Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.2 | The History Cooperative

Theodore O'Hara: Poet-Soldier of the Old South. By Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes Jr. and Thomas Clayton Ware. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1998. xiv, 208 pp. $32.00, isbn 1-57233-008-2.)

At Arlington National Cemetery, atop a gate honoring Gen. George McClellan, appear lines from Theodore O'Hara's poem "The Bivouac of the Dead." The McClellan monument is not unique, for nineteenth-century federal officials sanctioned the poem's use, and fragments appear in battlefield memorials around the country. Ironically, however, O'Hara was an aggressive warrior for the slaveholding South. Here, authors Thomas Clayton Ware (a literary scholar) and Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes Jr. (a biographer of other Confederate military figures) combine in a readable account the first scholarly biography of O'Hara and the history of his once widely anthologized poem. 1

The authors carefully correct the record of earlier, romanticized versions of O'Hara's life. He was born and raised in Kentucky, the son of an Irish immigrant who became an influential and prosperous teacher. Intelligent, charming, and ambitious, the young O'Hara showed early promise, but he never realized it. Instead, he floated between jobs and drifted around the South in search of money and honor. Somehow along the way, he became a heavy drinker. Nonetheless, he served effectively in the Mexican War, where he also made good friends and connections he would later exploit. . . .

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