On the same Manassas field I wrote you from last time, about a hundred and fifty yards from the visitor center, there is a small granite marker under a cedar tree. Most people walk right past it. It stands where a Confederate colonel named Francis Bartow was shot through the chest on the afternoon of July 21, 1861.
His men could not let that pass unmarked. Weeks later they raised a marble shaft on the spot where he fell, cut with his name and the words they said he spoke as he died. It may have been the first monument ever placed on a Civil War battlefield. The war was barely three months old, and they were already building memory in stone.
It did not last a year.
By the spring of 1862, when the armies came back through for the second battle of Manassas, the shaft was gone. Only the base remained, and it is still there, tucked in a cluster of trees a few steps from the marker you see today.
Colonel Francis Bartow was a Savannah lawyer and politician before the war, an ardent secessionist who sat in the Provisional Confederate Congress and felt honor-bound to fight for what he had spent years arguing for. He was leading a brigade of Georgians in a counterattack across Henry Hill when he fell. He was the first Confederate brigade commander to die in battle, and the South made him an early martyr. His men had called themselves Bartow’s Beardless Boys. They were the ones who came back with the marble.
What happened to the original, nobody can say for certain, and that is the part that stayed with me.
This is the thing I keep circling in these books. The past does not sit still. Someone buries it, someone else digs it up, and it goes back into the ground in whatever shape suits whoever is holding the shovel. A monument raised in grief becomes a monument raised in 1936 for reasons of its own, and somewhere in the handoff the man himself blurs. Knights of the Golden Circle lives in exactly that gap, the distance between what happened and what we are handed, and who profits from the difference.
From the Trail One Legend, One Fact
The Legend
They say the first Bartow monument was carried off by his own side, Confederates spiriting it away to save it from the Yankees when they abandoned the field in 1862. Others say it was smashed by Union soldiers of the 14th Brooklyn, settling a score over their own dead. Still others say it was simply chipped to nothing by souvenir hunters, tourists carrying the first great battle home in their pockets one fragment at a time. Take your pick. Each version says as much about the teller as about the stone.
The Fact
A marble shaft was dedicated on Henry Hill in September 1861, and it may have been the first monument raised on any Civil War battlefield. By the time the armies returned the next year it was gone, and its fate has never been settled. Only the base survives. The granite marker standing there now was placed in 1936 by the Georgia Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the WPA, and it calls Bartow a brigadier general, though his commission was colonel. Even the stone that remembers him rounds him up.
PS. Knights of the Golden Circle is two weeks out. It goes live August 18, and it lives in this exact territory: the buried thing, the rewritten record, the people who would rather the past stayed the way they set it. Right now the Kindle is $5.99 on preorder. On the 18th it goes to $7.99. If you have been waiting, this is the window.
One more thing. On August 15 I’m speaking at the Council of the Alleghenies Annual Symposium in Cumberland, Maryland, about Braddock’s lost payroll, the real history under the legend, and what it takes to build a believable thriller on top of it. The Council has been preserving the history and folklore of the Allegheny Highlands since 1961, so it is the right room for this one.
The symposium starts at 9:30 that morning at the Cumberland Country Club. It is $30 and includes lunch, and you will need to reserve a spot in advance by emailing Jim Race at jimrace21@gmail.com. If you are anywhere near western Maryland, come find me afterward. I would like to meet you.
Start the Series
New to the hunt? Start where it all began. Shadows Over Cozumel is free, and The Search for Braddock’s Lost Gold, the 2025 PenCraft Thriller of the Year, is where Jack Sullivan’s obsession starts.
One Question
The first marker was raised by the men who watched him die. The one standing now was raised seventy-five years later by people who never knew him, and it gets his rank wrong. Which one is the real monument? I would genuinely like to know.
Know someone who’d like this one?
Send them the vanished monument. No sign-up needed on their end, it’s just a page.
Someone forward this to you?
I send these periodically. Real history, buried secrets, and the stories behind the Echoes of Fortune series. Start with Shadows Over Cozumel, free. It’s a Kirkus “GET IT” Pick and most people finish it in one sitting.
Get Cozumel freeFrom Other Authors
I stood in the Amber Room in 2019, or rather the painstaking reconstruction of it, at the Catherine Palace outside St. Petersburg. The original, six tons of amber and gold, was looted by the Nazis and vanished in 1945. Nobody has found it since. Grant Kelly’s The Amber Room is a mystery built on that disappearance.
Get The Amber Room Free
There’s a bigger door open this month too. FREE Stories for Hot August Nights is a multi-author giveaway, a whole page of free ebooks, mostly mystery and suspense with some neighboring genres mixed in, open through the end of August. It runs from lighter cozy reads to darker suspense, so look over the covers and take whatever fits your shelf. Pick as many as you like.
Browse the Free BooksUntil next time, keep hunting.
David R Leng
Echoes of Fortune. The Past Refuses to Stay Buried… It Echoes into the Present.