The reason for the holiday

In 1865, the great national bloodletting finally, fitfully, drew to a close.

Whatever side you retroactively support, whichever cause you retroactively champion, remember that hundreds of thousands of men died fighting for it.

One in thirty Northern men died in the war.
One in twenty Southern men died in the war.

More men died in a single day near Sharpsburg, Maryland, on each side, than the total butcher's bill of twenty years in Afghanistan.