Theodore O'Hara, author of the greatest martial elegy in American
literature, was born at Danville, Kentucky, February 11, 1820. He was
the son of Kane O'Hara, an Irish political exile, and a noted educator
in his day and generation. O'Hara's boyhood days were spent at
Danville, but his family settled at Frankfort when he was a young man.
He was fitted for college by his father, and his preparation was so
far advanced that he was enabled to join the senior class of St.
Joseph's College, a Roman Catholic institution at Bardstown, Kentucky.
Upon his graduation O'Hara was offered the chair of Greek, but he
declined it in order to study law. In 1845 he held a position in the
United States Treasury department at Washington; and a few years
later he proved himself a gallant soldier upon battlefields in Mexico,
being brevetted major for meritorious service. After the war O'Hara
practiced law at Washington for some time; and he went to Cuba with
the Lopez expedition of 1850. After his return to the United States he
edited the Mobile, Alabama, _Register_ for a time; and he was later
editor of the Frankfort, Kentucky, _Yeoman_. O'Hara was a public
speaker of great ability, and his address upon William Taylor Barry,
the Kentucky statesman and diplomat, is one of the climaxes of
Southern oratory. During the Civil War he was colonel of the twelfth
Alabama regiment. After the war Colonel O'Hara went to Columbus,
Georgia, and became a cotton broker. He died near Guerrytown, Alabama,
June 6, 1867. Seven years later his dust was returned to Kentucky, and
re-interred in the State cemetery at Frankfort. If collected Colonel
O'Hara's poems, addresses, political and literary essays, and
editorials would make an imposing volume. His real fame rests upon his
famous martial elegy, _The Bivouac of the Dead_, which he wrote at
Frankfort in the summer of 1847, to remember young Henry Clay, Colonel
McKee, Captain Willis, and the other brave fellows who fell in the war
with Mexico. When their remains were returned to Frankfort and buried
in the cemetery on the hill, Colonel O'Hara, their old companion in
arms, wrote his stately in memoriam for them. He did not read it over
them, as Ranck and the others have written, but he did publish it in
_The Kentucky Yeoman_, a Democratic paper of Frankfort. _The Bivouac
of the Dead_ is the greatest single poem ever written by a Kentucky
hand, is matchless, superb, and is read in the remotest corners of the
world. Its opening lines have been cut deep within memorial shafts in
many military cemeteries. Colonel O'Hara sleeps to-day on the outer
circle of his comrades, one with them in death as in life, with the
lofty military monument, which Kentucky has erected to commemorate her
sons slain in the battles of the republic, casting its long shadows
across his grave. His elegy in honor of Daniel Boone was written at
the "old pioneer's" grave in the Frankfort cemetery before his now
much-mutilated monument was erected. It was originally printed in _The
Kentucky Yeoman_ for December 19, 1850. Two other poems purporting to
be his have been discovered, but there must be others sealed over and
forgotten in the scattered and broken files of Southern newspapers and
periodicals. So the poet has come down to us, like he who wrote _The
Burial of Sir John Moore_, with one slender sheaf under his arm. But
it is enough, enough for both of them.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. George W. Ranck's little books: _O'Hara and His
Elegies_ (Baltimore, 1875); _The Bivouac of the Dead and Its
Author_ (1898; 1909); Daniel E. O'Sullivan's paper in _The
Southern Bivouac_ (Louisville, January, 1887); Robert Burns
Wilson's fine tribute in _The Century Magazine_ (May, 1890). The
late Mrs. Susan B. Dixon, the Henderson historian, left a MS. life
of O'Hara that is to be issued shortly.