That apparently was the case as Sunday’s MDJ went to press. Despite the best efforts of all those involved, my column, which ran on Sunday’s front page, appeared in mangled form both in the print and on-line versions of that day’s newspaper. The first paragraph and several of the final paragraphs were omitted from the various versions, as well as the upcoming schedule for Brad Quinlin’s tours of Marietta National Cemetery.
So here is that story in its full, unexpurgated version:
UNKNOWN NO MORE:
Local Civil War Historian Identifies 16 Union Soldiers
The Marietta National Cemetery is the final resting place for 10,312 Union casualties of the Civil War, 3,048 of them buried as “unknowns.” Now 16 of those men, whose identities were “known but to God” since they were laid to rest, are having their identities returned to them, thanks to local Civil War historian and researcher Brad Quinlin. And in an even more interesting twist, five of those unknowns were members of the U.S. Colored Troops — freed slaves who enlisted in the Union Army as the war ended.
“This is positive proof (of who they all are),” he told me last week. “Not guesswork. This is all from documentation.”
Quinlin uses such information as where the soldiers were originally buried, where their units were from day to day, and rosters of the dead from each regiment in the Union army of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman to extrapolate the identities of the unknowns. Even more important for his work are the records kept by the Army just after the war as it exhumed the bodies of its men from the Northwest Georgia battlefields and hospitals where they had fallen and been hastily buried. Their remains then were transported to a spacious new military cemetery on 23 acres donated for that purpose by Henry Cole on a hilltop due east of downtown Marietta.
Cole — a Marietta businessman who was a Union sympathizer jailed by the Confederates as a spy during the war — donated the land as a gesture of reconciliation in hopes it would be used for the fallen of both sides. But the town’s residents, many of them no doubt embittered by the war, chose to continue to have Confederate remains buried in what is now the Marietta Confed-erate Cemetery on Powder Springs Street, where burials had begun in 1863.
The Union burial parties kept meticulous records (now housed in the National Archives in Washington, D.C.) about the description of each set of remains, including any identifying details and where they were found.
One such notation helped Quinlin identify the remains of a young soldier who died at a Mari-etta hospital set up in the First Baptist Church after the battle. He first was buried a few yards away from the church, then moved to the national cemetery after the war. The reburial records noted that a ring was found on the finger of the disinterred body, bearing the inscription, “From E.P. to J.P., With Love.”
Using information about the makeshift graveyard where the body had first been buried; and which units had used the hospital, and having a roster of those unit’s casualties, Quinlin deduced that “J.P.” was James Painter of the 21st Ohio Infantry Regiment (which coincidentally, is the unit of which Quinlin, a Civil War re-enactor, is a staunch member).
Further research showed that the ring was given to Painter at the outset of the war by his sister, Elizabeth. Quinlin then located Painter’s great-great-granddaughter, who amazingly, provided a photo (reprinted nearby) of Painter in uniform — with the ring clearly visible on his finger.
The first of the unknowns identified by Quinlin was another member of the 21st Ohio. Quinlin had been compiling a list of the names of every soldier from the unit who was killed during the Atlanta campaign and where each was buried, but could not find that information for several of them. He essentially cross-referenced roster information with knowledge of where the unit was each day, and with the burial notations (when available) about which unit the deceased was thought to have been a member of, and, where available, the initials of the deceased. He now has expanded his research to include each regiment of Sherman’s army during the Atlanta Campaign.
“There was an incredible level of detail written down on the part of those who compiled the burial records,” Quinlin said. “It’s almost like they hoped and prayed that someone down the road would be able to identify these men.”
Another example: a Union soldier disinterred from a grave near Cheatham Hill on the Kenne-saw Mountain battlefield was discovered to have been buried with a torn piece of paper stuffed in his pocket, which read, “A.H., Co. B., 113th Ohio.” The man was then reburied in Grave 9308 in the National Cemetery as an unknown.
Quinlin’s process of elimination showed the only soldier from that unit killed near the spot in question was Pvt. Adam Hissong.
Quinlin’s efforts have also proven the identities of the following men, all presently buried in Marietta National Cemetery as “unknowns”: Pvt. James Clymer of the 21st Ohio, age 17, who died of "dropsy" in a temporary hospital near the Confederate cemetery three months after the battle; Pvt. James Forrest, 21, killed at the Battle of Pickett’s Mill on the Paulding/Cobb line; Pvt. George Deal of the 20th Ohio, killed July 22, 1864 near Atlanta and first buried near the Troup Hurt House; and John W. Carter, Freeman Dulin, Lorenzo Kates, Michael O’Connell, Eugene H. Palin and Andrew J. Rhodes, all privates with the 113th Ohio who were killed in the Cheatham Hill area June 27, 1864 during the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain.
“After finding the first one, I realized that many more could be identified, so anytime I had the time to work on it during the past nine years, I did,” Quinlin said. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been to (Washington) D.C., to look at the old records. If I can keep my focus and make enough trips back to D.C., I could probably do the documentation for 200 of the unknowns.”
When producers of the TV show, “Who Do You Think You Are” were trying to find the re-mains of the Civil War ancestor of actor Matthew Broderick, they contacted Willie Ray Johnson, park historian at Kennesaw Mountain Battlefield Park. He, in turn, steered them to Quinlin, who then researched what had befallen Broderick’s great-great-grandfather, Robert Martindale, a sol-dier in the 20th Connecticut Regiment.
