Robert H. Hatton was born in October 1826, and early in his life his family moved to Lebanon. He graduated from Cumberland University, studied law at Cumberland School of Law, was admitted to the bar in 1850, and established a successful practice in Lebanon. In December 1852, he married Sophie K. Reilly of Williamson County, Tennessee, and they had three children. A Whig, he was elected to the state legislature in 1855, ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1857, and was elected to the Thirty-sixth U.S. Congress in 1858, where he chaired the Committee on Expenditures in the Department of the Navy. Although he opposed secession and believed the Union should be preserved, he reversed his position after President Abraham Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers following the attack on Fort Sumter. He organized the Lebanon Blues for state service, soon part of the 7th Tennessee Infantry, was elected its colonel at Camp Trousdale in Sumner County, and was sent to western Virginia in July 1861. On May 23, 1862, he was promoted to brigadier general of the Tennessee Brigade, 1st Division, Army of Northern Virginia. Eight days later, on May 31, 1862, he was killed while leading his brigade at the Battle of Seven Pines in Virginia, in an attack on a Union position in a low ditch in a wooded area. His body was returned to Tennessee, but because Federal troops occupied Middle Tennessee, he was temporarily interred in Knoxville. On March 23, 1866, he was reburied in Lebanon’s Cedar Grove Cemetery. His home on this site was destroyed by fire after the war, and his statue stands atop the Confederate monument erected on Lebanon’s town square in 1912.