The Poet and Musician
Sidney Clopton Lanier was a poet and musician born and raised in Macon, Georgia, in the decades preceding the Civil War. He was one of three children born to Robert Sampson and Mary Jane Lanier on Thursday, February 3, 1842. He had a younger brother Clifford and a sister Gertrude. Sidney was raised, as most boys were in the South at that time with a strong sense of honor and duty to his heritage in antebellum. He was a self-taught musician who learned to play a wide range of musical instruments including the guitar, flute, organ, and piano. It was his passion for music and literature that would later define his life.
At 14 years of age he entered Oglethorpe College near Midway, graduating at the top of his class in 1860. His love for the classics sparked a keen interest in traveling abroad after graduation but fate stepped in and his life took a different spin. His southern upbringing forged his desire to serve the South and all he felt it stood for. In later years he would comment in despair on having been foolish enough to have been so wrapped up in the Southern mystique that he felt it his duty to march off to war to defend his simple way of life.
He served valiantly in several campaigns including Seven Pines, Drewry’s Bluffs, The Seven Days Battles, Malvern Hill, Chancellorsville, and even in defense of Petersburg. While serving on the blockade-runner “Lucy” he was captured and imprisoned at Point Lookout, Maryland. It was while he was a prisoner of war that he contracted Tuberculosis, which would claim his life at such a young age. After the war he married, had children, traveled all over the country trying to find a climate suitable to his condition, all the while producing literature and music, in between periods of extreme illness, that endures even today.
He spent a good deal of his time near the end of his life in Baltimore, Maryland, having moved there for the first time in 1873, where he managed to played a flute for the Peabody Symphony and even become a lecturer at John Hopkins University. He would travel to other places for indeterminate amounts of time, usually for reasons of health but would eventually end up back in Baltimore .
In early 1881, at the advice of his doctors, he took to the mountains near Asheville, North Carolina in hopes the high, clean climate would allow him to continue his work and life. In August of that year he took a ride to Lynn, North Carolina in Polk County hoping the climate there would be better for his fever and hemorrhaging which by now had become an ever present companion. It proved to be the final round though, as his health took a turn for the worst and he was unable to return to Asheville .
An encampment was setup at Lynn and on the evening of September 7, 1881 he passed away. His wife had his body returned to Baltimore and buried in Greenmount Cemetery . A large pink colored boulder from the State of was placed at his burial site with an inscription from one of his poems “Sunrise ” “I am lit with the sun”.
Although a talented scholar and musician, his death at such an early age left historians to wonder “what if?” He lived and worked in argumentatively some of the most turbulent times in our history and did so while fighting a debilitating disease. By his account his music was a very special part of his personality but his poetry is what he is best remembered for and “The Song of The Chattahoochee” is the poem that endured his legacy as a native Georgian Poet.
US Army Corps of Engineers
Lake Sidney Lanier
Last updated: 10/20/2005