It turns out that Martindale had been hit in the head by a minie ball fired by a Confederate sniper during the Battle of Peachtree Creek on July 23, 1864 in Atlanta. He was buried in a makeshift cemetery adjacent to the Western & Atlantic Railroad tracks along with 25 other recent Union casualties. Quinlin located the burial locations of all of the men of the 20th Connecticut who were killed during the Atlanta Campaign — except one. And the burial log kept during the refinement process in 1866-67 noted that one of those 25 temporary burials was an unknown soldier of the 20th — who by the process of elimination, was obviously Martindale, Quinlin says. The soldier now lies in Section D, Grave 2469 of the Marietta cemetery, where he was paid a respectful visit by Broderick, Quinlin and a camera crew last winter. (To watch that episode online, go to http://www.nbc.com/who-do-you-think-you-are/video/matthew-broderick/1212991/?__source=recent-eps-module)
Quinlin is a familiar face at Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park, where he has served as a volunteer “living history” interpreter for years. He and his re-enactment unit also struck up a friendship with then-Vice President Dick Cheney, one of whose ancestors had served in the “real” 21st Ohio and took part in the battles of Chickamauga and Kennesaw Mountain. Quinlin wound up giving Cheney two “hush-hush” tours of Chickamauga and one of Kennesaw Mountain while he was in office, and Quinlin’s unit marched in President Bush’s second Inaugu-ral Parade in January 2005.
Quinlin, 56, has worked the past several years as a tour guide for the Marietta Historic Trolley Co.
“Marietta is one of the prettiest cities in Georgia, and it has preserved its history,” said Quinlin, who lives in Gwinnett County. “So the opportunity to work for the Trolley Company was the perfect job.”
But his research nearly came to a permanent halt in the past year when he unexpectedly con-tracted a severe case of spinal meningitis, which went into his brain and caused encephalitis, nearly killing him. He suffered severe damage to the right side of his brain and is only now on the verge of being able to resume his job as a guide.
“God saved me for a reason, and I think it was to continue my research,” he said.
Quinlin now has used the same approach to pin positive identities on five of the 258 Union soldiers of African American descent that are buried in the cemetery. He plans to reveal the names of the five as he leads tours of the cemetery on Memorial Day weekend.
“The research is there, and the documentation is there,” he said.
Those men were all former Georgia slaves who had enlisted in the U.S. Colored Troops in July 1865, three months after the war ended. They primarily guarded the railroads and bridge cross-ings, and those regiments were disbanded in January 1866, Quinlin said.
One of the black soldiers in question died in downtown Marietta across Church Street from the present site of the First Baptist Church, Quinlin said. His unit had been guarding the Kennesaw Avenue rail crossing there at the time of his death from chronic dysentery, an unfortunately common affliction for the war’s soldiers. According to the reburial log, he was originally buried 35 yards northeast of the church (which in that era was on the opposite side of Church Street from its present location, according to Quinlin), five feet east of the rail tracks in a makeshift burial ground that already held 31 other Union soldiers (all white) who had died in the summer of 1864 following the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain. Most had been among the 200 patients at the hospital set up in the Baptist Church, where boards had been laid across the backs of pews to serve as makeshift cots for the wounded. The church was one of at least nine temporary hospitals set up in that area to serve the sick and wounded of Sherman’s XVI Army Corps, commanded by Gen. Grenville Dodge, Quinlin said.
That temporary burial ground — its original occupants now in the National Cemetery — now is beneath the parking lot of Marietta Presbyterian Church.
Four of the five Colored Troop soldiers identified by Quinlin died of natural causes. The fifth was part of a detail guarding Vinings Station railroad stop when he was beaten to death and his body thrown into the Chattahoochee River. It was never determined who was responsible, Quinlin said. Renegade ex-Confederates? A fellow soldier or soldiers? It is impossible now to know.
Some of those buried as unknowns at Marietta National Cemetery have headstones bearing the simple epitaph “Unknown.” Other such graves are marked by nothing but simple granite blocks bearing a grave number. Quinlin has submitted his documentation to the Veterans’ Administra-tion and expects all those markers eventually to be replaced with headstones bearing the men’s names. That was the process when Athens historian/author David Evans ("Sherman's Horse-men") a decade ago discovered the identities of four Union cavalrymen buried in the cemetery as unknowns. Tombstones for those men and for Pvt. Clymer have now been erected. But Quinlin says he has no idea when the others might be approved.
Thanks to the efforts of Quinlin and Evans, the ranks of the unknowns at the Marietta ceme-tery have been thinned to 3,028 from 3,048. That's 20 more men whose identities now are known to all of us — not just to God.
Joe Kirby is editorial page editor of the Marietta Daily Journal, author of “The Bell Bomber Plant” and co-author of “Marietta Revisited: Then & Now.”
Touring the Cemetery: Quinlin will lead four free tours of the Marietta National Cemetery dur-ing the Memorial Day Weekend. They will take place at 9 a.m. and 1 p.m. Saturday, 1 p.m. Sun-day and at 1:30 p.m. Memorial Day. Tours will start just inside the park entrance on Washington Street
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