Their sons and husbands fought; they were the peacemakers. Women’s groups sprang up on both the North and the South after the civil war to bring unity and reconciliation to a divided nation. Mothers formerly in opposite camps came together, with one of them, Ann Reeves Jarvis, in 1868 creating a committee to establish a “Mother’s Friendship Day” to reuniting “families that had been divided during the Civil War.”

On this day, May 7, in 1914, after a lobbying effort of Ann Reeves’ daughter, and the adoption of the holiday by West Virginia and other states, Congress passed a law making the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day a national holiday.

President Woodrow Wilson made an official declaration on the holiday on May 9, thanking his own mother and echoing statements by past presidents John Quincy Adams, who said “all that I am my mother made me”, and Abraham Lincoln – “all that I am or hope to be I owe to my angel mother.”