Civil War-era editor largely remembered for poem

The poem “The Bivouac Of The Dead,” which appears at all U.S. national cemeteries, was written by

an editor of The Mobile Register, Theodore O’Hara.

O’Hara wrote the poem in memory of the Kentucky troops killed in the Mexican War.

O’Hara came to the Register in 1856 after President Franklin Pierce appointed Register owner John Forsyth to replace James Gadsden as U.S. minister to Mexico. The colorful, but highly erratic and alcoholic O’Hara wrote editorials in Forsyth’s absence.

With the outbreak of the Civil War, O’Hara raised a company called the Mobile Light Dragoons. Its members elected him company captain, but O’Hara then joined the 12th Alabama Volunteer Infantry where he rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel.

He later served on the staff of General Albert Sidney Johnston and General John Breckenridge. Civil War blogger David A. Powell has written on his Chickamauga Blog about a myth that has grown up about O’Hara being at the Battle of Chickamauga.

After the war, O'Hara became a merchant in the cotton business in Columbus, Georgia, until wiped out by a fire. He retired to a friend's plantation in Alabama where he died in 1873 from malaria. The following year, his remains were re-interred in the cemetery in Frankfort, Kentucky.

If you want to know more about O’Hara, read Theodore O'Hara: Poet Soldier Of Old South written by Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes Jr. and Thomas Clayton Ware.