Medal of Honor

• 1. Introduction

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  The Medal of Honor has a name that has been misquoted almost since the day it was created. Many Americans call it the Congressional Medal of Honor, which sounds official and weighty, yet the Congressional Medal of Honor Society itself notes that this is a mistake. The correct name, the one signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln in December 1861, is simply the Medal of Honor. That quiet correction opens a door into a much larger story: one of battlefield valor, bureaucratic controversy, revoked awards, legal battles over false claims, and the enduring question of what a nation owes the people it asks to risk everything. Who were the first recipients? Why were more than nine hundred medals taken back? And what happens when someone lies about earning one?

• 2. Born in the Civil War

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  On the 9th of December 1861, Iowa senator James W. Grimes introduced bill S. 82, authorizing two hundred medals to honor naval service during the ongoing war. Twelve days later, President Abraham Lincoln signed it into law. The driving force behind the Navy's medal was Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, who adopted the idea after Lieutenant General Winfield Scott, the Army's commanding general, rejected the concept entirely. Scott viewed medals for valor as a European monarchical tradition, unfit for an American republic. His retirement in October 1861 cleared the way.

  Philadelphia silversmith William Wilson and Son received the contract for both versions of the medal. The Navy ordered 175 medals at $1.85 each from the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia, with "Personal Valor" inscribed on the back. The Army contracted for 2,000 medals at $2.00 each, engraved with "The Congress to" on the reverse. Both medals were made of copper coated in bronze, which gave them what contemporary sources described as a reddish tint.

  On the 25th of March 1863, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton presented the first Army Medals of Honor to six U.S. Army volunteers in his office. Private Jacob Parrott, an Ohio volunteer, became the first official recipient. His citation covered a raid on a Confederate train in Big Shanty, Georgia, on the 12th of April 1862. The six soldiers met with President Lincoln in the White House after the ceremony. The leader of their raid, James J. Andrews, was not eligible; he had been caught, hanged as a spy, and as a civilian could not receive the military decoration.

• 3. The Medal's Changing Face

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  The inverted five-pointed star design of the Naval version's pendant has remained unchanged since early 1862. The Army version underwent more turbulent revisions. By 1896, nonmilitary organizations were copying the ribbon's design closely enough that Congress authorized a full redesign of the Army's colors. In 1904, General George Lewis Gillespie oversaw a further overhaul of the Army version, producing a smaller redesigned star and introducing the light blue ribbon with white stars still worn today. Gillespie also applied for and received a patent on the 22nd of November 1904, then transferred it the following month to Secretary of War William Howard Taft, as a legal tool to block imitation.

  The most contentious chapter in the medal's appearance came from the Navy's attempt to split its award in two. After World War I, the Department of the Navy created a combat version and a non-combat version to sidestep a 1919 law requiring recipients to have participated in actual conflict with an enemy. Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels commissioned a new pendant from the Tiffany Company in 1919, notably after snubbing the Commission of Fine Arts, whose submitted drawings Daniels criticized as "un-American." The resulting piece, widely called the Tiffany Cross, was intended for combat recipients.

  In practice, the Tiffany Cross became a legal and popular embarrassment. Navy Commander Richard E. Byrd and Floyd Bennett received the combat version in 1926 for their claimed flight to the North Pole, despite the existence of the non-combat form. Byrd himself apparently disliked the Tiffany Cross and asked President Herbert Hoover in 1930 for the alternate version. One author later characterized the Tiffany Cross as "the most short-lived, legally contentious, and unpopular version of the Medal of Honor in American history." In 1942, after a lawsuit, the Navy abandoned the two-version system entirely and returned to the original 1862 star design.

• 4. Nine Hundred and Eleven Revoked

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  The Army's Medal of Honor Review Board, established by Congress in 1916, delivered its report in February 1917 and removed 911 names from the Army's Medal of Honor list. The largest single group was the 864 members of the 27th Maine Volunteer Infantry Regiment, who had received the medal for reenlisting to guard Washington during the Civil War rather than for combat valor. Twenty-nine members of Abraham Lincoln's funeral honor guard were also stricken. Six civilians rounded out the list, among them William Frederick "Buffalo Bill" Cody and Mary Edwards Walker, a civilian Army acting assistant surgeon.

  Walker's case became particularly contested. She had received the award in 1865 after a legal opinion from the Judge Advocate General suggested she could be given a retroactive commission. President Andrew Johnson directed the medal be given to her nonetheless. When the 1917 review revoked it, Walker continued wearing her medal until her death, and some sources incorrectly stated the Army sought its physical return. In 1977, the Army's Board for Correction of Military Records restored her medal unilaterally at a relative's request, an action later contested as exceeding the board's authority since it violated the period law, the 1916 revocation statute, and modern law simultaneously.

