Theodore O’Hara
1820=1867.
Theodore O’Hara, son of an Irish exile, was born in Danville, Kentucky, and educated at St. Joseph Academy, Bardstown, where he taught Greek to the younger classes while finishing his senior course. He read law, was appointed clerk in the Treasury Department at Washington, 1845, and on the outbreak of the Mexican War entered the army as a soldier, rising to be captain and major. At the close of the war, he returned to Washington and practised law. He was afterwards editor of the “Mobile Register,” and of the Frankfort “Yeoman,” in Kentucky, and was employed in diplomatic missions. He was a colonel in the Confederate Army, and after the war, settled in Georgia. On his death the Kentucky Legislature passed a resolution to remove his remains to Frankfort and lay them beside the soldiers whom he had so well praised in his “Bivouac of the Dead;” and there he rests, the soldier bard, among the voiceless braves of the Battle of Buena Vista. This poem was written for the occasion of their interment; and it has furnished the lines of inscription over the gateways of several military cemeteries.