Portal:American Civil War/Selected biography/Archive2007
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
[edit] Original SB Placeholder during construction
This page occupied the Selected biography space on this portal from construction until July 29, 2007.
Simon Bolivar Buckner, Sr. (April 1, 1823 – January 8, 1914) was a career U.S. Army officer and a general in the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War, the officer who yielded to Ulysses S. Grant's famous demand for "unconditional surrender" at the Battle of Fort Donelson in 1862. He later served as governor of Kentucky and was an unsuccessful candidate for vice president of the United States on the National Democratic Party (or "Gold Democrats") ticket in 1896. (More...)
[edit] July 29, 2007 - August 30, 2007
John Watts de Peyster (born March 9, 1821 in New York City) was a prolific writer, historian, and General in the United States Army during the American Civil War, who previously served as Adjutant General of the New York National Guard. His treatise New American Tactics advocated making the skirmish line the new line of battle, and was considered revolutionary at the time. His tactics were put into practice by Generals such as John Buford and were later adopted world wide.
[edit] August 30, 2007 - September 9, 2007
Shelby Foote (November 17, 1916 – June 27, 2005) was a noted American author and historian of the American Civil War. Foote was born and raised in Greenville, Mississippi, the largest city in the primarily agrarian region called the Mississippi Delta; he attended the University of North Carolina but did not graduate before entering the United States Army in 1940.
After being discharged from the military, Foote was briefly a journalist. However, he began writing historical fiction, mostly set in the period surrounding the American Civil War. Although he never completed college or received formal training as a historian, Foote's ability to create a realistic portrayal of the American Civil War — factually accurate, richly detailed, and entering into the minds of men on both sides — led his editors at Random House to invite him to write a short history of the war to appear for the conflict's centennial.
Foote subsequently wrote a comprehensive three volume, 3000-page history of the American Civil War, together entitled The Civil War: A Narrative, which is considered by many to be a classic. The individual volumes include Fort Sumter to Perryville (1958), Fredericksburg to Meridian (1963), and Red River to Appomattox (1974).
[edit] September 10, 2007 - September 16, 2007
John Hunt Morgan (June 1, 1825 – September 4, 1864) was a Confederate general and cavalry officer in the American Civil War. He led 2,460 troops in a daring raid, called Morgan's Raid, racing past Union lines into Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio in July 1863. This was the farthest north any uniformed Confederate troops penetrated during the war.
After his capture and return from Ohio, Morgan was placed in command of Confederate forces in eastern Tennessee and southwestern Virginia. The men he was assigned were hardly comparable to those he had lost on his raid. Nevertheless, Morgan did what he could. However, he was surprised and shot while attempting to escape capture during a Union raid on Greeneville, Tennessee on September 4, 1864. (His men charged that he had been murdered to prevent a second escape from prison, but this seems unlikely.) Morgan was buried in Lexington shortly before the birth of his second child.
[edit] September 17, 2007 - September 23, 2007
Samuel Francis Du Pont (September 27, 1803 – June 23, 1865) was an American naval officer who achieved the rank of Rear Admiral in the United States Navy, and a member of the prominent Du Pont family; he was the only member of his generation to use a capital D. He served prominently during the Mexican-American War and the Civil War, was superintendent of the United States Naval Academy, and made significant contributions to the modernization of the U.S. Navy. Du Pont died on June 23, 1865, while on a trip to Philadelphia and is buried in the Du Pont family cemetery at Winterthur, near Greenville, Delaware.
In 1882, 17 years after Du Pont's death, the U.S. Congress finally moved to recognize his service and commissioned a sculpture of him to be placed in Pacific Circle in Washington. A bronze sculpture of Du Pont by Launt Thompson was dedicated in 1884, and the traffic circle was renamed Dupont Circle. Though the circle still bears his name, the statue was moved to Wilmington, Delaware, by the du Pont family in 1920, and replaced by a fountain designed by Daniel Chester French, dedicated in 1921.
[edit] September 24, 2007 - September 30, 2007
Andrew Johnson (December 29, 1808 – July 31, 1875) was the seventeenth President of the United States (1865–1869), succeeding to the presidency upon the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
Johnson was a US Senator from Tennessee at the time of the secession of the southern states. He was the only Southern Senator not to quit his post upon secession, and became the most prominment War Democrat from the South. In 1862 Lincoln appointed Johnson military governor of Tennessee, where he proved energetic and effective in fighting the rebellion. Lincoln selected Johnson for the Vice President slot in 1864 on the "Union Party ticket". As president he took charge of Presidential Reconstruction — the first phase of Reconstruction — which lasted until the Radical Republicans gained control of Congress in the 1866 elections. His conciliatory policies towards the South, his hurry to reincorporate the former Confederates back into the union, and his vetoes of civil rights bills embroiled him in a bitter dispute with the Radical Republicans. The Radicals in the House of Representatives impeached him in 1868; he was the first President to be impeached, but he was acquitted by a single vote in the Senate.
