Spring Grove Cemetery
Cincinnati, Ohio

General Dan McCook

Those of you who know me well, realize that I like to visit cemeteries. This affinity comes from my love of history, my time at Arlington in the Old Guard, and my connection to my GGF Guiseppe Milani, who quarried stone for use in memorials and headstones.

So on a recent work-related trip to Cincinnati, I decided to visit Spring Grove Cemetery -- truly the most beautiful cemetery I have visited and one of only 5 cemeteries designated a National Historic Landmark. http://www.springgrove.org/. An artist once said of Spring Grove: "Only a place with a heart and soul could make for its dead a more magnificent park than any which exists for the living." This is truly a special place -- the monuments, the crypts, the architecture, the landscape ... stunningly beautiful.

The cemetery also bears a local connection to Kennesaw, Georgia -- my hometown. It is the burial place of one of our nation's unsung heroes: Gen. Daniel McCook. A lawyer by profession, McCook was the law partner of William Tecumseh Sherman before the Civil War. So it is with great irony that Gen. Sherman would order what is described by many as the North's Picket's Charge against the "Dead Angle" of the Confederate left flank in the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain. It was an avoidable and senseless slaughter of 3000 men -- many from Illinois and Ohio.

The cynic in me supposes this was Sherman's determination to put his stalled command back in the news and dislodge Grant from the glorious headlines he was generating in Virginia. Instead of trying to outflank his enemy as he had proven time and again that he could do, and acting against the advice of his subordinate commanders, Sherman opted for a frontal assault against a well-entrenched enemy, atop what is now known as Cheatham Hill.

On June 27, 1864, McCook was brought "to the apogee of his military career" and was to lead the assault against Cheatham Hill. On this fateful morning, he seemed "eager for the trial" before him. He was cautioned by his commanders: "Don't be rash, colonel, don't be rash." In response to this cautionary counsel, Col. Dan responded with a quote from McCauley's "Horatius":

Then out spake brave Horatius,

The Captain of the gate:

"To every man upon this earth

Death cometh soon or late.

And how can man die better

Than facing fearful odds,

For the ashes of his fathers,

And the temples of his Gods."

Dan McCook led his brigade up a hill, over open terrain against an entrenched enemy. He made it to the top of the hill, "to stand fearlessly on the parapet, (of the confederate entrenchments) one foot resting on the head log. He used his sword to parry efforts by the Confederates to bayonet him. He was shot by a Confederate soldier who pointed the muzzle of his musket only a foot from Colonel Dan's body." Dan McCook would die from his wounds less than a month later in Steubenville, Ohio.

A fellow Ohioan would say of the Kennesaw battle: "There is no place where we were tested that to me finds so much interest, as Kennesaw Mountain was our Golgotha and our Waterloo."

Colonel Dan McCook was promoted to General just before he died. He was laid to rest in this beautiful cemetery with his family better known as "The Fighting McCooks" a family with a long and distinguished service (and loss) to this great nation. Indeed.

The picture is of me standing next to the McCook Family Memorial in Spring Grove Cemetery, Cincinnati, Ohio. The other picture is of Cheatham Hill, looking downhill from the Confederate position. The Union assault started in the tree line and moved 400 yards up this hill. The site of Dan McCook's mortal wounding is just behind this fence and is marked by a memorial plaque. I live just two miles north of this location.

Today is All Souls Day -- please remember Dan McCook in your prayers.

The Dead Angle - 3000 men would die on this hill.  Dan McCook would make it all the way to the top before being mortally wounded.  

The McCook family plot at Spring Grove Cemetery, Cincinnati, Ohio