Epilogue

After the disaster at Nashville, Hood resigned and the army was all but disbanded. The men that did not go home or surrender made their way to North Carolina where they fought once more for Joe Johnston. In 1865, as the end of the Confederacy seemed certain, Davis, prodded on by a suggestion by Robert E. Lee, approved of a measure similar to Cleburne’s which enlisted blacks into the army with guaranteed freedom at the end of the war. Like Cleburne had predicted, the blacks fought well. Davis, in his post-war book, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, claimed full responsibility for the bill. At this time, he believed that Cleburne’s memorial, and the fact that he had turned it down, would never surface. In a strange twist, the only surviving copy of Cleburne’s memorial was found among Calhoun Benham’s personal belongings at the time of his death—the very copy which he had used to prepare his rebuttal. Irving Buck later published an article explaining that Cleburne was the original author of the proposal to enlist blacks and the subsequent order from Davis to destroy all copies of the document. Unfortunately, time had run out for the Confederacy. No one knows what the outcome of the war would have been had Cleburne’s proposal been used at the beginning of 1864. It remains one of the greatest what-ifs.

Sue Tarleton was walking in her garden in Mobile when she heard a newsboy cry out “Reports from Tennessee! Cleburne and other generals killed!” She collapsed and was confined to her bed for quite some time. For a year after this, she wore mourning clothes. Eventually, she married Hugh Cole but she died less than a year later. (1)

Hindman, who was unfit for command after being wounded at Kennesaw Mountain, returned to Helena. After the war was over, he joined many other Southerners in route to Mexico to avoid the almost unbearable conditions of reconstruction. Upon returning home some years later, he began campaigning against the Carpet Baggers and Union Leagues. He did much good, uniting whites and blacks in an effort once again to “drive out the invader.” While relaxing with his family one evening on the night of September 27, 1868, an unknown assassin shot him in the head at point-blank range through an open window. Neighbors, hearing the shot, came to the assistance of Mollie Hindman as she laid her husband on the floor. With his last breath, Hindman urged all to “unite their courage and determination to bring peace to the people.” (2)

Nash, Magnum, and others returned to Helena after the war, but it was not easy. “When the Confederate soldier, in 1865, turned his weary footsteps towards his home, turning his back on the scenes of carnage, he commenced a journey of horrors for which language has no words, poetry no pencil.” Nash joined the Ku-Klux-Klan and fought the Carpet Baggers, “for self protection and the defense of the innocent.” As an old man, Nash published Biographical Sketches of Generals Pat Cleburne and T.C. Hindman. It was written, he wrote, “when driving in my buggy to see a patient far distant in the country, or at other times when the midnight bell warned all of the hour for retirement; other parts when confined to my bed, suffering intensely from an injury occasioned by a fall from a two story building.” (3)

The veterans of Cleburne’s Division did not forget their leader or the battles he fought. At the reentering of his body in Evergreen Cemetery overlooking Helena, twenty years to the day after he first arrived in the city, a large crowd gathered and heard General Gordon deliver an address:

A truer patriot or knightlier soldier never fought and never died. Valor never lost a braver son or freedom a nobler champion. As he charged amid the tempest of conflict he seemed the impersonation of the genius of battle--a veritable Mars on the field of war. He was a patriot by instinct and a soldier by nature. He loved his country, its soldiers, its banners, is battle-flags, its sovereignty, its independence. For these he fought, for these he fell. He could not have done more for his own loved fatherland than he did for the land of his chosen allegiance, in whose just defense he relinquished his life. He fell in the uniform of his adopted county, amid her soldiers and advancing flags. He died unconquered, and in doing so, threw Eastern luster upon Southern valor. Two countries share in the glory of his name. Ireland gave him to the world; the Confederacy to immortality. (4)

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori

Sources

1: Meteor Shining Brightly: page 278

2: Lion of the South: chapter 12 page 234

3: The Artillery of Nathan Bedford Forrest’s Cavalry: page 333

: Biographical Sketches: page 270

: Ibid: pages 5-6

4: ORATION BY GENERAL GEORGE W. GORDON.