give thanks to those who believed in the cause of America and proved it with their lives.

This is a beautiful tradition, dating back at a national level to Decoration Day—the laying of flowers on the graves of soldiers, specifically those who lost their lives during the Civil War. On May 30, 1868, James A. Garfield, then an Ohio Congressman who had served as a Union major general, spoke to a crowd of more than 5,000 gathered at Arlington National Cemetery, where over 16,000 Civil War soldiers were buried.

“I am oppressed with a sense of the impropriety of uttering words on this occasion. If silence is ever golden, it must be here,” Garfield began, gazing out across row after row of white wooden headboards. “We do not know one promise these men made, one pledge they gave, one word they spoke; but we do know they summed up and perfected, by one supreme act, the highest virtues of men and citizens. For love of country, they accepted death, and thus resolved all doubts, and made immortal their patriotism and their virtue.”

Earlier, on May 1, 1865, as many as 10,000 newly emancipated slaves and some white missionaries held a parade around a racetrack in Charleston, South Carolina. This was in the first weeks after the war’s end and followed the proper burial of 260 disease-ridden Union soldiers who had been hastily put in a mass grave.

On that day, according to news reports discovered by historian David Blight, thousands of Black schoolchildren carried flower bouquets and sang “John Brown’s Body,” the popular anthem of Union soldiers. “John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave/But his soul goes marching on,” they sang. “John Brown died that the slaves might be free/His soul goes marching on.”

We cannot fully comprehend or measure the scale of sacrifice so many Americans and their families have made, including in more recent wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam. Each loss is a tragedy. But we can cherish and honor their collective memory by doing what we can now to sustain their commitment to creating and securing a world of democracy, tolerance and freedom.

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