On a foggy Kentucky morning, the body of Confederate Brigadier General Felix Kirk Zollicoffer lay in the mud, surrounded by curious Union soldiers. The Battle of Mill Springs was still raging on January 19, 1862, when a federal officer demanded to know why the men were not tending to the wounded. One soldier pointed to the corpse and said it was Zollicoffer. The officer acknowledged the dead general but told the men to get back to work, noting that Colonel Speed Fry had likely sent him to his fate.
Earlier that day, Zollicoffer, a former Tennessee congressman and Nashville newspaper editor, had mistakenly ridden into Union lines. After a brief exchange of fire, he fell from his horse, mortally wounded in the chest. Fry may have fired the fatal shot, though no one could say for certain. Even in death, Union soldiers desecrated the 49-year-old commander’s body, stripping it of clothing, buttons, hair, and pieces of his underclothing.
Zollicoffer was not the only fallen Civil War commander treated with disrespect. The practice of looting the dead has a long history. After the Battle of Waterloo in June 1815, locals and soldiers reportedly extracted teeth from the dead using pliers. The teeth were boiled, trimmed, and mounted onto ivory dentures.
According to the British Dental Association, these so-called Waterloo teeth were listed in dental supply catalogs well into the 1860s. At Gettysburg in July 1863, soldiers from both sides collected mementos from the fallen. A soldier from the 14th Connecticut examined a fallen Confederate from Pickett’s Charge and noticed a young man clutching something near his left breast. Breaking the dead man’s grip, he discovered a daguerreotype of a young woman in her late teens or early twenties.
He later described it as the most precious relic of his war experience. Civilians also gathered keepsakes from Gettysburg’s fallen. Abby Howland Woolsey wrote of her mother, a nurse who collected battle souvenirs from Confederates, including items from a rebel lieutenant who died under her care and numerous Palmetto buttons from South Carolina coats. In his renowned Civil War memoir, Company H, Confederate soldier Sam Watkins described his attempt to take boots from a fallen Federal colonel.
He admired the man’s fine uniform, red sash, and splendid sword, but could not bring himself to remove the dead man’s boots. When he lifted the colonel’s foot and looked up, he saw the dead man’s eyes wide open, staring at him. He dropped the foot quickly, calling it his first and only attempt to rob a dead Yankee. At the Battle of Chantilly on September 1, 1862, Union Major General Philip Kearny scouted terrain ahead of his division during a torrential downpour.
Kearny, who had lost his left arm in the Mexican War, rode up to an entire enemy company, ignored their demand to surrender, and turned his horse to head back. A Confederate company fired a volley, and a bullet struck the 47-year-old general in the back near the spine, killing him instantly. Confederates took Kearny’s body to a field hospital and returned it to the Union Army the next day, minus his sword, pistol, watch, diamond brooch, finger rings, and wallet, which always held a large sum of money. They also kept Bayard, Kearny’s prized horse.
Confederate General Robert E. Lee burned papers found with the general, presuming they were personal. Four days after Kearny’s death, his wife Agnes wrote to Lee requesting the return of her husband’s horse and sword. Lee, who respected Kearny and felt sympathy for the widow, responded on September 28, 1862, saying he had inquired into the condition of the general’s remains.
He ensured the Confederates returned Kearny’s sword, a light one with a leather scabbard suited for a disabled person. The rebels also sent Bayard and Kearny’s saddle through the lines for Union General George B. McClellan to deliver to Agnes. McClellan thanked Lee for his kind and humane attention to the widow’s request, but the rest of the items taken from Kearny remained with the Army of Northern Virginia.
On July 3, 1863, Confederate Brigadier General Richard B. Garnett fell during Pickett’s Charge. Despite wearing a nearly new uniform coat with a general’s star and wreath on the collar, high-top boots, and spurs, his remains were never publicly identified, and his final resting place remains unknown. Garnett’s orderly, James Clay, recalled seeing the 45-year-old commander bravely waving his hat and urging his men forward.
Garnett wore a black felt hat with a silver cord, and his sword hung at his side. After Clay fell among rocks, he lost sight of the general during the struggle with Union soldiers. Then Garnett’s wounded black charger galloped out of the battle smoke, its right shoulder seemingly blasted by Union artillery. Several Federal soldiers dropped their weapons and ran toward the Confederate rear.
