“I am oppressed with a sense of the impropriety of uttering words on this occasion. If silence is ever golden, it must be here, beside the graves of fifteen thousand men, whose lives were more significant than speech, and whose death was a poem, the music of which can never be sung…..” 

So began James Garfield at Arlington National Cemetery on May 30, 1868, when the former Union general and current Congressman from Ohio delivered the first official national Memorial Day address (full text, courtesy of the National Park Service), although it was then called Decoration Day, because, as General John Logan wrote in his order calling for the event, it involved “strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country.”

 Congress formally changed the name in 1967 and then, four years later, declared Memorial Day to be a federal holiday, to be observed the last Monday in May, for honoring and mourning the U.S. military personnel who died while serving in the United States Armed Forces.  

Thirteen years after James Garfield gave his speech. he became the 20th president of the United States — and the second to be assassinated.