[edit] October 1, 2007-October 7, 2007
Mary Ann Bickerdyke (July 19, 1817-November 8, 1901), also known as Mother Bickerdyke, was a hospital administrator for Union soldiers during the American Civil War. At the outbreak of the war, she joined a field hospital at Fort Donelson, and worked on the first hospital boat. Chief of nursing under the command of Ulysses S. Grant, she served during the Vicksburg campaign. By the end of the war, with the help of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, Mother Bickerdyke had built 300 hospitals and provided medical aid to wounded on 19 battlefields. At Sherman's request, she rode at the head of the XV Corps in the Grand Review in Washington at the end of the war. After the war, she worked for the Salvation Army in San Francisco, and became an attorney, helping Union veterans with legal issues. She received a special pension from Congress in 1886, and retired to Bunker Hill, Kansas.
[edit] October 8, 2007-October 14, 2007
Old Baldy (ca. 1852 – December 16, 1882) was the horse ridden by Union Major General George G. Meade at the Battle of Gettysburg and in many other important battles of the American Civil War. Born and raised on the western frontier and at the start of the Civil War, the horse was owned by David Hunter though his name during this period is unknown. Baldy was variously reported wounded anywhere from five to fourteen times during the war, starting at the First Battle of Bull Run, where he was struck in the nose by a piece of an artillery shell. Soon after, in September of 1861, he was purchased from the government by Meade in Washington, D.C., for $150 and named Baldy because of his white face.
[edit] October 15, 2007-October 21, 2007
John Bell Hood (June, 1831 – August 30, 1879) was a Confederate general during the American Civil War. Hood had a reputation for bravery and aggressiveness that sometimes bordered on recklessness. Arguably one of the best brigade and division commanders in the Confederate States Army, Hood became increasingly ineffective as he was promoted to lead larger, independent commands, and his career was marred by his decisive defeats leading an army in the Atlanta Campaign and the Franklin-Nashville Campaign.
[edit] October 22, 2007-October 28, 2007
Winfield Scott Hancock (February 14, 1824 – February 9, 1886) was a career U.S. Army officer who served with distinction as a Union general in the American Civil War, noted in particular for his personal leadership at the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863. A military historian wrote, "No other Union general at Gettysburg dominated men by the sheer force of their presence more completely than Hancock." Hancock ran unsuccessfully for President of the United States in 1880. He was known to Army colleagues as "Hancock the Superb."
[edit] October 29, 2007-November 4, 2007
Henry Hopkins Sibley (May 25, 1816 – August 23, 1886) was a Confederate brigadier general, fighting in the New Mexico Territory. Sibley's New Mexico Campaign was intended to control the Santa Fe Trail up to Colorado and from there gain access to the warm water ports of California; however, he was forced to retreat after the Battle of Glorieta Pass, when he lost his supply train to an approaching California Union column under Colonel Edward Canby, formerly a comrade in arms in the U.S. Army. Sibley's retreat to San Antonio, Texas in 1862 ended the aspirations of the Confederate nation to stretch to the Pacific Ocean and utilize the mineral wealth of California. After the war, he served as a military advisor to the Khedive of Egypt before returning to the United States where he died at Fredericksburg, Virginia in poverty. He is buried in the City Cemetery at Fredericksburg.
[edit] November 5, 2007-November 11, 2007
Jefferson Davis (June 3, 1808 – December 6, 1889) was an American statesman and advocate for States' Rights. He is most famous for serving as the only President of the Confederate States of America, leading the rebelling southern slave states (the Confederacy) to defeat because of a lack of soldiers and supplies toward the end of the American Civil War, 1861-65. Davis was never touched by corruption, but he lacked the resources and experience to overcome his counterpart Abraham Lincoln, and was unable to defeat a more industrially developed Union. His insistence on independence even in the face of crushing defeat prolonged the war—Davis was a strong believer in the rights of the people to "alter or abolish governments whenever they become destructive of the ends for which they were established," noting such in his first inaugural address. Sam Houston of Texas uttered perhaps the most succinct, if not the most unbiased, characterization of Davis when he said the Mississippian was "ambitious as Lucifer and cold as a lizard." After Davis was captured in 1865, he was held in a Federal prison for two years, then released with no charges being brought against him.