Two of these deserters reached the rocks where Clay and a Confederate captain were, offering to help them to safety. They told the men their brigade general had been killed, shot through the waist by grapeshot. Garnett’s body and belongings were not recovered amid the chaos. Clay sought treatment at a field hospital for a shot-off finger and head wound, describing the place as like a slaughterhouse with legs, arms, and hands piled up.
A Confederate staff officer reportedly retrieved Garnett’s watch, but his ornately inscribed saber stayed with his body. Years later, George H. Stuart, a Confederate brigade commander at Gettysburg, bought the then-rusty relic in a Baltimore junk shop. After Stuart’s death, his nephew acquired the saber and later gave it to Garnett’s niece.
How it ended up in a Maryland junk shop remains a mystery, but it is now housed at the American Civil War Museum in Richmond, Virginia. At the Battle of the Wilderness on May 6, 1864, Union Brigadier General James Wadsworth met a similar fate. As Confederates advanced near the Plank Road, a bullet struck the back of the silver-haired millionaire’s head, splattering brains onto an aide’s coat. The aide desperately tried to retrieve a gold watch from the 56-year-old officer’s coat pocket but had no time with Confederates closing in.
He leapt onto the general’s horse and rode back to Union lines. Confederates looted Wadsworth’s helpless body. His sword, boots, coat buttons, gold watch, a Virginia map, silver spurs, a billfold with $90, and intricately engraved field glasses vanished. They left the white cotton stockings with his initials stitched in red thread on his feet.
Wadsworth died two days later in enemy hands. After the war, a Confederate veteran returned the watch to the Wadsworth family and was generously rewarded. Other items taken from the general were later returned by veterans. But the engraved field glasses remained missing.
In 1921, Confederate Veteran magazine published an obituary of William T. Lowry, a South Carolina private who claimed to have shot Wadsworth. Lowry reportedly once possessed the field glasses, but they were said to have been destroyed in a fire at his home years earlier. In the 1970s, the field glasses reappeared when a descendant of a South Carolina soldier showed the relic to a National Park Service historian during a visit to the Fredericksburg battlefields.
He claimed his grandfather had shot Wadsworth but was uninterested in donating the glasses or giving his name. In 1985, James Wadsworth Symington, the general’s great-great-grandson and a former Missouri congressman, placed ads in South Carolina newspapers seeking the gloves and field glasses the general carried at the Wilderness. The effort yielded nothing, and the relic’s whereabouts remain unknown. A sharpshooter’s bullet struck Sixth Corps commander Major General John Sedgwick in the cheek, killing him instantly.
Blood gushed like a fountain and soaked the surrounding bushes. News of the 50-year-old general’s death spread quickly through the Union Army. Army of the Potomac commander Major General George Meade and other officers mourned the loss of the general soldiers affectionately called Uncle John. Sedgwick’s death shook overall Union Commander Ulysses S.
Grant as deeply as news of President Lincoln’s assassination. The following year, Lieutenant John G. Fischer of the 14th New Jersey preserved a memento of the killing. He cut down a bush stained with Sedgwick’s blood, dried it in the sun, sliced off a Y-shaped section, and carved the date May 9th into it.
After the war, he displayed it on his mantel as a reminder of the ruthless manner in which his commander was killed. Four hours after Sedgwick’s death, Frederick T. Dent, Grant’s brother-in-law and aide, picked a violet from the death site and pressed it in a book. At Meade’s headquarters, Sedgwick’s remains rested on a bier beneath a canopy of evergreens.
Before the body was sent to Washington for embalming, soldiers paid their respects. No reports mention a soldier secretly clipping hairs from Sedgwick’s beard. After embalming at Thomas Holmes’s establishment on Pennsylvania Avenue, the general’s body drew many visitors. The Washington Evening Star reported at least one was a relic hunter.
Despite a guard of four soldiers near the body, a woman showed remarkable persistence in securing a keepsake of the fallen hero by snipping two buttons from his coat. Thieves also targeted one of the Confederacy’s most revered generals. At dawn on December 1, 1864, the day after the Battle of Franklin, a search party found Major General Patrick Cleburne’s body near Fountain Carter’s cotton gin, the heart of the bloody fight where five other Confederate generals fell. The Irish-born Cleburne lay on his back as if asleep, his kepi partially covering his eyes.
The 36-year-old division commander wore a new gray uniform and a white linen shirt stained with blood. He was in his sock feet, his boots stolen. His watch, sword belt, and other valuables were gone. His body had been robbed during the night, even though Cleburne had fallen within Confederate lines.
