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THOMAS STUART GARNETT grew up in Westmoreland County until he left at age 15 for an education at the Virginia Military Institute. Perhaps the Institute's "rat line" displeased him, or the science of medicine called, for after a year in Lexington, young Garnett traveled over the mountains to the University of Virginia and earned a medical degree. At age 21, the newly minted physician went off to serve in the Mexican War.
During the 1850s, Dr. Garnett practiced medicine in Bowling Green. Virginia seceded from the Union on his 35th birthday. For the two years of life left to him, Garnett led Virginia troops, first in the local 9th Virginia Cavalry, and eventually as colonel commanding the 48th Virginia Infantry. At Chancellorsville, Col. Garnett went down with a bullet in his throat. He lived long enough to send home a farewell note that betrayed mordant experience, both military and medical: "I am mortally wounded. I know the nature of these things."
Friendly hands conveyed Garnett's mortal remains to Richmond's Hollywood Cemetery. After the war, a grieving father moved them to a family cemetery in King George County. The stay in Hollywood, however, gave the colonel enough tenure to earn a page in Chris Ferguson's excellent book, "Hollywood Cemetery, Her Forgotten Soldiers: Confederate Field Officers at Rest."
I am easily moved by cemeteries full of Virginians of historical moment. Manicured grounds also please my aesthetic sense mightily (despite the haunting memory they conjure up of maladroit golfing ventures in such settings). Hollywood Cemetery surely stands at the top of any list of either of those considerations; combined, it must be unchallenged. Winchester's Stonewall Cemetery and Lexington's Stonewall Jackson Cemetery are full of interesting and important people, but they cannot match the range of Hollywood's inhabitants, nor the grandeur of Hollywood's grounds.
A collection of Richmonders established Hollywood Cemetery in 1847. An initial design for a grandiose, even flamboyant, setting proved too expensive. The directors settled instead for a more pastoral scheme. Their landscape architect spread winding roads across a rolling plateau above the falls of James River.
The cemetery's profile gained a tremendous boost when President James Monroe's coffin was moved to Hollywood from New York in 1858. The ornate ironwork monument above his grave (critics called it "the birdcage") remains today one of the most impressive sights on the grounds.
Ferguson's book is not concerned with the presidents (Monroe, Tyler, and Davis), the governors (six of them from terms before 1910), the two dozen Confederate generals (including J.E.B. Stuart), or the vast array of other notables--who include historian Douglas Southall Freeman, John Randolph of Roanoke, and Fredericksburg's own Matthew Fontaine Maury. His subject is the next-lower tier of military men from the 1860s, field-grade officers, ranking major through colonel.
Hollywood began the Civil War as a modest cemetery, notable primarily for James Monroe's magnificent tomb. By 1865, the hill above James River had become, as someone said, "The Great City of the Confederate Dead." Countless thousands of Southern men and boys who fell in the war jammed an ever-larger Soldiers Section in the northwest quadrant of the grounds. Some of the colonels killed in the war went into an Officers Section just inside the main gate. Many more wound up in private plots, especially those who died after the war.
I am even more impressed by diligent research than by beautiful grounds, and that kind of hard work illuminates every page of this book. Ferguson diligently uncovered every imaginable source for the colonels buried in Hollywood, including in many instances photographs that had been, in three-quarters of the cases, entirely unknown. Some of his officers stand out as particularly interesting. Richard W. Ashton, of Fauquier and Culpeper, died in battle at age 21; his stone reads, "While he lived, he shone."
Fredericksburg native Thomas P. August, a noted wit, died on July 31, 1869, after countering a friend's mild remark that "It is nearly the first of August" with the retort, "Yes, and nearly the last of August, too." John Mercer Brockenbrough had a difficult time at Gettysburg, but has always appealed to me because he produced a granddaughter who accumulated and managed a superb historical library in Richmond. Wilfred E. Cutshaw wrote an important pamphlet about the Battle of Spotsylvania. Nearsighted artillerist Willie Pegram looked enough like Dustin Hoffman to suggest reincarnation.
Philip F. Frazer had been attending Virginia Military Institute for only a few months when war broke out. He went to war, became a field officer in the renowned Stonewall Brigade, and fell in battle at the age of 19. His boyish face in the photo that Ferguson uncovered looks--as did so many of that generation--far too young to die.
By contrast, Rob Wheat had spent his entire life looking for battles. He went on a "filibuster," as such adventures were then called, to Cuba, and another to Nicaragua, When those failed, he traveled to Italy to fight under Garibaldi. The towering Wheat (6 feet, 4 inches tall and weighing 300 pounds) dragooned into shape a battalion of New Orleans wharf rats and led them into action in Virginia, where he died in battle in June 1862 and was buried at Hollywood.
Lewis Burwell Williams' mother was sister to the mother of Fredericksburg natives Col. George S. Patton and Col. Waller Tazewell Patton. Williams and Tazewell Patton led adjacent Virginia regiments in Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg. Somehow the two lads (Lewis was 29, Tazewell 28) survived the maelstrom of lead and iron and reached the famous stone wall at Gettysburg unscathed. Lewis dashed to his first cousin, grasped his hand, and shouted "It's our turn next, Taz." Taz and George Patton are buried in the same grave in Winchester; Lewis is in Hollywood, and his face looks militantly out from one of Ferguson's pages.
The front cover of "Hollywood Cemetery" reproduces an old photo of the site's most familiar landmark, the immense stone pyramid that covers a mass grave full of Confederate bones brought south from Gettysburg after the war. That pyramid resembles to some degree the stone monument next to the RF&P rail line near Prospect Hill, at the southern end of Fredericksburg battlefield. The same organization and some of the same people provided the genesis for both monuments (though they were constructed a quarter-century apart), so the similarity is not coincidental. Ferguson supplies a list of 16 Confederate colonels killed at Gettysburg whose bodies never were recovered, and speculates that their bones probably wound up in the enormous mass grave beneath the pyramid at Hollywood.
"Hollywood Cemetery" is a beautifully produced volume, 147 pages in length, printed on heavy coated-paper stock, and bedizened with about 200 illustrations. The books sells for $19.95, and is most readily available for purchase at Web site http://HerForgottenSoldiers.home stead.com Or contact the author at chrisfer@hotmail.com for other ordering options.
ROBERT K. KRICK of Fredericksburg was chief historian of Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park for 30 years. He is the author of 14 books; the most recent, "The Smoothbore Volley That Doomed the Confederacy," was published in February by Louisiana State University Press.
