Abraham Lincoln was dead three years before the first Memorial Day was proclaimed by General John Logan, national commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, in May 1868, but had he lived he would have found something memorable to say upon the occasion.
After all, we have not only this brief, poignant reference to the fallen soldiers and their survivors in the Civil War, but also the magnificent Gettysburg Address, and this ringing closing sentence from his First Inaugural Address, on the binding ties between the living and the dead who made it possible for us here in the United States to celebrate our freedoms this weekend:
“The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
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