Florida will observe Confederate Memorial Day tomorrow, a state-recognized legal holiday that honors those who fought and died for the Confederate States of America. It is not a paid holiday in Florida, and there are no official ceremonies planned for the observance.
Gov. Ron DeSantis has not publicly recognized the day. That silence matters because Florida’s own secession papers, long incomplete in the public record, now leave far less room for doubt about what the state was defending in 1861.
Historians found and authenticated Florida’s unpublished Declaration of Causes in the State Archives in recent years, and the document reads like a plain defense of slavery. Adopted on Jan. 10, 1861, it repeatedly returns to slavery as the overriding concern, denounces John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, and condemns Northern newspapers and clergy for treating Brown as a martyr.
The declaration also attacks Northern states for rendering the Fugitive Slave Act “inoperative” through counter-legislation, arguing that without the power to pass such laws, “the Constitution would not have been adopted.” It accuses Northern members of Congress of circulating books with the “direct tendency and avowed purpose” to “excite insurrection and servile war with all their attendant horrors,” and it describes Abraham Lincoln as a man elected “mainly if not exclusively on account of a settled and often proclaimed hostility to our institutions and a fixed purpose to abolish them.”
Florida’s secession reasoning was not fully clear from its brief public Declaration of Causes until the unpublished version surfaced. The new document makes the central issue hard to miss: slavery was not a side argument but the core of the break. That helps explain why the state’s commemorations remain so politically and morally charged today.
In 1861, Florida was largely confined to the northern portion of the state, including its panhandle, and the declaration reflects the anxieties of that moment. Tomorrow’s observance offers no state ceremony and no paid day off, but it does place the state’s Civil War-era record back in view. The answer to when is Memorial Day, at least in Florida’s Confederate observance calendar, is tomorrow.