through Sergeant Maccubbin an autograph direction from Mr. Davis to show to Colonel Ould or his sergeant the place of burial of Colonel Dahlgren, for the return of his body would be of material advantage to the confederacy.
I at once ordered my horse and rode with Sergeant Maccubbin to Oakwood and pointed out the spot. I, after a few days, learned that Maccubbin had opened the grave, but had found the coffin had been removed, and I received a sharp reproach direct from Mr. Davis, in having, as he supposed, been disobedient to his directions, to. show Colonel Ould where this body was laid. I replied that I had shown Maccubbin the grave where it was buried, and if it was subsequently removed, I knew nothing of it.
After the war, when I saw in a Washington newspaper a notice that Admiral Dahlgren had recovered the body of his son, and that there was an imposing funeral in Washington, I was greatly surprised, and expressing this in the presence of Patrick Gibson, who at one time was on the staff of the Richmond Examiner, he said he knew who had taken up the body of Dahlgren, and had been paid a handsome reward by his father for its delivery to him; that it was disinterred by Martin Meredith Lipscomb, who was at one time quite a well-known character in Richmond, and said to be during the war a Union man.
Late Commanding Tenth and Nineteenth Battalion, Artillery, C. S. A.
