I have never been able to think of the day as one of mourning; I have never quite been able to feel that half-masted flags were appropriate on Decoration Day. I have rather felt that the flag should be at the peak, because those whose dying we commemorate rejoiced in seeing it where their valor placed it. We honor them in a joyous, thankful, triumphant commemoration of what they did.

Benjamin Harrison, a Union veteran of the Civil War who later became the 23rd U.S. president, expressed these sentiments in connection with Decoration Day (now Memorial Day), the late-19th-century observance honoring Union war dead. In the postwar decades the holiday carried both grief and civic pageantry, and public officials often used it to shape national memory of the conflict. Harrison’s remarks reflect a strain of commemorative rhetoric that emphasized vindication and national preservation—treating the day not only as lamentation for loss but as celebration of the restored Union and the flag’s survival.

The passage argues that remembrance of the war dead should not be framed chiefly as sorrow. Harrison distinguishes mourning from commemoration: the fallen are honored best by affirming the cause for which they fought and the outcome their sacrifice secured. The image of the flag “at the peak” rejects the symbolism of defeat or bereavement and substitutes a civic, even triumphant, gratitude. In this view, Memorial/Decoration Day becomes a ritual of national continuity—an occasion to reaffirm shared political ideals and the legitimacy of the Union’s victory rather than to dwell on private grief alone.