Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,671
By This is the grave of Sullivan Ballou.
Born in 1829 in Smithfield, Rhode Island, Ballou grew up pretty wealthy, despite his father dying when he was young. He went to Phillips Academy and then was off to Brown and then the Ballston Law School. He passed the Rhode Island bar in 1853 and started practicing there. He got interested in politics, was elected to the Rhode Island House and then became Speaker. He was a staunch Republican and big time supporter of Abraham Lincoln.
This leads us to the only reason to remember Ballou, but it is a powerful one. Ballou immediately volunteered for the war at the first call from Lincoln to do so. He was commissioned as a major in the 2nd Rhode Island Infantry.
Just before he was to participate in the first battle of the Civil War, Manassas, he wrote his wife a beautiful heartfelt letter. This letter became one of the core pieces to Ken Burns’ Civil War. That film does not age well in some ways, especially its reliance on the awful Nathan Bedford Forrest fanboy Shelby Foote as its key talking head. But the best parts of that film are really quite powerful and nothing is more powerful than the reading of Ballou’s letter. There’s no reason to reprint the letter here. The power comes in part from the reading of it. Here it is.
This still gives me chills every time I hear it. And as the narration closes, you know what happens. Ballou got his leg shot off at Manassas and died a week later. His wife never remarried and lived until 1917. It’s such a powerful moment of understanding both the deep love people have for each other and also the horrors of this terrible war, launched by the same forces who want to destroy America today and who, unlike in 1861, might succeed.
Sullivan Ballou is buried in Swan Point Cemetery, Providence, Rhode Island,
If you would like this series to visit other politicians who died in the Civil War, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Edward Baker, the senator from Oregon who was the only senator killed in the war, is in San Francisco and Henry Marchmore Shaw (you have to admit, that’s a hell of a middle name for a military officer), a former Congressman from North Carolina, is in Shawboro, North Carolina. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.