December 2023
He was so depressed that, referring to his work, he confided to his longtime friend, “I would consign every line of it to eternal oblivion for one hundred dollars in hand.”10
Simms and Hayne, struggling themselves, could offer no help. In the fall of 1866, sympathizers in the legislature brought Timrod’s name up for a messenger’s job, but he got only eleven out of ninety votes. At least the governor hired him as an office clerk—but only for thirty days. A few months later, around Christmastime, General Wade Hampton persuaded a Methodist minister to take a bit of money to Timrod for the care of his family. Embarrassed, the poet reluctantly accepted, and from then on Hampton and others at least provided for Timrod’s most pressing needs.
“One of my literary friends, a man of fine capacity, is literally dying by inches, of poverty and disease together,” Simms wrote an acquaintance in March 1867. Of course he was referring to Henry Timrod. Jay B. Hubbell, the authority on Southern literature, writes, “Timrod did not starve, but the want of proper and sufficient food had its effect upon his weakened condition.”11
And yet he kept writing. “It was natural,” wrote a friend years later, “that he should yearn to be permitted to give expression in his own melodious verse to the noble thoughts which crowded his teeming brain.”
Perhaps Timrod’s most famous composition is “Memorial Ode,” which was recited at dedication services of Confederate soldiers’ graves in Charleston’s Magnolia Cemetery on May 10, 1867. “Sleep sweetly in your humble graves,” the poem begins,
Sleep, martyrs of a fallen cause; Though yet no marble column craves
The pilgrim here to pause.
Timrod was heartened that autumn when a benefactor began talking of collecting all his verse for publication. Proof sheets for a book even appeared. The poet was clutching them during a visit to a friend’s house on Laurel Street in Columbia when he suffered a hemorrhage of the lungs, spitting blood all over the pages. He was dying of tuberculosis.
Physicians kept Timrod in bed, but he could not refrain from composing. When, on October 4, doctors told him there remained no hope, he was shocked. “Must I so soon depart, who hoped to achieve such great things?” he exclaimed.
On Monday, October 7, 1867, he was correcting proof sheets for his hoped-for compilation when he breathed his last. Soon his body was laid to rest in the yard of Trinity Episcopal Church in downtown Columbia.12
The melancholy bard, denied fame and fortune in his lifetime, pondered his luckless fate in one of his last compositions, “Why Silent.” “Already, I think, for a little praise,/I have paid too dear,” he laments,
While worldliness, does not miss What a poet sings.13
10. Thompson, Timrod, 38-41, 44-45,
11. Thompson, Timrod, 43-44, 48;
12. Thompson, Timrod, 9, 48-52, 126,
13. Ibid., 127. “Why Silent” is one of
Henry T. Thompson, Henry Timrod: Laureate of the Confederacy (Columbia: The State Company, 1928 [repr. AMS Press, New York, 1971]), 9, 11-12, 14; Patricia G. McNeely, “Henry Timrod: Reluctant Confederate Who Became Poet Laureate” in Patricia G. McNeely, Debra Reddin van Tuyll and Henry H. Schulte, eds., Knights of the Quill: Confederate Correspondents and their Civil War Reporting (West Lafayette IN: Purdue University Press, 2010), 160-61; Guy A. Cardwell, “Henry Timrod” in Robert Bain, Joseph M. Flora and Louis D. Rubin, Jr., eds., Southern Writers: A Biographical Dictionary (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 455.
Thompson, Timrod, 15; Jay B. Hubbell, The South in American Literature 1607–1900 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1954), 467. Thompson, Timrod, 16.
Thompson, Timrod, 17-18, 20, 23, 27-30; McNeely, “Timrod,” 162. Thompson, Timrod, 32; Timrod, “Ethnogenesis” in Richard Beale Davis, C. Hugh Holman and Louis D. Rubin Jr., eds., Southern Writing 1585–1920 (New York: Odyssey Press, 1970), 609; Timrod, “A Cry to Arms” in Thompson, Timrod, 95. Thompson, Timrod, 32-33; Patricia G. McNeely, “Felix Gregory de Fontaine: Chronicling the Horrors of War” in Knights of the Quill, 50. Timrod, Thompson, 34-35; McNeely, “Timrod,” 171; Stephen Davis, “Henry Timrod: Poet Laureate of the Confederacy,” Civil War Times, vol. 21, no. 10 (February 1983), 25.
Thompson, Timrod, 36-38; Timrod, “A Theory of Poetry” in Thomas Daniel Young, Floyd C. Watkins and Richard Croom Beatty, eds., The Literature of the South (Glenview IL: Scott, Foresman, 1968 [1952]), 310.
125 (“Sonnet”); Marion Brunson Lucas, Sherman and the Burning of Columbia (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1976), map, “Columbia Buildings Burned Feb.17-18, 1865.”
Hubbell, The South in American Literature, 471.
the half-dozen pieces by Timrod reprinted in Clyde N. Wilson, ed., The Land They Loved Volume I: Southern Poets and Poems, 1606–1860 (Columbia: Shotwell
Publishing, 2023), 126-27.
If Henry Timrod worked in the clutches of Erato, the Muse of Poetry, Stephen Davis is a devotee of Clio, the Greek Muse of History. He’s been writing on the war for well-nigh onto a half-century, having first been published in Civil War Times Illustrated back in ‘76.
He is the author, among other titles, of a two-volume study of Gen. John B. Hood’s war service (Mercer University Press,
“I Thank
Eliza Frances Andrews (1840–1931) received a strong education and was
the Lord I
a successful writer and educator. Her War-Time Journal of a Georgia Girl
Am Not a
surely ranks among the most observant
Yankee...”
and intelligent wartime memoirs by a
Edited with commentary by Stephen Davis, I Thank the Lord I Am Not a Yankeeincludes selections of her wartime and postwar journals which are most expressive of her Confederate
patriotism and Southern pride.
Stephen Davisis author of ten books on the Civil War, most of which treat the Atlanta Campaign. His two recent volumes
on Confederate General John Bell Hood have won several prizes, including the Fletcher Pratt Award of the New York CWRT.
Next year Savas Beatie will publish The National Tribune Remembers the Atlanta Campaign. The Tribune served the same purpose as did Confederate Veteran for ex- Rebels; it allowed Union veterans to submit and have published reminiscent articles on their war experiences. Of the hundreds of articles on the Atlanta Campaign appearing in the National Tribune from 1877 to 1911, Steve has chosen seventy-six pieces for reprinting—and bringing to a modern readership.
