Bellefontaine Cemetery, founded in 1849 in St. Louis, is the final resting place of more than 86,000 people across 314 acres and fourteen miles of roads, and it holds a rich Civil War legacy through the burial of prominent Union and Confederate figures and others connected to the conflict. Among them are George Graham Vest, who supported the South, served as judge advocate general with General Sterling Price, and was elected to the Confederate Congress in the fall of 1862, though he later became especially associated with his "Eulogy of the Dog" in the Old Drum case; Major General Francis Preston Blair, Jr., whose military service won high praise from General Grant and General Sherman; General Sterling Price, one of the Confederacy's most beloved generals, whose 1864 Missouri raid failed after a major defeat at Pilot Knob; Major General John Pope, a controversial Union commander whose reputation grew after the second battle of Bull Run; Major General Don Carlos Buell, celebrated for relieving Grant at Shiloh but later removed from command by Lincoln after delaying battle against orders; and Lieutenant General Alexander Stewart, the highest-ranking Civil War general buried there, who opposed secession and slavery but joined the Confederacy out of belief in states' rights and fought in many crucial western battles. Those buried there also include figures ranging from emancipated slaves to one of St. Louis's most successful madams. Civil War history tied to St. Louis also appears in the story of James Eads, who in 1861 designed Union ironclad gunboats for the Navy, had 4,000 men building them in Carondelet within ninety days, and ultimately produced fourteen of the war's twenty-two such boats, whose shallow draft, armor, and firepower helped Union operations at Fort Donelson, Fort Henry, New Madrid, and Vicksburg; despite this work, he later sent part of his earnings to aid Confederate victims because he saw the war as "an accursed contest between brothers." Adaline Couzins volunteered early in the war with Doctor Charles Pope in St. Louis, helped care for wounded soldiers brought from what became known as the battle of Wilson's Creek, was injured while nursing soldiers during the ninety-eight day siege of Vicksburg for the Western Sanitary Commission, later secured a U.S. Government pension for that service, and, with her daughter Phoebe, one of the nation's first female lawyers, joined the Ladies Union Aid Society. The cemetery also contains Frederick Dent, father of Julia Dent Grant, whom Ulysses S. Grant married in 1848; Dent, a slave owner who initially disapproved of their courtship and later lived at the White House with his daughter and son-in-law, died in Washington, D.C., in 1873 and was buried at Bellefontaine, while the Dent family farm, White Haven, later became the Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site.
