Hugh A. Garland Jr. and the Old South
When one considers the immense carnage and destruction wrought to the Army of Tennessee on November 30, 1864, at Franklin, it is difficult to dispute the oft-told claim that Franklin “was where the Old South died.” Though it may be somewhat of an exaggeration, there is plenty of truth to the sentiment.
To begin, we must accept what the “Old South” was. It was not the nostalgic, or romantic, imaginings of the idyllic plantation, rather it was a slave-based agrarian society defined by a rigid racial hierarchy between white and free and black and slave. If there is a single soldier whose life and world well embodied the Old South, it was Colonel Hugh A. Garland Jr.
His family tree was a “who’s who” of American history. His great-great uncle was the “Father of the Constitution,” President James Madison. Garland’s father, Hugh Garland Sr. served as a member of the Virginia House of Delegates before he clerked in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1838 to 1841. A defender of slavery, Hugh Sr. understood the institution’s function within Southern society as the bedrock of the economy, and the political and social composition of the world in which he lived. Throughout his life, Hugh Sr. was known for his “devotion to States Rights.”[1]
When he married Anne Burwell on October 12, 1826, two of the most influential and well-connected families in Virginia became one. Anne’s father, Armistead Burwell, fathered thirteen children with his wife Mary Cole Turnbull. He also fathered a fourteenth child with an enslaved woman named Agnes. Sometime around 1818, Agnes gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth.
This young girl, born into slavery, became Burwell property and suffered a terrifying few years as she came of age. When Armistead learned of Elizabeth’s skills as a seamstress, he began to sell her products to others. The money, never shared with Elizabeth, instead went to other Burwell family members. She endured a horrific period of enslavement by a family associate, Alexander Kirkland. Fortunately, she and her newborn son, George, a product of a brutal sexual encounter with Kirkland, returned to the Burwells. Upon her return, Elizabeth was given to Anne, her half-sister. In 1847, the growing Garland family relocated to St. Louis, Missouri. Between 1830 and 1847, Hugh and Anne had eight children, among them Hugh A. Garland Jr., born in 1837.[2]
In the meantime, across the country, a decade’s old debate about the politics of slavery and its expansion into the west continued to rage and in 1847, a legal battle drew Hugh Sr. into the sectional crisis.
Ten years earlier, a U.S. Army surgeon, Dr. John Emerson, traveled to Fort Snelling in the Wisconsin Territory. An enslaved man, Dred Scott, accompanied him into the free territory. While there, Scott met and married an enslaved woman, Harriet Robinson. The marriage was presided over by Harriet’s owner, Lawrence Taliaferro, a local justice of the peace. Upon their marriage, Taliaferro gave Harriet to Emerson. While the Scotts remained at Fort Snelling under a series of leases to other army officers and post officials, Emerson traveled to Fort Jesup in Louisiana and in 1838, he married Irene Sanford.
By 1840, the Emersons and Scotts settled in Missouri. Emerson left the army in 1842 and struck out for the Iowa Territory where he died a year later. Irene Emerson then leased out the Scotts, who by 1846 had two daughters, Eliza and Lizzie. That year, Scott offered Irene $300 to purchase his family’s freedom. She refused.
Intent to be free, Scott filed a lawsuit to sue for his family’s freedom. The basis of their legal standing extended from the idea that the Scotts resided for an extended period in a free territory, thus they were considered free. Both the Scotts and Irene Emerson hired lawyers to represent them. Irene hired one of the most well-known lawyers in St. Louis, and a pro-slavery advocate, Hugh Garland Sr.
By 1847, Hugh Sr. and Lyman Decatur Norris successfully led the case against the Scotts and won the first case. Scott appealed the verdict and in 1850, won his case; however, Irene appealed the decision again. It was also in 1850 that Irene married her second husband, an abolitionist from Massachusetts, Congressman Calvin Chaffee. Two years later Irene successfully appealed, and she transferred ownership of the Scotts to her son, John Sanford. Scott’s desire for freedom had not waned and he appealed the decision again in 1854. Because Sanford resided in New York and Scott in Missouri, the appeal was filed in the U.S. Federal Court under the case name of Dred Scott v. John Sanford. That same year, Hugh A. Garland Sr. died.
Prior to his death, Elizabeth launched a campaign to purchase her freedom and after two-years of persuasion, Hugh Sr. permitted her to purchase her and son George’s freedom for $1,200. By 1854, Hugh Sr. was dead, but the agreement stood. In October 1855, Elizabeth raised the money and both she and her son were manumitted. Before she departed Missouri, she formally separated from her husband, James Keckley, whom she married in 1850.[3]
By 1860, George attended school in Ohio and Elizabeth settled in Washington D.C.. Through connections made through her clientele, she secured a business license to operate her seamstress shop in the capital city. She became one of the most sought-after dressmakers in Washington D.C. with an incredible list of the capital city’s socialites. But no other client of Elizabeth’s surpassed the woman she met on March 4, 1861.
