Theodore O'Hara was a poet and an officer for the United States Army in the Mexican-American War, and a Confederate colonel in the American Civil War.
Background
Theodore O'Hara was born on February 11, 1820, in Danville, Kentucky. His father, Kean O'Hara, was one of three brothers who were implicated in Lord Edward Fitzgerald's Irish conspiracy in 1798, and fled with their father to the United States. He became famous in Kentucky as a schoolmaster, married a woman of Maryland Irish lineage, and bestowed affectionate care on the training of his son.
Education
After graduating in 1839 from St. Joseph's College, Bardstown, O'Hara read law in the office of William Owsley at Frankfort.
Career
Theodore O'Hara was admitted to practice in 1842. Soon thereafter he secured an appointment in the Treasury at Washington, but finding a clerk's life unbearably tame he returned to Frankfort and joined the staff of the Yeoman.
During the Mexican War he served from June 26, 1846 to October 15, 1848, as captain and assistant-quartermaster of Kentucky volunteers, was brevetted major August 20, 1847, for gallant and meritorious conduct at Contreras and Churubusco, and participated in the battle of Chapultepec as a member of Franklin Pierce's staff. After another sojourn in Washington he went back to the Yeoman. In the winter of 1849-50 he joined Narciso Lopez's expedition to "liberate" Cuba and was made colonel of the Kentucky regiment, which numbered about 240 men. They landed at Cardenas early in the morning of May 19, 1850, but O'Hara's filibustering on Cuban soil lasted only a few hours. He was shot in the legs while leading an attack on the Spanish barracks, was taken aboard ship, and conveyed safely to the United States.
In 1852 he became one of the six editors, every man of them a colonel, of the Louisville Times, a militant anti-Know-Nothing sheet that was extinguished by its opponents' victory in the elections of 1855. He was a captain in the 2nd United States Cavalry from March 3, 1855 to December 1, 1856, and an editor of the Mobile Register from then until the oncoming of the Civil War. With his usual enthusiasm he raised the Mobile Light Dragoons and in January 1861, with the assistance of kindred spirits, seized Fort Barrancas in Pensacola Harbor. Later he was colonel of the 12th Alabama Infantry and a staff officer to Albert Sidney Johnston and, after Johnston's death at Shiloh, to his old friend Breckinridge.
After the war he became a cotton merchant at Columbus, Georgia, but a fire destroyed his warehouse and other property. The story of his connection with William Walker, the Nicaraguan filibuster, is apocryphal, and his movements during several periods of his career have not been traced.
He is remembered for a single poem, "The Bivouac of the Dead, " a sonorous dirge commemorating the re-interment at Frankfort, July 20, 1847, of the Kentuckians slain in the battle of Buena Vista. The poem exists in two versions, of which the earlier and longer is also the better. Certain lines from it have been carved in marble or cast in bronze on soldiers' monuments or over the gates of military cemeteries throughout the country. His scanty literary remains also include a short dirge for Daniel Boone and a eulogy of William Taylor Barry. The latter was long regarded as a masterpiece of Southern oratory.
O'Hara spent his last days on a friend's plantation near Guerryton, Alabama, where he died of malaria. His body was re-interred in 1874 in the state military cemetery at Frankfort, Kentucky.
Personality
O'Hara was of medium height, with black hair, hazel eyes, and regular features, was fastidious in his dress, and comported himself like the Irish gentleman that he was. Besides the social charm and derring-do that were natural to him, he possessed a magniloquence that his friends amiably mistook for evidence of literary genius.