I have one ancestor who died wearing the uniform. John C. Throgmorton was my 4x-great-grandfather. Although born and raised in Tennessee, he joined the Union army in 1863.
His son-in-law William Riley (my 3x-great-grandfather) had been serving in the Confederate army for two years when John enlisted, as had many of his friends and neighbors from northern Wayne County. There was a very real risk that the two could have faced each other on the battlefield. It makes you wonder what John’s daughter Rebecca—William’s wife of less than three years—thought of it all.
In the autumn of 1864, Throgmorton was captured by Confederate cavalrymen of Biffle’s regiment near Hampshire, Tennessee. In a twist of fate, another 3x-great-grandfather, Milas Glenn Alley, was serving with Biffle’s Regiment at the time of Throgmorton’s capture. Milas could have been present or even participated in the capture, and although the connection would have meant nothing to either man at the time, Milas’s yet-unborn son would marry Throgmorton’s similarly yet-unborn granddaughter some thirty years later.
Throgmorton spent the remainder of the war in the prison camp on the Cahaba River, near Selma, Alabama, where he contracted dysentery. When the war ended, he was sent first to Vicksburg, then on to Nashville, and was probably aboard one of the steam ships just ahead of the ill-fated ‘Sultana.’
Indeed, many years later, a rumor persisted among his descendants that he had perished aboard the ‘Sultana’ when that ship exploded on the Mississippi River, killing many of Throgmorton’s comrades.
He died of acute dysentery at Cumberland General Hospital Nashville in July 1865 and is buried in the Nashville National Military Cemetery.
John C. Throgmorton was 45 years old when he died. He left behind a widow and twelve children, seven of whom were under the age of 14. The youngest was barely 2 years old at the time of his death.
Visiting his grave a few years ago was an emotional moment. I don’t understand why he chose to wear the blue coat instead of the gray. But to know how his life ended, to see those hundreds of rows of clean white stones, and to know that the very DNA I carry in my body was absorbed from his blood and bone into the dirt beneath my feet more than a century before I was born left me feeling greatly humbled.
I respect the great sacrifice that my ancestor made when he took up arms, and I always think of him on Memorial Day, and the other boys who never came marching home.
The cost of the freedoms we cherish is chiseled in millions of stones like this one, spanning 244 years and dotting the globe. How can we begin to thank them? How do you thank someone for paying a debt that you can never repay?
