Did you know? #MemorialDay was the brainchild of a Civil War general! Well, sorta. Although John “Black Jack” Logan gets credit for coming up with the national holiday, it was actually ...

(stop me if you’ve heard this one before, History fans) …

his wife’s idea.

This is Mary Simmerson Cunningham Logan -- an esteemed author, journalist, and suffragist. (And, as her expression makes clear, NOT a sufferer of fools.) Mary planted the seed of a Memorial Day holiday and kept pushing the idea after her husband died. Here’s the story …

John Logan embodies the dramatic moral turnarounds of the era. Before the war, he was a peace Democrat and passed legislation prohibiting black migration to Illinois. By the end of the war, after seeing the effects of slavery up close, he had become a radical Republican.

Logan was a fiery speaker, and a natural choice to head the Grand Army of the Republic veterans group, and he became its second president. Logan introduced the idea of a Decoration Day (cue the Isbell song), which was informally observed in many places already.

Logan decreed May 30 “designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet churchyard in the land.”

The first official Decoration Day ceremonies occurred in 1868, and thousands of people (including some History Channel star named U.S. Grant) attended the event at Arlington National Cemetery. After WW I, the name was changed to Memorial Day ...

But it had been Mary’s idea!

On a tour of battlefields shortly after the war, Mary was touched by “the devotion of the people of the South,” and she told John of the flowers and wreaths she saw in cemeteries when she got off the train. “What a splendid thought!” he said, and huddled with aides to fix a date.

“Time has shown how well that order has been obeyed,” Mary wrote in 1903. “In Dixie they garland with one hand the mounds above the ashes of the northern soldiers while with the other they strew beautiful blossoms on the graves of their own heroes. We of the north do the same.”