General Robert Hatton

The figure on the statue in this square is Robert Hopkins Hatton, and his story is full of contradiction. Born in Ohio in eighteen twenty-six, he came to Lebanon to attend Cumberland University, became a lawyer, won a seat in Congress, and openly opposed secession. He wanted the Union preserved.

Then Fort Sumter changed everything. When President Lincoln called for volunteers, Hatton reversed course, raised a regiment of local men, and was elected their colonel. He was promoted to brigadier general on the twenty-third of May, eighteen sixty-two, and killed just eight days later at the Battle of Seven Pines outside Richmond. He was thirty-five. United Confederate Veterans erected this monument in nineteen twelve, and in recent years it has been at the center of a long local debate over what to do with it.