![]() ![]() ![]() The poem’s first and last stanzas reflect the sentiment of a Nation joined in mourning all its war dead: It is said that Finch was inspired to write the poem by a story he came across in the New York Tribune, about a group of women from Columbus, Mississippi, who decorated the graves, with flowers, of both Confederate and Union soldiers in their local Oddfellows Cemetery. Through its message of reconciliation by honoring the war dead, North and South, the poem became an inspiration for Decoration Day, later renamed Memorial Day. Finch, an Ithaca lawyer, unexpectedly (as he later admitted) struck a major chord in the American consciousness with his poem, The Blue and the Gray, published in the Atlantic Monthly in September 1867. Two years after the close of the Civil War, forty-year-old Francis M. ![]()
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