Three years after the end of the Civil War, an organization of Union veterans called the Grand Army of the Republic established Decoration Day as a time for the country to honor their war dead by decorating their graves with flowers.

The first Decoration Day was May 5, 1868.  In 1971, Congress declared Memorial Day a national holiday and set its celebration for the last Monday in May.

However, it is a commemoration given over the final resting places of 51,000 Americans in Gettysburg by President Abraham Lincoln on Nov. 19, 1863 that resonates for most Americans on Memorial Day:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met here on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of it as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But in a larger sense we can not dedicate - we can not consecrate - we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled, here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but can never forget what they did here.

It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they have, thus far, so nobly carried on. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us - that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion - that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom; and that this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Lincoln, a lawyer by trade, had need of only 272 words and two minutes of podium time to craft a message that continues to echo down the ages.

The event’s main orator, Edward Everett of Massachusetts, delivered a two-hour formal address and no one remembers what he said that day.

Something to keep in mind when you’re crafting your next blog post....