Last night I sang Dixie. Like the other 25 attendees, I put my hand over my heart, and whupped and hollered at the end of the song. Here in Virginia, history bubbles out of the ground. It’s not two dimensional. Not sterile pages in a book, it lives and breathes all around us. The past lives in the flesh and blood of the present. No city in the New World has been fought over more than Richmond. The surrounding soil is soaked in blood.
I believe understanding history and honoring the dead are noble enterprises, indeed a duty much aligned with the 5th Commandment. So last night, I met Thomas Garnett at my Sons of Confederate Veterans meeting. We had spoken on the phone a couple months ago. He asked me to help him with a particular problem. The following is his story.
As is typical in Virginia, when he called, I recognized his surname and of course told him I knew a number of his relatives, knew that his family had a long history with Hampden Sydney College and that his relative General Richard Garnett had been killed while waving his soldiers on during Pickett’s Charge. He made it within 20 yards of the Angle on Cemetery Ridge before he was cut down.
In 1971, a cast iron casket was dug up during the construction of Confederate Hills Golf Course just outside Richmond. The casket had a glass window, and one could clearly see the remains of a red-haired Confederate officer. The ladies of the United Daughters of the Confederacy were called, and they determined the officer was Lt. James P. Turnbull of the 5th Louisiana Infantry. The body was moved and interred with thousands of other Confederate war dead in Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, where this young man rests today.
Tom says they got it wrong. Lt. Walter Jones Garnett was wounded at Chancellorsville and moved to the Baptist Clinic in Richmond for treatment, but sadly died on July 16, 1863. When Tom told me this, I couldn’t help but visualize my great-great grandmother Ella Peatross Williams reading the bible to him during his last earthly breaths. She likely was there or nearby. Lt. Garnett’s father was Judge James Muscoe Garnett, a Columbia Law School grad and large landowner. Family lore has it that Judge Garnett had his son buried on his nearby relative’s property instead of his own, to avoid the pain and grief of seeing his grave every day.
What are the chances that family lore and history combine to tell the exact same story? The Garnetts were wealthy and could afford a cast iron casket. Not many could, and it’s unlikely that an officer from Louisiana had the resources or the local contacts to obtain one. Tom wants to exhume the body and have it reinterred with his parents and extended family in the Garnett family graveyard at Hampden Sydney.
I applaud Tom for his efforts, and I hope to help him.
