Patrick Cleburne was born in County Cork, Ireland, in 1828, the son of a doctor. Orphaned at 15, he failed the entrance exam for Trinity College of Medicine in Dublin in 1846 and enlisted as a private in the British Army’s 41st Regiment of Foot, guarding starving prisoners on Spike Island during the Great Famine. He bought his discharge, emigrated with three siblings to Helena, Arkansas, and worked as a pharmacist, studied law and co-owned a newspaper with Thomas C. Hindman. In 1856, after he was shot in the back by a Know Nothing gang, he turned and killed one attacker.

Cleburne rose from private in the Yell Rifles to major general by December 1862, fighting at Shiloh, Corinth and Stones River. In early 1864 he presented a written proposal to free enslaved people and enlist them in the Confederate army. General W.H.T. Walker sent it up the chain as an abolitionist plot, Jefferson Davis ordered it suppressed, and Cleburne was passed over for corps command three times. On November 30, 1864, he protested John Bell Hood’s frontal assault at Franklin, then led it and was killed near the Union works.

• At Richmond, Kentucky, a minie ball struck his left cheek, smashed through his teeth and exited his mouth, yet he returned to command at Perryville.
• At Ringgold Gap in late 1863 his hidden rear guard halted a force about three times its size and earned him the thanks of the Confederate Congress.
• His proposal cited the Spartan helots, galley slaves at Lepanto and the revolts in Haiti.
• His body was found looted of boots, watch and sword the morning after Franklin.
• He was reburied at St. John’s Episcopal Church near Mount Pleasant, which reminded him of Ireland, then moved to Helena in 1870.