Some Gave All: Reflections at the Grave of Private Throgmorton

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?

The Old Road

It was at about this time 154 years ago that one-third of the Army of Tennessee passed silently through these woods, on their way to Franklin and then Nashville.

If I have estimated correctly, the original route of Hood Road was here. Nathan Bedford Forrest, himself, lead an advance guard of cavalry through here consisting of men from Biffle’s regiment of Tennessee Cavalry. We know this because Biffle’s regiment engaged the enemy on November 22 on the Turnpike, and this was the route they most likely took to get there.

Among those men was likely a large contingent of men from Lawrence County leading the way through familiar territory, and among those local men very likely could have been my own 3x-great-grandfather, Milas Alley, who grew up just a few miles north of this place, near Henryville, and who fought in Biffle’s regiment from 1862 until its surrender in 1865.

If Milas was at this place, he could have never guessed that one day, in a much more peaceful time, his grandson Charlie Alley would buy this land, and that it would pass down to his descendants to this day, when his 4x-great-granddaughters would play and laugh in the leaves there while cattle grazed languidly nearby.

That day in 1864, my ancestor was a 23-year-old soldier fighting for a nation that had not long existed and that had but six months left to exist at all. He was riding through the frigid drifts of a freak November blizzard, no doubt wondering if that day would be the last of his short life, or if he would ever come this near his home again.

He did survive that day, and he went on to survive the war and six more decades beyond that. In fact, that day in 1864, he had not yet seen a third of the days he would see before death.

We have no clue what he thought when he passed through these woods, and we don’t know if he would have appreciated the serendipity that generations of his descendants yet unborn would come to live on and love this land that he passed through so briefly with his comrades that cold day.

I like to think that he would have grinned if he had known it—cold and hungry and scared though he may have been; and that he would grin still today if he could see my girls playing in the leaves there.