Patrick Cleburne

• 1. Introduction

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  Patrick Ronayne Cleburne was an Irish-born soldier who rose from a British Army corporal to one of the most respected division commanders in the Confederate States Army. He was killed on the 30th of November 1864, just south of Nashville, Tennessee, advancing on foot with his sword raised after his horse had been shot from under him. His men called him the "Stonewall of the West." Robert E. Lee called him "a meteor shining from a clouded sky." Federal troops reportedly dreaded the sight of his blue division flag across a battlefield. Yet within a generation, he was largely forgotten. His story asks how a man born in County Cork, who had no personal stake in slavery and in fact proposed to abolish it, came to fight so fiercely for the Southern cause, and what it cost him when he said something his superiors refused to hear.

• 2. County Cork to Arkansas

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  Patrick Cleburne was born in Ovens, County Cork, Ireland, on the 16th of March 1828, the second son of Dr. Joseph Cleburne, a middle-class physician of Protestant Anglo-Irish ancestry. His mother died when he was just eighteen months old, and by the time he was fifteen, he was an orphan. Following his father's path, he tried to enter Trinity College of Medicine in Dublin in 1846, but he failed the entrance exam. He enlisted in the 41st Regiment of Foot of the British Army shortly after, eventually rising to corporal.

  His posting took him to Fort Westmorland on Spike Island in Cork Harbour, a fortress then serving as a convict depot. Watching prisoners file through during the Great Irish Famine hardened his resolve to leave. Three years after enlisting, he bought his discharge and emigrated to the United States with two brothers and a sister. After a brief stop in Ohio, he settled in Helena, Arkansas, where he found work as a pharmacist and was quickly folded into the town's social life.

  In Helena, Cleburne formed a close friendship with Thomas C. Hindman, who would later become a Confederate major general himself. The two men, along with William Weatherly, bought a newspaper, the Democratic Star, in December 1855. The following year, their partnership was tested in blood: in 1856, both Cleburne and Hindman were shot during a street fight with members of the Know-Nothing Party after a political debate. Cleburne was shot in the back, turned around, and shot one of his attackers dead. After he collapsed in the street, the others fled. Both men appeared before a grand jury and were exonerated. By 1860, Cleburne was a naturalized citizen, a practicing lawyer, and a well-regarded figure in Helena's civic life.

• 3. From Private to General

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  When secession became a crisis, Cleburne joined the local militia company called the Yell Rifles as a private soldier, despite having no reason born of ideology. He later said his choice was not driven by any attachment to slavery, which he claimed not to care about, but by loyalty to the Southern people who had taken him in. He was quickly elected captain of the Yell Rifles, and he led the company in the seizure of the U.S. Arsenal at Little Rock in January 1861.

  When Arkansas left the Union, the Yell Rifles were folded into the 1st Arkansas Infantry, which was later redesignated the 15th Arkansas. The regiment was placed under William Hardee, who became a recurring figure in Cleburne's career. On the 4th of March 1862, Cleburne was promoted to brigadier general. He fought at the Battle of Shiloh, leading a brigade on the left side of the Confederate line.

  At the Battle of Richmond in Kentucky, a minie ball pierced his left cheek, smashed several teeth, and exited through his mouth. He recovered in time to rejoin the army for the Battle of Perryville. His promotion to major general followed on the 13th of December 1862, shortly after his division advanced three miles at the Battle of Stones River, routing the Union right wing and driving it back to the Nashville Pike.

  The year 1863 brought further proof of his abilities. At Missionary Ridge, his troops held off a much larger Union force under Major General William T. Sherman on the northern end of the ridge. At Ringgold Gap in northern Georgia, he bought the retreating Army of Tennessee enough time to fall back to Tunnel Hill. The Confederate Congress extended an official Thanks to Cleburne and his men for their conduct in that campaign.