[edit] November 12, 2007-November 18, 2007
George Gordon Meade (December 31, 1815 – November 6, 1872) was a career U.S. Army officer and civil engineer involved in coastal construction, including several lighthouses. He fought with distinction in the Seminole War and Mexican-American War. During the American Civil War he served as a Union general, rising from command of a brigade to the Army of the Potomac. He is best known for defeating Confederate General Robert E. Lee at the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863. In 1864 and 1865, Meade continued to command the Army of the Potomac through the Overland Campaign, the Richmond-Petersburg Campaign, and the Appomattox Campaign, but he was overshadowed by the direct supervision of the general in chief, Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant.
[edit] November 19, 2007-November 25, 2007
Ambrose Powell Hill (November 9, 1825 – April 2, 1865), was a Confederate general who gained early fame as the commander of "Hill's Light Division," becoming one of Stonewall Jackson's ablest subordinates. He later commanded a corps under Robert E. Lee in the Army of Northern Virginia before his death in battle just prior to the end of the war. Known to his soldiers as Little Powell, Hill was born in Culpeper, Virginia, and graduated from the United States Military Academy in 1847, ranking 15th in a class of 38 graduates. He was appointed to the 1st U.S. Artillery as a second lieutenant. He served in the Mexican-American War and Seminole Wars and was promoted to first lieutenant in September 1851. From 1855 – 1860, Hill was employed on the United States' coast survey. In 1859, he married Kitty Morgan McClung, a young widow, thus becoming the brother-in-law of future Confederate cavalry generals John Hunt Morgan and Basil W. Duke.
[edit] November 26, 2007-December 2, 2007
Judah Philip Benjamin (August 6, 1811 – May 6, 1884) was an American politician and lawyer, who served as a representative in the Louisiana state legislature, as U.S. Senator for Louisiana, in three successive Cabinet posts in the government of the Confederate States of America, and as a distinguished barrister and Queen's Counsel in England. He was the second Jew (after David Levy Yulee of Florida) to serve as a U.S. Senator and the first in the Cabinet of a North American government, and had the opportunity to be the first Jewish nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, though he declined the position.
[edit] December 3, 2007-December 9, 2007
Benjamin Franklin Butler (November 5, 1818 – January 11, 1893) was an American lawyer and politician who represented Massachusetts in the United States House of Representatives and later served as its governor. During the American Civil War, his administration of occupied New Orleans, his policies regarding slaves as "contrabands", his ineffectual leadership in the Bermuda Hundred Campaign, and the fiasco of Fort Fisher rank him as one of the most controversial "political generals" of the war. He was widely reviled for years after the war by Southern whites, who gave him the nickname "Beast Butler".
[edit] December 10, 2007-December 16, 2007
Nathan Bedford Forrest (July 13, 1821 – October 29, 1877), was a Confederate general and perhaps the American Civil War's most highly regarded cavalry and partisan ranger (guerrilla leader). Forrest is regarded by many military historians as the war's most innovative and successful general. His tactics of mobile warfare are still studied by modern soldiers. After the war, Forrest's reputation suffered from allegations of brutality in the Battle of Fort Pillow, as well as his role as the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
[edit] December 17, 2007-December 23, 2007
Thaddeus Stevens (April 4, 1792 – August 11, 1868), was a member of the United States House of Representatives from Pennsylvania. He was the powerful leader of the Radical Republicans during the American Civil War and Reconstruction. His biographer characterizes him as, "The Great Commoner, savior of free public education in Pennsylvania, national Republican leader in the struggles against slavery in the United States and intrepid mainstay of the attempt to secure racial justice for the freedmen during Reconstruction, the only member of the House of Representatives ever to have been known, even if mistakenly, as the 'dictator' of Congress."
[edit] December 24, 2007-December 31, 2007
Frederick Douglass (February 14, 1818 – February 20, 1895) was an American abolitionist, editor, orator, author, statesman and reformer. Called "The Sage of Anacostia" and "The Lion of Anacostia," Douglass was one of the most prominent figures of African American history during his time, and one of the most influential lecturers and authors in American history.
Douglass' most well-known work is his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, which was published in 1845. Critics frequently attacked the book as inauthentic, not believing that a black man could possibly have produced so eloquent a piece of literature. The book was an immediate bestseller and received overwhelmingly positive critical reviews. Within three years of its publication, it had been reprinted nine times with 11,000 copies circulating in the United States; it was also translated into the French and Dutch languages. After a distiguished career, Douglass died in his adopted hometown of Washington D.C. He is buried in Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, NY.