  Cody's restoration followed a different path. A relative of Cody's, citing Walker's precedent, requested the same action, and the board reinstated medals for Cody and four other civilian scouts on the 12th of June 1989. None of the 911 original recipients were ordered to return their medals, and the Judge Advocate General had advised the board that the Army was not obligated to police the matter of continued wearing.

• 5. Firsts and Singular Recipients

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  Bernard John Dowling Irwin holds the distinction of being the first Medal of Honor recipient by chronology of action, for events on the 13th of February 1861, during the Apache Wars. The first U.S. Navy sailors were awarded the medal on the 3rd of April 1863, with 17 of the 41 awards going to men for action during the Battle of Forts Jackson and St. Philip.

  Signalman First Class Douglas Munro remains the only Coast Guardsman to receive the Medal of Honor. He was posthumously awarded it on the 27th of May 1943, for evacuating 500 marines under fire during the Battle of Guadalcanal on the 27th of September 1942. The only woman to receive the medal is Mary Edwards Walker. Her citation traces back to a legally questionable award and a revocation that was itself of questionable legal standing.

  Hiroshi "Hershey" Miyamura received one of the most unusual Medal of Honor citations in the record. Awarded for his actions on the 24th of April 1951, during the Korean War, his medal was classified top secret because he was presumed dead at the time. The medal had not been publicly announced, and keeping the award secret was intended to protect him. The classification held until his release in August 1953.

  Sixty-one Canadians who served in the U.S. Armed Forces earned the Medal of Honor, most during the Civil War. The only Canadian-born naturalized U.S. citizen to receive the medal for Vietnam War service was Peter C. Lemon. Nineteen service members have earned the medal twice, with the last living double recipient being John J. Kelly, who received his second medal on the 3rd of October 1918.

• 6. Stolen Valor and the Law

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  Brigadier General George Gillespie pursued a patent in 1904 to prevent unauthorized copies of the redesigned medal. His effort foreshadowed more than a century of legal maneuvering. Congress passed a statute in 1923 prohibiting the unauthorized wearing, manufacturing, or sale of military medals. In 1994, an enhanced penalty was added specifically for offenses involving the Medal of Honor. The unauthorized wearing, manufacturing, or sale of the medal is now punishable by fines up to $100,000 and up to one year of imprisonment.

  The Stolen Valor Act of 2005 extended the law further, making it a federal criminal offense to falsely claim receipt of a military decoration. The Supreme Court struck it down in United States v. Alvarez, ruling in 2012 that criminalizing false statements about military awards violated the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech. The case involved an elected official in California, Xavier Alvarez, who had stated at a public meeting that he had been awarded the Medal of Honor while never having served in any branch of the armed forces.

  Congress responded with the Stolen Valor Act of 2013, signed by President Barack Obama. The revised law narrowed the offense to false representations made "to receive money, property, or other tangible benefit," such as grants, educational benefits, or housing. As of 2017, the federal law had produced only two reported arrests and prosecutions, prompting at least 22 states to pass their own stolen valor legislation. Federal and state prosecutions have continued since, with convictions recorded in courts from Texas to Rhode Island through at least 2024.

• 7. The Wounded Knee Question

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  In 2019, a bill called the Remove the Stain Act sought to revoke 20 Medals of Honor awarded for conduct during the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890. The actual number of medals awarded for Wounded Knee was 19; the discrepancy traces to a clerical error in the War Department's circular listings from the 1890s, which mistakenly recorded Private Marvin Hillock as a Wounded Knee recipient when he had actually earned the medal at White Clay Creek a day later.

  The bill was added to the House version of the FY2022 National Defense Authorization Act but did not survive the Senate. The Senate Committee on Armed Services stated that the medals "were awarded at the prerogative of the President of the United States, not the Congress," reflecting the view that legislating the revocation of presidential awards fell outside congressional authority.

  In July 2024, the Secretary of Defense announced a joint review by the Department of Defense and the Department of the Interior. The DoD review concluded in October 2024, with all three DoD panelists voting against revocation and both Department of the Interior panelists voting in favor. Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe chairman Ryman LeBeau responded with an op-ed stating that "the Pentagon board has recommended that America keep the Medals of Honor for the Wounded Knee Massacre," a formulation that made the weight of the decision plain. The unresolved divide between DoD and Interior leaves the matter in an unusual institutional limbo as of the review's conclusion.