• 4. The Proposal No One Wanted

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  By late 1863, Cleburne had concluded that the Confederacy was losing the war through a simple problem: it was running out of men and resources. In 1864, he called together the leadership of the Army of Tennessee and delivered a proposal that stunned the room. He argued for the emancipation of all enslaved people, quoting his own letter: "emancipating the whole race upon reasonable terms, and within such reasonable time," in order to "enlist their sympathies" and then enlist them in the Confederate Army.

  His letter drew on historical examples to make the case. He pointed to the helots of Sparta, to the galley slaves at the Battle of Lepanto who were promised freedom and fought at a critical moment, and to revolts in Haiti and Jamaica. His own observation from the war itself: "the experience of this war has been so far that half-trained negroes have fought as bravely as many other half-trained Yankees."

  He anticipated the objection that surrendering slavery meant surrendering everything: "Even if this were true, which we deny, slavery is not all our enemies are fighting for. It is merely the pretense to establish sectional superiority and a more centralized form of government."

  The response at the meeting was polite silence. Word leaked out, but no official action followed. General William H. T. Walker, who both supported slavery and regarded Cleburne as a rival for promotion, attacked the proposal as an abolitionist conspiracy. Walker persuaded Army commander Braxton Bragg that Cleburne was politically unreliable. The source records plainly: three times in the summer of 1863, Cleburne had already been passed over for corps command. He would remain a division commander until the day he died.

• 5. Franklin and After

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  Before the 1864 campaigning season opened, Cleburne became engaged to Susan Tarleton of Mobile, Alabama. The engagement was never fulfilled. On the 30th of November 1864, he was killed at the Battle of Franklin, just south of Nashville, in an assault he had opposed as ill-conceived. After his horse was shot from under him, he continued on foot, sword raised, toward the Union line. His body was found just inside that line. When Confederates recovered him, he had been stripped of his sword, his boots, and his pocket watch.

  Confederate war records suggest he died of either a bullet to the abdomen or a wound through the heart. His former corps commander, William J. Hardee, put the loss simply: "Where this division defended, no odds broke its line; where it attacked, no numbers resisted its onslaught, save only once; and there is the grave of Cleburne."

  His remains traveled a long road to their final resting place. He was first laid to rest at Rose Hill Cemetery in Columbia, Tennessee. Army Chaplain Bishop Quintard urged that the remains be moved to St. John's Episcopal Church near Mount Pleasant, Tennessee, where they stayed for six years. Cleburne had noticed the church during the Army's march into Tennessee and reportedly said it was where he would like to be buried, because of its beauty and its resemblance to the Irish landscape he had left behind. In 1870, he was disinterred and brought with ceremony back to Helena, Arkansas, where he was buried in the Confederate section of Maple Hill Cemetery, overlooking the Mississippi River.

  His name passed into geography in several ways. Cleburne County exists in both Alabama and Arkansas. The city of Cleburne, Texas, which features a statue of him, carries his name, though locals pronounce it "Klee-burn." The site in Franklin where he fell was reclaimed by preservationists and is now called Cleburne Park. The Patrick R. Cleburne Confederate Cemetery in Jonesboro, Georgia, was named in his honor.

• 6. A Grievously Neglected Figure

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  In a 1994 interview on Book TV, when C-SPAN's Brian Lamb asked author Shelby Foote to name his favorite Civil War figures, Foote listed the expected names and then added one that surprised many viewers. He said he had favorites who were "grievously neglected," and placed Cleburne at the top of that list. Foote called him "probably the best division commander on either side" and said that reading of his death at Franklin produced in him the same grief Cleburne's own soldiers had felt. "I was greatly saddened to lose him," Foote said. "He's been largely forgotten today."

  Foote noted that Cleburne is buried "right there at Helena where Crowley's Ridge comes to the Mississippi," the adopted town where an Irish pharmacist-turned-lawyer-turned-general had once bought a newspaper and survived a gunfight. The small monument at Cleburne Park in Franklin, often read by visitors as a tribute to the general, is actually a marker for the Carter Family Cotton Gin, which stood at the heart of the battle and near the Carter House, the headquarters of Union Brigadier General Jacob D. Cox. Cleburne's memory, even in the place he died, slips behind other histories.