page_title: McClellan Gate
section_title: The O'Hara poem
hierarchical_section_title: McClellan Gate / About the McClellan Gate / The O'Hara poem
caption_attribution_description: English: Looking west-northwest at the east-facing pediment atop the McClellan Gate at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia, in the United States. The upper portion of the inscription (only a portion of which is visible from this angle) reads: "Here rest 15,585 of the 315,555 citizens who died in defence of our country from 1861 to 1865." The inscription counted only Union casualties buried at the cemetery as of 1871. U.S. Army Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs had authority over Arlington National Cemetery after the American Civil War. At that time, the eastern boundary of the cemetery lay where Eisenhower Drive is located today. In 1871, Meigs ordered the a main ceremonial gate to Arlington be constructed just east of what is now the intersection of McClellan Avenue and Eisenhower Drive. Built of red sandstone and red brick, Meigs named it the McClellan gate after Major General George B. McClellan, who organized the Army of the Potomac and served from November 1861 to March 1862 as the general-in-chief of the Union Army. Meigs ordered the name "MCCLELLAN" inscribed into the gate's east=facing rectangular pediment in gilt letters. In the left main column of the gate's west face, Meigs had his own name inscribed as a tribute to himself. In 1900, the federal government transferred 400 acres of Arlington National Cemetery which lay between McClellan Gate and the Potomac River to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which used it as an experimental farm. In 1932, Memorial Drive and the Hemicycle (now the Women in Military Service to America Memorial) were built as a new ceremonial entrance to the cemetery. The 400 acres were returned to Arlington National Cemetery just before World War II, which required the abandonment of the McClellan Gate as Arlington's main gate.
context_page_description: The McClellan Gate is a memorial to Major General George B. McClellan located inside Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington County, Virginia, in the United States. Constructed about 1871 on Arlington Ridge Road, it served as a main gate until about 1879 when the Sheridan Gate was constructed. The McClellan Gate became nonfunctional in 1966 when the road closed, and expansion of the cemetery eastward in 1971 left the gate deep inside Arlington. It is the only gate constructed on the cemetery's eastern boundary in the 1800s that survives.
context_section_description: Both sides of the McClellan Gate are inscribed with lines from Theodore O'Hara's poem, Bivouac of the Dead. His name, however, is not on the memorial.
  A native of Kentucky, O'Hara served in U.S. Army in the Mexican–American War of 1846-1848, and mustered out as a brevet major in October 1848. In 1850, he joined the private army being raised by Narciso López to overthrow the Spanish colonial rule of Cuba. He was wounded in both legs in 1849, and returned home to Frankfort, Kentucky, to recuperate. The state's Veterans Memorial was dedicated in Frankfort on June 25, 1850, and O'Hara spent a great deal of time over the next weeks and months contemplating the memorial. Some time in the latter half of 1850, he composed the poem Bivouac of the Dead as a memorial to those who fought in the Mexican–American War. During the American Civil War, O'Hara fought for the Confederacy in the 12th Regiment Alabama Infantry as a lieutenant colonel. When he died in 1867, his poem had circulated widely throughout the country — usually without credit to its author.
  Bivouac of the Dead is believed to have been one of Montgomery Meigs' favorite poems. Meigs ordered the lines from the poem be inscribed in gilt letters on the McClellan Gate.  On the east side architrave is written: "On Fame's Eternal Camping Ground Their Silent Tents Are Spread and Glory Guards With Solemn Round the Bivouac of the Dead". On the west side architrave is written: "Rest on Embalmed and Sainted Dead, Dear as the Blood Ye Gave; No Impious Footsteps Here Shall Tread on the Herbage of Your Grave".
  O'Hara was apparently unaware that his poem was being used to commemorate Civil War dead at Arlington National Cemetery. His family learned of the inscriptions only after the gate became nationally famous in the years after its construction.
caption: Lines from Bivouac of the Dead on the east facade of the McClellan Gate.
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