James A. Garfield spoke at the first official Memorial Day (then known as Decoration Day) at Arlington National Cemetery. The man who would become the 20th President of the United States was a master orator whose words still echo a noble beauty over 150 years later.

“If silence is ever golden,” Garfield said, “it must be beside the graves of 15,000 men, whose lives were more significant than speech, and whose death was a poem the music of which can never be sung.”