Cowley worked for the Lowell Daily Courier, a Whig newspaper, before he was twenty-one years old and was called the "boy editor" due to his age.

[4] He left the Wamesit Rifles to join the Navy in 1864 as Paymaster of the USS Lehigh but resigned later that year to be Judge Advocate in the South Atlantic Squadron where he served on the USS Philadelphia as part of Admiral John A. Dahlgren's staff until the end of the war.

He worked as a reformer both inside and outside of government to bring about change including the passage of an act incorporating the first trade union in 1870 and ten hour factory law in Massachusetts in 1874.

[5] Cowley was involved with several organizations including the Knights of Pythias, Grand Army of the Republic and New England Historic Genealogical Society.

Although the idea has been republished and debunked several times in the past, David Blight reintroduced this claim in his book Race and Reunion in 2001.

Bellware and Gardiner credit Mary Ann Williams and the Ladies Memorial Association of Columbus, Georgia as the true originators of the holiday as abundant contemporaneous evidence from across the nation exists to substantiate the claim.