Until Confederate Memorial Day are 9 days.

In 2021 Confederate Memorial Day is on April 26th (monday).

Similarly to Memorial Day, a holiday known as Confederate Memorial Day aims at commemorating Americans who died during their service for U.S. Armed Forces. This observance, however, is focused on honoring those soldiers, sailors and marines of the Confederate States of America who died during the Civil War. Confederate Memorial Day is also observed in several Southern states on different days.

In Alabama, Florida and Georgia Confederate Memorial Day is a state holiday observed on the fourth Monday of April. Most state offices are closed that day, while some federal offices may remain open. The date is connected with the surrender of the last major Confederate field army which took place on April 26, 1865. This day for many Americans marked the end of the Civil War – a war between the Union and the Confederate States of America. One year later, in 1866, women from the Ladies Memorial Association in Columbus, Georgia, invited other associations to join them in commemorating the Confederate war dead on April 26. During the first observance, in some states such as Mississippi or Georgia, Union graves were decorated – similarly to the same custom on Memorial Day.

The first official celebration took place in 1874, when the day became a public holiday as Georgia legislated an act announcing April 26 to be a Memorial Day. Florida joined Georgia in choosing that date for a holiday, while many other states decided to celebrate Confederate Memorial Day on other days, for example on June 3.

The purpose of Confederate Memorial Day is to commemorate more than 250 000 soldiers, sailors and marines who died during the Civil War. One of the most popular activities on that day is placing flags or wreaths on their graves and memorials.

Did you know?

In 1866 – the year of the first Confederate Memorial Day observance – a Virginian journalist E. A. Pollard wrote a book entitled: The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates. The Lost Cause has quickly grown into a myth, an ideology promulgated in order to reunify the North and the South after the Civil War. The war was earlier strongly connected with the problem of slavery, but the Lost Cause dismisses its role in beginning the war and portrays the Confederacy’s cause as a noble and heroic one. Many symbols of the Lost Cause, such as stories of happy slaves, are still present in the memory of Southeners and in their children’s education.