For this Memorial Day, instead of visiting the grave of my Uncle Frank, who was killed in Vietnam three days before his twentieth birthday, or of my grandfather, whose body was still expelling shrapnel from WWII on his deathbed in 2006, I visited Great-Great-Grandpa Arnold’s grave.

Hiram Arnold (Great-Great-Grandfather)

Hiram Arnold came to Texas from Ohio in his early twenties. When he was 23 he married Thirza Birchfield. After losing their first child, twins were born in 1861: Jefferson Davis Arnold and John Baylor Arnold.

(If you’re not familiar with Confederate leaders or the Civil War, Jefferson Davis was the President of the Confederate States of America; John Baylor was a US Indian agent, publisher and editor, politician, a senior officer of the Confederate States Army (CSA), and all-around piece of human garbage keen on murder and genocide. Thankfully, we don’t have many more lackluster namesakes in our family.)

When I was researching this branch of my family I found someone online who had speculated that Hiram must have been a die-hard Confederate since he named his sons after Davis and Baylor. That assumption is simplistic at best. It’s not as if he owned a plantation and slaves.

It’s far more likely that Hiram, because of his well-documented poverty, had been working alongside slaves in the cotton fields of Texas. It’s also likely he fought against family members and childhood friends who served in the Union from his home state of Ohio, where his parents and siblings are buried. I think poverty and being a newly-arrived settler in the South are sorely under-analyzed dimensions in understanding the race ideology of the Confederacy.

The following year, in 1862, Hiram enlisted in the CSA. He served in Company I, 30th Texas Cavalry for about two years, then served with Company A, 29th Texas Cavalry until the end of the War. He fought in the Battle of Mansfield and the Battle of Pleasant Hill, both in Louisiana, under Major General John G. Walker’s command. His company surrendered at Galveston in June of 1865 at the close of the War.

In 1881, when he was 45, my Great-Grandma Thirza Garrett, née Arnold, was born. My family used to visit her at the old folks home on weekends after we moved back to east Texas. She always had one of those giant, thick two-pound peppermint sticks that us kids could chip off pieces of. She died when I was 6. Hers is the first funeral I remember.

It wasn’t until a few years ago that I learned about her father Hiram. I’m still amazed that I knew someone whose father fought in the Civil War, albeit on the losing side.

In January 1911, at the age of 73, Hiram applied for and was granted a Confederate Pension. On his application, he listed a handful of blacksmith tools in a country shop as his only assets. As attested by the county judge, he lived in his shop and did his own cooking, “with no property other than his tools.” He died of stomach cancer in 1917 at the age of 80.