General and Secretary of War John Aaron Rawlins lost his battle against consumption late in the afternoon of Sept. 6, 1869. His death struggle played out in a bed at the home of a fellow veteran in Washington, D.C., surrounded by doctors and a few friends. About 4 o’clock, Rawlins propped himself up on his right elbow and leaned his head into his hand. A few seconds later. He turned over on his left side, heaved a long sigh, and motioned to a physician.
“Lift me up a little,” he requested.
The doctor, Willard Bliss, with the help of another physician, raised Rawlins and adjusted the pillows. In this moment, Rawlins’s eyes glazed over, his muscles relaxed as his head tilted back into the bedding, and his life’s blood drained from his face. He leaned into the left arm of Dr. Bliss, who held his patient’s right wrist and monitored the fading pulse with his watch.
The heartbeats stopped at 4:12 p.m. Dr. Bliss broke the awful silence when he uttered, “The soul of Grant’s Cabinet is gone.” The group gathered around the bedside nodded their heads in agreement.
Rawlins was 38.
An hour later, President Ulysses S. Grant arrived. Dr. Bliss told him: “Mr. President, towards the last he inquired constantly for you, as indeed he did all the time.” Grant explained the delays that prevented his earlier arrival and asked if Rawlins’ wife, Mary, had been notified. She had, Bliss assured him. Grant sat and wrote a brief telegram expressing his condolences and sketching out a rough plan for the funeral and burial.
Sixteen years later, after Grant lost his battle with throat cancer, his Personal Memoirs paid tribute to the friend who had accompanied him on his meteoric rise from obscurity to the nation’s highest ranking military officer and victor of the Civil War. “Rawlins remained with me as long as he lived, and rose to the rank of brigadier general and chief-of-staff to the General of the Army—an office created for him—before the war closed. He was an able man, possessed of great firmness, and could say ‘no’ so emphatically to a request which he thought should not be granted that the person he was addressing would understand at once that there was no use of pressing the matter. General Rawlins was a very useful officer in other ways than this. I became very much attached to him.”
Rawlins’s body was interred at Congressional Cemetery following a large funeral procession that included Grant and a large group of family and friends.
In 1899, the remains were removed to Arlington National Cemetery due to the efforts of veterans of the John A. Rawlins Post No. 1 of the Grand Army of the Potomac. One of its members, Henry M. Castle, delivered an oration that reminded attendees of Rawlins’s value to Grant: “He was supremely executive, the right arm of power, a steadfast citadel of strength to his trusting chief.”
Most Hallowed Ground is part of the Arlington National Cemetery (ANC) Project. Established by Jim Quinlan of The Excelsior Brigade, its mission is to identify all Civil War veterans on the grounds. Contact Jim at 703-307-0344.
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