Amos Beebe Eaton
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Amos Beebe Eaton (May 12, 1806 – February 21, 1877) was a career officer in the U.S. Army, serving as a general for the Union during the American Civil War.
Amos B. Eaton was born in Catskill, New York. He graduated from West Point in 1826; he was an infantry lieutenant until the Florida campaigns of the late 1830s. After that, his only fighting experiences took place in the Mexican-American War, for which service he was brevetted a major. Eaton served for 12 years as a field officer in the U.S. Army, then joined the commissary department for 23 years.
Appointed a lieutenant colonel and assistant commissary general in 1861, Eaton was given the task of creating an effective supply system for the fledgling Union army. The large number of troops entering the Army at the beginning of the war was overloading the existing system. His work provisioning and distributing supplies to the troops earned him the rank of brigadier general.
Eaton took over the position of commissary general of the Regular Army upon Brigadier General Joseph P. Taylor's retirement, and was brevetted a major general dating from March 13, 1865. He held the brevet until he retired in 1874, and moved to New Haven, Connecticut. Eaton died in New Haven, on February 21, 1877, and was buried there.
His daughter Frances Spencer Eaton married Charles Atwood White, the great-grandson of American founding father Roger Sherman. They were the parents of U.S. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson's wife Mabel Wellington Stimson and women's suffrage leader Elizabeth Selden Rogers.