Early in the 20th century, the . 36 caliber Colt revolver Cleburne carried at Franklin surfaced with a man in Cleburne, Texas. It later disappeared for years. In 1944, two boys found it on the banks of the Nolan River in Texas.
Today, the weapon is housed in the Layland Museum in Cleburne. Perhaps no fallen Civil War general suffered as disgraceful a fate as Zollicoffer. Days after the Battle of Mill Springs, a newspaper correspondent saw his body outside a settler’s tent wrapped in a blanket. His skin was strikingly pale and clear, and his face bore a calm expression, which even in death was not entirely lost.
Zollicoffer had shaved his beard, likely to avoid recognition, the correspondent speculated. Federals had stripped Zollicoffer of his clothing from the white rubber coat over his uniform to his shirt, undershirt, and socks. An Ohio private cut three buttons from his coat. Colonel Speed Fry claimed to have Zollicoffer’s spyglass and intricately engraved sword, reportedly bent when the mortally wounded general fell from his horse.
The sword was returned to the Zollicoffer family per an 1893 account in the National Tribune, a veterans’ newspaper. In 2020, the weapon and the general’s sash from the battle sold at auction for $31,980. Another soldier sent a piece of the general’s bloody undershirt to a friend in Alexandria, Virginia. Possessing it made me uneasy for a time, abolitionist Julia Wilbur wrote in her diary.
She called it a strange and fascinating memento of the rebellion. Even Zollicoffer’s hair was cut close to the scalp, likely by ghoulish relic hunters. The correspondent wrote that the general’s remains were shamefully mistreated by thousands of soldiers and civilians who flocked to see them, likely exaggerating the number. By Tuesday evening, the body was nearly bare, he added, noting that this kind of relic hunting borders on desecration.
Some fiercely denied the mistreatment of Zollicoffer’s remains, but the evidence is undeniable. A federal soldier boasted of having a small piece of Zollicoffer’s undershirt and a daguerreotype of a secessionist woman taken with other spoils. An Ohio newspaper reported a Union officer displaying a piece of the general’s buckskin shirt, noting it was very soft and likely quite comfortable when dry. A week after the battle, 31st Ohio Captain John W.
Fike wrote of the division of Zollicoffer’s clothes as trophies until strict orders were given to stop. His trousers and fine buckskin shirt were likely scattered across the northern states, as four or five different states were represented there. Another Ohioan confirmed Fike’s account. Private John Boss of the 9th Ohio wrote that soldiers tore Zollicoffer’s clothing from his body and divided his shirt for souvenirs.
A Tennessean wanted his entire scalp but was stopped because a guard was posted. Ninth Ohio Quartermaster Sergeant Joseph Greif wrote to a friend that he enclosed a lock of Zollicoffer’s hair and a piece of his trousers, having searched for his corpse shortly after the battle and found it lying in the mud. Union Army authorities eventually halted this gruesome practice. They cleaned Zollicoffer’s mud-covered body and placed it in a tent under guard.
With no suitable clothing to dress him, he was wrapped in a fine new blanket until proper attire could be obtained, after which he was dressed and cared for respectfully. Officers and men showed particular regard and unusual respect for his body. Chaplain Lyman F. Drake of the 31st Ohio viewed the general’s remains on a board in the tent.
He wrote that he saw where Zollicoffer was shot and placed his hand on the general’s broad forehead. Drake described him as about six feet tall, strongly built, with one of the finest heads he ever saw. The Federals kept the body until January 31st, treating the general as a strange and by then odorous war trophy. At division headquarters in Louisville, federal soldiers lined up to view the remains of the general and his aide, also killed at Mill Springs.
The Union Army even paid for fine burial cases for the two Confederates, a gesture one indignant federal soldier noted was paid for by the generosity of the government Zollicoffer had fought to overthrow. Under a flag of truce, the two Confederates’ remains were sent through the lines. The federal soldier wrote that it was courteous, soldierly, and Christian to return the bodies of these men prominent in the misguided cause to their friends, but that neither courtesy nor military etiquette nor Christianity required anything more. Back in his native Tennessee, the remains of one of Nashville’s prominent citizens were treated with reverence.
In early February, Zollicoffer’s body arrived in the state capital, where thousands passed by the remains at the capitol despite rainy, highly unpleasant weather. The next day, the procession to Zollicoffer’s grave site at Nashville City Cemetery, just over a mile away, was one of the largest ever witnessed in the city. At last, Zollicoffer could rest.