Tears glisten in Debbie Morgan’s eyes as she reads a newly found 147-year-old letter penned by an ancestor who lies under an “unknown” marker on the manicured slopes of Marietta National Cemetery, one of 10,312 Union soldiers who came to Georgia in 1864 and never went home.
“Finally, after all these years, his family knows where he is,” says Morgan, an Indiana transplant who lives in Powder Springs. “We just found out.”
It happened by fluke. Morgan, program director of the West Cobb Senior Center, heard that local historian Bradley J. Quinlin was an expert on Marietta National and asked him to take her elderly folks on a tour. He did. That was five years ago.
Then, just a few weeks ago, she heard from a cousin in Indiana who had found a sheaf of letters written by an ancestor who was wounded at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain on June 27, 1864. The soldier, Pvt. Wilson Fields, died less than four months later in a hospital in East Point, but no one ever told the family where he was buried.
Morgan gave Quinlin the letters on the off chance her relative might be buried in the cemetery she had “passed a million times.”
After studying regimental, cemetery and muster logs, Quinlin soon identified Fields’ grave as being under marker 5386. He had been disinterred and moved to Marietta in 1866.
A member of the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War who has an ancestor buried in an unmarked grave in Vicksburg, Miss., Quinlin feels an obligation to try to identify those at Marietta as a way of honoring all Americans on Memorial Day.
“I’m doing what I feel is owed to these young men who saved the country,” says Quinlin, 56, who retired early on disability. “It’s my life’s work.”
So far, Quinlin has identified 45 of the 3,048 unknowns. Noted historian David Evans, author of the acclaimed “Sherman’s Horsemen,” has identified four others.
But Morgan’s ancestor is the first in Marietta National whose letters have been found and they paint a sometimes humorous but often chilling picture of what it was like in “Gorgy,” as he spelled it, as Union forces closed in on Atlanta.
He referred to Rebels as “rebes,” and began many words with the letter “a” — such as “the cannon is athundering very much.” Or “We are agoing to be in a hard fight.” Or “Atlanty is agoing to be hard to take.”
He asked his wife Sarah how his children were doing, urged them all to write, wondered whether they had enough to eat and described the fighting as terrifying.
“I don’t believe a man has got to die to go to hell, for he can get right up and walk right into it alive,” he wrote June 14, two weeks before he was wounded.
He enclosed “a lock of my hair” in one letter at her request, asked her “to have a chicken killed for me when I get home” and “to train the children in the right way and tell them there is a true and aliving God.”
On Sept. 11, 1864, she received a letter signed by “your friend Chas. M. Stuart” telling her that Fields had died in the East Point hospital.
“The discovery and confirmation of my great-great uncle’s final resting place has been the source of a great deal of emotional release,” Morgan says. “It is a sobering look into the last days of one of my ancestors. Knowing his fate lends a touch of humanity to a tragic situation, often populated by faceless participants. Now one of the unknowns has a face and a name.”
The land for the 23-acre cemetery, close to the Marietta Square, was donated by Union sympathizer Henry Cole as a gesture of conciliation, hoping men from both sides would be buried there. But animosity was still too strong, so the people of Marietta established a Confederate Cemetery a few miles away. It contains about 3,000 graves.
Marietta National has 18,839 graves and is closed to further burials and probably any removals. One Rebel, B.F. Dumas, was buried in the cemetery by mistake. He was in the 46th Tennessee Infantry, but had been buried in a temporary grave near Union troops close to Marietta. When they were disinterred, gravediggers assumed he was in the 46th Pennsylvania. Quinlin discovered the mistake.
Betty Hunter, head of the Confederate Cemetery Foundation, says Dumas’ descendants would “like him to be moved to ours” but acknowledges that’s unlikely. So does Sara Amy Leach, senior historian for the National Cemetery Administration of the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Quinlin says any change would be a shame because, “Marietta is a tapestry of American history.” He says 258 men who served in the United States Colored Troops are buried there. He recently identified the grave of one of them, Austin Gilmore, a cook who was wounded at Kennesaw Mountain and died four days after the battle.
Also buried in the cemetery are Emma Stephenson, an African-American nurse who tended Union soldiers, two men from the Revolutionary War, one from the War of 1812, many from World War II, Korea and Vietnam and one from Iraq.
“It’s Arlington National on a smaller scale,” Quinlin says.
Evans says “Every grave marker in Marietta National Cemetery is a monument to someone who gave what Lincoln called ‘the last full measure of devotion.’ They died for the sake of preserving liberty for future generations.”
He calls the cemetery “the last bivouac of the army Sherman led to Atlanta.”
As Memorial Day dawns today, Cub Scouts will have put American flags on all the graves. Dumas’, too.
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