Theodore O'Hara - Legacy

Legacy

After the war, O'Hara went to Columbus, Georgia to work in the cotton business, but eventually he lost his business to a fire. He later lived on a plantation near Guerrytown, Alabama, where he died. He was returned to Columbus for burial. On September 15, 1874, his remains, along with those of other Mexican War officers, were buried in the state cemetery in Frankfort, Kentucky Frankfort Cemetery. O'Hara's friend Sergeant Henry T. Stanton read "The Bivouac of the Dead" at the reinternment and said, "O’Hara, in giving utterance to this song, became at once the builder of his own monument and the author of his own epitaph." Lines from the poem would eventually grace the gates of numerous national cemeteries and several monuments of Confederate Dead. In particular, the first verse's second quatrain is often quoted:

On Fame's eternal camping-ground

Their silent tents are spread,

And Glory guards, with solemn round,

The bivouac of the dead.

Because he served for the Confederacy, O'Hara often goes uncredited when the quatrain is used in a non-Confederate cemetery setting. There is a dispute over when O'Hara wrote "The Bivouac of the Dead." It is popularly thought to be written after the Battle of Buena Vista of 1847, where many Kentucky volunteers died. Others say it was actually written after the Battle of Cárdenas in 1851. The New York Times wrote that it was first published in the Frankfort Yeoman in 1850, which puts it before O'Hara's Cuba adventures.