Originally aired on November 03, 1995 - In part 62 of our Civil War series, Virginia Tech history professor James Robertson profiles the life of Theodore O’Hara, author of one of the most-quoted poems of the Civil War: The Bivouac of the Dead.
#62 – An Ode to the Dead
The muffled drum’s sad roll has beat
The soldier’s last tattoo;
No more on life’s parade shall meet
The brave and daring few.
On Fame’s eternal camping-ground
Their silent tents are spread,
And Glory guards with solemn round
The bivouac of the dead.
Go into a national cemetery and those lines, etched on a metal tablet near the entrance, immediately catch your eyes. The words are the first stanza of a poem, The Bivouac of the Dead. It – along with Father Ryan’s The Conquered Banner and Walt Whitman’s O Captain! My Captain! – are among the most quoted poems associated with the Civil War. Yet so much misinformation exists over The Bivouac of the Dead as to deserve clarification here.
No questions remain about the poem’s eulogies to the dead or its legacies to the living. The lines are as clear as they are encouraging.
Rest on, embalmed and sainted dead!
Dear as the blood you gave,
No impious footsteps here shall tread
The herbage of your grave;
Nor shall your glory be forgot
While Fame her record keeps,
Or Honor points the hallowed spot
Where Valor proudly sleeps.
Theodore O’Hara was the author of the nine stanzas of poetry. Born in Danville, Kentucky, in 1820, O’Hara graduated from St. Joseph’s College with above-average credentials for the future. Yet things did not turn out well. As a colleague later observed, O’Hara “did not stick close enough to any one pursuit to master it in all of its details”.
Starting in the early 1840’s, O’Hara bounced from newspaper work in Kentucky and Alabama to service as an army quartermaster to practicing law first in Washington and then in his home state. It was as editor of the Louisville Times and Frankfort Yeoman that he acquired a gift for words and a reputation as an orator of eloquence. That brings us to the poem, The Bivouac of the Dead.
Sometime before the coming of civil war, the remains of Kentucky soldiers who had fallen in the 1847 battle of Buena Vista were brought home for interment in Frankfort. O’Hara was asked to compose thoughts for the occasion. His poetic sentiments followed. They were originally a private tribute to compatriots killed in Mexico. O’Hara never thought that his lines would transcend the boundaries of his native state.
In the Civil War, he served as second-in-command of an Alabama regiment before shifting to the staffs of Generals Albert Sidney Johnston and John C. Breckenridge. The end of the war found O’Hara penniless and without roots. He went to Columbus, Georgia, and joined a kinsman in the cotton business.
Adversity struck O’Hara again when fire consumed the company. The hard luck continued. O’Hara bought a small plantation on the Alabama side of the Chattahoochee River. Little came of the undertaking, for he died of an intestinal disorder at the age of forty-seven. O’Hara never married, and few were left in the family to mourn his passing.
There is one more point to add to the story.
In response to an 1874 resolution by the Kentucky legislature, O’Hara’s body was taken home to Kentucky and placed beside his Mexican War soldier-friends under the shadow of the monument dedicated to their honor. The place had always been O’Hara’s favorite spot. Today, on the obelisk near his grave, are the words he wrote to esteem those Kentuckians who fell in the 1840’s.
Yet the final stanza of the poem is timeless:
Yon marble minstrel’s voiceful stone
In deathless songs shall tell,
When many a vanquished age hath flown,
The story how ye fell;
Nor wreck, nor change, or winter’s blight,
Nor Time’s remorseless doom,
Shall dim one ray of holy light
That gilds your glorious tomb.