That day, from the steps of the unfinished U.S. Capitol building, a lanky Springfield, Illinois lawyer named Abraham Lincoln made a final appeal to a fractured nation torn asunder by the rebellion in the Southern slave-holding states. “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen,” said Lincoln, “and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war.” On the very same day that her husband delivered these remarks, Mary Todd Lincoln met Elizabeth Keckley for the first time. Over the next three and a half years, they developed first a professional relationship and through time, a genuine friendship. At the same time, the nation went to war.[4]
Though Missouri did not secede from the Union, thousands of men cast their lot with the Confederacy. On June 22, 1861, Hugh A. Garland Jr. mustered into Company F, 1st Missouri Infantry. Others flocked to the loyal forces in Missouri. Among them, George W. Kirkland, Elizabeth’s son. Though Federal policy barred black men from the service, George managed to pass as white. While their circumstances in life could not have been more opposite, Hugh Jr. and George spent much of their childhood with one another. In 1861, they found themselves on opposite sides of war driven by those very circumstances: freedom and slavery.[5]
On April 24, 1861, Kirkland joined the 1st Missouri Light Artillery (US). On August 10, Kirkland was killed at the battle of Wilson’s Creek. In September 1863, his mother began to collect his pension.
On May 8, 1862, Garland’s soldiers elected him to the rank of major and in August he received a promotion to lieutenant colonel. In November, the 1st and 4th Missouri Infantry was consolidated, and by January 1863, Hugh made his way to Vicksburg, Mississippi on detached duty. There, in July 1863, he and his men were captured and subsequently paroled. In May 1864, Garland received a promotion to colonel and command of the 1st/4th Missouri. From Dalton to Atlanta, he and the men of Brigadier General Francis Cockrell’s Missouri Brigade fought relentlessly.
By fall 1864, there was no finer battle-hardened unit in General John Bell Hood’s Army of Tennessee than Cockrell’s Missouri Brigade. On November 30, at Franklin, Cockrell’s 696 men filed into a line of battle and with a determined yell, the Missourians marched across the open farm fields toward an entrenched Federal position bristling with well-placed artillery. At the front of his regiment rode Garland. Federal fire disabled Cockrell’s horse and the brigade commander suffered multiple gunshot wounds to the legs and arms. Garland fared no better.
As he advanced with the regiment’s banner in hand, a bullet struck him in the knee, and he lay helpless as the battle raged around him. A soldier in the 88th Illinois Infantry, Private James K. Merrifield “vaulted the works and wove his way through the dead and wounded.” He reached Garland and “pulled the bodies off…and gave him a drink of water.” Merrifield gathered Garland’s sword and belt, as well as the flag of the 1st Missouri. No sooner had Merrifield hastened back to the works then did a ball strike a mortal blow to Garland.[6]
In the Confederate assault, the Missourians suffered over 400 casualties. Among the dead, lay Hugh Garland, the great-great nephew of a president, the son of an attorney who led the case against Dred Scott, and the half-nephew of Elizabeth Keckley who spent four years in the Lincoln White House. Within a year, not only was Garland dead, so too was the Confederacy. By December 1865, the 13th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States abolished slavery and simultaneously overturned the Dred Scott Decision of 1857. The ways of the Old South died in the din of battle, so too did young men like Garland.[7]
[1] Alabama Times, Wetumpka, AL., February 28, 1841. 1
[2] Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes: Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House, (G.W. Carleton & Co., Publishers: New York, 1868), 17-20, 38-39.
[3] Keckley, Behind the Scenes, 49, 56-59.
[4] Keckley, Behind the Scenes, 81-83.
[5] The National Archives in Washington, DC; Washington, DC, USA; U.S., Civil War Pension Index: General Index to Pension Files, 1861-1934; NAI Title: General Index to Civil War and Later Pension Files, Ca. 1949-Ca. 1949; NAI Number: 563268; Record Group Title; National Archives and Records Administration; Washington, D.C.; Record Group Title: Records of the AGO, 1780s-1917; Record Group #: 94; Series Number: M405; Roll #: 0759; National Archives and Records Administration (Nara); Washington, D.c.; Compiled Service Records of Confederate Soldiers Who Served in Organizations From the State of Missouri; Catalog Name: Carded Records Showing Military Service of Soldiers Who Fought in Confederate Organizations, Compiled 1903 – 1927, Documenting the Period 1861 – 1865; Catalog Number: 586957; Record Group Number: 109; Source Reference Number: 1274.jp2; Series Number: M322; Roll: 93.
[6] Eric A. Jacobson, For Cause and For Country: A Study of the Affair at Spring Hill and the Battle of Franklin, (O’More Publications: Franklin, TN, 2013), 354, 415.
[7] Kenneth Weant, “Missouri Confederate Death Records,” (Ancestry.com Operations, Inc: Provo, Utah, 1999).
Great Post, Joe. Very interesting with all the historical connections in the Garland family..
Great article covering alot of territory, no Wisconsin or Iowa pun intended. Virginia families seemed all cousins to each other, Custis, Lee, Randolph, Garland, Burwell, etc. Some Lee’s stayed loyal to the Union, for example, Marse Robert’s cousins US Rear Admiral Samuel Phillips Lee and his brother US Judge Advocate General John Fitzgerald Lee, brother-in-law to US Postmaster General Montgomery Blair. Like Sly Stone said, “It’s a family affair.”
Welcome to ECW Joe. Great insightful article. As someone who has visited Franklin and Springhill many times, I always appreciate more on the subject.
Congrats on a nicely structured narrative. Making all these characters & histories weave together coherently had to be a challenge.
Great article! Another Garland relation was Brig. Gen. Samuel Garland, who was killed at South Mountain. The Petersburg, Virginia, building that Garland Sr and family lived in before heading to Missouri is still standing on Sycamore St.
I’m curious. In the six slave states that stayed in the Union during the war, were they not “the nostalgic, or romantic, imaginings of the idyllic plantation, rather it was a slave-based agrarian society defined by a rigid racial hierarchy between white and free and black and slave”? And in the free states during the war – did they cancel the Black Codes so they were no longer defined by a rigid racial hierarchy between white and free and black and slave”?